Like most people, I get almost all my news online. This is not only because I am used to receiving instant information but more importantly because I am used to getting multiple view points on issues. I feel it is necessary to read from multiple sources, listen to experts make comments about the issue/concept at hand, read general public’s engagement on the news outlets, sometimes read from the curated news on various groups on social media, as well comments on those closed groups. Only then will I start to make some meaning of the issue at hand.

So learning from other people’s comments is very valuable. Social Media sites such as Facebook and Instagram have realized this aspect, and have started to recognize their top fans through badges. When I first saw “top fan” type badges on commenters profiles, I became curious to know how they got these badges. Recently, I received a notification on one of the small local news outlets’ from Turkey offering me a “top fan” badge. How cool!

These badges look like the following:

Top Fan Concept from https://www.digitopia.agency/blog/facebook-fan-badges-everything-you-need-to-know

To earn these badges, you have to be one of the top engagers of that social media account, like/share/comment on their posts. These badges help you stand out from the crowd when you make comments. If you have made comments that many people relate to (and engage with by liking/commenting), you may even gain subscribers/followers to your profile. You could easily become an influencer by simply curating news for people who subscribe to your account. This practice encompasses many affordances of new learning we covered in this class, from gamification, to differentiated learning, collaborative intelligence, and learning through recursive feedback to count a few.

This new emerging concept has inspired many Higher Education Institutions to figure out how to use these "Top Fan Badges" to their advantage. One of the best examples I found was from Colorado State University where they created special content just for the top fans, and found out that the results were rewarding. Social media experts from Colorado State University realized that by differentiating content for the top fans, they were able to create the kind of community they were hoping to establish on social media. 

Differentiated Content for Top Fans

The possibilities are endless in the realm of new media technologies to make learning a more enjoyable, relatable and motivating process not only between the learners and teachers, but also between institutions and the communities they serve.