One of my assignments last week required the review of a social media tool and its value to instructional design and elearning. Quora.com is a repository of questions and answers submitted by users of the site. I decided to check out Quora for several reasons. First, I am a huge information junkie. I can spend hours on the web. As a child, I was a huge bookworm and would read everything from the encyclopedia to medical books. I was constantly asking questions to someone who seemed to know everything – my dad. Quora piqued my interest as a site to review because I’ve noticed over the past year that when I Google a topic, many of the links are to their site. I’ve clicked on a few but always came upon a page that would require me to log-in or register to see the response. I never had the time or energy to complete the registration so I would go to a different site.

However, it always seemed like the best information about my topic was on the Quora link from looking at the preview on Google. For this assignment I finally went and registered on the site. I was not disappointed. I am an avid Reddit user because of the massive amount of subforums about any topic you can think of, which are called subreddits, and Quora seemed to be along the lines of Reddit but in a smaller version. As soon as I registered, it asked what my interests are and then it began giving me postings that I might be interested in, and I ended up spending quite a long time there.

In an education setting, I could envision this site being used by teachers in K-12 who might have a question that is being asked by his or her class. The teacher could post the question on Quora and then revisit the site a few days later and read the responses aloud to the class. For me professionally, I can’t see how this site would quite fit into what I am doing currently, but I can see the value in it later on if I begin working in elearning. There is quite a bit of information on there for instructional designers with some good career advice. I am glad I finally registered with this site though and can see that it is a valuable tool for so many reasons.