"Don't believe everything you read on the internet." -Abraham Lincoln

A little earlier in the course, I talked about misinformation and the role we, as networked individuals, have in preventing the spread of information.  I'd like to explore and highlight this point again in the context of the 2016 election, as it deeply concerns me.  On  my Facebook feed, I see intelligent people, on both sides of the political spectrum, falling for misinformation on a fairly regular basis.  And I'm not immune to it either. To be honest,   I am not sure whether I am noticing more misinformation because there is more of it as presidential campaigns pick up, or, more likely, because I am more attuned to it than ever before. Regardless, as we get closer to the 2016 election, we need to be even more careful about misinformation.  If we're not careful, it could change the election and, potentially, the course of the country.

 For example, I've recently noticed people are falsely attributing quotes to people who didn't actually say them.  These quotes are meant to unfairly harm reputations.  No, Donald Trump did not saying  that "Dr. Walter Palmer did nothing wrong and I will pay his legal fees." Likewise, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, never said that “Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds … a deadweight of human waste … Blacks, soldiers and Jews are a menace to the race.”   Similarly, Obama is not running for a third term.  No one is trying to establish Sharia Law in the United States.  Planned Parenthood is not selling baby parts.  Regardless of your political leanings, these are reputations these people and organizations do not deserve.  If they lose funding or elections for the wrong reasons, I think we all lose.

Whenever you read something that seems implausible, it probably is.  Check Snopes, check Politifact to confirm the truth in what you read.  It is not just about making sure you are informed.  It is about making sure everyone is informed.  If you are able to correct people, and point out misinformation, you can propagate the correct information through your networks.  And, in the political context, this is essential because we need to address real problems and issues, and not waste our time on nonsense.

The first Republican debate is tonight, and I am curious to see how everything goes.  Not necessarily because I care deeply about the electoral process, but because there will be lots of gaffs and misspeaking.  And it will be a bit of fun to parse out the truth and discuss it in my networks.

 

 To end, here's a little humor about how trustworthy the internet is:
 

Some Reflections

Over the course of these six weeks, I've come to a few conclusions about how I like to work and interact with other people.

1. I love technology, new tools, and innovative ideas, but there are limits to my love.  I need to the tool to be very useful and worth the time I put into it.  I found that far too many Web 2.0 tools did not fall into this category.  While Facebook, LinkedIn, and the Google Docs were all tools I could see myself using, so many tools seemed only minimally useful or useless: Pinterest, Diigo, Storify, and more are not really going to benefit me in any way.  And they're not dumb enough to be fun, like a joke Twitter account.  Thus, I have learned to look at Web 2.0 tools and technologies with a eye towards use, and not just "coolness." 

2.  Similarly, I've learned that I hate having to juggle many tools at one time.  In this course, I quickly grew exhausted trying to use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Diigo, Scoop.it, Storify, Delicious, Youtube, Wikis, and more all at the same time.  I wanted to go back to using one tool where I could focus on all the various functions of the tool.  I think this is why I enjoy Facebook so much.  To me, it is the best amalgamation of all Web 2.0 tools.  I can create and share, connect with friends, and be exposed to new information all in the same tool.  I don't waste time managing different accounts.  For this reason, I will probably double-down on Facebook and ignore many other tools (at least for now).

3.  In general, I don't like communicating with/talking to people online, anonymously or not, for two reasons.  First, I'm constantly afraid that what I type will taken the wrong way.  I often write with a sarcastic tone, and this often will not come through.  Furthermore, if I am giving feedback to my classmates, I'm afraid it will come across as mean-spirited, rather than constructive.  Second, I still care about my reputation online.  Even if I'm using a handle or nickname, I'm still representing myself, and I am wary of damaging that reputation.   I also don't want to draw unnecessary criticism or abuse my way.

4.  I don't care about privacy as much as you might think.  While there's certain information I don't want my professors, family, and/or friends to know about, I'm not that worried about it overall. For instance, maybe I don't want Vanessa to know I spent lunch watching the Jerry Springer show, but it's not the end of the world if she finds out., Therefore, I don't really care what corporations and the government do with my information..  My data is part of a massive data collection effort, and I tend to trust that people within those organization are not going to go through the effort  of pulling that info out to use against.  Maybe it's because there's nothing that bad to find, but I just don't care that Facebook and Google have all this data about me. 

So these are my major reflections.  What  do you think?  Do you agree with me on any of this? Or do you have a radically different point of view? 

