Social Life on the Internet

(1) What are your thoughts about virtual environments and "life on line?"

I like to play games that allows me to do some things in a virtual environment. For instance, the app game that I used to play is called "Home Design". It's a game that allows player to decorate their own home and design the way they want it to be. In this game, there's also the avatar of the player. This avatar can go to other users' houses to visit and socialize with other avatars. But the avatar can't talk with each other. Users can only socialize with other players by leaving comments in others' comment wall. I guess the way the design the game to be like this is because the game designer want its users to fully focus on "designing home" rather than socializing with their neighbors which might become another second life game. I kinda like this idea of just directing players' attention to design itself.

Speaking of this kind of virtual environment, what I like about it is that it allows me to do what I cannot do in my real life. In the real world, I am not a home designer and of course I am not that artistic in creating a beautiful home. However, it's always my dream to design my own comfy house. By playing around in this virtual environment, I get the chance to fulfill my designing dream. I can have a magnificent house with splendid furniture like chandelier or fancy bed or a big backyard with a Japanese style pond over there. Even if I buy some ugly furniture or wallpaper there or even mess up with my design, I could tear them down within a few clicks without losing my actual money. In that virtual environment, I feel that I'm powerful and talented in perfecting my house. And within a few clicks,I can also go to my neighbors' houses to check out their home design and maybe imitate some of their design style. This--randomly walk into a neighbor's or a stranger's house just to check out their home design--is what I won't be able to do in my real life. But again, this virtual environment grants me this opportunity to achieve what I cannot do in my real world. I guess that's one of the reasons why so many people are so obsessed with playing around in virtual worlds in order to escape from their real life and feel empowered to do things in their virtual environment.

While spending some time getting away from the real world won't be a bad thing, users still have to be cautious about not being too indulged in that environment. Otherwise, they might end up spending too much time online and losing themselves in the virtual reality and might even have a hard time going back to the real world or socializing with others in their real life.

My another thought related to this question is about the reading "Second Thoughts About Second Life". In that article, the author mentioned that we overlooked the violence, sexual harassment and other misbehavior happen in virtual environment. Those are something we have to take into account and think about seriously while we are playing the games in virtual reality. I've never thought about the impact those misbehavior could bring to a player until I read this article. As it said, the avatar is like the representation of oneself. It represents the player's wishes, aspirations, virtues, etc. It's very authentic and just like "the other you". I think about it and realize that it's quite true that a player would definitely have emotional impact when its avatar is attacked or sexually harassed. S/he would have the feeling that s/he is the one being offended even though s/he isn't being physically assaulted. That kind of experience can still make people feel emotionally uncomfortable! So it's for sure that more laws should consider this kind of problem and have more action on how to deal with it.  

The app game : Home Design 

(2) Do you feel there is a correlation between life online and academic achievement, for better or worse?

For me, it depends on how you use the internet. Some people would make good use of the Internet and manage it well even if they have an active life online. I have a personal experience about how I make good use of Facebook to make it both a place for socializing with my friends and learning. A few years ago, I had to take official exams to compete with other teachers to be admitted to teach in a public school. To prepare for the exams, I had to do lots of test questions from previous years. After I was done with those test questions, what I would usually did is to organize the questions which I did wrong and vocabulary which I didn't know and put them on my "personal Facebook club". So every time I went through Facebook to go for a rest and reading through my friends posts, I would also go to my personal study club on Facebook to go over my notes. During that time, eventually I found out that I spent more time browsing through my notes of my own Facebook club rather than socializing out there with my friends! Luckily, that year I was fortunate enough to be admitted to teach in a public school after competing in that fierce exams. I certainly would give some credits to my Facebook club. I didn't lost myself there; on the contrary, it helped to attain my goal in the end.

Based on my own experience, I would say that it really depends on how you manage your life online. If you can manage yourself and time well, you can have an active online life and also use the Internet correctly for learning purpose which might also lead to better academic achievement like I did.

