Charles's EME6414 Web 2.0 BLog

As someone who aspires to be a writer, I find the potentials in online writing created by social media technologies to be fascinating.   I meant to blog about this a few weeks ago, but I was reminded of my interest in this new potential by the online Twitter adventure from a few weeks ago, wherein you had to roleplay and keep from being fired as Beyonce’s assistant.    https://time.com/5614204/beyonce-twitter-thread-explained/ The brainchild of a 19 year old who was just experimenting with the choose your own adventure aspects narratively possible on Twitter, it’s a great ideat to see what is possible in creating a scenario on a platform that wasn’t really intended to do such. About a 15 years ago, there was a similar narrative that made use of the disaparate social media technologies of the time to create a creepy story, one that wasn’t interactive in a “choose your own adventure” style but still fully immersed you in the narrative.  It did this by taking the fo...

I have to imagine that whenever someone starts to pursue a career in education and starts taking higher education courses to their degree they grapple to some extent with their own education that they experienced growing up.   Because necessarily there will probably be a gap of 15-20 years, and especially since the rise of digital technologies the differences in what the student experienced in school and the techniques they are studying in pursuit of their degree must be vast. It’s certainly something that is on my mind, studying in this course and the rest of my courses as I pursue my certificate and reflect not only on my elementary and high school education, but also much more relevantly on the online coursework I took from 2002-3 in pursuit of my Library Science Masters.  In the interim of those 16 years from then to now, online education has become so different they might as well not even be classified as the same thing.   They aren’t, really, with current coursewo...

https://rm.coe.int/16809382f9 The article is fascinating in what it proposes for an ideal online environment.  The pessimist in me feels it’s too late. I keep wondering if things online are really so bad as you’d expect or hear.   I’ve been enjoying Twitter this summer, but I still overhear my coworkers dismissing it, still see the comments on various feeds I follow talking about the nature of the site.  I’m not sure we aren’t just focusing on the bad interactions and glossing over the many good communications that routinely take place.  This make sense, as a bad experience tends to overwhelm or outweight even a day full of good ones. It’s interesting to frame this concept in terms of digital citizenship, transferring a conception of civilized society to the online realm.   Because what I think is that civilized society is unfortunately forced to be that way by enforcement and authority.  We have police officers for a reason, to ostensibly maintain th...

We looked at a new tool to integrate into our LMS this week, a tool called Yellow Dig.  It offered a variety of features, but the one that got us most excited was the potential to dramatically change how online class discussions are held. Currently, most online classes use a discussion board model, divided by week.  It’s what every class I’ve experienced so far in this certificate program has featured.   Being relatively new to my job, I’d never heard any complaints, but apparently there was a desire by more than a few faculty to try and create a more organic form of online discussion. I suppose they felt that breaking the discussion by week, with a requirment of so many posts and so many replies per week, felt sort of forced and not really natural.  Perfunctory on the part of students, essentially. What Yellow Dig offers (and I”ve only seen about a 30 minute preview through a remote presentation) was to have one feed, an ongoing discussion if you will.   So...

Library Social Media Use The social media use in academic library article this week was interesting, because of what I feel have been missed opportunities in the public libraries I’ve worked at.   The article’s statement that most libraries use social media for marketing purposes lines up with my experiences.   I was never in charge of these accounts, but I really wonder at the effectiveness.  They certainly don’t hurt, but when I see most posts garnering a handful of likes, I’m not sure it’s relevance. I admit I had never considered doing more with social media (as it wasn’t within my list of duties), but I always did think it was a missed opportunity that the two large library systems I worked for only had one account for their entire systems.  At the branch level (and in both cases the systems had 40+ branches), we were not allowed per library system policy to have our own pages for our branches.   These were large county libraries, beholden to policies t...

It's strange to me the places where I encounter feeds and the ability to update a social status.   Recently I encountered it on the cash exchange app Venmo.   A few weeks ago I used the app for the first time to pay my kid's babysitter.  Venmo creates a profile for each user, and I was sort of shocked, after the payment was complete, to discover I was able to view my babysitter's profile, which included a record of all the various transactions she used the app for.   I did not linger once I realized what I was looking at, but it was strange to me that I could see all this detail, and also that I could even see the messages related to each transaction. I'm sure (or rather hopeful) there must be a setting to hide these profiles, but I can't help but wonder why this wouldn't be the default setting.  Why on earth, especially on an app related to finances, should I be able to see (or willing to show) a history?  It seems like in many places wh...

