The Situation

A buddy of mine and I are working on a zombie survival game from the ground up. Yeah, it’s an odd hobby and it makes sense for us. We both have a heavy language arts and technology background. But, one of the hardest issues we’ve discussed is the story and specifically… how do you make a survival scenario scary when everyone has a cellphone? Our group of survivors is stuck in ruined post-apocalyptic San Francisco after a plane crash. How do they get help, how do they alert the army they need a transport out? Well, they use their cellphone. What if they need to know how to make a signal fire? The survivors google it using their 3G-enabled smartphones. It’s a marvel that Romero never had to deal with back in the 60s and 70s. What do you do when everyone is connected to the largest information-gathering system (read: internet) on the planet?
The same question is being asked in classrooms around the world. I remember the tail end of my high school career (a lifetime ago of six years now) and listened to an english teacher caution us on proper sourcing and not to use Wikipedia for anything. Even now I hear this sentiment echoed, but the times keep a-changing as studies indicate that Wikipedia has become as scholarly as its for-profit competitor, Britannica (http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html). Beyond this one single website, the digital web is expanding in influence and pervasiveness. Curtis Bonk in The World is Open notes in his introduction the increasing use of mobile devices to connect to the Internet in Asian countries such as China, South Korea, and Japan (pg. 14). This increase is also being felt in the Western world with the rise of Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android operating platform, and the decreasing popularity (though this should not be mistaken as a decrease in use, exactly) of normal cellphones such as Nokia brands.
I think the major problem with the institution of education is that most of this learning is informal and mobile. Imagine for a moment that a learner needs to know about college-level algebra. In the time before the Web, he or she would have two courses for this. The learner could go to a university (or city community college) and learn from a professor or teaching assistant the necessary principles to understand this level of algebra. Thus, in this example, comes the original classification of college-level: a difficulty that necessitated the instruction by a college.
The other way would be to self-teach the material with books (the rise of the For Dummies books is plenty of evidence this indeed happens). However, self-teaching a subject a learner is not proficient in or not familiar with leads to many problems in comprehension. The guarantee and cost of buying workbooks would also be quite high.

Without Distance, Time, or Money

The digital Web allows those without the means or the geographical location to procure a proper learning environment. Instead of self-learning in isolation, places like Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow, millions of blogs, wikis, and youtube videos and a billion net-izens can help a learner understand most any subject. This relates to Bonk’s idea of pipes, pages, and virtual learning communities. In the past 20 years, the physical means and software necessary to connect to learning communities has enabled more and more people to learn from each other (pipes). This in turn has created a massive content load for virtually any subject (pages). And in turn, virtual learning communities have arisen to understand, catalogue, and edit information.
Further, the economic impact of technology on education is becoming immense. Let us go back to my friend. He went through four years at a private college to obtain a BA in English. His passion was not in literature, but in technology, specifically networking, and decided to obtain his CCNA. He has had more success at being a technology consultant, networking engineer, and computer programmer than he ever thought he would have with traditional education background. It’s said a normal American will change careers three times in their lives. Well, in this case, the Internet’s ability to service this change is its greatest strength. No longer is education just for the wealthy or something that should be thought of as a linear path. As with my friend’s education background, I have a Bachelor’s, but I can easily learn programming languages, physics, and psychology (all of which are interests of mine) and at the same time polish on my web searching skills. The Internet becomes a democratizing tool.

The Result of Bonk

Honestly, much of The World is Open is covered in other books I’ve had to read for my Virtual Learning Communities class. However, Bonk breaks it down much the technology and education relationship as Alan Friedman’s The World is Flat explained the burgeoning economic paradigms Web 2.0 and current trends were creating. As before, my analysis of the situation is easy to surmise. I think that current education methods need to change and are being resisted in a political climate that demands standardized testing and, as a result, ignores constructive learning perspectives. As a culture, the West needs to embrace the idea that from this point on in history people will not receive just information from grades K-12 from the classroom, but from the endless spectrum on the Digital Web.

