What it is. February 12, 2009

Part One: Mario, The Sims and World of Warcraft

In this section, Meadows talks about the Sims, which up until this class, I have had no experience with.   The game itself is pretty fascinating, especially considering all the things you can make your characters do.  Meadows breaks down Sim’s users into four categories: The conformers, The Death Dealers, The Reality Television Viewers, and The Doll Housers.  Immediately after playing Sims for the first time, I was able to categorize myself as a “Reality Television Viewer.”  I was fascinated by the natural interaction between the two characters I had created and can see how people get wrapped up in this life.  I was also able to tell that other people in class were falling in to other categories.  One thing that Meadow’s said that stood out in my mind was that “The characters are not controlled by the player, but a player can determine the emotional recipes of the character as he or she is building it.”  Before playing Sims I just assumed that the characters did exactly as they were told, but I quickly learned otherwise.  My group and I found it absolutely impossible to get our characters to behave the way we wanted, and they really did seem to take on a life of their own.

Part Two: The Three White Girls From YouTube

I found this section to be really amusing.  For me, social interaction through an avatar is not real and a lot gets lost in translation.  There is no way for you to tell who is behind an avatar- I used to play word games on gsn.net and sometimes I would forget to change the default avatar that was a little punk guy, and there was no way for anyone else to know that wasn’t me.  I thought this section was really neat, especially after finding out that all three girls were actually acting under an identity other than their own.  I think people do communicate online because it is so easy to be someone else.  You can push your real life aside and take on a new persona that embodies everything you wish your real life was.   In a society that is so focused around online communication, it is easy for people to build an online following and literally live a second life entirely different from their own.

Part Three: A Point of View

I found this section really interesting because I had no idea that there was more than one point of view that you could use when creating characters.  On page 20, Meadows discusses the way that point of view can change the perspective of narration.  I had no idea that avatars were so complex before- the fact that people use different features to alter the depth of narration of a character was fascinating to me.  This section in meadows pointed out a lot of neat things regarding the actual physical appearance of avatars and ways to adjust how people see your characters.

Part Four: A Simple Character

In this section, Meadows describes creating an avatar as classic character development.  This struck me as being weird at first, because I think of classic character development as being a result of writing, but this is starting to replace that.  When I started to think about it though, I do think that just as much character development goes in to an avatar as it does to a character in a book.  I actually think that it requires more because of the fact that you physically have to create a character that looks the way you want them to and that embodies the quality of character that you want.  He also says that internet consists mostly of small avatar villages, which is also not something i’ve thought of before.  Every website that we are on uses an avatar to represent ourselves.
I guess overall I’ve just never thought of how prominent avatars are in the digital world or the effect they have on our communication.  Although I can never see myself becoming really involved in an avatar-driven world, I am fascinated with the idea that people live through characters in a digital environment and am looking forward to experimenting more with digital characters.

Higher Education as Virtual Conversation February 4, 2009

When I was in high school I took a composition course that relied heavily on the feedback and discussion of my peers.  I went to a fairly tech-saavy high school and every student was required to have the same laptop, so we had access to the internet.

As soon as I read the article by Robbins-Bell that class was the first one that popped in to my head.  In the section entitled “The Social Media Rift,”  She talks about more modern forms of communication between students as a result of the internet, and mentions blogs, and the way to comment and post on them.  I though of how easy and accessible blogging would have been in my composition course.  We would have work shopping days that required us to sit down and review the works of fellow students but the time restriction and classroom atmosphere was very distracting and did not make it easy to edit a work.  If we had the option of blogging, we would have had the option to do all of our peer reviews online and would be able to give a more thoughtful, well thought out response.  Not everyone gets their best ideas during the day or when someone tells them they need to, and blogging would have allowed students to access the assignment whenever they thought of something new.

On page 34 of the article, Robbins-Bell explains that one of the main things teachers need to accept is that they would not have total control over their students in a digital environment.  Although this may be true, the need for teacher-student interaction will never fade, and internet communication will simply make it easier for students to communicate outside of the classroom, making it easier to work together on assignments and also to gain productive feedback from one another.

The whole idea of having an avatar would have also come in handy during my composition course.  I went to a pretty large high school and it wasn’t uncommon to be in a class with students you weren’t very familiar with.  An avatar would have allowed us to connect with these students, especially if it was an actual picture of themselves.  Also, with the world’s increasing dependence on technology, it is not uncommon for students to feel much more comfortable voicing their opinions online under an avatar’s name then to speak up in class.

Overall, I feel lucky to have had the experience of working online in many of my college courses, and this article made me see how helpful certain internet sites could have been for some of my high school classes.

Wikipedia vs. Twiki February 2, 2009

Wikipedia and Twiki are both online encyclopedias that offer users with thorough amounts of information on almost any topic imaginable. Wikipedia is an open information source, which makes it different from Twiki. Wikipedia allows users from all over the globe to log in, access, and edit any of the information found on the website. Twiki is a little more formal and allows it’s more than 200 employees to step in and help with the editing process. Twiki focuses on the “information flow within an organization” and allows groups to work together through the site itself. Wikipedia does not offer assistance like that, rather focuses on the simple task of supplying people with information. For me, the formality of Twiki makes it seem much more useful than Wikipedia. I have used Wikipedia several times to look up information about topics, but it is by no means a “reliable” source. Users can edit the information to say anything they want and there is no “head user” of any sort to help weed out the misleading information. While the information on Wikipedia can be useful in certain situations, it is not helpful for research projects or anything or that sort, unless you have another source for information comparison. Twiki would be extremely handy, especially when it comes to working in groups. It is very difficult to coordinate projects with group members outside of a classroom setting and Twiki is trying to make it much less stressful. They are creating a formal work environment that allows people to collaborate on projects and has made it very easy to edit the work of you group members. My understanding of Twiki is also that only members of a specific group are able to access a certain page, which makes the site more reliable because no random people can edit your information. Overall, I think that both of these sites can be helpful if used correctly, but Twiki does seem much more stable and reliable than Wikipedia.

Hello world! January 25, 2009

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