It’s interesting to me to think about the attempts to integrate social media into education and the ways past new technologies have been attempted to be integrated and what happened then. So televisio was the big tech innovation in the 50’s, right?   I recall reading somewhere that the first inventors of television envisioned the device being used for educational programming, beamed into everyone’s homes at night, as a means by which everyone would learn and improve themselves to their fullest potential.  Instead, of course, it was used primarily for entertainment.  (I hear gameshows were big in the 50s) I do not know (and I’m not doing the research now) to figure out how television was or even if it was incorporated into schools at the time.   There wasn’t vcrs back then, so any programming for television was primarily broadcast based- I don’t know but doubt that network television was producing educational content for school broadcasts. Television is closel...

I am pretty addicted to Super Smash Bros.  It’s a fighting game series from Nintendo, filled with all their popular characters from their various franchises and mashed together into a chaotic battle royale with tons of easter eggs and homages to video game culture.   For a long time Nintendo fanatic,it’s incredibly fun.  I’ve been playing the different installments of the series for the past 20 years.  (!) Nintendo has sort of gotten a reputation for being behind Sony and Microsoft when it comes to their online gaming offerings.  The first few installments didnt have online connectivity.  The 2014 Wii U installment did, but no way to really communicate with the online players you were competing a match with.   Yet, players found a way to communicate.   This installment had a way to name your profile, and it allowed it to be changed before and after a match.  Quickly, you had players using this function to write out little mes...

What a brutal few weeks it’s been on social media lately.   Because it was all great to sign up for Twitter at the beginning of this class and to really try it out, unlike my last few forays into it.   It was great to see the positive aspects of the platform, using it to connect with the class and think about how to use it and other tools for education. But of course I also explored twitter for my own interests.  I followed entertainment writers, musicians, connected with personal acquaintances.  And because of the times we are living in, I also followed a few political twitters. It was all well and good at first.   Very much unlike Facebook or Instagram, it became quickly evident that the real conversations in our society/culture were occurring on Twitter.   That is a scary thought, but I can’t help feel it’s true.   Sure, there are news reports and press conferences and such, but in the weeks I’ve been on twitter I’ve see...

So my duties at my job are starting to take firmer shape (after some months of feeling I was in a sort of limbo, first doing odd jobs here and there and then being without a manager more recently) My new manager is a very driven and commited Instructional Designer, excited about technology and using it to improve coursework.  (He even teaches a course on social media.).  The coincidence of him becoming my manager at the same time as I’m taking this class has not escaped me, and I’m excited if I can put into practice the lessons I’ve learend from this class in my work. I’m on the Learning Design Innovation team, with the idea to test out and pilot new tools/policies/procedures to improve and expand our course design.   It’s been only a few weeks that I’ve really worked with this goal in mind, and it’s been great. At the same time, sometimes I look at these new technologies and just wonder if they are bells and whistles and not really improving/affecting online learnin...

It seems to me that usually before a brave new technology takes the world by storm, there’s an earlier attempt using whatever was available.  These earlier attempts are usually a little messier, and not as user friendly, painting the way to their eventual failure and the rise of something that polishes and successfully finishes what they started.  So it was with social media. Because the internet has been around for awhile, and enabling people to get connected for just as long.   Before the years approaching the turn of the millennium, it was an area that only dedicated computer aficionados spent much time at, because of how clunky it was, but it was still there, in its nascent form even then representing technology’s ability to connect.  But even in earlier days you had untrained users striving, trying to connect, express themselves as much as they could, pushing at the technical boundaries of what their hardware and skills enabled.  It’s this era I th...

Over the weekend some of you posted on Twitter how you were unfamiliar with the social media site Tumblr (and by some I mean 2 of you).   I’ve written plenty of stuff for less of a potential audience than that, so here’s an introduction to Tumblr! If I had to describe Tumblr, I’d say the platform was a cross between blogging and retweeting.    To make very basic analogies, Tumblr is to blogging as Twitter is to Facebook. Tumblr is a more rapid focused form of blogging and repurposing of other users posts, like Twitter is a more rapid form and repurposing of other people’s tweets, which bear a resemblance to Facebook’s status update feature.  Another analogy: Tumbr is to Twitter as Instagram is to Facebook. Tumblr adds a strong multimedia component to a rapid newsfeed platform like Twitter, just as Instagram adds a strong multimedia graphical emphasis to the sort of connective network you create on Facebook. If all that was confusing, just go bac...