Khan Academy: A Case for E-Learning in Web 2.0

I haven’t taken a math course since freshman year of college---and I nearly failed that one. Only a surprising loophole in procedure and a week of cramming for the hardest final of my life saved me from having to take Algebra 3 two semesters in a row. However, I’m running through a video about statistics right now. I’ve got it paused so I can write this in fact. What happened to me? When did I not only become a numbers man, but actually enjoy thinking about the probability of lightning striking me versus winning the Oklahoma State Lottery?

Khan Academy.

Unless you lived under a cave (yes, under since even caves can get wireless signals these days), I’ll recap this internet success story. Khan Academy started out as a couple of mathematics videos by Salman Khan. After an endorsement from Bill Gates, who uses it to teach his own children off of the website, Khan Academy as quickly grown into a living example of how e-learning could seriously compete with public education. There’s a rebellious streak in me that imagines thousands of parents dropping public in favor of homeschooling youths with direct tutelage from Salman Khan’s brilliant videos. But, videos have been down before, what’s the difference?

Stop and Start

Most videos you run into on youtube.com are meant to be played from minute 0 to minute 1-credits. I’ve used youtube in the classroom, but rarely much farther than how teachers of old used the TV and VCR to let kids watch documentaries on nature or famous events. Khan Academy’s videos are meant to be stopped, restarted, and played in the middle. At one point, in a technology class, we stopped a video and used a smartboard to etch our own arithmetic on the screen (the first amazing idea I ever saw for smartboards, the one I thought “this is exactly what this technology is for”).

Practice, Practice, Practice.

Videos and clever narration are one thing, but Khan also supplies practice to each of his courses. For instance, going through the basic addition practice gives simple addition problems. However, what’s different is the level of extrinsic goals found on a single page. First, there’s the smiley faces and frownies given to right or wrong questions respectively. But KhanAcademy.com also uses a streak system where students can see how many questions they answered correctly in a row. If a student gets a certain number correct, they’re labeled as proficient and given a choice to go to a new subject.

The Future

It’s a wonderful place. Imagine a place like facebook or a MMO, but with students wanting to answer as many questions as possible to attain trophies and rewards. This is still based on extrinsic goal structures (basically wanting to out-do everyone else), but it creates a competitive environment that might be beneficial to the both the overachiever and average student. Average students get the help they need through repetition, viewing simple instruction videos, and social pressure. Overachievers are able to speed ahead to what actually challenges them rather than wait for everyone else.

Wiki Walking: Whistle While You Work

Yes, the above title is more my own love for alliteration, so please forgive its cheesiness. Wikis are like…

The dog from Up: intelligent, sometimes random, lovable, and a part of a community. They’re a different breed of community from the ones I’ve talked about before like Myspace or Facebook because those are centered around the social process. However, wikis are based around the collection and catalogue of information . For instance, Wikipedia, where the name comes from, catalogues information that its users find relevant from city information to videogame plot summaries to political upheavals. There is nary a topic I can think of that is not on Wikipedia for a person’s reading pleasure.

But, it’s different still from a traditional encyclopedia by virtue of being edited before. A short history on dictionaries and encyclopedias show they were motivated into existence by people wanting to preserve a microcosm of culture. Since culture can be shown by the information it possesses . So, that’s why an encyclopedia has information on U.S. Presidents rather than potential social conspiracies. Consumers are more likely to purchase information that is relevant to them. Wikipedia Is different by virtue of cataloguing information on such a massive scale that it could hardly ever be entirely read through. This means that Wikipedia’s content is chosen passively by the reader rather than selected But can individual organizations use Wikis to impact their own learning environments?

