EME 6414 Review of Week 3

One of the comments from my last Participation Log from Dr. Dennen was how Inoreader was working for me for reviewing classmate’s blog posts? I was able to import the opml file she shared previously, and I have everyone’s blogs linked into a handy dandy single location. One of the most convenient things I like about inoreader is that it can separate new posts and read posts. When I read a post, I have the option to start it and make it a favorite to more easily refer to it later. One of the things I am still trying to figure out is if I click on a post, it highlights it but doesn’t always open it fully, and instead marks it as read. Something for me to look into! I reviewed several of the readings this week and decided for the first assignment to go with the concept version. I’ve always been good with writing papers, so I’ve been looking into various articles and resources to best determine community norms. I’m curious to see what others come up with as suggestions for communities. 

I joined the EME 6414 Reddit community as well, so looking forward to interacting more with everyone.

Communities - Podcasts and Forums

As shown below on my blog page, I am a total bookworm, and love to read. Mainly my first love is the Fantasy genre (although I try to branch out when I can), but in no particular order, my three main fantasy series that I dearly love (in no particular order of preference) are The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling, The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. What I have looked into more recently are podcasts with fellow bookworms, to find different viewpoints of these series. In the past, I have found online forums, but with the growing prevalence of podcasts, more emphasis is put on active content and creating more of a community around the beloved book series.

A few podcasts I listen to, Narniaweb, The Prancing Pony Podcast, Pottercast, Mugglecast, and The Alohomora! Podcasts all encourage their listeners to join the online communities for discussions outside of the podcast airtimes and it helps people have an even greater connection to the book series itself, but I feel that this can be applied to a variety of topics and fields, given enough time, effort, and interest in the topic and community. One of the things that can more easily grow a community around a podcast is that their communities are often made and joined on public websites and are often easier to find.

I subscribe to a bunch of podcasts in a variety of subject areas and I’m curious to hear everyone’s opinions on this topic.

Online Communities - Discord

 I have been looking into articles for the upcoming Community Norms – Concept version paper, and one of the communities I have been looking into is Discord, although is a hobby focused service, and throughout it’s history has been a more chat service, but through time has evolved (sorry, shameless Pokemon reference!) to include more gaming topics and introduce more of a community aspect. What is interesting is that a discord “channel” starts from the top-up of a specific influencer or gamer, and from there the community spreads with the effort from each person to grow the community. The influencer starts the discord community, and through the main channel, the community can branch out through sub-channels. It’s similar to Reddit in there is the main channel for the individual game that starts the discord community, and then from there they can create a variety of sub-channels that can range in topics – some specific to a certain game, to others such as channels about pets, general conversations, literature, etc, to help stimulate the community. For researching the strengths and weaknesses of different Web 2.0 tools for promoting learning and performance, Discord I will admit is a more hobby focused service as I mentioned, I found this a good thought exercise to examine details of various sites to determine communities, how to create and sustain one. In this instance, the root Discord channel of an influencer starts the channel, invites known members to join, and then create and branch out more to additional sub-channels. It’s important to note that Discord channels are more private in nature, locked behind an invitation code that one has to seek out to join if they know the person’s name. YouTubers for instance often list their Discord links in the descriptions of their videos to act as an additional level of privacy to the public to find a Discord community.

Let me know if anyone has any questions! I’m curious to see what everyone thinks, and I am curious to read more blogs about various communities.

EME 6414 Week 2 Review

I am starting to get my bearings with this course, the readings each week, and attempting to break out of my more introverted shell and interact more throughout the week in the ongoing blog posts and Twitter sections. I have used one of the inoreader feed for blog posts for the class, which provides a resource to read each new post as they are written and can mark them as read as I process them. I’m still trying to work out how to remove duplicate posts as they appear, but I found the overall site and feeder themselves very convenient for the needs of the class. 

I learned a lot this week with the readings and blog posts, and am excited to move forward learning new things and discuss new thoughts and ideas!

