Assignment 1

ITC510 Assignment 1

[OLR] Exercise 5.2: Social architects and online games

[OLR] Exercise 5.2: Social architects and online games
Define what is meant by a social architect?

Social architects are developers or designers of user-engaging online community interfaces. They focus on social media functionality; i.e. social architects are people whose role is about attracting users to build a community and create a center of gravity that people on the Internet will converge to, creating sites that will become collectors of relationships - Facebook is a good example of this: look at my profile and you'll get links to all the people that I know and that I can interact with. Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo are all examples of sites that would make use of social architects. If we think of the Internet as a place that is becoming increasingly social (a place to visit) and communal (meet with other people), then social architects are the people that are helping to create the necessary groundswell of people that will click, click, click on all of those adverts to pay for all of this social engagement. I'm sure social architects have a sound sociological knowledge about how large groups of people interact (and what they seek in these interactions).

Investigate and compare ANY two of the following online communities and become a member

Try to find out who is behind the organisation and management of each online community. Are they true social architects?

Whyville has a range of sponsors but it comes out of Numedeon Inc which was founded by Dr. James M. Bower his students and collaborators at the California Institute of Technology interested in ways in which the Internet and simulation-based serious gaming could change education (thanks wikipedia!). Yes, these people really are true social architects in the sense that they focus on social media functionality and drawing in users. Whyville seems like quite a decent sort of site - clear educational outcomes are apparent and their virtual world makes sense. I could image a child becoming quite immersed in it. A 'shortcoming' of the site is that it doesn't allow for an ongoing avatar that will 'travel on' as it were with its users as they grow up and move on.

Honestly, I found Shuffle Brain a little bit creepy and more than a little pointless (to me anyway). The site talks about brain games and that's all good and well. However the founder of the site is, to quote the site:

Amy Jo Kim ... an internationally recognized expert in online social architecture. She has designed social architecture for Electronic Arts/Maxis/Origin, Digital Chocolate, MTV/Harmonix, eBay, There.com, Yahoo!, and others. Her influential book Community Building on the Web (published 2000), translated into 7 languages, is required reading in universities and game companies around the world. She has a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from University of Washington, and a BA in Experimental Psychology from UCSD.

Nothing personal against her - at all - but for me the first game that I tried (a picture matching game) seemed to be designed to be easy to engage with and designed to suck me in (it promised me updates / solutions tomorrow). Yep, this site is a true product of social architecture, I think. It uses the trust that I've got with Facebook (I use my facebook ID to get started immediately with their games) and it's active about getting me to play with others and suck my friends in too. This is great leverage of Facebook-as-a-social-collector: suddenly I'm looking at all these people that I don't even 'know' as a friend of a fried. Bah! Humbug to that! Given the creators background - I can only assume that this is being done to ultimately earn the founders money in some sort of buy out / take over. Nothing wrong with that but it does raise the question - who is paying for all this internet that we're using. Advertisers today and companies that are speculating that 10-20 years from now the Internet will be different and people will be able to earn $$'s in a much freer manner than they can today.

I liked Whyville because it offered something - educational games that a teacher could make use of. I disliked Shuffle Brain because it offers trivial games designed to make me suck other people into playing trivial games. Sorry, what's the point? Shuffle brain gives me a real "we're hoping that you're going to have to pay one day feel". I'd rather play 'trivial' games in a rewarding social context. Like with my wife or friends. Face to face over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. As an educator I recognise the validity of Shuffle Brain as a product that demonstrates the strengths of social networking but as an educator I'd be keeping it away from kids. End Rant!

[OLR] Exercise 5.1: The many faces of you

Make a list of all your online identities [eg A quick audit of mine includes myCSU e-box, Interact, e-mail accounts, Web pages, blog, wikis, Podcasting channel, MOOs, ZOPE, athene, broadband ISP, MORPGs, Moodle, Google services...]

