The discovery of Reddit was an eye-opening learning experience for me. I did not stumble upon the site when looking to seek an educational community, neither did I intend to use it as an educational resource – I just saw it as a good aggregator of news for topics that I was interested in (sport, movies, music, etc.). The more I used it, the more I came across sections of the site that could actually serve educational purposes. There are all news subreddits, that are usually effective at educating on current events. One thing I like about it is that you can then read the comments section, where people will often provide additional context or information regarding the subject that the news article did not provide. One caveat to this is that since it is other people posting these comments, you cannot be sure that the information is 100% verified. However, due to the upvote system in place, pertinent information is usually rated highly by other users and can potentially be trusted, if they haven’t already posted a source with their comment which they commonly do. It isn’t just the news-related subreddits that provide education though – there are subreddits dedicated to specific sciences, nature, media, etc. I have had many memorable learning experiences through reddit, as it’s very easy to ‘rabbit hole’; you might stumble upon an interesting article or report through regular browsing of the site, but then as a result of the comments section, you can then go and research a facet of that subject that somebody else has provided, and then that easily leads into something else, and so on. It was an exciting realization when I learned that I could use reddit as an educational resource, rather than just a place to find pop-culture memes and related media, and every week I learn about topics that I would never have sought out on my own volition.
As reddit is not a platform built explicitly for the purpose of being learning environment, many of the concepts taught so far in this course do not directly apply; synchronicity, however, is relevant to this platform (as it is to any platform that facilitates communication). The site is primarily asynchronous – people post things, and people can then view them and/or reply. There is also synchronous elements to the site though. While not as prominent, there are typically ‘live feeds’ (more similar to an instant chat environment than a message board) during a major world event, so that people can deliver salient news items and sources as soon as they are posted online.
Openness is also a very significant concept with regards to sites like reddit. As it is a public forum, it is open to absolutely everyone, without the need to even create an account if you aren’t interested in posting anything yourself. This makes it an incredibly accessible learning environment that anyone can use, as long as they have an internet connection and a device to connect to the internet.
As I had stated before, my favourite thing about this platform is that I can go on to the front page of reddit (the main portal where the recent top posts from the entire site appear), see a post about a topic or event that I would never even have thought to look into myself, and then proceed to learn as much or as little as I would like to about it. For example, this appeared on the front page today (click the picture to visit the original post):
This comes from the ‘Awwducational’ subreddit, where people will post a cute picture of an animal, along with an interesting fact about it. On the top comment on the post, somebody then posted a fact pertaining to both pangolins and coronavirus (obviously a current hot topic), as well as a video for further information. From just casually browsing the site, I’ve learned something not only from the initial post but the subsequent comments, and had the opportunity to learn about something extremely interesting and something that I likely would not have encountered through a typical focused learning platform!