flaneuse.org

Well, I am still achy — day four of this : ( — but doing somewhat better and I don’t think I am contagious any more. So I am going to try to leave the house today! Yay! And it is sunny and might even get up to 32 so not too bad at all.

As I am stuck in the house and therefore, to computer access rather than physical interaction, expect lots here and elsewhere online (my online class is going to hate me by the end of tomorrow, I bet. *evil grin*).

Some thoughts as I work on a paper/presentation about Facebook and MySpace. Would love to hear your reactions, if you have any:

2/8/07 Where the hell are my notes on my former students contacting me through myspace??/

So what does all of this mean?

That much of the time, I don’t know what I am doing when I logon to facebook and myspace. I can’t figure out how to spend my time and most of the times I login, I just check my page and go. Perhaps 25% of the time, I get caught looking up what other people are doing (this does not include collecting data with my subjects) and learning about groups and pages. While I am trying to figure out how pages are constructed, I am also trying NOT to learn too much about my students – sort of my own sense of keeping their privacy intact.

I know there are things I choose not to post on these pages, and I was really worried when friends called the picture I have up “sexy”. It’s soft focus because I take terrible pictures, rather than in a Glamour Shots kind of way.

I guess I am still trying to figure out how to represent myself in this Web 2.0 space. I am much more familiar and comfortable with blogging – probably because it is all writing and I have total control of the layout and content of the page. It’s easier for me to understand, being a textual person who does well with lots of writing and few pictures. To me, the layout is predictable – following a genre I know well of diary/personal writing. Facebook and MySpace, on the other hand, are completely different – genres of their own. Not comic book exactly, but also different from the hypertexts I knew well. Not nearly as linear as blogs, and updated perhaps even more frequently. Do the pieces on this page even work together in any kind of coherent whole?

From danah’s blog –
We’re living with the complications of no walls online. Determining context is really really hard. Is your boss really addressing you when he puts his pic up on Match.com? Does your daughter take your presence into consideration when she crafts her MySpace? No doubt it’s public, but it’s not like any public that we’re used to in meatspace.

I am hyper-aware of the public audience to my pages – that these are, in most cases, my students. Much more aware in terms of paranoia than I am on my blog – as a medium I feel much more comfortable in and use better. There’s a perceived generational gap on my part in even being on MySpace or Facebook. I feel like I am intruding, and (of course) none of my students have told me that, yet their faces show surprise when I tell them I am on there. Some, maybe 10% add me. The others must know that I could find them if I chose, and yet I don’t go looking for the faces sitting in my classroom.

It’s a weird position of being and not-being in this community populated mostly by people much younger than I am. I stay the lurker – responding to comments but not usually making them, not poking someone first. It’s as though I need someone, anyone? To put their hand out and show me around and tell me, “Yes, you belong here too.”

Also, that I am lurking and doing research. Am not collecting anyone’s page without a consent form, but studying myself and yet that means studying those connected to me in some way. There is no clear demarcation that this is MY page and that is YOURS.

Danah’s point that these pages are the “clothes” our students dress themselves in, to represent who they are and who they’re becoming. That makes sense – as their friends and others recognize these clothes and what they mean. There’s very little uptake of Facebook and MySpace in my world, though, it’s as though we don’t recognize these as clothes or what they mean. The nuances of the cultures of MySpace and Facebook are lost on me and many of my colleagues – this is a whole different tribe with markers and discourses and conventions of its own. And that builds on the feeling I have when I talk about MySpace and Facebook to my peers – that I am taking them on a safari to the other side of the globe (the other side of the Net, in this case) to visit a culture of which they’ve hardly dreamed.

Sadly, Chris and I both seem to have the flu. I’ve been fighting it for a couple of days, but today I have managed to be out of bed all of maybe two hours and I am heading back there soon. Chris is out period. Agh.