Part of my personal learning club on Facebook

PowerPoint -- Pro or Against & Week 3 readings

In our last week class discussion, the professor mentioned that some people think that PowerPoint shouldn't be used when people are presenting important information. They think PowerPoint could cause people to make bad decisions and even lead to horrible consequences. 

In the beginning, I thought those people are just too extreme about hating PowerPoint and didn't think that PPT could cause harm. However, after the professor gave the example of NASA's Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster and I read the PPT(6 provocations for big data) of this week, I rethink about the impact and effect that PPT could bring to the audience.

On reading that PPT, I had the feeling that some information need to be illustrated more rather than just had a few bullet points listed there. Because of the succinct bullet points, I am not sure whether I fully know what the presenters want to present. I understand why the presenter did so because s/he wanted to make the PPT simple and readable. But this also means that some important detailed information would be left out in this PPT; audience must fully concentrate during the lecture or they would miss those points and probably jump to wrong conclusion just like the decision makers in that Columbia space shuttle disaster case. Like what the professor stated in class, some data can not be completely presented on the slides. Sometimes, this important and detailed information need to be presented in paper so that full elaboration and information can be shown there. And experts can make better decision based on the comprehensive information. 

Speaking of being pro or against the use of PowerPoint, I have a neutral stance. Sometimes, I do feel that PPT works for both the presenter and the audience. As a more visual person, I would prefer the presenter to show me some PPTs instead of doing all the talk the whole time. Visualization helps me grasp the concept or the content of the talk better. However, this benefit would cause some problems for me from time to time. For instance, I might rely too much on the PPT and so concentrated on reading the words from the slides which I turn off my ears. In this case, I would miss some information which isn't listed on the slides but explained by the presenter. But if you ask me whether I'm still for using PPT after hearing the example of NASA's tragedy, I would still say yes because it's friendly for both presenter and audience. But to avoid tragedies like NASA's, I would say that probably it would be best for presenters to prepare both slides and paper which could be referred to after the presentation. 

One more thing on my mind is that we talked about some alternatives for PPTs like Prezi. Personally, I am not a fan of Prezi. In fact, I kind of dislike it. When I first used it, I thought it's kinda cool and more dynamic compared to PPT. Prezi allows your slides to move around, zoom in and zoom out. As a presenter, I like this animation. But as an audience, I really don't like it because the movement of the slides makes me feel dizzy and uncomfortable. If the presenter keeps moving on his slides and zooming in and out, I think I might pass out very soon. And some people say that PPT presents information in a linear way. However, in my opinion, presenters can add some links to the PPTs (link one ppt to another) or add some other special animation effects to make it more dynamic and interactive!

I found out an website that is totally "Anti-PowerPoint". It's called Anti-PowerPoint Party. I don't even know there's such thing until I goolged some related info and found it. It's quite interesting to see what these advocates have to say about PPT.


*** Week 3 reading
I found the reading "The Reader-to-Leader Framework" pretty interesting.
It talked about that social participation can be categorized as "reading, contributing, collaborating and leading". When I looked back on my online social participation pattern, it's pretty much like it. I still remembered that when I was in 5th grade, there was a trend of creating "online clubs" which were a kind of online community supported by Yahoo in Taiwan. In the beginning, I joined different clubs like western music club, English learning club, etc. People would post pop music in the club or share related information about the singers. At that time, I just read through the information and listened to music recommended by other online members of the group. But after a few weeks, I had the thought that I wanted to create my own club and be the chief of the club who is in charge of the online community. So I did create my own online music club. I started to post stuff there and organize people's postings in my forum. 

My own experience of social participation wasn't exactly following the linear pattern. But it got all the elements there. I first did the reading and then contributing, collaborating and leading happened altogether. I felt motivated to manage my own online club because I want to have this "ownership"--that something I own it, not other people who own the online club. And the reason why I kept posting things in my club is because I received good comments or responses from my club members. It's very motivating whenever you see that your hard work pay off just by reading a few positive lines made by other online members.

