I should have just kept my domain hosting updated to my most current email address. Months ago I forgot to renew the domain for my site “Cultivating Minds” at the same time that I was starting to not like that blog title anyway. Actually, I found the title of that limited. First of all, I’m not a big gardener. Second of all, the title seemed to presume that minds are something that should be…”cultivated.” As my thoughts about learning and lifelong learning evolve, this metaphor just doesn’t work for me. Learners need to take responsibility for their own interests, and while formal education can be helpful in guiding people in directions that they hadn’t previously considered and posing provocative questions, it’s less about something I as an educator do for others and more about the avenues that people open for themselves with guidance. Maybe if I’d called it “cultivating learning?” But why did I ever think that people’s minds were something to be tilled. (Never mind the potential puns as this naming moves from tilling to webbing, but I digress).

But that’s besides the point. When blogging, it feels important to have a home. I have blogged in a bunch of different places, but it makes me feel scattered. When foraging through the many tools available on the internet, it feels important to have a cohesive identity. (I want to note that this state of multiphrenia is well-noted in CMC literature, but not succinctly in a manner that would make sense to link.) I’m tying more of my disparate resources into one place. What’s posted here is a start of identity organization, and it will continue to morph over time.

So even though this blog probably isn’t much to look at, it’s the result of several days of wrestling with my hosting to get out of some circular redirect loop that wouldn’t let me just point my content differently, dumping data from one table to another in phpmyadmin and all sorts of other contortions. And now the colors are making me bored. As I said, work in progress, but at least we have a start.

I fortuitously aggregated upon the essay Vernacular 2.0, which discusses the development of user expression as it has morphed from the 90s into the 2000s. First, her observation: “The space that we’ve researched as a new medium for the last ten years has turned into the most mass medium of them all” rings so true that it gives me pause. But the internet is not mass media as we understand that even somewhat neologistic term, given the relatively short context of “mass communication.” Thus, should a construct of mass communication whereby a few formulate and communicate messages to many be modified? Has what we call “new” media, for lack of a better term really, actually been just a new mass communication tool that has flipped all the rules of mass communication around? Maybe this is just semantics. Certainly, with the direction that “new” media has gone, with the proliferation of tools at the “common” person’s disposal, the power of mass communication is placed in the hands of a whole lot more people. Whether their message will be part of a mass communication message will depend on a number of other factors, but certainly the whole “famous to 15 people” may be true. (Although this confounds the meaning of fame and suggests it has nothing to do with mass anything but instead social distance?)
As usual, I digress. What Lialina’s Vernacular 2.0 article brought to the forefront of my thoughts is the increasingly intensified expectations for web presence today. An early assertion in the article, picking up from earlier observations about home page construction and early user expression in web environments is about the usurping from ordinary users:

“It is also clear now who owns the home with the garden and who are the gnomes grimacing on a manicured lawn in the company of plaster ducks and real flowers.” - From Vernacular 2.0

Ok, pulling that quote out of the context that abruptly requires you, the reader, to head to the essay and figure out why we’re talking about gnomes in the first place, but essentially the idea is that a home page was never analogous to a home, but to a gnome hanging out in the garden outside the home. Enter Web 2.0 interfaces: google pages, myspace, etc., and suddenly the garden gnome/traditional home page is a duck out of water among the corporatized, more standardized designs.

Certainly, on the one hand, the availability of these tools has given users a whole lot more robust usability. Whereas with a standard traditional web page, if the page got big, one struggled with file management underneath the surface, today it is possible to set up a CMS and create a database-driven web-site, where the user doesn’t have to concern themself with back-end data management. But I hear what Lialina is saying loud and clear, and for me it begs a larger question: what skills are necessary to move from an amateur to a specialist in “new media?” If you have students developing a home page, which is so 1995, is this a valuable skill and necessary step in the process of learning, or is it so old school as to be obsolete? My web design abilities grew up simultaneously with the medium, to an extent, so to me it has been a natural progression, but if one were to come in without that context, does the whole big world of creating art, objects, communication, etc. for the web seem overwhelming? Or does it seem touch-of-a-button easy as all the message-creator needs to do is learn to exploit existing tools? Which is it? Or can it be both?

“Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.” -From A Cyborg Manifesto

What are people learning when they engage in activity, interaction, and communication in Second Life? Beyond the question of whether there is a demand for learning English in SL, there is a larger question of how the tool, in this case a complex virtual world, and an understanding of a way of being within the context of the use of that tool, is an important question when we embark down this path.