Lauren Horne

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

In this week’s readings, I learned a lot about different ages of people involved with technology, and I know myself from a very young age was exposed to a wide variety of technology through television and my first mackintosh computer that I had in my home, and learned on in my Elementary school each day for typing lessons.

 

From Prensky (2001), digital natives constitute an ever-growing group of children, adolescents, and nowadays young adults (i.e. those born after 1984; the official beginning of this generation) who have been immersed in digital technologies all their lives. Per my last post, and attempting to look at video games in a more academic context (even with jokes), I had to smile a little bit at the definition of the digital immigrants – those born before 1984, when 8-bit video games saw the light of day. Digital natives, at least to Prensky, were assumed to have sophisticated technical and digital skills, and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared and unfit.

 

As I mentioned, I have essentially grown up with technology all around me, and I think it’s interesting to see other generations that were born before the time of more mainstream technology – television, the internet, video games, and social media platforms. I look forward to seeing what others have to say on this.

New Age Technology - Video Games

In one of this week’s readings, Digital natives, digital immigrants part one from Prensky 2001, my inner video game nerd was intrigued by several video game franchises getting mentioned and discussed, specifically Pokemon. I have been a longtime Nintendo and Pokemon fan, and any mention of a beloved series that isn’t outright condescending in nature is welcome. It was funny to me that during the discussion about Geography, there wouldn’t be a reason that a generation that could memorize over 100 Pokemon characters with all their various characteristics, history, and evolution couldn’t learn the names, populations, capitals, and relationships of all the nations in the world. Currently, Pokemon is celebrating its 25 year anniversary and with all the different forms and versions, there is a total amount of over 1000 pokemon. My love for the franchise started very early on with my very own Gameboy color, and I have fond memories with the first main games in the series, and it stuck with me ever since.

I like the challenge of learning new things and becoming familiar with them over time. I am discovering new things each day and with each reading and blog post for this class, and I am slowly becoming more familiar and confident in the strange new surroundings. And like with each new game and area with new creatures to befriend and grow with, I feel that I grow in knowledge and experience, and with the readings and blog posts, I have set out on a new journey of adventures and discoveries of my own, and I’m excited to see where it goes!  

Communities and Networks

From the 1^st week of discussion topics for EME 6414, questions were asked of determining the differences between communities and networks – both online and off.

How would I define each term?

Social Networks – From the Health Knowledge website, social networks are individuals or organizations that are tied together by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchanges, friendship along with dislikes, conflict or trade. I like the idea behind the social network being a map of all the relevant relationships under study. The map can be a means of identifying individuals or organizations in various locations that are a part of the network. 

Communities – also from the UK Health Knowledge website, communities are a specific group of people who all hold something in common. Communities are more associated with two key aspects: people who share locality or geographical places, and secondly people that are communities of interest.

Describe some communities and networks to which you belong, noting what differentiates the two.

For me, communities are more in person, and networks have more of an online presence. Communities I am a part of in person are my local neighborhood, and my co-workers. I’m hoping to become more involved in more local communities once Covid is more under control, and it is safer to venture out once more people locally receive the offered vaccine. Networks I am a part of include the members of the course EME 6414, as we all connect with each other over the internet, along with several video game streamers and various hobbie podcasts I am involved in, mainly on a passive basis of just consuming content, I don’t create any of my own.

How do communities and networks differ in offline and online spaces?

Communities tend to be more in person focus with people gathering together, and networks being more online focused, but they can apply to both areas. Communities in person can be larger and more personal, whereas online communities sometimes take longer to build up and often remain small. Networks on the other hand can be large both online and offline with organizations and entire teams involved both in person and online to achieve a specific goal.

What happens when they co-exist in both spaces?

In the cases where communities and networks can co-exist, either in person or online, it can seem overwhelming at first with a new audience, but once things begin to open up and come together, larger ideas and solutions to problems can be accomplished as more individuals and companies or teams within companies could pool their collective resources to accomplish more together than they ever could on their own.