Using the following question from Jordan et al (2003) :

• Do you show multiple identities or are you consistent across all instances? I have multiple identities which comes about from intention of separating y professional and personal lives. When I first went online, as it were, with flickr and blogger I chose to use a pseudonym. However I later started to feel that the pseudonym was somehow wrong - that if I wanted to talk to people, wanted to actually have conversations on various online communities of interest; then I'd be better off using my first name.surname initial as my ID. Then I started to think that I'd be better off simply having a .name domain and linking things back to that (professional and personal). I then realised that this happening anyway I started to use more things in the Google universe and all of those things tied back to my gmail address anyway. I still have concerns and most of these concerns revolve around disclosure and privacy. Do I really want to share with just whoever bothers to google search me? Sometimes I care more than others, but I think overall that maintaining a distinction between my personal and professional lives is probably best overall. After all I can always share with people that I choose to with anyway.

• What does your "persistent identity" online say about you, and what shouldn't it say? My persistent identity speaks about my level of trust in placing information about me into the public domain as it is incorporated into the architecture of the Internet. Ultimately a persistent identity that is shared more widely across websites provides opportunities for people to more smoothly get into contact with me or to share interests. If I'm willing to go down the road of having a persistent online identity I open myself up to the possibility of meeting people who share interests, affinities or complementary capabilities across the widest range of social networks. This raises the question about how much I can trust that network - a perhaps myself to do the appropriate thing whilst online. Online trust / verification systems will come into play at the juncture of these questions. But they're other questions :) What shouldn't my persistent identity say? Well, it certainly shouldn't say anything negative about me in a way damages my personal reputation. There's an old Boomtown Rats song, Someone's Looking at Your with a line at the end of the song "Don't flatter yourself, nobody's listening". The song also mentions the idea of 'with walls as thin as these'. Perhaps that's the key metaphor to consider: Even if I/we wall our online lives into many partitions and effectively wall this part of our life off from that part of our life. Well ultimately these barriers are pretty small and are probably really transparent to anyone with the first idea about Internet security and privacy. People are always looking / listening / responding / reviewing you anyway. If people are listening - don't say anything that it's inconsistent with who you are and what you stand for.
  
  
• Analyse and comment on other aspects of your 'persistent identity' across all those multiple identities. This entries running on. One last thing that I would say about my persistent identity is that I am becoming more relaxed about it over time and to some extent the boundaries between my private, work and study identities has been tending to merge and overlap somewhat over the past few years. This is of my own doing as I find that work and play - are to some extent - merging.

[OLR] Exercise 4.3 Social networking tools for your "PLN"

Using your set of own heuristics, Make up a new new table from lists A and B showing which sites have ordo not have potential and challenges as platforms for:

i) Learning?

ii) Professional development in the workplace?

Basically my 'Too hard' choices are because the sites appear to be gossip, or too full of advertising, social networking with an implication on chat rather than discussion. Plus many of these sites are far too uncontrollable to ever fly past my Education Department's ICT Block guidelines - for example if I get students onto Facebook they are on Facebook - I can't control who they befriend choose to talk to. At this point in history I believe that parents and schools and communities expect that their students stay within the classroom - even though learning transcends classrooms (a contradiction, I know). Viewing the world Web 1.0 style fits within that view of staying within the classroom more so than having interactions such as the Too Hard choices. I guess what I've learnt for myself here is that the sites that I've chosen allow for what I perceive to be a more focused, less open, more controlled Web 2.0 type of co-collaborative experience. I really value the learning and building of knowledge. Delicious has uses for educators moreso than students in yr 6/7 I think - although it's principles of sharing are good. Flickr has problems with inappropriate content, but I'll put it on the OK list anyway. Ditto youtube. Youtube's a wonderful resource that provides so many rare and engaging snippets to demonstrate lesson points with. Teachertube as well of course, but it's much more limited in scope.

b) Make a up a social profile at two new social networking sites, using one from each list or from any you found online.

