EME6414: Web 2.0

 Did anyone buy a Peloton during the pandemic?  I didn't.  I was incredibly skeptical: I've been working on my fitness for more than 15 years and I have reached the home-workouts-are-boring stage of my progress.  I did buy the Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells.  They are very...decorative.  So when a friend of mine highly recommended Peloton, I laughed it off.  As an increasing number of partners at my old job would share their bike usernames during work calls, my ears perked up.  Finally, on the second work trip for my new job, I came face to face with a real live Peloton bike.  "Fine.  What's the big deal?" I asked the empty hotel gym.   After 10 minutes, I got it. See, spinning may be a great workout, but it's hard to get started.  I tried a few times at the gym.  If you don't know what you're doing, it feels like a loose, yet uncomfortable version of a stationary bike.  However, the orientation videos on the Peloton ge...

 What did I learn from EME6414?  Not only did I interact with great designers, I also learned about Web 2.0 and its vastness.  What people - even scholars - get wrong about social media and connectedness is that it looks and feels like intense entertainment.  How did you feel when you found out that people who posted videos online could make millions of dollars a year?  My reaction: "I'm in the wrong business."  Recognizing that Web 2.0 and its platforms are infinitely more powerful than meets the eye.  Instructional design must move and adapt in the spaces to build learning there and connect to users.  Open learning becomes increasingly attractive in these contexts; the knowledge is out there.  Why create where you can curate?  In traditional spaces, designers can feel pressured to create depth and proficiency by deep effort and piles of data.  Social media learning builds depth by being reflexive - where learners can respond to th...

 When we consider Web 2.0, the biggest draw is the global reach.  The premise of the World Wide Web is to share information (originally a library system) quickly across the miles.  All you need is a connection.  Wireless Internet and smartphones means that getting connected should be easier.  So imagine my surprise when reviewing the Pew Research study from this week's reading that this overview is based on 37 countries.  Notably, there are only six sub-Saharan African countries and zero data from Central America and the Caribbean.  While DataReportal reports a significant gap in penetration in these areas, these three gaps represent roughly 10% of Internet users.  This makes me challenge even the conclusions about sub-Saharan Africa.  Worse by erasing such a significant part of the developing world, we miss the high penetration of social media use in the Global South. Global Means Global.  If we are truly learning to engage learners a...

2020 was a tough year.  Halfway through it we were knee-deep in the COVID pandemic and then George Floyd was murdered.  As a half-homebound, half-emerging America started wrestling with the images of police brutality out loud, corporate spaces became full of well-intentioned listening and calls to learn.  At the time, I was working as an L&D program manager for a telecommunications company.  The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion wave came our way and several initiatives of guest speakers, awkward and emotional conference calls (we were still remote), and quickly deployed learning modules were here.  As I had well-intentioned connections with my white work family and some brave leaders, I kept thinking "we can do more."  Terms like intersectionality, microaggression, and CRT were new and hard to parse for them and while Black people like me having frank conversations about race was helpful it felt overwhelming.   I knew it was overwhelming. They told...

 Language is a funny thing.  I was born and raised in Florida, an English-speaking area.  My parents are immigrants from Jamaica who were educated in England before meeting and marrying in Connecticut.  Even my relationship to my native language is complicated.  I was a star student in English classes growing up and yet my skills were still not good enough for my mother.  After all, she grew up thriving through colonial Common Entrance at home that required her to learn Latin and Greek along with the Queen's English.  Then ten years in nursing in London in the seat of the Empire meant she challenged my lazy Southern diction.  I still remember when she teased me one day on how I pronounced "controversy" like an American (with emphasis on the first syllable.)  "You Americans don't know anything," she joked and pronounced it the Commonwealth way - emphasis on the second syllable. Where we bonded over language was the dialect she spoke with frien...

 I watch a significant amount of TV.  Do I blame being a latchkey kid in the 1990s, preferring hanging with his grandparents than playing outside?  Do I blame working 18 years for a cable company?  Who's to say?  Nearly a year into a new industry, I still turn on a real TV set and watch live linear channels every day.  From old-school broadcast channels to the apps, I consume hours of visual media every day.   Even though I have clung to the traditional ways of viewing, I have also maximized my viewing on Web 2.0 platforms like YouTube.  For years I kept them separate: YouTube was for short-form videos like vlogs and viral videos.  Then, after consuming a long series of shorter videos (what I called falling down a YouTube rabbit hole) I found Jack's Story. Jack's Story is a supercut of a character from the New Zealand evening soap opera Shortland Street .  Thanks to the industrious supercut (assuming a way to overcome international copyr...