What are our “historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies” when we start to engage with each other in virtual, increasingly multi-dimensional worlds? In the physical world, we have histories, individual and communal, that underlie our interactions. We have the ability to formulate abstract communications with each other, disembodied interactions, through written language. With the development of communications technologies we have been able to modify to more “bodied” exchanges, where the nuance of tone, pitch, and articulation in a voiced interaction convey more embodiment than words on a page, but less than an interaction with the whole person.

The development of information communication technology, the ability to digitize both written text and spoken information has fractured our sense of “distance” and “presence.” Whereas these were previously, at least colloquially, measures of space and time, we can be both distant and present with others across physical space and chronological time. But how is this new “enforced meaning” changing our communication? How does a shift from a visual online world (how I will loosely label our text/image-based internet) to a tactile online world (borrowing from McLuhan’s definition whereby “tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object“)?
One question in regards to teaching and learning in Second Life specifically is, how does the culture of that virtual world impacts the communicative process? Another question I would ask is how participation in a virtual world such as SL changes the participant, and is the way the participant is changed– the way they are forced to confront their identity and engage in communicative action– something that should be imposed on someone in the same manner we are all required to be participants in the physical world? What kind of disclaimer should be provided for learners who are required through coursework to join these burgeoning and wholly immersive tactile worlds?

I bring up this issue for several reasons:

1) Because much of the research and exploration of using virtual worlds such as SL for teaching and learning appears predicated on a wholly technologically deterministic approach whereby it has been created for us, so we must use it. Or from a technological utopianistic view that online we can explore these new identities in a wonderful way that doesn’t need to be critiqued. I haven’t seen a whole lot of critique of what ways of being are being introduced to students who engage in SL.

2) In the one class where the issue of SL has been brought up this semester, a student mentioned it as this “place online, where like, people live their lives and spend real money” with a tone as if to skeptically indicate that s/he had heard of this, but does such a thing really exist?

3) Capitalistic values (that whole spending real money aspect) are inherently and obviously perpetuated in the SL environment, and that may or may not be appropriate for language learning and/or other educational endeavors. Maybe, as English is the current lingua franca of business, that makes it the perfect learning environment for English.

And on that note, with #3 tying nicely back into more questions of how SL perpetuates or breaks previous historical patterns, I will break in search of lunch…

As it may be obvious, the Quechup incident really got to me. Whenever I get really upset about something, I like to understand why.

First, it was the circumstances. I received an invite from someone who is reputable in social networking circles. I don’t blame her personally, but I do think her perspective that this is not a big deal is a little off. It is a big deal because before I could trust references from her, and now I can’t. Sure, we’re not close buddies in RL, but I trusted her judgment. But obviously, due to the manner in which companies feel compelled to operate, I never should have. All of us are operating electronically on borrowed networks, of which we will not always have control.
Second, I have taken the social networking thing for granted. Social networking, for lazy people, would consist of facebook, myspace, ning, friendster–whatever sites allow you to access all your contacts via a simple log-in. Why do I say lazy? Because, of course, one could socially network via blogs or wikis or whatever, and have more local control, but you don’t get access to a larger community. But let’s face it people, we’ve all been had. When companies like rapleaf and upscoop come along, and I will add to that spock, a very clear objective of these sites becomes apparent. As ZDnet notes, a lot of personal information is being traded, and the process is not transparent for users. So is social networking really about cultivating relationships online or is at all a big scam to follow my spending habits and market shit to me.

Maybe I was overreacting yesterday, but I’m thinking pretty clearly today about where I want to stand in relationship to these companies.

I enjoyed this post at Dangerously Irrelevant because I had never thought of the argument FOR blogging as that it might save time.

This was originally posted here.

Dean asks, “Is a blog a blog if there are no comments?” I find this ties in with my questions in the past few posts—is a blog a blog if it does not have a global audience? Is a blog a blog without trackbacks? One thing I can say with certainty, x is not a blog without RSS. Now that I’ve said it with certainty, I’m sure there will be someone to tell me I’m wrong.

Trying to understand what makes a blog a blog may seem irrelevant. However, the very essence of what blogs and wikis can provide—social collaboration, lateral spread of control over content, venue for discourse—is no longer radical if a blogging platform or wiki is simply appropriated so that students can make a website without knowing html.

This is just an informal post to list some of the issues and questions that came up in the course of our workshops today on RSS feeds, blogs, social bookmarking and podcasting (and every place I use blogs in this post, feel free to replace with dynamic social collaboration tools). I don’t want to lose these thoughts, and I will if I don’t write them down. So in no particular order:

-I was surprised about the initial perceptions about blogging and particularly myspace as largely negative and mostly irrelevant to education. There was mention of the association of myspace with crime (I’m guessing the resonating effects of the Taylor Behl case).

