For my final project in this class I am to aggregate everything I've learned from this class and express a coherent whole out of it. I like some of the examples given, such as the comic strip suggestion, but sadly, as I am extremely strapped for time, this is going to have to take the form of a rambling stream-of-conciousness essay punctuated by linkspam.
On the first week of Weblogs and Wikis my true love gave to me... err, I mean, we got organized and introduced the concept of a Personal Learning Network. The most concise definition of PLN I can come up with is a system an individual creates for themselves to improve their efforts of self-education, taking advantage of modern social media technology. Here's a bit of further reading that I did, which expands on the concept a bit: A scholarly article on the theory, a good article on how tweeting and PLNs.
The second week, we started to take a real look at the wider view of the concept of social networking and how very vital it is becoming, as well as getting a head start on the theory and practice of blogging. Some of the issues involved, like the "rise of the amateur" complaint, which stresses that news bloggers don't count as "real" bloggers, struck me as wildly and hilariously reactionary, and reactionary over something that is borderline mainstream by now even. TV Tropes has a fun article on this phenomenon: New Media are Evil. We see here that this mentality has a long and storied history, which inevitably ebbs when the next big thing comes around. So don't be afraid the next time some state starts considering legislation to license journalists, they'll forget about it soon enough. Also, Twitter makes you immune to human suffering, donchaknow.
Week three was actually about just that.
Week four, we got started on wikis. Wikis are a fun subject, though I think it's the sort of thing where you can learn how to format things in wikis but you can't really learn more than that without spending a lot of time contributing to them. Still, we learned a lot about wikis, like the history of the wiki and the technological limitations that originally impeded reaching that ideal, and the implications of using a true hypertextual medium now that it has been invented. We can see a bit of that New Media are Evil prejudice against wikis now (how often have you heard "But ANYONE can edit Wikipedia" as if that were the most terrible thing ever?) but I became increasingly convinced that this represents a vocal minority nowadays.
Week five was also wikis.
Week six was a day of reflection, you can find my reflection here.
Week seven was when we learned the corpro-speak-sounding term "produsage." It's kind of a confusing term, but I'll try to define it. Produsage is a portmanteau of producer and user, or rather, that gets us produser, who creates produsage. It's essentially the same concept from above, in the wiki section - instead of living in a world where there are producers and consumers of information, we have the potential (and are slowly starting to) live in a world where the lack of a significant cost for publishing information (that is, the simplicity of putting information on the internet, instead of printing it off and mailing it, as was our only option not too long ago) means that everyone who consumes information also has the potential to produce information on the same level. Moreover, it becomes increasingly easy for the produser to produce something out of something that someone else has already produced (which might be called annotating, refining, or stealing, depending on your point of view). Here's the website of the book that coined the term.
Week nine was the point where we were sort of let loose, having been introduced to the class's two major topics and most of the themes involved. We talked about Japan, and how the recent disaster displayed some of the effects of an increasingly wired, social-media-involved society. As a personal anecdote, my girlfriend was anxiously trying to contact her brother, who was in Japan at the time, using Facebook and found out he and his family were ok only a day after the initial disaster (It took them awhile to get access to a computer).
Week ten was when we got into the fun Privacy debate, concerning the implications of widespread social sharing and Facebook's wonderful privacy issues. I ended up penning a somewhat extreme and fantastic opinion piece that sums this up better than I can do here, so check it out.
In week eleven we got into more of the reactionist social worries, the classic "texting is ruining grammar" debate. I don't really have much to say about this. The fact is, as long as language is understood by the intended audience, then there's no problem with it. The way we communicate online is mutating and changing something fierce, and in a lot of different ways, but I've never heard of any situations where this actually causes problems, so it's not really worth worrying about. And I'm a writing major, I get to decide these things.
In week twelve we learned about crowdsourcing. I'm cynical about this. It seems in a lot of ways like a cynical attempt to get other people to do your work for you. This isn't necessarily the case, but that's how everything I've read on the subject seems to frame it.
Finally week thirteen was about cell phones. [expand]
I do hope this is complete enough. It seems to me that one of the problems with using a Personal Learning Network in a college environment is that your study is largely self-guided, but your grading...isn't.
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