Ning: This could be very powerful to support a rich student learning online experience within a relatively controlled environment.

Facebook: I've been surprised how much I like Facebook. It's a great way to keep in touch with other teachers that I've worked with over the years, touch base and share ideas. Who'd have thunk it?

c) Visit http://sites.google.com/site/buildingapln/Do you have a personal learning network? Look at the potential and challenges of each new site as platforms for learning and inclusion in a PLN?

No, I don't have a PLN - that sounds a bit too grand for hunting and pecking on the net. Frankly I find the noise / info ratio a little too high. In my personal life I do have a PLN - to do with cameras and photography. Curious that I don't have one for work. I worry about getting sucked into the noise. Plus there's merit in less ideas more deeply thought about. One shouldn't be ashamed to try less - but more deeply - at the expense of (potentially) trying to try everything in a shallow and superficial manner. For example I found LC MOO a bit old school in the light of more 'modern' GUI alternatives. But who knows, through deep use (and understanding of LC MOO) I could start to see all sorts of opportunities and strengths / virtues in it that aren't obvious at first encounter. This really raises the deeper truth: Good educational tools et al are the tools that you understand most deeply how to use and be empowered by / empower others with.

[OLR] Exercise 4.2 Hosting good conversations: House Rules!

a) Discuss three ways of providing users with more control in an online community

1. Begin by giving users the option to 'hold back' on the personal disclosure - much like Facebook does. This is really important as it allows users to begin small and grow as a member of a community - disclosing as they go and building up an awareness of who they are / are not sharing information with.
2. Provide a 'virtual sandpit' like LC MOO does or as Wikipedia or any number of wiki sites do. In other words a sort of virtual playground to let you know how the system works. Control of the system is a big issue for potential users. I know that I held off of facebook for years really because I was afraid of joining up and being inundated with unwanted social interactions. The closed nature of the facebook interface (either you're a member and can see something or your not) also had me holding off until I had to for this course :-). Being able to look and play without committing one's virtual ID is a big factor, I would argue, to getting people into virtual communities.
3. Make it easy for users to update or modify their identity / status and accessibility. Gmail's chat function is a good example of being able to go offline in an unobtrusive manner when you don't want to talk to someone but you still want to access other tools. The benefits of this are more obvious in a forum that might well have many years of relevant information - but you don't want people to see you looking at - because perhaps you're busy / working / whatever. I found LC_MOO a bit too old school and arcane in its use of text commands. I ended up wandering out of my room accidently and found it hard to get back in. Literally blundering around in a virtual world.

b) Howard Rheingold wrote the The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online in 1998. What three rules or tips did you find interesting or have experienced so far in your online meetings or interaction?

1. A spirit of group creativity, experimentation, exploration, good will. This is key for me. Without these elements I find the online community experience rather barren. With something like LC_MOO or a forum we rely our words to create our world.
2. Pose questions for the group to consider. I think that this what it's all about. Real questions. Questions that will bring out a range of opinions and perspectives to help people build their knowledge and understandings. I find a lot of the off-topic chatter about drinks etc a bit confusing in our weekly chats. I really like the idea of talking about the subject at hand as proposed by the host or the host via the agenda.
3. Communities don't just happen automatically when you provide communication tools: under the right conditions, online communities grow. They are gardened. For example in a synchronous community people are going to need to be heard out and feel as if they are being addressed / replied to. A community where people are always being drowned out isn't a community and won't grow.

c) Read the ISPG policy for user behaviour in a MOO at http://ispg.csu.edu.au/subjects/cscw/moo/moo-policy.doc and compare it with the Community Guidelines at http://digg.com/guidelines. Why do collaborative social software systems with synchronous and asynchronous communications need to develop a set of “rules of engagement"? Is the need the same or less when using a document sharing systems only?

