Well, we made it to the end of module 2, and I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some of the thoughts that have been swimming around in my head.<\/p>\n
Affinity Spaces:Inevitable \/ Not Sufficient<\/strong><\/p>\n Regarding \u201caffinity spaces\u201d as described in one of our readings: Children in a participatory culture are described as gung-ho little multi-taskers, adept at transmedia navigation, expanding their consciousness by leveraging collective intelligence and distributed cognition.<\/p>\n When reading this, I kept wondering when the first toddler CEO would hit the world stage. All of the examples were of very young kids out there acting like little corporate celebrities. The message seems to be \u201cyou\u2019re very special, you\u2019re too smart for traditional education, drop out and get rich\u201d.<\/p>\n I won\u2019t bore everyone with my dissection of the paper, but I will just say that these affinity spaces seem to be necessary (or at least inevitable), but not sufficient for the cognitive development of children.<\/p>\n What about critical analysis? What about critical literacy? I don\u2019t feel that the participatory culture satisfies these developmental needs.<\/p>\n The Fourth and Fifth Walls: Spatial Metaphors and Performance<\/strong><\/p>\n When reading about the glass-walled bedroom where people come in and out, watch and creep around as a metaphor for these online interactive environments, I started thinking about a spatial metaphor from traditional theater.<\/p>\n I copied this from Wikipedia: The fourth wall is the imaginary “wall” at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The term “fifth wall” has been used as an extension of the fourth wall concept to refer to the “invisible wall between critics or readers and theatre practitioners. The acceptance of the transparency of the fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events. Speaking directly to, or otherwise acknowledging, the audience through the camera, in a film, play or television program, is referred to as “breaking the fourth wall.\u201d<\/p>\n Violating the boundary: With social media boundaries, there\u2019s no wall to violate because there\u2019s no widely accepted social norm defining behavior at the boundary. And the boundary itself is fragmented, nondescript, difficult to locate and define. The glass-walled bedroom metaphor is effective in describing participation, but I think it needs to be developed a little more to include the ways that information is communicated. The boundary of social media is more like a membrane.<\/p>\n I think it would be helpful to spend a lot of time developing new metaphors. We live our lives and shape our perceptions through our mental maps, and these are formed by metaphors.<\/p>\n Participation: Death of the Transmissionist<\/strong><\/p>\n What I came to realize this past week was that participation in online environments kills the transmissionist teaching model. The idea that a teacher has to prepare a regimented lesson and deliver it to students who sit in chairs and take notes is a little outdated and in need of reconsideration.<\/p>\n I have heard this sentiment in several classes by teachers who stood before a class of students sitting in chairs taking notes. This is the first class that I\u2019ve had where we practice what we preach.<\/p>\n Also, I very much enjoyed thinking about and interacting with different levels of understanding of participation such as lurking, snooping and furtively gumshoeing. What I came to realize is that I change roles and behaviors in online environments about as often as I do in physical environments given the context of the situation and the role that I embody at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, we made it to the end of module 2, and I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some of the thoughts that have been swimming around in my head. Affinity Spaces:Inevitable \/ Not Sufficient Regarding \u201caffinity spaces\u201d as described in one of our readings: Children in a participatory culture are described […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7782,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7782"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/gregferg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}