I guess I come at social media from a very suspicious place.   It’s very apparent to me when I read everyone else’s excited blog posts and I feel like mine are sort of pessimistic.  But I really do appreciate this class showing me a different side to social media!   I was very much in a mindset that it was destroying society, that its tech purveyors were milking us for our private data, that it was eroding my time to do more productive things.   I’m still of the belief that it’s doing all that, but hey, it can be used to teach you stuff, too! I kid. What appeals to me most about this class is the vision its putting forth, one of how the internet was supposed  to be when it was first becoming mainstream.  At the time, all the news reports or whatever heralded a new era of communication.   The tech giants touted the ability for ideas to flow forth and connections to be made at an unprecedented level.    It was so idealistic, it reminds me o...

I think there’s a lot of Disney World fans in this class.  We live in Florida, it’s to be expected! Has anyone read this 2003 science fiction novel by Cary Doctorow?  It’s set in the future, where what we would now call social media technologies and cloning have revolutionized the world into the Bitchun Society.  Basically, everyone is connected to the network at all times via their brains, instant cloning and the ability to fully backup your memories for downloading into clones of yourself has made everyone functionally immortal, and no one wants for anything- basic needs are met, but true economic standing is instead determined by your Whuffie score, a social barometer that is most analogous to how many “Likes” you have. The Disney connection comes from the setting of the novel.   Since there’s no real economics anymore, people live and work wherever they want, so the main character is part of the group that runs Liberty Square in Disney World.  ...

I switched careers this past Dec, fulfilling a goal to leave librarianship behind and embark on a new career.  I’d been trying for this change, directly to an instructional design job, for about 4 years.   Multiple applications over the years, never got in the door.   Resume updated along the way incrementally, but I can’t say it was with any big changes.  In the spring of 2018, I began the certificate program.    I applied again, this time getting a call back.   Was that the difference, that I was enrolled in school? I don’t know.  I bring this up because I read about the rise of badging and I wonder how far it’s going to go.  But when I really about it, isn’t a diploma or certificate from a university a badge?  For a badge, you prove you have some sort of competency and they award you one, gatekeeped behind the blockchain cryptography, and it says to the world “This person can do this, whatever this is!”  ...

Some thoughts related to how social media is appreciated after reading the Teens and Social Media article These kids are able to plan, for both their professional and entertainment pursuits, much better than I could at their age, because they have the tools to do so.  I had to use magazines to get the kind of casual instruction/information they are getting- magazines were the most current type of information to me when I was researching colleges to attend. Even pre-social media, a school’s website would be fairly static in the information it could provide.  Usually updated once a year, with perhaps a text news feed being the only updated/current source of information.   With social media, not only do you get a dynamic information source from the school itself, but also get a direct line to the students and faculty, who will provide other information that was inaccessible in previous generations. It’s interesting that the teens had to be probed into recognizing how t...

 So there’s this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/thedweck/status/1132328834265624576 This tweet represents what my previous perception of twitter was prior to this class.   I’d largely heard about twitter in terms of harassment, the spread of misinformation, doxxing, and other bad things.  I’d also heard that Twitter administrators were largely unresponsive to these complaints.   I’d heard about these negative aspects from the news, from bloggers I follow, memes, articles, you name it.   It didn’t really seem to be a site worth trying out, based on all that. Yet, there are obviously lots of people who enjoy using the site.  Many of my coworkers are on twitter and sing its praises.   There’s a thriving and vital information network here, especially in our field.  And the class has made particular good use of the #eme tag to connect and interact with each other. So where’s the truth?   Is Twitter like a public space, somewhere th...

On Twitter a lot of our classmates are commenting that they are feeling more connected to their peers, more than in previous classes. For me, I think I’ve been getting more knowledge about the heavy Twitter and Instagram users, but I’m not so sure about the rest of the class. I’m also having trouble with the Blogging-discussion format of the class. While there is a discussion board, we are able to fulfill our participation requirement by commenting on blogs. The blogs have been wonderful, and I have enjoyed reading them very much. I do get a big sense of my classmate’s thoughts when they have been free to post about whatever they want, and not necessarily to answer a posted discussion board question. On the oher hand, I am missing the conversational aspect that arises from restricing the discussion to one discussion board. While I see some activity on certain blog posts, many of them do not get more than 1 or 2 comments. So far, I haven’t seen lots of the back and forth a...