I Broke Facebook's Terms of Service

Back when I was an undergraduate, I took a course on Social Issues in Interactive Media and Games.  As part of this course, I had to play a variety of Facebook games with my class.  Games on Facebook tend to be manipulative and are often designed  in ways that exploit the player, so we needed to play and examine the designs of several of these games (I remember playing CityVille and some Marvel game). 

I have always had a very negative view of Facebook games.  While I trust Facebook's privacy settings, I don't trust Facebook games and apps to not annoy my friends with obnoxious posts and message.  I know there are settings to stop this, but I was afraid I would miss something or that they wouldn't work, and my friends would still get annoyed. So for this class, I decided to create a second "gaming account" on which I would add my classmates and play games.  Notably, this was the option suggested by my instructor if we were uncomfortable with playing the games on our personal account.  I found that this worked fairly well. 

However, now that I have read Dennen & Burner (2013), I realize that I was breaking Facebook's Terms of Service, which, like the rest of the world, I have never read.  That said, I think it is still up for debate as to whether or not my instructor and I acted unethically.  Ethics is about more than just following rules.  I need to respect Facebook, the service I use for free, but I also need think about how am affecting others.  Spamming others with useless junk isn't a good thing.  Similarly, my instructor made that suggestion in order to keep his students comfortable online.  Was he unethical for putting his students' comfort over rules.  Another interesting aspect of this situation is that the lesson wasn't just using Facebook. It was about Facebook.  In many situations, instructors could teach via other mediums.  But teaching about Facebook without using Facebook would be much harder.

So what do you think? Did we behave unethically by creating another account for the lesson?  Or is it ok to break rules in certain situations?  Do you hate Facebook games as much as I do?

What to do with Hashtags?

I used to think that hashtags were stupid, something without a real use.  In fact, the only time I ever engaged with hashtags was when I included them in posts ironically to make fun of hashtags.  Over time (before this course), I evolved to see some uses of hashtags (e.g., track what topics are trending), even though I still had no desire to engage with them.  This course has helped me to evolve my position on hashtags further. Earlier in this course, we talked about how we could use hashtags to categorize information and find what we care about.  For example, Twitter chats like lrnchat allow people to discuss a common topic in an organized way.  And as we saw in Dennen (2011), conferences attendees can use hashtags to build their networks with others both attending and not attending a conference.

However, I realized this week that we can get very creative with hashtags.  I was watching the cinematic masterpiece that is Sharknado 3, and as the film was wrapping up, the film encouraged me to tweet one hashtag to save a character and another hashtag to let that character die.  They were using hashtags as a voting mechanism, with the results being revealed in Sharknado 4.  After getting really excited about the existence of another one of these dumb movies, I went to my rarely used Twitter account and "voted."  (You can check my twitter feed).  Now, voting with hashtags maybe isn't the most unique or creative things in the world.  However, this helped me to realize that these stupid pound sign things can be used in a lot of different ways.  They can be really interesting, provided that we get creative with them.

Sharknado 3 may or may not end with sharks in space.

   Image from: http://www.businessinsider.com/sharknado-3-bizarre-ending-2015-7

So what do you think about hashtags?  In what ways have you seen them used?  Any really interesting uses that I should know about?  And have you seen Sharknado 3?  What did you think?  Will Oscar come knocking?

Emergent Gameplay

While looking through the Williams, Karousou, and Mackness (2011) article from this week's readings, I began to think about how we can best facilitate emergent learning.  Williams et al. defined emergent learning as "learning which arises out of the interaction between a number of people and resources, in which the learners organise and determine both the process and to some extent the learning destinations" (p. 41).  Thus, a teacher who wants to encourage emergent learning needs to set up the learning environment to allow for interactions between between the people and resources and take a hands off approach (while imposing some constraints to keep the students focused).

What struck me was how similar emergent learning is to emergent gameplay.  The experience of a game can be thought of as a collaboration between the player and the designer.  In most games, the designer sets up the game's rules, mechanics, and play space, and the player works within those constraints.  The best games allow the player to experiment and explore within the game space to come up with player-directed goals and/or novel strategies to a defined goal.  Gameplay emerges from the player's creativity and the game's set up.  As game designer Warren Spector puts it in Alexander (2013), game designers should be putting "a sort of creative box around" the player experience, and not directly scripting every experience.  Sounds familiar to emergent learning, right?

