Why Don't You Just Tell Me What You Want to Learn?
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I can confidently say that without EME6414 I would have no exposure to the term "folksonomy". However, if you really want to understand how adults learn in the Information Age and this time of Web 2.0, things like folksonomy will be requisite in your exploration. Folksonomy, from what I gleaned from the article in week 4's reading, is the people-driven approach to gathering, classifying, and categorizing information. This at first does not sound intriguing - why do I care what another learner calls or categorizes other information? I have had this sentiment when made to create word-based diagrams for college courses. When reviewing others' work it feels like an amalgam of the same. It's governed by the source of information, right? It should look the same. What's the point?
Consider from the designer perspective. To do more than engage learners or create exciting edutainment, to get learners to retain the information, being aware of how they work together and create folksonomy becomes important. Otherwise, you could be Kramer faking being a Moviefone:
(If you are too young to remember Seinfeld, you might need the context that before the Internet in order to find out the times at our local movie theatre, we had to call an automated system...did I ruin the joke by explaining it?)
In other words, what learners call something becomes important in how the information is presented, processed, and learning assessed throughout a learning experience. If we learners have separated colors by warmth, the ROY G BIV distinction in a learning module for paint mixers might be problematic. The remedy is ultimately to understand the learner: use the discovery steps of the design process to meet and test learners.
There's an additional element that could be explored here: the DEI element of folksonomy. Who determines what the tags are in a truly democratized forum? If the designers or instructors are, are we ensuring that they are thinking through diverse lenses? The most sensitive dimension is in language: even with an assumed academic version of a spoken language, translation and non-native learners may change the landscape.
One of my favorite self-help gurus, Iyanla Vanzant, is infamous for the statement "let's call a thing a thing, people!" In folksonomy, that's important...but it can't be assumed to take place in a vacuum. How can we make the tools and the users do better in this space?
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...
I mentioned The Social Dilemma in a previous blog and its assertion that social media uses the reward loop to stimulate dopamine. That point continues to rattle around in my dopamine dependent brain when considering my own social platform use and our semester’s work with social media in learning design. Diving further into the dopamine relationship, I found an explainer article from Harvard that contained a compelling quote: Although not as intense as hit of cocaine, positive social stimuli will similarly result in a release of dopamine, reinforcing whatever behavior preceded it. Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that rewarding social stimuli—laughing faces, positive recognition by our peers, messages from loved ones—activate the same dopaminergic reward pathways. Smartphones have provided us with a virtually unlimited supply of social stimuli, both positive and negative. Every notification, whether it’s a text message, a “like” on Instagram, or a Face...
Between Uvalde, Buffalo, and the ongoing war in Ukraine and others that don't make the trending pages, mourning has been on my mind. I wrote in my personal blog before that my view on mourning in America has changed. For years, I indicted American society as one that could not properly mourn. More recently, I declared that my fellow Americans do mourn, but don't do it collectively. My hypothesis was because of the battlements within our society that we mourn in communities. Other than the President declaring flags flown at half-staff, there is no collective gesture in the United States that marks death or encourages others to mourn. To be fair, all of my judgments are against how we mourn in the Caribbean. While even as Jamaica entrenches itself in the cultures of its neighbors, there are some things that are still requisite. My short list includes: The long list of phone calls The emotional church service Clothing that is set aside for just such an occasion Dis...
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