The main theme of this week’s readings have been digital natives, and the differences between growing up or not with the Internet. Though I have posted my objections to Plensky’s conception of digital natives vs. digital immigrants, the idea that there is a sort of sea change occurring between people who grew up in a mainstream computerized world vs. those that didn’t is compelling.  I just dispute that the ones who didn’t are somehow at a disadvantage, or that the disparity in their behaviors is really so major.  When I read articles like this, I can’t help but think about someone yelling about getting off their lawn and walking through 10 feet of snow back in their day. What I find more optimistic is not that the digital “immigrants” (again, a term I hate to describe this group) are at a disadvantage for growing up before the rise of a computerized world, but that they have been forced to acclimate, and are succeeding.  Indeed, I think the behaviors and skills they de...

Slack for Education I thought it was unfortunate that part 2 of Networked didn’t have a section devoted to Networked Education (or if it was discussed in one of the other sections, I missed it since it wasn’t reflected in the titles). So I read Networked Work instead, since after education using the information I get in this class (and this degree really) is meant to help me in my career.   The book focuses mostly on the telecommuting work that social media technologies have enabled.  I really want a work from home job.  I love my current job, but as I sit all day typing in a computer, I really can’t see any justification for why I can’t do this from the comfort of my home.  Maybe one day. Because all the benefits that Networked spells out are so true.  But beyond that, social media technologies have basically replaced the main methods of communication already.  I see it all around- most of my coworkers are typing away at their desk, and only r...

Plenksy: “The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain. “ ----Apparently I’m a Digital Native. It’s helpful to me while reading this to remember that it is written in 2001, so it’s very clearly talking about experiences I went through growing up. I had already graduated college by then, and while I was increasingly using the...

So I’ve been watching and really enjoying Cobra Kai, the Karate Kid revival airing on Google.  I’m a big Karate Kid fan, but I do think the series is great regardless of any personal bias. I’m writing about it on this blog because one of the main older characters is completley clueless about computers and social media.  It’s played for laughs (how can you not know what Facebook is?), but the reality is that there are plenty of people in the world who aren’t on social media, and somehow managing their lives.  I know this especially, because I dealt with them on a daily basis while working at the library.  When I talk to some of my friends, they may have some experience with older relatives being relatively clueless about it, but I’m not sure they really understand the signficant portion who are not choosing to unplug but are just unplugged because they don’t know or never had the chance to. What’s interesting and somewhat tragic to me is that this is the way the w...

 Web Ages timeline https://flatworldbusiness.wordpress.com/flat-education/previously/web-1-0-vs-web-2-0-vs-web-3-0-a-bird-eye-on-the-definition/ I like this timeline a lot for helping me understand what we are talking about in this class, but what’s really eye opening is that 2.0 is sort of considered to have occurred around 1999.  When I think of mass internet usage becoming mainstream, I often think of it around the time it got to my house, which was 1996.  You know something hits a sort of mass market appeal when a hollywood movie starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks can be based upon it and be successful (1998’s You’ve Got Mail).  This is not some film about hackers (95’s Hackers) or cryptologists (1992’s Sneakers), who used computers but we as the audience largely understood them as not being everyday people.  At the time, if you used a computer, it was probably as a glorified typewriter.  (Ha, just thought of Mathew Broderick in 83’s WarGames.  Th...

So I worked for over 14 years as a librarian.  Somewhere in the middle there I started to first become aware of the term Web 2.0, mostly because there was the idea of Library 2.0 starting to go around, too.   I'm not sure that it meant much to me on the frontlines in a public library branch, where I had to worry more about helping sign up for email accounts and getting kids their AR books.  I figured I would become aware of it when it was time to, but that never really happened. Understanding in class this week that Web 2.0 is more of a philosophy is eye opening.   I was experiencing Web 2.0 without even knowing it, just in the different questions coming from my customers. According to this wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_2.0) library 2.0 “attempts to harness the library user in the design and implementation of library services by encouraging feedback and participation.”   That sounds great, but I’m not sure what is so 2.0 about that?   ...

This is my first post.  Did it work?