Originally posted by Vincent Dong on February 10, 2019
TikTok (Chinese: 抖音) is an app which provides users a platform to share their short videos. In the past two years, TikTok has become so popular that it has become an icon of subculture, and many young people are even addicted to this app. This has already become a widespread social phenomenon in China and has caused some negative impact.
Why is TikTok so addictive? How do the developers make users addicted? Why users can’t live without TikTok? As educational technologists, what can we learn from TikTok?
These are the questions I would like to explore in my assignment A1, and I am very glad to share my findings with you. Please feel free to click this link to get more details. Cheers!
https://spark.adobe.com/page/tu7m8HTFvuOlT/
I am amazed with how popular this app is not just among teenagers but with elementary aged children, as well as adults and even grandparents. This is the “it” app for social sharing. So the big question would be how do we capitalize on this in an educational setting? My husband frequently has students, in grade 6, telling him to figure out a way to use it in the classroom. There are still ongoing concerns with how Tik Tok uses personal information as well as with some of the concerns with child safety with younger users of the app. As Vincent noted in his post, there are also concerns with the addiction aspect of it.
I haven’t jumped on the TikTok train yet, but am definitely interested in trying to find an educational use for it. I noticed when I did a deeper search that there are articles of how teachers are using this in the classroom, however, this is with older students in a high school setting.
I think that we also need to look at the content, the type of videos that might be usable for classes. My experience using videos with elementary children is that they get hooked. They would say: can we watch another one? Then, it would not end.
Back in the days was about Youtube, nowadays is about TikTok. I would not be surprised if something new comes out. TikTok usually offers short videos. The system is setup to show videos that are based on your interest (as other apps do too).In certain Chinese brand cellphones, TikTok is already preinstalled on the phone. Do you think that this would even incentivize them to use it more?