Social media as a learning tool

This semester, I maintained a blog, twitter, and YouTube channel for my IEOR class. The use of social media in the class was very interesting, as it enabled me to develop a learning community with my peers. I subscribed to my peers in the class on twitter, which enabled me to receive live updates on cases that were happening in the patent and intellectual property world. Students utilized the hashtag #Berkeley190G which enabled us to filter the twitter and get only intellectual property related content. Many students imbedded links into their tweets, which enabled their peers to go to the site and read more about the specific case. During my time in the class, I purchased a subscription to Law360, which by far had the best content on Intellectual Property. My favorite part of using social media was commenting on my peers blogs and videos. I was able to learn about a variety of cases from my peers, as they included more analysis than many of the news articles that are available on the web.

I also liked the YouTube videos, as it was helpful to hear my peers elaborate even further on the articles. The videos also included their opinion on the case, which was insightful to see how they interpreted the case. Social media also made doing the homework fun, as it was a good change from the traditional style of all my other courses. As a business major, this is the first time I had taken a course in the engineering department, and I thought that the peer community developed through social media helped me to understand the technical aspect of patents. I was able to meet with peers in technical majors outside of class to further discuss patents.