Reflections

I thought this course was going to be a writing course. I assumed from the title that it was a writing course that taught you how to write for the Internet. Yes, there was some writing involved, although not as much as I expected. You could probably count the blogs and the facebook as writing, but I count those as online conversations and interactions, not technically writing. But what was unexpected were the assignments that took us to social bookmarking sites, online communities and gaming sites. My husband stared at me in disbelief when I told him I had to play in Second Life for homework. I still don't quite think he believes me! LOL

And probably like some of you, I spend alot of time online. I thought, well, what could they possibly teach me that I haven't already done or seen. I was wrong. (as a side note, when you're a teenager you know everything, but when you start getting to be 25 you think hmm, maybe there is something I don't know... then at 30 you think maybe I really don't know it all... and the older you get the more you realize that you have so much to learn!) I found some sites and tools that are very useful to me and that I am now using regularly. I would not have know about them without this course. There are also those that I gave a try that I probably won't return to.

I am really glad I chose this course. I would even recommend it to people who are looking for something new and maybe less traditional. It would benefit anyone studying communications, business, english, sociology and psychology.

Discoveries

The group projects from both groups really brought up some interesting discoveries for me. I have been an regular Internet user for at least a dozen years now. I began creating web pages as far back as 10 years. First free pages with places like Homestead and Geocities, and Tripod. To express myself and to share my interests and support various causes. Then I advanced to my own domain and building pages all with html coding and then with FrontPage and FTP programs to upload the files. The domain name registration had cost and the monthly server space had cost. It was also time consuming. Very time consuming. You started with a blank screen. And had to create everything from scratch.

Now there are places like Ning.com where you can create an entire social networking site, with no coding skills, no software needs, and no cost. You can create it, then let the people who join build your community with their own content. Then there is Wetpaint.com where you can create a site-- again at no cost, no software and no coding skills needed. Here you have the ability to create a site with potentially unlimited content and can allow multiple people to provide that content. So you are creating the site and everyone else is keeping the content fresh.

It makes me think that the only advantage of having your own individual unique site is that you are the only one who is creating the content and keeping it updated. If you are looking out for your integrity, then that would be your way to go. But what would happen if you forgot to update, or were unable to update for whatever reason? Your site would suffer. And when you start losing visitors, you don't get them back. It seems that using the free sites that already have templates and allow for multiple authors is the smarter way to go for the average person.

While I was working on the big assignment...

With the thought of assignment #4 looming overhead, I see that I was not the only one to have neglected my original blog posts for a while. It's much easier to reply to other people's posts that create your own! LOL

But while I was working away at my paper, I have to share with you that using my social bookmarking site (diigo.com) that I researched for the previous assignment, became a valuable tool, as well as for the group project. It helped me collect all my online bookmarks as well as organizing them and putting them in order. Any order. I rearranged them several times based on which ones I needed to read first, which ones I needed to include in the bibliography and so on. I was even able to use Diigo's highlighting tool to highlight parts of the text I wanted to focus on out of the whole webpage. So I am definitely going to be using that on a regular basis! It saved me a lot of time and alot of paper and ink costs.

Reluctant to get involved

I am still hesitant about jumping into SL or any of the other online VR worlds. I have the problem that when I involved with something, that I have a tendency to get obsessive or even addicted to it. When I first started chatting, I was up all night chatting with people from all over the country. The great thing about the Internet, there is always someone online. When I get new PC games, I play constantly. I am not a casual player, an hour here or there. I am a stay up til 3 a.m. and try to get up at 6 to go to work kind of person. I want to immerse myself in it until its over. Those free online games? I can sit and play the same one for hours once I get started. And then there are the IRL things that I'd rather not mention, LOL.

So I am afraid that if I start getting too involved in SL, that I will be down on the PC every night, all night. Since there is no ending, would I ever come up for air?

To use or not to use?

Ever watch the news and notice that one day coffee is good for you, then the next day researchers find that its bad? The same with wine, chocolate and everything else. I think computers and the Internet can be looked upon the same way. If you don't use a computer or access the Internet, you're looked upon as backward or slow or something. But if you do everything online, you can be looked at like a junkie, someone who is too engrossed in fantasy life or is escaping reality. Some people even go into withdrawl if they can't connect (and you know who you are! LOL).