Think about a game like Scrabble for a minute.  The rules and constraints are fairly simple.  The player must make words to score points.  Words can only be place on the board and go from top to bottom, or left to right.  There are bonus points that can be earned.  However, from these basic rules, you see players engage in deeply strategic and interesting  behavior.  For instance, players may play worse words in order to prevent their opponent from gaining points.  Or they might allow their opponent to make a good play so that it opens up an opportunity for them.  The simple mechanics breed interesting depth.

Image by Flickr user amazing_podgirl - available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license

This has further clarified for me why I find the relationship between games and education so interesting.  It is not that I necessarily believe that kids should be playing lots of games in school.  It is that game design and instructional design are similar enough that they can learn from each other.  When designing learning environments, especially those online, we should be examining the affordances that are available to students and what types of behaviors those affordances facilitate, just like good game designers do.

References

Alexander, L. (2013). Spector: Go emergent - Game design is not all about you.  Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204942/Spector_Go_emergent__game_design_is_not_all_about_you.php

Williams, R., Karousou, R., & Mackness, J. (2011). Emergent learning and learning ecologies in Web 2.0.International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 39-59.

Rating the Driver...and Passenger?

So while I was out in LA this week, I decided to try out the ride sharing service, Lyft.  For those who don't know, it basically worked like this: I downloaded and opened the Lyft app on my phone, marked where I was on a map, marked where I wanted to go, and signaled for the ride.  Both times I used it, the driver rolled up less than 2 minutes later.  All payment is handled in the app, which is nice.  Overall, I had a pleasant experience with the service.

Lyft drivers are rated by passengers on a 1 to 5 star scale.   When I requested a ride, the app displayed the driver's photo, their car and license plate, and their rating.    This makes sense.  The consumer should be able to get an idea of the type of experience they will get.  The two drivers I got were both 4.9 out of 5s, but I'm assuming that I could say no if their ratings were low.  However, I also noticed that passengers have a star rating.  After I got out the car, the drivers rated me (two 5 star ratings!). This weirded me out at first, but I suppose it make sense.  If I'm making the drivers wait for me, being rude, or not tipping, the drivers should know about that and be able to not provide service (since they are independent contractors).

This got me wondering about whether a similar reputation system could be useful in online learning environments.  For instance, what if we all rated each other in Blackboard on 1 to 5 scale.  People who are making positive contributions to the community get high ratings, while those who are just phoning it in get low ratings.   Likewise, those who demonstrate collaboration and help others will also get positive ratings.  Then, maybe these ratings can influence who we choose for group projects, whose advice we trusted, and who we provide help to.  Our actions in Blackboard have more meaning.

Of course, there are plenty of problems with this idea.  Chiefly, in my mind, it creates an atmosphere that may not be conducive to learning.  We may feel like we're out to get each other, and this could interfere with collaboration and learning.  Additionally, since we all know each other fairly well, there is a potential for the system to be abused to harm that one person we all hate (you know who you are).  Finally, it could create a situation where all of the "bad" students are sent a "prisoner's island" so that they do not have the chance to improve.

So what do you think? Does a reputation system in an online learning environment sound at all appealing?  Can you think of any learning environments that do something like this already?

The Good Old Days

Greetings all.  I hope that the webinar was enjoyable.  I originally intended to attend in person, but then I remembered I would be on a plane out to LA during the webinar.  Fortunately, I can catch up with the archived version and discuss it online with all of you.  Seriously, how cool is it that I am able to participate in the class from over 2000 miles away?  I feel like this is something we often take for granted, even though the technology that facilitates this is fairly new (Yes, correspondence courses have existed for a long time, but I think Web 2.0 distance learning is fundamentally different than these more "traditional" distance courses). It's hard not to be amazed how fast technology moves today.

Pasadena, CA - My initial thought was to go run up those mountains. I wrote this blog post instead.

However, some people are not so fond of our connected world.  They want things to go back to how they were in "good old days."  They want life to go back to how it was in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, when it was "simple" and "pure."  I know some of these people.  (Ironically, they use Web 2.0 tools to complain about how the world is worse off now.)  The era these people want to go back to never actually existed.  They look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, and forget all the problems associated.  However, assume for a moment that their views of the 1950's really are accurate.  That life was simpler.  That life was exactly like Leave it to Beaver.  Would any of us really be willing to give up the technology to go back to that?

I certainly wouldn't.  Sure, our interconnected world comes with problems, but it allows to be more social and more productive than ever before.  How about you?  Would you take the deal?  And how should we deal with the tradeoff that new tools and technologies bring to our world?