I think Wikis are a perfect example of a tool being used by users that has varying levels of success not dependent on leadership. Leadership is a variable in a wiki community since contribution needs to come from a variety of sources and intelligences rather than a guide intelligence. Of course, there can be a hierarchical leadership in a wiki community and in fact, as discussed in early posts, these positions are usually reserved for the physical leaders (those that maintain and run the service rather than just provide content). However, in a school or business, wikis be a way for individuals to contribute information that is normally shared through dialogue. For instance, a person might be more likely to discuss etiquette in the workplace on a forum such as a wiki where he or she is not the only contributor. Being able to have numerous people edit one file at once can affect the dynamics of the group from being centered on one figure to giving each person a self-assigned role. Don’t like to do content? Fine, there’s plenty of work to do editing the style used. Don’t like either? Then editing content mistakes or sourcing errors might be your thing.

Overall, wikis have many levels of organizational contribution and none have to be leadership promoted. Now, this does not mean that natural leadership does not happen, its just that pre-assigned leadership is less effective than normal. When content is the central issue, the person who contributes the most might well become the leader or someone who edits a category across multiple articles.

Forums, the Future, and Facebook (also some Web 2.0)

The snow storm that trawled across the Midwest gives a good example of how virtual communities benefit and detract from the learning experience. Beneficiary from the fact I can access all of my school work without having to meet with my class or having to brave the weather for meetings with a professor. On the other hand, virtual communities are harder to keep track of and invest time in. They are socially driven rather than a physical responsibility. So, to further my discussion last week of virtual communities, let’s dive into content and structure.

Most of what I’m referring to is from Renninger’s Building Virtual Communities (Chapter 5, 6, and 8). I said last week I’d cover the importance of content and luckily Renninger really goes with the different communication methods virtual communities’ use. Some of these are as old as usenet groups or mailing lists. While both of these methods still exist, I think the proper way to think of the evolution of the internet is the classic Web 1.0 versus 2.0 argument.

1.0

Mostly, this era translates itself as the use of one medium: typed messages. Forums (sometimes called discussion boards), mailing lists, and early chat clients mainly used typed messages to communicate ideas. Not that no other medium existed, but the bandwidth limitations in the late 80s to early 2000s made Voice Over IP (VoIP) and videos a much more rare (and in my opinion, badly implemented) idea. As such, Usenet and other discussion boards created communities through their members’ mutual understanding of topics such as engineering, videogames, politics, or any number of issues.

Mailing lists were a bit before my time. Sure, my university has some that give out updates, but people used these lists to create dialogues between the mailers. My understanding of the process makes it out to be like letter pen pals who discuss things back and forth. The difference between this and a forum were an exclusivity issue. Mainly, this came from mailing lists not being a resolvable address a normal person could type into a search engine or address bar.

With a broad brush, I think of this era of community as being one that tries to bring people together with limited technologies.

2.0

However, the current view of the Internet is one of unlimited technology further typing people together. The inclusion of multiple media websites such as youtube.com (a combination of text, sound, and video) creates an entirely different experience. No longer are users limited, as much, by bandwidth and computer hardware restrictions, but by their willingness to participate. Content is the essential factor still in determining the cliques and circles communities form into. As a constant example, Facebook, which has millions of users and who use a variety of text media to communicate. Facebook is even breaking the wall down between the instant and slow forms of communicating with their announcement to create a messaging system that incorporates email and chat. Google is doing the same thing with its Google Wave two years ago and current chat clients which relay emails as well as communicates with friends.

In Summary…

This is normally where I’d put the “The Future?”, but honestly Web 2.0’s technological innovation and its effect on teaching communities isn’t over. Mobile communication is getting bigger on smartphones, but I feel this technology has yet to reach its ultimate resolution and honestly, speculating on the future with communication technology might lead me farther into science fiction rather than science theory.

I hope everyone in the Midwest braved the weather well and I’m hoping that next week will be a sunnier (and more productive week) for everyone.

Virtual Communities: Cornerstones of the Web

A special note to readers: Many of these posts will be for a class project for my master’s degree. As such, if any of the public at large were to view, there might be some context missing. If you have questions, please leave them in the comments section below.