But whether or not you're a sometime-user or an over-user, I think we all can use the fact that we use the computers and Internet. Even use the way we use the Net to our advantage IRL. If you're a journalist, you could use the fact that you blog everyday to help you get a job. If you're a Guild Master (if I get the term wrong let me know) in WoW, you could use that to help build your resume and point out to your employer that you have the ability to lead and manage people and get that promotion. If you're designing web pages or cool new graphics for fun, you could use that to build a portfolio and get yourself a job. And the examples could go on and on.

Hands on experience with programs, interactions with people and being able to come up with creative ideas are all valuable in today's world.

Second Life

I created my Second Life account last week for the new unit assignment. I can now see why this unit is twice as long (time wise) as the others and the accompanying assignment worth more points. I have spent a considerable amount of time in second life already, spread out over three sessions and have just gotten off Help Island and am exploring Dublin.

The reason I haven't advanced so far yet is because I have a problem when I play the 3D games either on my PC or on my TV. After 30 - 45 minutes, I start to get a headache and I feel off balance. The only way for me to get rid of it is to go lay down in my dark & quiet bedroom and try to take a nap for maybe an hour. So the first 2 sessions really gave me headaches with trying to get orientated with movement and features and stuff. Yesterday I went out and bought a box of Dramamine tablets. I took one, then did some unit reading for about an hour, them logged onto second life. I explored for about 2 hours with no headache! I would have stayed on longer, but alas, real life called and I had to go make dinner.

There are so many things to learn in Second Life! I mean WOW! And every new step leads you to new stuff, new places, new people. Its quite fascinating. I have been shy though. I talked to a few people on Help Island, but no one yet in Dublin. Just the basic, Hi, how are you. Are you new here? kind of stuff. I thought maybe that online I'd be more willing to talk to people, but maybe I just haven't been doing it long enough yet to get over the shyness.

Social Bookmarking Comparison

OMG! I have been surfing the social bookmarking sites for the upcoming assignment, and I can't believe the difference of what I found versus what I expected to find. I browsed about 11 different sites before I settled on the two I was going to seriously create and compare. I chose Delicious & Diigo. I have been hearing about delicious for over a year now. I have seen the little icons you can click on to add them to your favorites and all that. I expected a freaking awesome site once I got there. And since Diigo was fairly new, I expected something... well, I wasn't expecting much, let me put it that way.

You probably have figured out from my build-up that my expectations were totally wrong!!!

I love Diigo! I really didn't think I was going to get into a social bookmarking site, but I have. I may not use it to connect to other people, but I will use it to manage my bookmarks and find new ones that interest me. There are so many ways that you can navigate through your stuff, and you can make yourself notes & lists & things.

Delicious left me wanting. :( There were no folders, lists or any way for me to organize my bookmarks other than alphabetical and most recent. And If you don't tag them, you can't to a search. Half the time I can't remember what the name of my links are, I just know by content. So I would be out of luck and would have to go down the entire list to search for a bookmark. Not very efficient.

I have explored probably only half of what Diigo has to offer on its site, and its way more than I have found on Delicious, and I have think I have explored most of what they have already.

Its nice when you get a little surprise you weren't expecting.

Folksonomies: the people's labels

Whether or not we remember, we've all seen those scientific charts showing taxonomies, or other representations. Taxonomies are classifications of things in a hierarchical structure. But they are very structured and items within the scheme have specific relationships. The most commonly known taxonomy is the Linnaean: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

While this gives us specific information about things, unless you're a scientist, you probably won't know all the tags given to narrow down what you're looking for. But folksonomies are created by everyday people. Lets say you upload a photo of a girl and her dog at the park. You tag it with common everyday words that everyone can understand, girl, child, dog, park, etc... That image can now be found by millions of people just by them searching for the same words. Maybe they are looking for a picture of a dog, or a park. Because you labeled all the possibilities, they can now find exactly what they were looking for.

So by having the common folk labeling the content rather than the scientists or other professionals, the material is accessible to so many more people.

When I first read the unit's topic of social bookmarking, I was like, oh, boy, another account I have to sign up for and never use again after class ends. But I was wrong.

I have bookmarks I use on my home computers, and I have bookmarks I use on my work computers. I never thought about mixing the 2. But the other day I was at work, and the way our network is set up, I can log in on any staff computer and my profile loads and all my files and bookmarks are right there. But some computers have a generic staff log in where anyone working that desk can use it. When you're working there, you can't log in as yourself. It was there that I really wished I had access to my bookmarks.

So even if I only use my work related URLs, it will be valuable because I will always be able to access them, no matter what computer I may be sitting at.

Should we or shouldn't we?