At a glance - what a profound difference. The MOO document reminds me of the classic free software movement document. Long and well principled and very much about your freedom, the nature of that freedom and how that freedom should not impact on the freedoms of others - all wrapped up in pages of 'how-to' that makes sense. The Digg guidelines were much more short, sharp, shiny and to the point - in a conversational style. Ultimately though they both do the same job: tell you how you should behave - although much of this should be common sense. The MOO document seems to be necessarily more complex because it covers both people viewing / people creating documents.

Rules for engagement (and post engagement) are important - especially so in a digital world where it's easy to duplicate and replicate at little or no cost / perceived risk. To me, a document sharing system implies a level of permanence and attribution rights that needs to be considered. Authorship. In the case of synchronous and asynchronous communications - i.e. conversations - there is, to my mind a need to protect conversations that might be seen as being more transient given that text (and audio) logs can be kept of transient, ephemeral chats and this raises the need to include certain rights - such as the right not be taken out of context. This also raises the question of ownership. If I say it online in a community - do I own my words or does the community? A creative commons license might come to the fore here. At any rate I don't want to remain accountable for the rest of my days for something that I said online, once, somewhere ....

[OLR] Exercise 4.1 Blog or Wiki design

"You don't need an on-line community when most people are in the same geographical area, such as a building or a village and people are not so busy that meetings can be organised when most people can attend." OLR task

As a primary school teacher my community is in my classroom - in our classes shared conversations, in our shared learning experiences. In this sense the immediacy of face-to-face conversations is a great strength and the undertaking of these conversations supports us to develop as people that can talk and interact appropriately with each other. However online learning activities do give us some opportunities to explore ideas in ways that enhance our face-to-face experiences and which draw upon the strengths of blogs and wikis.

1. How would you design and manage content in a blog? Use your blog experiences so far.

To begin with I must be honest and say that I've always struggled to 'do blogs'. I'm kind of in awe of bloggers like Graham Wegner who have been at it for years and years without, seemingly, a break. Graham's blog gives good pointers about what to do with a blog:

1. Stay focused - Graham's been on about using IWB's for years. And when I looked at his site recently he's still focused on that idea. His core idea. I think an effective blog surrounds a core idea / purpose.
2. Be informed - as an ICT Coordinator Graham really does know his stuff: and not just technical stuff. He has a good handle on pedagogy and big picture and that comes out in his writing.
3. He links back selectively - Graham doesn't read and comment and respond to everyone - just a core group of co-respondents. It gives his blog focus and a sense of continuity. Graham doesn't try to address everything, just certain things that he's interested in.
4. Good use of categories - it's easy to pick up on a thread or an area of interest over time

So bearing all of this in mind, if I were to be a blogger I would aspire to Graham's way of doing things: Focused, informed, selective and organised. A blog can be an effective tool for capturing stream-of-consciousness thoughts. But too random an input will kill the blogging experience. Beyond this using effctive headings and organising 1 topic per entry is also key. A weakness, from a certain point of view, of blogs like Graham's, is that his entries have, over the years, become longer. This fairly reflects his, I guess, possibly increased writing to his community audience. But overall shorter is better for blogs I think. Although perhaps blogs are evolving into longer forms as Twitter, Facebook, RSS and the like fill the needs of short headlines and updates.

2. Select ONE blogging or wiki product, such as the one you use in this subject- eg Blogger. Write a 100-word summary of how it has supportive tools that are similar to the design advice in this topic. In your summary, consider how it satisfies the nine design requirements and the 3 underlying principles, suggested by Kim (2000a; 2000b)?