It's a pity that Yahoo online club grew out of favor as time goes by. When I went to junior high, that stuff was no longer popular. In the end, Taiwan Yahoo decided to take out that stuff. Many years later, blogging became popular in Taiwan, too. And that's another story for me. 

Cool Online Community & 2 Questions

In Thursday's class, some classmates shared a few interesting online communities such as Quora. I have one to share here and it's called "VoiceTube". Basically, it's a website for English language learners to learn and practice their listening and speaking skills. There are thousands of videos imported from Youtube; staff of VoiceTube would translate English into Mandarin and make both subtitles for those videos.

But what surprises me the most is the nice atmosphere created by this "Pronunciation Challenge". It's a place where one staff of VoiceTube would record a short audio clip containing pronunciation of target sentences and explanation of the sentences for ELLs to practice the pronunciation. What ELLs would do is to record their own practice and upload it to the web. At first, I thought people would just upload their practice to the page and nothing more. However, it's not like that and not that boring at all. In fact, people not only upload their recordings but also type some other messages to share how they feel about the today's pronunciation challenge. They talk about the problems they have, compliment on others' good pronunciation or even give advice to other ELLs on how to improve their pronunciation.

An example of how ELLs interacted with others in the online community.

Moreover, I thought people would also just record their pronunciation of their target sentences. But there were several times that I heard more than those things. Sometimes people also record their own viewpoints of the target sentences in their clip. The most interesting one I've ever heard so far is that a young kid recorded his own singing at the end of his practice recording; lots of people responded to his pronunciation and singing and encouraged him to keep his good work! 

This is one of the examples that the kid recorded his pronunciation practice and sang a song at the end of his recording.

I think that's the beauty of this kind of online learning community! Users would be able to help out and encourage each other in learning even though they are totally strangers. And the more interaction they receive via the online community, the more motivated they become in terms of learning the target language. To be honest, I was a little bit surprised to see that this pronunciation challenge works so well without the staff further being in charge of its discussion board. I thought they need to have the host who posts daily pronunciation challenge to respond to the audience/ELLs so as to facilitate the learning atmosphere there. It turned out that the staff and the host don't have to step in and things work quite well!



*** 2 Questions:
From the reading "Technology as Social Practice", Bertram mentioned that in educational settings the question that educators should ask is not why the tool is employed or what is lost by using it; on the contrary, teachers ought to focus on the question how to make the best of the technological tool during the class.


This is a very thought-provoking viewpoint. Looking back on my own teaching journey, I was like that kind of teacher who constantly think about "what kind of technological tools" ought to be used during my teaching. However, I forget to look at the aspect of effectiveness of the use of the tool which I think is a very important question to think about! After all, students are the main focus of learning. I feel that I am being too subjective in terms of choosing what technological tool to be used. I think what "might be useful and helpful" for them to learn from my own perspective. I ought to switch my role to students when it comes to learning with the technological tool! Therefore, the question that I am interested in exploring more is how to choose an appropriate technological tool for students to learn with and how to make it effective in terms of learning.  



Another question that I am interested in knowing more stemmed from our first class discussion. During that time, we talked about "self-identity" in the cyber world. A classmate talked about having different Facebook accounts for different groups of people. Another classmate shared her experience of having different social media platforms for different groups of people. These got me think about how I presented myself in the cyber world. Take my Facebook for example. Some of my friends use their real name as their Facebook account. But for me, I don't do that. I don't feel comfortable in using my Mandarin names out there. Thus, I put my English name up there. For me, it's just like a nickname or an alias. I do so because I don't feel like expose my real name in the cyber world. This probably has something to do with keep my privacy. But the conflicting thing here is that I sometimes post my life on my Facebook wall. So it's quite interesting for me to think about my viewpoint and my behavior on this! So the question that I would like to explore more is how do people construct their self-identity in the cyber world and the factors that affect the whole process.