Remember that scene from Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum is sitting at the table with the other scientists & he is saying that the the scientists were so worried about whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should? I kind of had that same thought when I was visiting sites from the Most Comprehensive Web 2.0 lists. In particular the Mologogo site.

Mologogo is a mobile locater site. Basically, it uses GPS to track movements of cellualr phones. At first I was like, "Cool! How many of my friends and family can I get listed on here?" But as I clicked around, I was able to see info about the people who were signed on, I could look at the map and see the last 100 places where their mobile device had been located. Then I was like "No, way!" Every little dot on the map was telling me where these people had been. Sure, it would be nice to be able to see where my people are on the map-- mom is at the mall, hubby is at work, etc... but uh... they would be able to know where I was too. That stopped me. Not that I have anything to hide. But sometimes you DON'T want to be accessible to people. I am a grown woman, I don't need my mother knowing where I am every minute. I don't ask my husband every stop he made this week, I certainly wouldn't want him to be checking to see every little place I went. And what if that friend I occassionally talk to, is tracking me becasue I am not answering her calls? So, what first was a novelty, now became an issue of privacy. Would I want my boss to be able to track my location? If I was in a work vehicle on company time, sure I can see that, but with this and my cell phone #, she'd be able to see where I went in my off time. I don't like the idea of people being able to get that much information so easily.

The advances of technology...

Well, its true right? Technology has changed our lives, it has brought us out of the paper age and into the digital age. We are free of the endless stacks of papers, the books, the bulky folders and binders full of information. Only... what happens when you're without your computer?????

I love my computers. All of them, the ones at home and at work. At work they make my job so easy, I work at top speed, I am so productive and can access just about any information int he world with a few clicks and keystrokes. But if our system goes down? Everything comes to a screeching halt!!! People stop coming in, because with out our computers its very difficult to find the information. And alot of my job can't be done without those computers.

And lets talk about home. I took 2 days off work this week, thinking I could get caught up on some online stuff, blogg and post like crazy and still get a nap in. WRONG! The first day I was so sick I went from the bed to the couch to the bed, and then to the recliner. So , even a laptop doesn't do you any good when you can't stay vertical. The second day, I am feeling better & am ready to go. My laptop is out of commission temporarily, I should be getting it back next week (hopefully!!) So downstairs to my desktop and I get into position. Only, no Internet connection! yikes! My hubby is checking the connections, sending me up & down the stairs to check the lights on the modem, restart the computer, turn off the modem, turn on the modem, check the wires on the router, restart the computer again, disconnect the phone cords, reconnect the phone cords, restart the computer, run back upstairs and check the lights on the modem.... Eventually he got it connected again, and then when I finally had Internet again, I didn't' even want to use it anymore. :(

Why do some spend so much time online?

As I sit here & ponder the meaning of life and other random thoughts, it occurs to me that the people I know who are really happy with their lives, where they are, who they're with, what they're doing, they really don't spend a lot of their time online. They get on, do what they need to do and get off. While some of the people I know who seem to spend the most time online are the people who are unhappy with their jobs, their partners (or they don't have one), they complain a lot and wish they were somewhere else. Are virtual activities acting as an escape for those people who find it difficult to make real changes in their lives?

Why didn't Zuckerberg sell?

In the article How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform it talked about Zuckerberg and the money he turned down for Facebook, I might be able to understand a bit why he didn't sell after all. He put a tremendous amount of himself into this project. Years of his life. It is a huge accomplishment just as it is now. But he has bigger plans, things he wants to see happen, ways in which he wants to see the site evolve. If he sold out and turn his creation over to someone else, he would no longer have any hand in its growth and evolution. Even with $1 billion dollars, how could you walk away from something you put so much of yourself into creating?

Kids & MySpace

I work in a public library, spending half my time in the youth department. This means children from birth to 14. The biggest draw is the computers. Once school gets out until closing, those kids are online. MySpace is where 80% of them go. There is this one family, 3 kids, they are like 8,9 and 14. The younger ones spend the entire time on MySpace. I could have sworn there was a minimum age limit to create an account. Another girl who frequents daily is 12, and gets very cranky without her daily MySpace fix. The other day I sat & asked her what exactly does she do there all day. She said, email, chat, plays games like mobster (or something like that) with her friends and then there are the babies she can create & raise. I sat with her while she explained to me how to create a baby and how to care for it. It seemed alot like DigiPets my kids are begged and cried for a few years ago then let them die because it was too much trouble to play with it.