I'll look at wikispaces as a site. Over the years I've used it a bit for a range of projects. Most recently for a project in emt-501 in 2008. I think wikispaces offers a range of supportive tools that comply with the design advice in this topic. Specifically with respect to Kim's Nine Design Strategies:

1. Wiki's allow for clearly defined purpose-built communities with easy creation of all comer / private member only participation rules. Wikispaces makes it easy to allow people to form a group that fulfils an ongoing need. It's easy to include a Vision Statement - and it is also easy to support editing of that statement and discussion of that statement so that it might evolve (as communities can and do).
2. The groupware technology should make the establishment of the community easy: Wikispaces gets a big tick for this. Easy to set up accounts and create login rights for one's students.
3. There should be ways of defining the characteristics of participants. In LC_MOO we can "look" at a participant's description they define themselves. There are also extended profiles. Wikispaces provides support for photo avatars and for a member profile. Potentially this can be quite powerful because the member profile can be both what you choose to say about yourself, and it can also include links to all of the wiki's that you are involved in - this can tell quite a powerful story about who you / other people are.
4. Participants will take on various roles in the community. Newcomers' will need guidance; old-hands may give leadership. Wikispaces supports different levels of editing control. But this is fairly ad-hoc. Either you're an administrator or your not. It's not like a game where you can develop and attain greater powers.
5. Leaders need to be fostered. Discussion tabs can support this through background conversations.
6. Community rules and morés need to be developed. This would be up to - in my case - the teacher to set up and this would really be about the in class face-to-face establishment of expectations. Not such a strength of wikispaces I think.
7. Regular events help promote relationships. Unlike Facebook or Twitter (unless you're using the RSS feeds to draw people back) wikispaces is not particularly strong in this area. But that's consistent with a wiki being a place to go to perhaps. I'm not sure about this one.
8. Rituals help develop a mature online culture. Can't comment.
9. A large community can sustain sub-groups. Can't comment.
   
   

   
   

   In addition to this Wikispaces also related to these principles:

   • Design for growth and change. Wiki's have an organic sense to them - they (at least it seems to be to me) are created for a shared, communal purpose. All stakeholders can contribute to their development and therefore to the sites growth and change. Blogs seem rather more single handed - the author alone sets direction and chooses to (or not) respond to comments and conversations out in the blogosphere. As a commentator you either engage with the conversation or move on.
   • Create and maintain community feedback. Not so strong in a wiki as it is in a blog - where I think, arguably, feedback is king. Wiki's - being more collaborative are built on consensual feedback perhaps - but pages can be endlessly reviewed and reverted to by the administrator.
   • Allow your members to gradually take more control. A possibility with wikis - admins can hand over and pages can grow greatly through the contribution of interested stakeholders - on a wiki you only need to be able to edit (and be informed - or not) to take control.
     
     

[OLR] Exercise 3.2: Mobile computing research

“If we are in earnest about universal education, we must … recognize that our education succeeds just to the extent that we make it focus upon the real activities of life” Charles DeGarmo 1895

To me, the educational value of online mobile games and mobile social network access is that they potentially provide hardware / platform independent opportunities to offering students real world connections between technology and learning and integrating that connection into coherent / purposeful / meaningful / relevant learning experiences that are consistent with the everyday practices and motivations of students in their day to day lives. The challenge will be in controlling this technology (integrating in into lessons for example) to support effective delivery of learning outcomes whilst - as a teacher - breaking down some of my own prejudices against using such technology in the first place.

In this entry I've used a Nintendo DS Brain Training game that I'm familiar with to demonstrate the level of novelty and engagement that can be brought to a simple mental-maths type activity.

Many teachers found computers to be a nuisance because they required preparing extra lessons, and moving children to a computer room. Some were even intimidated by the computers. But the DS could be used briefly and in the classroom. And it cut down on paperwork. “It’s not like we’re letting the students play games without supervision,” [a school manager] says. “I don’t even consider them to be a game device. It’s a tool.”

Really the challenge and opportunities hinge around the idea of integrating technology into the lessons - mobile games and mobile social network access (facebook is replete with games and add ons - an educational facebook could be very viable - and doable) offer the potential of getting the technology into the lesson and not requiring the lesson to move out into the computer room or onto the pods as such. Technology that can be instantly accessed from the students desk would be desirable from a lesson flow point of view whilst being consistent with the sort of practice alluded to by Marc Prensky by improving interest and access for ‘digital natives’ by employing familiar and flexible modes of learning through such technologies games, social networking or roleplays that mimic the real life activities of everyday life (although I can't help being a contrarian and including a quote from Clifford Stohl:

"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading."

