Friday, March 30, 2007

Comments from Michael Day

I'm re-posting this for Dr. Day. Sorry to hear that I had to miss what sounds like a great class this week! - Dr. Reyman

------------------------------------------
At any rate, it was great to be able to discuss social networking with you last night, and I applaud you for your great ideas. So that we don't forget, here are some of the questions we addressed:

*What IS social networking, and is it limited to services such as MySpace and Facebook?

*What should be taught about social networking in K-12 and college classes? Who should teach it?

*How do we make education relevant to students who come to us with a variety of social networking and online literacies?

*Could/should social networking spaces such as Myspace and Facebook be used in secondary and higher ed? Or should they be protected spaces, for social interaction only?

*How can strategies and motivating factors used in social networking be harnessed to the task students face in creating an electronic portfolio of their work, for academic and professional purposes, a record of online learning and professional practices?

*How can aspects of social networking inform the work of professional communicators?

Here are a few of the terms that seemed important in our discussion:

*Writing for different audiences, repurposing online identities for different audiences, code switching.

*Fine tuning access to online identities through different versions of the online "package" for different audiences. How public do you want to be? How can you choose how you want to be seen by various groups: family, friends, professional contacts, academic contacts?

*Google thyself. Know thine online presence and keep it (as) pure (as possible.

*Focusing on the creation and maintenance of online identity in classes that have to do with writing and communication.

*Crowd sourcing, grassroots groupminds, living database as responsive sources of information for personal and professional issues, teaching tips, and technical help (the blog or listserv group as a living "manual" for software).

*Problems of credibility and reliability in online collaborative environments. Who's an expert, and how do you know? The wikipedia effect: does group editing lead to authority?

That's enough, I think, but I'm hoping that some of you will want to explore a few of these issues further in a blog post.

Thanks, and see you again on April 11,

Michael Day
mday@niu.edu
http://mday.org

2 comments:

sunset said...

On Googling yourself, you might get associated with someone with the same name and have to explain away their unsavory profile. Or, someone might tag you with guilt by association. On the other hand, you might discover some family history you were unaware of. When I Googled my last name, a teacher in Poland who had won awards came up. I had never met her but she might be related to me as my name is not very common. This, of course, was a positive thing, but we all have negative associations which could pop up through no fault of our own.

Unknown said...

And on that note, a Michael Day in England sent me a friend request on Facebook last week, which I accepted. Then he immediately sent a request for me to join a group of guess what? All the Michael Days all over the world. There are something like 26 of us and growing. So, what you have in common with others may only be a name, but to some, that's a reason to forge links.

But Sunset, I am glad you googled yourself and learned something. Dr. Gunkel reminded me of the term "identity surfing" again last weekend. If you have a presence on the web, can you resist checking it out now and again to see not only who's mentioning you and linking to you, but also who is sullying your name and eating into your web reputation because they have the same name.

Google thyself, and report back.

Film at 11.