EME6414: Web 2.0

Delving into the Prensky article regarding digital immigrants vs digital natives, I can't get past a quote in the opening paragraph: Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. Even beyond the concept of comparing learners in a designer's target population based on their entry into Web 2.0, how learners approach life from their variable cultural contexts and dimensions of diversity must inform how technology works in design. What is the point of designing learning within a social media or relflexive content if there are significant barriers to learners accessing the platform? The digital divide is real and separates learners still based on racial and economic terms worldwide. In the corporate context, while companies have an obligation to stratify the equipment and platform access, the time and investment to allows learners access can also vary on the same lines. It's about diversity! Does design get people in, protect th...

I'm old enough to remember the days when wanting to socialize with people you had to...go somewhere. In person. Picture it, Sarasota, 1997. In High School I had many acquaintences but only a few true friends I spent time with outside of class. Worse, even those friends were on-campus friends: if we didn't see each other at a club meeting or school event, most likely I wasn't there. My parents were both hard-working and I went to a magnet school 15 miles from home. Getting me to extra places other than school was a stretch for them. So when a friend of mine invited me to the school gym after school, I mostly said yes because I could connect with them for longer periods of time. And I was fat and didn't want to be anymore. I have been obese since the age of six...but that's for another post. We didn't know a whole lot about weight training, cardio, or anything to really make a change to our bodies back then. But we bonded. One of the students I work...

*insert Netflix chime here* Didya see The Social Dilemma? If you haven't, here'e the gist: you can't trust these platforms. Since the creation of most of the social media sites we rely on started, they have been governed by companies that surrendered the normal control over content to automation. Algorithms controlled how consumers see on the main feeds and guidance is irresponsible at best and sinister at worst. Examples like Cambridge Analytica and how misinformation affected responses to the novel coronavirus pandemic beginning in 2019 point to how the myth of the flat, unregulated Internet space is a myth. What we see on social networks has several invisible hands behind it - and not all of them are beneficial to all. To paraphrase one of the experts in the documentary, the social media platforms are not the products. We, the social media users, are the product. Didya delete your Facebook profile? No, neither did I. I have an important, personal reason...

Adding the term "produsers" feels like Orwellian doublespeak emerging into my vocabulary. The classic book 1984 (which has been used with varying amounts of accuracy to describe the Internet experience) described how the future government would control language by shortening words into hybrid terms and shifting how people described the world. Thankfully, reading the Bruns article explains the term produser is not the term shifting the world but a description of how the world has changed around language. If you consider that many of us raised with television, movies, or books, the act of consumption is one-way. Few of us immediately read or watch and then create our own art in direct response or inspired by what they experienced, especially in the context of entertainment. A produser expresses how Web 2.0 democratizes expression: on the same media, people can produce and use content at the same level. Bruns cites YouTube as one of the examples of an internet space whe...

When I was considering courses for my Master's Degree program, the word "innovation" was hot with my team at work. In corporate learning and development, innovating is just as vital as it is with marketing or product development groups. The changing generations in the workplace (Boomers retiring and Gen X through Z working side-by-side) make new, fresh approaches to work necessary. Also, insert requisite phrasing about how the COVID-19 has changed work forever. The "final frontier" for many large L&D organiztions is how to make learners own their learning journies and learn in informal ways. Social learning, specifically learning with the aid of social networks, feels like the new thing to make learning at work more effective. All I can think of is Degrassi. Yes, that Degrassi. The Canadian teen soap opera has had several iterations (including one coming soon to HBOMax ). The last two iterations have included scenes avidly discussing social media,...