Charles's EME6414 Web 2.0 BLog

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...