Project Report for Non-Profit Social Media Education Project (excerpt)
The goal of the project was to develop tools to provide LYIA youth with new forms of interacting with each other as well as disseminate their program information. We wanted to emphasize on the participatory nature of social media and how learning and using these tools can provide a safe, nurturing, and empowering environment for self-expression as well as community building.
On further evaluation of our project direction in relation to LYIA’s needs as well as the material to which we had access, we decided to focus the project on developing an online session prototype, including some concrete social media tools for LYIA’s immediate use that would also supplement current classroom learning. LYIA specifically mentioned that it would be helpful for youths to have a way to further review the different types of drugs they learn about in the HIV and Drugs session, as much of that information can be dense and hard to digest in one sitting. With that in mind, our group chose to make an online prototype out of the “HIV and Drugs” session. Given the obstacles we faced (including no current curriculum, no recorded session, no on-going session) we had to scale down on the original project.
In the end we created a wiki to fully integrate the curriculum online. The “HIV and Drugs” session wiki page includes a thematic video and interactive quiz, as well as a multimedia “sprout” (essentially a moveable, dynamic widget that can be embedded on the LYIA website or other online platforms) that contains a description of the various drugs and their effects. The wiki is structured in a way that will make it easy for LYIA to implement the rest of the curriculum on-line in the future (once it is updated), and to do so in a participatory manner. The wiki has since qualified as an educational wiki by Wetpaint (wiki host) and all ads have been removed. In addition to serving as an example of how LYIA might implement their curriculum online in the future, the media produced will hopefully be useful to LYIA in their upcoming school year.
Online components to LYIA’s current and future curriculum will change their method of outreach and engagement to some degree by fostering further education outside of class sessions and offering up new types of connections and expression between peers. They also widen audience reach, so that even youths outside of the NYC area have a chance to learn from and be involved with the program. Youths who might otherwise have avoided the program because they are uncomfortable revealing their identity or want to test out the waters first, may do so anonymously through an online avatar. Attention should be paid to how youths find the tools useful in their education, social marketing, and community endeavors, and appropriate measures for maintaining those forms of engagement should then be taken (for instance, integrating those uses into classroom activities – if youths enjoy taking/sharing photos or keeping an online journal, having them express themselves through a photo essay posted online or initiating a dialogue through their blogs might be something to consider). Using social media to engage in forms of online education not only creates a richer learning experience, but it teaches youths useful and marketable online skills in the process.