Stohl's 1995 quote neatly dovetails with much of the imagined benefits of playing games and engaging with the presumed learning habits of digital natives:

“Work sheets were such a pain […] These exercises feel like a game.”

The role of the teacher (as always) will be to mediate and guide students to contextualise the learning and not get lost in the showiness of the game. Another Stohl quote is that adult work is not always fun. Making every aspect of learning is not necessarily preparing students for some realities of adult life. I'm not sure how that conection can be addressed for getting the best value from online educational gaming / learning.

[OLR] Exercise 3.1: The Battle for Wesnoth

For me The Battle for Wesnoth shaped up as one of those really intriguing, superficially engaging but ultimately somewhat disappointing gaming experiences. I theory I really like the idea and the premise (the classic role playing scenario of starting off lowly and building up one's army and power to greater and greater heights - a handy metaphor for life I suppose!). I also really like the idea that the game is open source and cross platform which means that it can be played on pretty much any platform including free ones; potentially lowering the entry / equity bar for students in a range of schools.

Ultimately, however, I found the very 'realness' of the game's task off putting from an educationalist perspective - in as much as the game requires a considerable amount of time to get fluent with it (well for me anyway) and this requires a commitment and engagement to the idea of learning to master the game that I find hard to muster in practice.

However from a teacher's point of view this game could be empowering for students because its fantasy elements are reasonably intriguing for most kids and the idea of conquering others certainly appeals - these could all be used to model / front or back end real world learning areas and help develop strategic thinking capabilities. Frankly I'd see equal benefit in teaching kids chess / checkers and those game have lower entry points with high potential exit points and those games also support a higher degree of (when engaged) face-to-face dialogue and interaction. Perhaps I just like quick and simple games that teach a point.

At any rate virtual worlds certainly provide educational opportunities and great potential:For a teacher that sings to that tune I suppose - which would be consistent with the idea that learning is facilitated when experiences are embedded into a context into which the skills being used can transcend the context of the classroom and where students, in effect can use the sort of environment / worlds] of Wesnoth to practice their strategic learning in a 'real' (albeit virtual) context with all of the complexity that such a 'real' world implies. My ideas about quick games of chess could - in this context - seem more unreal to kids than the virtual world. And I'm not even a very good chess player.

[OLR] Exercise 2.4 Online Identity and my state of presence

The discovery and re-discovery of radical imagination in Aristotle and Kant, is now seen as essential to "both self and to the objects of experience" and "to imagine the self as other". In virtual reality systems, an avatar is described as a new state of presence. The avatar allows group members, such as you, to not only imagine, but to act "the self as other", in support of learning and teamwork processes.

1. Briefly explain, in your own words, what you think of the ideas and solutions presented in Reading A by Dick Hardt. During his 15 minute talk he mentionedphishing, pharming, privacy invasionand identity theft. Give an example to support your explanation of each of those activities.

Hardt's article raises the challenges of going online in a manner that allows you to protect your online identity whilst being able to be verifies by websites for being who you say you are. The challenge of achieving this can be backgrounded against the phenomena ofphishing, pharming, privacy invasionand identity theft. Unlike traditional responses where you rely on another company to authenticate you, Hardt's company proposes using a user-centric model which has the following advantages:

• The user is in the middle of a data transaction. This does not mean the user has to approve every transaction, but that the data always flows through the user’s identity agent. This does have user control and consent advantages that others point out, but I think more importantly, it provides huge scale advantages as the Identity Provider does not have to have any prior knowledge of the Service Provider. The network of sites can build up ad-hoc, just like SMTP servers do today.
• The user has a consistent user experience. That does not mean that all users have the same user experience, but that a specific user is using the same identity agent over and over for each identity transaction, similar to the interfaces we all see for saving and printing files regardless of the application. Currently each SP provides its own user interface which means the user is learning a new interface, sometime for onetime use (eg. site registration) By separating the identity component from the rest of the application, the user also has more certainty on who the SP is which helps resolve phishing. (Source)

