draft

Three suggestions for revision:  1. Aim to describe the different things that the people you were observing were saying, rather than stating the points you seem to agree with as if they were simply true. For example, you write, “Any educational endeavor has a better chance of being fruitful if it is brief and interesting.” That’s not a fact; it’s an opinion — a debatable interpretation of the facts. So, if some of the people you’ve observed in the educational Tik Tok community are making that sort of a claim, then quote one of them who represents the group. But don’t state it as if it were a fact. Again, your job in a cyber-ethnography isn’t to restate the claims you agree with as if they were true; your job is to represent the diversity of ideas that you saw expressed.  2. Remember that your talk isn’t about whether Tik Tok is a good or a bad educational platform, or about how it can be made better, or “more” effective. Your talk is about what the app means in an educational context, how the meaning of education differs when we compare what students using the new digital-based forms understand themselves to be doing with what students understood by education when the context was the older, analog forms. Focus on what the experience means, not on whether it’s good or bad, effective or ineffective. Those are value judgements that you’re not equipped to make (if ever) until you’ve developed a fuller understanding of what students mean and have meant by “education.” 3. Speaking of which: On the one hand, you seem at points to believe that the increased “entertainment” value of Tik Tok educational videos is an obvious, uncomplicated plus. On the other hand, some of the scholars you allude to (and, at least once, you yourself) clearly don’t subscribe to this idea. In other words, whether TikTok’s entertainment value serves or obstructs its educational value is the subject of debate. If you presented it that way, and clarified the stakes of the debate, I think you’d make much more headway in developing some actual answers to your research question, rather than veering off into questions about “efficient utility.”