For one thing, at my workplace, the community of the workers has been spreading the word about job postings as they come up, but with the organization’s online network getting more exposure to the job post, which together with the efforts of the network and community can reach more people for successful candidates to fill open positions.

Lauren Horne

Reference

Health Knowledge. Social networks and communities of interest. (Web page). Retrieved from https://www.healthknowledge.org.uk/public-health-textbook/organisation-management/5b-understanding-ofs/social-networks

Scientific Research - Social Media and Networking Platforms

One of the things I have grown to learn through my job as a Research Administrator is the prevalence of the scientific field, how collaborative in nature it is to have larger collaborative teams working together to produce results sometimes larger than themselves.

With the growth of the internet age, information can appear to come from all sides and can be overwhelming at times. The use of social media tools can be greatly valued to help keep focus and perspective on specific areas and fields. As fmwaetcher.com discusses, the traditional nature of communication is unidirectional (scientific conferences or articles published in peer-reviewed journals), but the longer-term narrative contrasts with the current evolution of communicative preferences across the globe. The two-way interactive exchanges in social media platforms can open more avenues of conversations between people of a wide variety of backgrounds. There has been some resistance among scientists and researchers preferring to use more professional networks with a clear scientific or academic focus, such as Researchgate or Mendeley, and it begs the question of whether platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin are being unfairly overlooked and could contribute something to scientific research. In the research institution I work in, Facebook is becoming more accepted as there has been more of a recent push into more emerging fields and need more funding and developing projects, and our clinic seeking more participants for a specific clinical trial. These approaches appear to be more well-received by the local community as news over the internet travels faster than word of mouth, and the smaller research institution is quickly becoming more well known.

Additionally, as fmwaetcher.com discusses, Facebook’s social nature makes it easier to find audiences with similar concerns or collaborate on projects ranging from research sponsorships to event funding. Linkedin has a wider acceptance among scientists, maybe due to the idea that this network as a high-profile and professional focus. But the platform can offer more than just the option to create an online profile and can become the virtual equivalent of a lab meeting or discussion between like-minded professionals.

Twitter is often used to interact with fellow scientists, tweet with each other about research, or link to relevant articles. Two features of Twitter can be very useful to the scientific fields: conference hashtags and lists can help create online communities of individuals with common interests and goals. Twitter can be used to report the scientific process by providing raw data. Researchers, scientists, and conference organizers can gain extremely valuable insights into how social media users react and interact with news, and these findings can show patterns and modify online strategies to reach a wider audience in terms that make sense. In order to make the most of social media and networking, the focus on the audience and focus on purpose.  All of this information is very informative for people of all academic levels to keep in mind when considering which social media tools to use for what they are trying to achieve.

Reference

Waetcher, F. (No date). Social Media For Science and Research: Current Trends And Future Possibilities. (Web page). Retrieved from Share this postShare this posthttps://fmwaechter.com/social-media-science-research/#:~:text=Social%20media%20networks%20can%20help,science%20communication%20between%20different%20stakeholders.

Reflections on the 1st week of EME 6414.

 And So, It Begins!

I am looking forward to seeing where this journey of a semester will take me, and what all I will learn throughout the process!

I must admit that I am a bit more introverted when it comes to sharing my thoughts online, but I’m hoping to still be as active and participatory as I can. Hoping to contribute more each week to both my blogs and add my two cents to the discussion posts as well. My personality has always led me to want to be independent in my work and thoughts, but after reviewing the course materials and looking at other perspectives, a lot of my own work as a Research Administrator within a Nonprofit Research Institution has taught me that no one person can do it all, no matter how they try, and that we need each other for support and to move ideas forward. One person alone cannot do it all but can be an integral part of the overall machine of a company to help move a team and department forward. My job helping more with the administrative paperwork trail helps provide proof and accuracy of the information that is being put out there into the world, and I like to think this course is much the same. 

My future goals for this course are to be more open to ideas and try and post more regularly throughout the week as I plan to do more readings earlier in the week to get more conversations going.

Looking forward to interacting more with everyone!

Lauren Horne