User-centric identity is a response to these challenges:

Phishing is the criminallyfraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwordsand credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. (Source: Wikipedia). So for example the classic Bank email scam asking to update your details with the bank - and by doing so you end up going to a false site by following a link that looks like your bank's URL address but isn't (see Pharming).

Pharming (pronounced farming) is a hacker's attack aiming to redirect awebsite's traffic to another, bogus website. Pharming can be conducted either by changing the hosts file on a victim’s computer or byexploitation of avulnerability in DNS serversoftware. DNS servers arecomputers responsible for resolving Internet names into their real addresses — they are the "signposts" of the Internet. Compromised DNS servers are sometimes referred to as "poisoned". (Source: Wikipedia) Classic redirect that sees you being diverted from a genuine site to a fraudulent site.

Privacy Invasion The wrongful intrusion into a person's private activities by other individuals or by the government. (Source: answers.com) To my mind this raises the question of who can be trusted with your details and of you, the consumer, being able to understand the differences between trusted and untrusted forms of authentication. Moving away from third parties to do your authentication will arguably, leave less of a digital trail

Identity theft is a term used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits. The term is relatively new and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it. (Source: Wikipedia). This cuts to the core of this course and Hardt's presentation - being able to go online and actually prove that you / your avatar is who you say you are. It would be bad enough to be engaged in an online debate with a bot, but just as bad to be debating with someone who isn't even who they say they are. User-centric digital identification could resolve that.

[OLR] Exercise 2.3: Create and record your online persona

Design and construct your Facebook

I want to avoid doing this like the plague. I don't like leaving digital footsteps against my name and I don't like the idea of taking what I consider to be ephemeral, spoken conversations and converting them into permanent written conversations that can be tracked and review by literally anyone.

I won't be having a persistent avatar because I don't want to give up my anonymity. I don't want to chat with friends online. Sorry if your a friend reading this - I'll call soon! I promise. I guess this all goes back to the idea that I think of the web as a-thing-apart and I don't want that thing following me back into this world. So if I pick some random name for my online avatar then I won't want that to follow me back into the real world ("You called yourself what?"). Likewise I don't want to link my online name / online life back into my real name / real life. Partly this is because of concerns about identity theft. Partly it's because of some sort of deep seated aversion to the social.

[OLR] Exercise 2.2: Virtual worlds and "citizenship"

My initial 'pre-action' (thought before action) of Second life is, I suppose of the classic “I’ve got my hands full in my first life." type of mindset. I kind of think that I haven't been on Second Life. Of course being greeted with a 'Can't sign up now' advisory isn't winning me over.

I can't see second life being a big deal for primary educators like me. For starters kids under 18 can't use it and the bandwidth requirements aren't possible for a school to support. It was slow on my 1.5 megabit ADSL connection. Of course the big question for me about citizenship in the VL world - is what's the point, the world itself is open ended which sounds like great pedagogy but I can only manage one open-ended life: My first life. However, there appears to be real possibilities for virtual meetups and collaborative efforts - but if I wanted to achieve a 'real-world' outcome I'm not so sure that I'd want to use this sort of virtual world in preference to a Skype meeting or a Gmail Chat or even a Facebook group - all of which require less bandwidth and don't require as big an install as Second Life does.

Of course Second Life offers the opportunity to collaborate and foster meaningful (i.e. proactive and engaged) citizenship in the real world- for example EnergyTeachers.org sustainability Energy Science Lab. But this seems to bring me back to the idea that online involvement is really only an adjunct to real world involvement. Citizenship online doesn't mean much unless you're willing to practice out in the real world.