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Hi from UIUC!

I?m blogging about the second panel, Social Media. BelowI offer highlights from each panelist?s talk, followed by questions andconversation points the talk generated for me (and for the wider HASTACcommunity). At the end, I summarize the brief Q&A.

Enjoy!

(Session Chair and Moderator: Brendesha Tynes (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

1. Christian Spielvogel (Hope College) and Laura Ginsberg Spielvogel (Western Michigan) presented ?Traversing the Boundaries of Pedagogy  through Curriculum-Based RPGs: The ValleySim and Marriage of Cultures Prototypes.?
?    Christian described ValleySim, a interactive game that strives toprovide an accurate depiction of the Civil War (which involvescountering romanticized views of Civil War combat) as it engagesstudents in activities that encourage multiple perspectives related,for example, to gender and race while also providing the war?sdispossessed with agency. Students can read character profiles, meet inchatrooms, respond to opinion polls, read original articles fromarchives, and publish their own articles in the daily interactionalnewspapers.
?    Laura described the game ?A Marriage of Cultures,?  whereundergrads study Japanese culture by anonymously playing charactersinvolved in an upcoming Japanese wedding. Rather than reading atextbook on Japanese culture, students assume more central and activeroles by playing characters like the corporate matchmaker, mother ofthe bride, and so forth. The interactive experience fosterscross-cultural recognition and the kind of ?thick description? (Geertz,1973)) not typically available to undergraduate students. The game isnot meant to serve as a replacement for going abroad but rather as apre-requisite for students going abroad ? to address exaggeratedstereotypes and promote tolerance.
?    In both RPGs, instructors are actively involved: playing characters, moderating discussions online and offline.

?    Questions:

- I wonder what other disciplines/classes lend themselves to RPGs?

- How might the role of the instructor vary across disciplines and games?

2. In ?Identity Learning and Support in Virtual Environments,? Sharon Tettegah (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Cynthia Calonge(Colorado Technical University, presenting from within Second Life)showcased the ways we can traverse boundaries vis-à-vis Second Life,merging physical material classrooms and virtual worlds.
?    Sharon demonstrated the use of text-based interfaces, media-textimages, and individual applications embedded in LMS within Second Life,and noted that users engage in cooperative learning, differentiatedinstruction, and learning as a process. She noted that instructors haveto be creative in how they engage students in constructive learning invirtual environments, and that instructors have to have a sense oftheir pedagogical goals for having students participate in virtualenvironments: ?Learning and instruction using Second Life basicallybecomes a question of whether curricular goals and objectives can beeffectively promoted in this environment.?
?    Cynthia (as her Second Life avitar, Lyr Lobo) offered examples ofclass projects in Second Life. For instance, how high school studentsparticipating in a courtroom in Second Life and debated whether George(Of Mice and Men) is guilty of murder. It is another example of virtualworlds enhancing (rather than replacing) classroom learning.

?    Questions:

- Sharon also noted that such virtualworlds require particular bandwidth and other capabilities ?capabilities not available to all students, instructors, andinstitutions. How do we work toward equal access to emerging learningenvironments like RPGs and Second Life? Can we ensure equal accesswithout further widening the participatory gap Jenkins has described?

3. Christine Greenhow (University of Minnesota), in hertalk ?Engaging Youth in Networked News: Connecting the Social, Civic,and Educational through Action-oriented Facebook ?Publications,??shared her project that aims to engage young people in news-sharingspaces. She notes that young people are the least likely demographic toget news on any given day, and the aim of Hot Dish, a news-sharingcommunity around global warming located on Facebook, is to provideaccess to for this particular demographic. More broadly, she isinterested in examining:

o    Engage youth in news around an issue (e.g. climate change)
o    Develop users? knowledge about current events
o    Build community
o    Generate real world impact (e.g. online and offline behaviors)
o    Promote reading and writing practices (e.g. new literacies)

Likethe RPGs and Second Life discussed earlier in the panel, Hot Dish is aninteractive space. Grist.org provides the articles, and users can poststories from other sites, publish their own stories, upload videos, andinteract with each other. ?Action challenges? encourage different kindsof participation by using a point system: Users receive pointsaccording to how they participate ? writing stories vs. singing apetition vs. partnering with business in their communities to promoteawareness.

?    Questions:

- Christine noted that this project emerged out conversations withcolleagues across a variety of disciplines, all interested in newssharing spaces. I remain especially interested in how theseconversations take place across universities since, as many of youknow, I am establishing an interdisciplinary group at the University ofMichigan aimed at facilitating these very kinds of conversation andprojects. Are there other examples that people can share?

- Are there other projects aimed at studying Facebook and its users?What are the aims of such projects ? do they align with some ofChristine?s?

- I study LiveJournal and FanFiction.net as sponsors of literacy(Brandt, 2001), and I wonder what other research there is on emergingspaces as alternately enabling and suppressing literacies?

4. In her talk ?Identity in the Age of Cybercitizenship: Teaching Intermediate Composition in Second Life," Svitlana Matviyenko(University of Missouri, Columbia) notes that she is teaching in SecondLife and also teaching about Second Life. She has her studentsparticipate in Second Life and also asks them to think critically aboutthe space. Indeed, she argues that it is important to see Second Lifeas a venue, not just a game ? and I would guess that the otherpanelists would agree with this assessment. Included in the manyquestions she has her students pursue in her class, Identity in the Ageof Cybercitizenship, is this question: ?MySpace, Facebook, Second Life:How do we obtain our citizenship in these domains?? Students? projectsfrom the class represent their interdisciplinary interests; theprojects range from the fields of education (?Teaching Rhetoric inSecond Life?) to medicine (?Disability in Second Life?) to arts andentertainment (?A Short Social Commentary on Dancing in Second Life.?)

?    Questions:
- Svitlana?s work in particularhighlights the importance of having students think critically aboutemerging platforms and spaces, something I am asking my students to doin my research on fanfic writers. What are the limitations andadvantages associated with a particular space?

- As we and our students transgress the boundaries of the screen andtransition from the human to the post-human ? ?a pre-cyber self? or?the idea of the self?; ?a cyber self? or ?the digital representationof the self? ? what are the implications on learning and identities forstudents?  

Q&A:

Q1.  ?There is research on how students take aspects oftheir academic life into their virtual lives.  Are we seeing how theytake their virtual identities into their real lives ? i.e. do we seeexamples of the reciprocal occurring? Is the flow bi-directional??

- Sharon noted that her experiences with a diverse group ofpeople within Second Life taught her humility, and definitely saw thelearning as bi-directional.

- Laura observed that the flow is reciprocal, citing as anexample that students become more sympathetic in real life when theytake on a character.

- Svitlana emphasized the ability to ?become someone?highlights the complexities of self, and that we need to continuestudying and discussing this act of taking up identities.

Q2. ?When you run into an administrator and he asks, ?How is this doing the student body good,? how do you answer that??

- Laura and Christian responded that they are working on articulating objectives and then determining how to measure those objectives.

- Sharon responded that we need to engage in longitudinalstudies to see if users can apply what they learn in these spaces, andthat we need to figure out ways to measure this learning.

Overall, a terrific panel highlighing the exciting work going on in social media!