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

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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

FTP to NIU H account

Using IE (very important here -- IE has a built in FTP client):

Type in the address window:

ftp://ftp.niu.edu

You will get a pop-up window asking for your user name and password.

Your user name needs to be typed in as follows:

.z123456.6.students.niu

Your password is your regular zid password.

This will allow you to access your NIU account files from any computer with IE. What will show are your folders and your files. You can copy them to whatever computer you are using, modify them, re-upload them to the NIU account, etc. This also includes access to your WWW folder.

free web space

Hi, this is Elizabeth's Polish grandma chiming back in! We were discussing Geocities as an alternate option to using NIU's limited webspace today. Just so everyone knows, I googled "free webspace" and got a ton of options. There's a lot out there that might be worth looking into--especially for those of us who won't be at NIU forever and may want to keep their sites online post-graduation.

Cheers!

E-commerce Predators

A common warning to all who participate in the social networking sites was not to put to much personal information on the sites (e.g., profile pages), so visitors with unethical or immoral motives can't make contact or create false identities. Makes sense to me. But soon after, I had a funny feeling in my stomach. I do not have actively participate in any social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, yet my information lives on megasites such as Amazon.com and Walmart.com to name a few. We are all aware of the security features that supposedly safeguard our info with encryption, and so many of us continue to buy safely online. Aside from privacy settings, do these social networks offer the same type of protection for its users?

If e-commerce is becoming more acceptable and trustworthy despite possible identity theft (predators), why should people worry so much about Facebook and MySpace security? I don't know the answer, and though I write this, I don't see myself joining any of these popular networking sites any time soon.

MY CHILD’S KEEPER

This week, I do not mind being candid with my views, considering that our topic is social networking. I am not at all impressed by this new medium of communication, and while I do not particularly find any value in it for myself, I will acknowledge that others seem enamored by what they can do. The problem that I have with social networking websites relates strictly to children under the age of eighteen. As a conscientious parent of a teenage son and a pre-adolescent daughter, I am considerably suspicious about the safety of children who visit or have accounts on websites like Facebook or MySpace. In fact,
I am more worried about the predators who navigate these websites, looking to inflict harm on innocent children. Just last week, I had an intense conversation with a complete stranger while waiting in line at Nordstrom. She was a mother of a teenage daughter, who had been recently been targeted by a pedophile on her My Space account. The pervert had gone as far as to arrange a date with this child, and it was only the actions of jealous teenage suitor who informed this mother that her child was in danger. Moreover, this pervert had covered his tracks so well that the police could not assure this mother that he would never contact her child again. As responsible parents, we condemn other parents for using television to entertain their children, so why are we not more vocal about letting predators entertain children on these websites.

I am just as equally concerned about protecting my children from predators on the web as I am with protecting them from predators that they may encounter on our suburban streets. Problems with social networking sites extend beyond my concerns here, but for the time being, I will continue to knock any website or medium that does not effectively provide security for children.

Free stuff part dos

My Polish grandma told me to share this with class. I have used a site: www.flickr.com for some projects when I need fancy images. (sorry about not linking flickr...my browser won't let me, honest) Anway, flickr is a snapfish sort of thing where members can post their favorite photographs, or rather, artsy cool photographs one could use in a website. Some pics you need to ask permission to use, but most are free for everyone to use. So if you need an image of almost anything, flickr may just be for you.

Loving IA

Am I the only one who thinks Information Architecture is a great textbook? It is incredibly practical and clearly written, and prudent in its use of jargon. I'm finally putting names on concepts that have beenthere all the time - (global, local and contextual embedded navigation systems, example). And the idea of utilizing user search queries to help revise your label system is so obvious that Homer Simpson's exclamatory comes to mind.
I made web site a long time ago for the Rockford YMCA and now I am going back to revise the site incorporating the info from IA Chapter 6. I wish I'd read the book years ago.
DMCG

More free stuff

Hey, guys! I'm beginning to feel like my Polish grandma--obsessed with free stuff. I'm not, really, but if you can get it for free... Anyway, for those of us who are not graphic designers or illustrators (and even those who are) and who could use a hand in furnishing the graphics for their web sites, here are a couple good, free image sources. (I know from experience that just googling "free stock images" gets a lot of conspicuously UNfree stuff!) My personal favorite is the stock.xchange, which will give you a selection of free images along with some for a price. Please note the usage guidelines; some of the images request that you contact the artists to request permission--and although that kind of thing is usually not a big deal for school projects, I know most of us have real websites that will eventually be published to the web. I hope you find these useful. Cheers!

stock.xchange
image*after
morgueFile

Missing your IA book?

"I wouldn't exactly say I've been missing it, Bob."

I mistakenly grabbed someone else's IA book along with my own at the end of class last week. I'll reunite it with it's proper owner tomorrow night.