-The question was raised—why is it that a child who would freak out if their mom invaded the privacy of their room is willing to post all kinds of private information (name, address, school, etc) in an online forum such as myspace?

-It was expressed that blogging content is not reliable information (fair enough) and thus information from blog sources may not be appropriate for the classroom. This is an interesting one. I’m going to take this a little farther with a RL (real life) analogy. If we were all sitting at the corner store, having a glass of soda on the porch and having a conversation, how would we know whose information to trust? The “blogosphere” is not really all that different—the information is as credible as the source, and all netizens must develop the skills to be adept at evaluating the source. Looking at who is authoring a site, who connects to or comments on their site, what sources they refer to—this is how we can start to construct a perspective of what is “true” using a variety of information sources.

-The above leads into the larger point—we cannot just think of blogs purely as CONTENT. They are dynamic. The information is updated with regularity. The style is colloquial. It is PROCESS, not PRODUCT driven. The perspective of the writer is hopefully changing, growing, developing over time. The affordances built into a blogging platform allow for discourse and quick linking to original sources and other commentary. The interactions with others through the medium; the links to the words of others; belonging to a community of discussion–this is the larger picture of the potential of these RSS-fueled media.

-Internet 2 ≠ Web 2.0

- A lot of concerns about privacy, and what is appropriate and not appropriate for students to discuss openly. When confidentiality, privacy, building insular trust in a class is critical, blogging/podcasting/etc is not appropriate. Are controversial topics appropriate? Where do free speech lines get crossed?
-For educators preparing professionals in the community (nurses, teachers, etc.), even if blogging is not integral to the course, discussion of one’s representation of self online could be key, as inappropriate content online can derail a career.

-Can .swf files embedded in RSS feed be automatically detected and downloaded to a podcatcher (Juice)? Are there any restrictions on the type of embedded media that can be dowloaded via a podcatcher?

-My own question—is blogging behind password protection still blogging? Or is it something else? This is only an issue at this point because Blackboard is so backwards in terms of not providing any kind of blogging space that would be worth using, and because they do not provide a way to link RSS feeds from discussion boards. (In other words, our choices at my institution are a basic discussion board or a wide-open-to-the-world blog.) When those features are added, I hypothesize that the majority of educators interested in blogging will step back behind their content management system for student discourse. And that’s ok. But we still need to understand what is going on with all that information is out there in the blogosphere.

-The progression the use of these tools need to take is for students to become adept at finding useful information to their process of lifelong learning, to create their own content, to participate in educational communities that sustain the curiosity that convinced students to enroll in a course in the first place.

Some things we did not talk about nearly enough:

-Use of these tools for communication is fundamentally changing how we interact with others. There is no way around this, once you start digging in. In addition, once you start to “lurk” and comment on blogs, these changes begin.

-I do not like to the buy into the myth of the “millenial” students, who are basically cyborgs at this point. That is way too simplistic. These students–perhaps more than older students who understand what we are giving up and sacrificing in the way of privacy, and who have certain conceptions of what constitutes a “trusted source”–NEED space and guidance in reflecting on the nature of information and communication in the age of ICT.

-The truly positive side to these social communication and collaboration tools in terms of connecting isolated individuals with various needs (whether it be educational, community support in dealing with an illness or life difficulty, friendship) and providing a space, not connected with geography, to form human ties.

-If one believes that most of what is on blogs is useless drivel and too much information, what sources of information do you trust and why? We give a lot of credence to information that is “published” because it has been peer-reviewed. In a heavily read blogging site with many readers, isn’t that also “peer-reviewed” to some extent? Are experts always acting in the interest of simply deploying truth, or are there other factors at play?

All in all great audience participation and questions.

Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar

The above article from the NY Times did not exactly surprise me, though the section where it describes instances of kids sending pictures or video clips of themselves of very personal moments and having them mass-distributed on the Internet was a little shocking. But why not? We’re worlds “ahead” of the 35 mm film cameras that I had in high school that even if you did take a picture that would be embarrassing, it would be a month before you’d have the money and inclination to get it developed. And who would take a video of themself and then convert to a VHS tape to give to someone. The sheer amount of time it would take nipped those problems in the bud.

But now many of us have instant access to digital images and video. We’re drowning in data. And a lot of it seems disconnected from our selves–in other words, we see pictures of people every day who are not people we know, so it becomes easy to objectify them. And as this article indicates, this technology makes it even easier for us to objectify people, treating them as if we don’t know them through faceless harassment or embarassment.