Virtual communities come in various shapes and sizes. The very idea of defining one to a single media is a problem. Does an IRC channel count as a community? Do instant messaging services or the near-ancient mailing lists count? What about the humble bulletin board that still retains a level of popularity for many hobbyist websites and discussion forums? Overall, the best way (I’ve found) to define a virtual community is a group that derives its purpose through their mutual communication on the internet. Yes, this is vague, but the relationships presented to us on the internet are equally vague. Take for example, the lurker archetype who travels from website to website, blog to blog reading content, but not contributing in any proactive way. Most of this archetype’s influence comes from the age-old pageview counters and metric website operators receive that translates into advertising. Beyond this, I think the best way to think of virtual communities is to break them down into three pieces: purpose, people, and programming.

Purpose

What is purpose? For a virtual community, it is the reason anyone comes to a website, service, or forum in the first place. For example, people regularly use Facebook to talk to friends and family. Before this, Myspace.com (and before that xynga.com) was the top social networking service, but this fell away for a variety of reasons (most of them discussed here: http://doteduguru.com/id3701-social-network-failure-what-happened-to-myspace.html). Even moreso, Renninger in Beyond Virtual Communities notes in chapter 1 the failure of MediaMoo, a MUD designed for teachers and researchers, occurring because of its founders not following technology trends and better purpose-driven services emerged. Perhaps the first rule of a successful website might be:

1.       Find a purpose and stick with it. Be something people need.

People don’t support ideas that don’t have any sort of benefit. If we’re to look at Linux for a moment, Linux languished for years until the Ubuntu distribution made GNU-Linux a viable product. There was always a rich community of Linux users, but Ubuntu has redefined that community away from the professional programmer and computer-hobbyist into an operating system that can be used by the normal end-user.

People

I discussed with my class the idea of, what is essentially, different levels of participation in different virtual communities. Many concepts such as leadership and participation (not the same thing) seem to define what many see as virtual communities. I would term this a functional philosophy of virtual communities; each person has a place in society. However, I subscribe to a conflict theory. There are two major groups on the internet: the owners and the users. I define this by their physical ability (or lack thereof) to influence a virtual community. A user can become popular, make content, and even have a social status equal to a civic leader in real life. However, for lack of a better term, owners are gods. At any time an owner feels it necessary, he or she might simply turn the server off and,”poof,” there goes the virtual community. Take the facebook outage of 2010 (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20025930-501465.html), no matter how many  friends or your influence in the Zynga (Farmville) gaming community could keep those servers up during that long thirty minutes.

The other distinction is that owners can apply rules, rules that must be followed sometimes with grievous consequences for disobedience. For example, an owner who runs an IRC channel can kick, ban, or mute community members with a touch of a button.

However, users also have power. As touched upon earlier, users have the power to leave, to go somewhere else, and to give the virtual community a bad reputation. This is an example of soft power. Sure, an owner could become a virtual despot, but honestly most of the community would leave for safer waters with that policy. The reason behind the Facebook.com outage in 2010 was a maintenance issue. It does, respectively, outline the differences in owners and users though.

Programming

Much of this I think I’ll touch upon later in the week, but briefly: the community is defined by its content. A news website is just that: a website that reports on the news. A video gaming website talks and writes about video gaming. Virtual communities always have a context and a lingo that they work in. Obvious, but imagine writing up a lesson method for a southern cooking forum to a cookie-baking podcast. Both exist in the same realm (cooking), but each has a different emphasis. Thus, a teacher or research needs to become fully aware of the cultural anthropology of a virtual community.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, it’s hard to squeeze everything about virtual communities into one post and I had a hard time thinking about communities without context. Whether my observations up to this point are simply conjecture or actual insight is hard for me to perceive. The internet is a vast place with communities numbering as many as the stars in the sky. But overall, I think the idea of virtual community is sound and would like to see it defined more.

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