Online consciousness and conscience

When reviewing the "thoughts" and suggestions on Facebook and other social networking sites as provided by Cornell University and USC, I imagined that most (if not all) of us felt they were a matter of common sense, especially given the myriad discussions we've had this semester. However, when I consider the audience for which these were intended, they don't seem nearly as pedantic. When I ask my 8th grade students about MySpace and other similar sites, I am amazed by the depth of the naivete they possess. They seem to think that the Internet and the social worlds within it don't lie within the "real world." The freedom (whether real or imagined) within these sites warps students' senses of right or wrong, at least from a social standpoint. Don't get me wrong, I still think more kids than not use these sites in perfectly harmless ways, but the number of people misusing them, intentionally or unintentionally, is increasing.

On a tangential note, we had an interesting discussion during our institute day this past Friday. Our faculty meeting began with a discussion regarding grading policies and the apparent decline in work ethic among our student body as a whole. Theories and anecdotes were bandied about for 20 minutes or so before one of the quiet leaders among our staff was compelled to speak. In his roughly ten-minute monologue, he made a very powerful statement regarding MySpace, YouTube, and the like. He said that the ability to post information, host their own sites, and even manipulate information that is not "their own" is creating a "false empowerment and sense of entitlement" within children not yet mature nor responsible enough to recognize and appreciate the consequences of all of their actions.

Now that I've read how they work....

I am still in awe of how quickly these social network sites have grown-- how someone simply had an idea and the whole thing took off! I would still like to "lurk" a bit first, especially now that I know nice people (like John B.) do that! I am really curious to check out the sites, but somehow I'm too shy, or nervous, to do so--the way I used to be too shy to talk to people in person! I don't understand why this is, but I am really nervous about weird people doing weird stuff with my name and/or photo, etc., if I were to put these in the wrong place on the web. When I googled my own name, however, the only two accurate matches to myself that came up were my NIU teaching intern information, and a link to an honor I received from NIU's Communication dept. (under my full name), and I guess I'd like to keep it that way. I like Cornell's guidelines for their students, especially their basic conclusion to follow a " 'Golden Rule.' Don't say anything about someone else that you would not want said about yourself." Another interesting notion, that danah boyd pointed out in his/her comparison of MySpace and Friendster, was how MySpace adapted to its users: "Basically, MySpace evolved with its users, building a trusting relationship, figuring out how to meet their needs and cultural desires, providing them with features and really trying to give them what they were looking for. Friendster did not - it fought its users hand and foot, telling them how to behave." Since I've never been on either site, the information d.b. provided throughout his/her? essay/blog has made me feel more comfortable about going to MySpace. I'm more likely to experiment with using these sites now. I guess it's just that being scared of that which you don't understand phenomenon. If only I had the time...

Get out of my blog, Mom!

Consider the following excerpt from danah boyd's manifesto:

A huge part of the success of MySpace is an age and culture thing. Part of being an American teen is figuring out who you are, how you fit into society and culture, how social relations work, etc. Part of this process involves sharing cultural objects, hanging out and trying out different self-performances to find the one that feels "right" (think Goffman "faces"). There are plenty of adults who are doing this as well, but it is central to youth culture. Youth will always do this, using whatever medium is available to them.

I find the above passage to be particularly striking. The positioning of MySpace and other social networking sites within youth culture isn't surprising, but this is absolutely terrifying. Well, at least that was the knee-jerk reaction. I say this not because I believe the 30+ crowd shouldn't be on these sites, but because I almost never see them there. Am I just oblivious? Are thirtysomethings (and beyond) actually using these things?

We talked about this a lot during our blogging week, but the prospect of potential employers, teachers/professors, parents, etc. finding embarassing information about us on the Internet is scary. And while reports of this information being held against people increase, we've seen MySpace and Facebook respond by allowing users to adjust their own privacy settings. So this sort of armchair detective work is becoming harder to do. So will the people of elder generations have to friend me first? Or can they rely on the six degrees of separation and use my oblivious cousin to make an end-run around my privacy settings?

I have a different take, because I tend to be a lurker. I think most of the non-participants are without malevolent intentions (yes, they might be older than you) who like to see the ways in which others deal with the Internet and themselves. It's much easier to watch others jump in first, after all . . .

But perhaps my Mom did see my MySpace profile before I deleted it. And maybe she wanted one of her own, but this social networking thing might have screamed "kids only" to her. Could that help explain why 40% of MySpace visitors are 35-54, but are largely unnoticed by people my age?

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." – Wendell Phillips, (1811-1884)

So far, you can tell your personal story on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites. The only controls are those of the marketplace. There’s talk of protecting people from predators and terrorists, but, for now, it’s the Wild West.

But, “copyrighted” content is another matter. Several companies have set up software to screen movies, tv shows, etc. from MySpace and other social networking sites. http://www.dailyherald.com/business/story.asp?id=294752. But, at least The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg http://www.dailyherald.com/business/story.asp?id=294757 is doing his journalistic best to tell the story and advocate steps to take to achieve a workable solution.