Maybe I should do a blog

In 2006, a student of mine suggested that the club on campus that she was leading and which I was advising use Facebook to communicate. She was tired of always having emails bounce back because of limits on numbers or mistyped addresses. Since we all had .edu addresses, we could use this relatively new platform. It worked great for our purposes!

Then Facebook grew, and grew, and grew. I remember the days of actually being able to look at all the posts of friends and finish scrolling. There was a bottom to the page. But, never again will that be the case for someone who has collected contacts and liked pages for fourteen years.

As a Professor in the Communication department at Cardinal Stritch University, I decided it would be a good plan to create some courses about social media. I designed an online course called "Social Media & Society" that focused on interpersonal communication through social media. Later, I added "Organizational Social Media." The course I've had the most fun with is our first year seminar where I've been able to have students trace the history of a meme, understand the persuasive communication that leads to viral posts, and get a basic understanding of how different people and organizations use social media.

So, after more than a decade of teaching about and participating in social media, I have decided to jump into blogging. I hope to organize my thoughts on social media here, but also to help my students see the possibilities involved.