Discussion: TikToks, Instagrams, Telegrams, etc., as well as liking, rating, reviewing, recommending, etc., are all aspects of Micro-Expression, and are the basic currency of digital presence and identity. There isn’t a single dimension of such presence and identity that aren’t subject to AI enhancement and exploitation, so even the tiniest engagement has implications.
523 Inspiration: Humanity has long been expert with tiny social communications such as sounds, words, gestures, looks, etc, but these have always been fleeting – quickly lost in time. We have therefore educated our youth to build their presence and value in the world through more durable forms of expression such as poems, essays, books and (more recently) media presentations. Yet every tweet now has durability as part of a broader spectrum of presence management. Mobility is the medium for Micro-Expression – do you have a strategy?
This was a frontier that particularly jumped out to me from being an elementary music educator. More and more when students ask me if I can play something they listen to, the examples and artists they present to me come from online platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and Youtube shorts, not even from platforms we think of as being streaming services dedicated to music, and certainly not from more traditional mediums like official downloads or physical purchases. I’m particularly interested in how this frontier could be used to teach students the idea of fair compensation for artistic creation; just because something may be available online for free, should they consume/purchase it?
Micro-Expression was actually a new term for me, but the more I read about it, the more I see how much it is already part of our students’ lives. As an elementary administrator, I see how much students communicate and express themselves through short videos, comments, likes, and other forms of social media. I think this is an area that schools need to pay more attention to, especially around digital identity, how students present themselves online, and how quickly something they post can become permanent. Rather than ignoring these forms of expression, I think there is an opportunity to bring them into learning in a safe and purposeful way.
I am mainly interested in this frontier due to the fact that I believe that it is currently very poorly addressed within the K-12 educational system. The world of micro-expression dominates the personal media consumption of our students, but has almost no footprint in our (traditional) educational lives. How can we as educators integrate micro-expression into our classrooms to give our students a safe place to experiment and learn? Can we build a digital learning community through micro-expression that supplements the physical communities that we have been fostering for years, and to what end?