I understand that people go to these social networking sites to meet people and communicate and have fun and all that. But I see these kids with their friends lists of 50, 100, 200+ people and can't believe it! How could they possibly know so many people, they can't all be in their classes at school. I think the whole situation leads kids to be too trusting of people they don't really know. That person wouldn't lie to me, they're my "friend"! I've known that person for like a year now! Am I the only person that this bothers?

I have had to ground 2 of my kids in 2 separate instances where they got chatting with kids and even though they have been told a hundred times by us and by teachers and everyone on the planet, NOT to give out your personal info, they turned around anyway and gave out our address and phone number over the internet to people. Luckily, the 2 people they gave it to WERE actually kids, and I had to talk to 2 other very upset mothers.

And if you're asking what were my kids doing at places like MySpace if I don't agree with kids their age using it, I'll tell you it's not that I haven't tried. Our ISP has filtering software, we run separate monitoring software that will block certain types of sites and ones we specifically choose. But through word of mouth at school, they discover sites that you can go to that safely get through the filter, that you can then within the frame, log onto sites that are blocked. We then block those as soon as we find out about those as well, but it seems never ending. Sometimes, they'll go to friend's house where there is no parent concerned with Internet activity, sometimes they'll go to the library and use the public computers which do not filter anything. I ask you what's a concerned parent to do?

The original virtual world

Thanks to replies to my last post. I didn't even realize I had comments until I started clicking around the pages. It seems I didn't spend as much time as I thought getting to know my way around the site. Another thing I haven't figured out is the first post that I made, I can see it from the Google Reader listings, but not from the blog site. hmmmm. I wonder what happened. If you by chance didn't read it, and can't see it on Goggle reader like I can, it was about a book I had finished that day. I am a huge reader and make it a point to read every day, some days I read more than I do anything else.

But anyway, I feel that reading a good story puts you in the original virtual world. When you read fiction, you are in essence being put into the story--the thoughts and the feelings. If you are into the story, you experience the emotions your characters are feeling, your physical being responds, your respiration increases, your natural hormones kick in. Fear, anger, sorrow, happiness, arousal, they all become real to YOU, even though all you are doing is reading a story about a fictional person that someone else wrote.

Today people talk about playing online and virtual games. Aren't they the same thing except instead of having words on a page that your mind uses to create that virtual world, you are looking at a screen and your eyes transmit those images to your brain and then you become immersed in that virtual world? Except its less work for your brain because all the sensory input has already been created for you. Its much easier to accept the created world when the colors are chosen for you, the placement of object are pre-selected and the look of everything is done for you.

This has opened up virtual worlds to a whole new group of people who would never have bothered to open up a book, or who have difficulting reading with fluency. I think this is a great thing. But... and you had to know there was a but in there somewhere. LOL But I think many people have lost sight of the fact that someone still had to write the programming and create and write the characters and possiblities that online virtual worlds contain. The ideas and the work had to come from someone's mind. As long as we have people who are creative and can express thoughts and ideas to people in different ways, we are going to see the virtual world continue to expand and evolve in different ways in years and generations to come.

To blog or not to blog...

I've never been a big fan of blogging. I hear some people talking at work about how they read "blah blah" on this blog and "blah de blah" on that blog. Then they ask me if I subscribe to (insert famous person's name here)'s blog and I say no. Personally, I have too many things going on in my life, I don't have enough time in the day to do all the things I have to do, and want to do, to spend my time reading about what other people think on a daily basis. If you want to use it as a journaling tool, thats great, but its just not my thing. I write articles and stories to share with other people and I journal privately in a notebook for myself.

I do email, only a small percentage of what I used to do in years past. I have cut out alot of the time wasting emails that used to plague my inbox by politely telling my friends and family to stop forwarding me things that they think are cute or that I should pass on. When I get online, I have a specific purpose, I want to spend my time doing that, not wading through a hour of "pass this to 7 people in the next hour" crap. I instant message during work hours, because our system has its own messenger program to let the employees communicate with each other. I do use yahoo messenger occasionally to talk to family members, but after spending 8 hours a day on a computer at work, I usually don't feel like spending any more time online. About 9-10 years ago I could be found at my PC, running AOL, MSN and ICQ IMs chatting away most of the day. But I found that got in the way of real life. I also used to do a lot of yahoo groups. Those were lively email days when you'd open mail and find 300 emails to read. Again, it got to be too much, and those got deleted one at a time.

I think web 2.0, virtual reality and all the interactive stuff out there is really cool and has so many wonderful possibilities, but I think too many people spend too much of their time in virtual worlds and not enough time in the real world.