Reflections

This class has opened a whole new world to me. I hadn’t used ANY of the tools we’ve covered or even heard of half of them. It will take me a while after this class is over to get more familiar with them all. Still, this class got me over a block of sorts in using these tools. I was a bit stressed over the first produsage project as it was all so new.

In addition to starting to get familiar with Web 2.0 tools, the Shirky and Bruns books have opened the world of the produsage concept and theories to me. I hadn’t really thought about the movement of Web 2.0 as a collective so much. I guess I wasn’t amazed by the breadth and scope of its reach as much as the formal thought and documentation of it. Even the most casual observer such as me can see the influence of social media tools on society. What was an eye-opener was the intelligent design that is going into it.

I imagine for the immediate term I will continue to educate myself on these tools in preparation for using them in some work setting. I do not see that I will use them any time soon in the places that I work. However, I am certain that eventually I will. On the personal side, I am still considering how I want to use them. I am concerned about issues of anonymity still, though don’t see a way around it, especially since the IS program is now using Twitter, Facebook, and other things. Just want to jump in with a bit of care.

Table of Tools

I felt the need to put together a list of all the tools we've covered or people have used. I know there are many more out there but this is a start.

Delicious - Organized set of bookmarks. You can do a search by topic.
www.delicious.com

StumbleUpon - Organized set of websites. You can search by topic.
www.stumbleupon.com

Technorati - An organized set of blogs. You can search by topic for a particular blog.
www.technorati.com

citeulike - Organized set of scholarly articles and other references
www.citeulike

Twitter
www.twitter.com


Diigo - Bookmarking. Easy to use. Started to cause issues on my computer so need to check that out.
www.diigo.com

Flickr - Photosharing. A lot of the other tools made it easy to import photos from here.
www.flickr.com

Youtube

Second Life - Place for setting up a sort of imaginary set of circumstances for play and also for testing things out. Has been used for advertising purposes.

Ning - A bulletin board or sorts. Posts photos, videos, text boxes, chat, blog, forum

WetPaint - Similar to Ning, but has a wiki-type menu on the lefthand side, which makes me like it a bit more.

Wiki

Moodle - Used to create courses.
www.moodle.com

Chapter 13 - Notes

Chapter 13 - Produsage in Education

Discussion of educating people on using produsage
Issues:
- Divide between people who use and understand produsage and those who don’t
- Any produsage project doesn’t get even attention to all aspects of the project. The more interesting stuff will draw more people.
- Educators must understand produsage so they can properly teach students how it is created and how to use it.

Literacy to Capability
- People must be able to consume as well as contribute to produsage (no free riders I guess)
- In order to produce literacy, the capacity must also be produced to accommodate the usage
- How would the model of education have to change to a “produsage” model.
- Role of teachers would change like the “expert”. The teacher/student dichotomy would have to change. But, “the time when information was scarce has passed”.
- It is necessary to reinvent learning as a process of collaboration.
- This requires teachers to fundamentally reposition themselves as teachers.
- Five pillars of pedagogy that this would be based on:
- Creative – ability to act as a creative co-collaborator
- Collaborative – know how to collaborate effectively
- Critical – the ability to evaluate and critique
- Combinatory – ability to combine and re-combine arifacts
- Communicative –

A Casual Collapse of Conventional Education
Teachers ultimately become facilitators

Tip of the Iceberg
- New models for self-education by produser for produsers are emerging.
- Educational institutions could be “the hierarchical tip of the heterarchical iceberg of education”
- TeacherTube – widens the rage of participants able to engage in the development and provision of teaching resources…open-source-type classrooms in which everyone contributes to the curriculum
- OpenCourseWare
- Assessment and accreditation – schools could/would maintain the role of providing assessment and accreditation, but people/learners would acquire this knowledge

Reopening Academia
Traditional academic processes are not really that different from the vision of a produsage-based paradigm: open to input and review, never really finished, etc.