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...