While you wait for updates on our condition (no, not really, don’t worry), this is totally worth checking out. It’s a video from a prof in Kansas (now I need to look him up and find out more about his work — can’t remember if I know the name or not) about the differences in Web 2.0. It’s fantastically well done and raises lots of questions we need to answer…

Just finished and put up my first podcast here: http://web.mac.com/drdana33/iWeb/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html

It’s for the New Literacies course and can also be accessed through the Wikis for classes link here on flaneuse. Amazingly enough, I remember the very first web page I put up, using Netscape Navigator, in 2000. I was so proud! And it was this terrible page that was much too text heavy (I think it had like an entire grad class paper on part of it) with no color except for some lines and these shaded circles that took me forever to draw. While I didn’t have to learn how to do it, I fell in love with creating online content from that first page and then taught myself Dreamweaver and its assorted graphics programs (I forget the name now). I took beginning programming — that’s a whole ‘nother story — and designed a virtual magnetic poetry project page for middle schoolers.

Now I don’t have that kind of time and thank God for Apple’s iLife programs that make all of this much easier. I made the podcast in GarageBand and uploaded through iWeb, with my 60-day trial version of a .mac account. It’s still fun and I’m so glad I get a chance to do it.

So everyone has been posting on my blog their comments and thoughts and for some reason, they weren’t showing up. Chris worked on it tonight and now they should be there — and let me also say thank you for your kind thoughts about my migraines and teaching and everything else. It’s wonderful to connect back and forth and get the expertise you all have to help me think through things (and yes, it sounds like maybe I should get checked for TMJ — thanks for the tip, Randi).

Back to House, M.D. God, I love love love Hugh Laurie.

I just finished teaching the basic skills class and talking some about genocide and Darfur as well as Rwanda. I showed some of the Frontline special on Rwanda, but actually stopped the video before it got to the more graphic parts. The class was so quiet today and most of them said they knew little about these conflicts and genocides. I worry about focusing on such tough material — talking about the evil humans can do and looking at actual primary sources on these things. How many stories about the Janjaweed raping and burning and killing can you hear before you become numbed to it? I know I haven’t yet, but I also don’t want to push some of these difficult topics too far and alienate these students.

We’re reading Kite Runner now, after Wiesel’s Night. I know this book is slower, but I hope it takes off for this group as it did with the class last year. Perhaps the human face Hosseini puts on the story, the intimate relationship of Amir and Hassan will help this become more palatable, I hope.

I feel so strongly about how important these topics are and yet, I know how intense exposure can be to them too. What is the right balance here?

Here’s the link

Interesting. Apparently kids and teens are being exposed to more pornography, both willingly and unwillingly, as a result of their online access and activities. The most important part is that we don’t know (yet) what that means. Does it have an immediate, negative or traumatic effect on kids? Do they dismiss it, as the example in the article did? What causes one reaction over another?

It’s not as simple as kid + internet = online prey but it’s also something we, as the adults here still making (most of) the decisions, have to keep in mind and monitor.

despite the tone of recent posts, I am a basically happy person. Really. *smile*

Yes, I like cold. No, I don’t like painfully frigid, I have to wear a hat AND a scarf wrapped around my face and I’m still cold. That’s just plain ridiculous. February sucks. No way around it. The weather is mostly hideous, Valentine’s Day is stupid, the cold keeps us from being able to take Willa to the dog park (she doesn’t care but we sure as hell do). Thank God for Netflix and antibiotics.

Crap. I didn’t get to the movies like I said I would. Crap crap. I need to go see Freedom Writers to talk about it with my early childhood class, who now gets a free extension until Thursday to see it. I don’t want to go out in this weather. Argh. I have to go see it tonight, actually, because I also offered the whole extra-credit-if-you-see-it deal to my other class, which meets tomorrow morning. F’in brilliant. Oops, pardon my French.

Stupid Mondays in stupid February. Sigh. I would like to be in a hot bath right now with a cold drink and a good book and as much hot water as I want. A deep, nice tub. Mmmmmmm.