Talking About Talking About Social Networking While Social Networking. And Identity.

Sometime back in 2004, I signed up for a Facebook account. I hadn’t really heard about social networking sites before an old residence hall acquaintance of mine told me that I “had” to sign up. Really, this notion was completely alien to me, and I really didn’t understand the point. I think “keep in touch and meet new people” was the catchphrase. I saw this system as a friend collection service: Facebook seemed to be keeping score. And, for a long while, I had very few “friends.” But for whatever reason, I felt compelled to check up on the page from time to time. The early days of Facebook were pretty low-maintenance. I don’t even remember status updates being a feature.

My first real social act on the network was posting the above profile picture (which is currently on my page, though I’ve changed it over the years). Before media explosions over identity theft via social networking sites or other fear-mongering, I felt uncomfortable about putting a picture of myself online. How could I represent myself with a single picture? It seemed pretentious. However, like anyone else who ends up with friends on Facebook can relate, pressure mounted for me to post a picture of myself. So there it was, about as obscure a popular culture reference as one could imagine: a picture of Balin from the Rankin/Bass produced animated film The Hobbit. Balin has only a few lines of dialogue, but for some reason I related to him better than any of the other Dwarves. Maybe it was the glasses. That and his apparently bad eyesight made him an ironically poor choice for “lookout,” unless he’s as farsighted as I am.



Balin was (and has since been) received with relatively wide acclaim. In recent years, he’s gotten more than one “like”—maybe no small feat considering my somewhat low friend count. At the time, I wondered if people thought he resembled me closely, or if they just liked The Hobbit. Asking other people what other people think about oneself felt infinitely more pretentious than posting the picture in the first place. Posting Balin must surely be illegal, unless it falls under fair use statutes. Vie notes that such questions would be compelling to ask students in the classroom—who owns a Facebook page? (15). More importantly, who’s being represented?
I ask the question because now it seems that on both MySpace (which I also eventually created a profile for—it contains quiz results identifying me with Captain Picard, Hannibal Lecter, Severus Snape, and William Wallace) and Facebook ads are ubiquitous, and the format of both sites trumps the user content. We’re given pretty limited tools with which to express ourselves. Even the names of the sites suggest identity loss. In “Facebook” we’re faceless amongst throngs, or just a face. “MySpace” is patronizing and ironic: it’s not “mine” at all. dana boyd has much to say about identity and social networking, arguing that race and class divisions play a major role in determining who uses Facebook and MySpace. She notes a trend where high school-age online social network users talk about online spaces in terms of vectors, and more specifically, how MySpace has often been characterized as being the online equivalent of ‘the other side of the tracks’ (35). I would be calling down torrents of theoretical criticism were I to simply state that space/place play a role in how humans conceptualize their identities, but I will anyway. Therefore (making a huge leap in logic), online social network users “*place*” their identities. That is, they place their identities on the internet, *and* make them into places where others can visit. Naturally, a web-site can’t contain the whole of a person (and I’d invite even more philosophical abuse were I to attempt defining “identity” here). So, we have to be picky, limited to the confines of what these sites, and our knowledge, allow us to do. And, again, those spaces are highly restrictive and self-promotional. Aren’t all MySpace pages, for example, mirrors of the creator’s page and persona? Maybe that’s not an entirely fair question—all expression is limited by medium—but putting one’s identity into someone else’s hands seems treacherous. Maybe unavoidable, even outside online social networking, but treacherous all the same, and even exacerbated by the somewhat static representations online at any given point.

Take the profile picture I included, for example. Though my profile looks very different from the way it did when I first started using Facebook, and it will again in the future, this picture won’t ever change. Unless somebody decides to use it for a mash-up or alter it using image-editing software, this image will endure. More importantly, the image will endure in the mind’s eye. We can’t keep track of every change on Facebook or MySpace, and most of the changes that take place on people’s profiles aren’t very exciting. Facebook’s newsfeed confirms. The biggest change I’ve made to my account in the past few months has been to remove an old AIM screen name. There’s no internet zeitgeist guiding the world to see our profiles at their masterful (or hapless) peaks. So, again, who is being represented?



Formats aside, maybe this is the wrong question. “Who is this for” might be more interesting. For my part, I can only speak for the page that I’ve constructed, and guess that many others do the same. Right now, Jacob Hughes’s Facebook page is pretty bare, and what’s absent is probably more significant than what’s present. I have my educational info listed under “Bio,” but no quotes or other information. Various relations are listed above, including my brother, sister, and significant other. The list is of course incomplete—I have some other relatives (including my mother) as friends on Facebook, and they don’t appear in this list. Rather, I obliged those people who asked me to list those things. I have displayed my actual hometown, *not* Kennewick or the Tri-Cities proper, but the small area outside the larger cities, declaring not pride but rather the absence of shame. I have a bum email address listed under contact information (it exists, but I *never* check it), indicating nothing. Only seven photos of me, which I will probably shortly un-tag, are currently available under my name. I’ve posted very few pictures of myself online, most obscuring my features, and those have since been deleted. Vincent Price stands in for two profile pics, and Brian Blessed another in addition to Balin. I regard these pictures about as honest and accurate as any that were taken of me and posted online. My only activity/interest listing is Saturn Missile, possibly the most face-melting and famous band in the world. Otherwise, that’s it: a page that’s quasi carefully constructed to avoid garnering attention while grasping for it anyway, hoping that nothing there will damage my reputation or employer credibility. Cheeky, but not as cheeky as it used to be; It’s devoid of political opinions, religious beliefs, and anything else which might indicate I have a perspective. On the other hand, often my wall belies the lack of posted information—I’ll curse and swear, launch politically-motivated tirades, complain about heartburn, and whatever else I feel like publishing via the web, more often than not hoping for some other perspectives on my perspective. How egotistical.

I hate to keep saying this, but I’m not so sure “ego” is represented. Maybe “Jacob’s ego filtered through a particular social networking lens, forwarded with an oddly paranoid sense of who cares about/sees what, and questionable priorities” is more accurate. For instance, if anyone clicks on the “Saturn Missile” link, and should that person linger on the page for more than a moment, they’ll see another side of my possibly inconsistent online representation. Yet, those pages are somehow separate, different spaces of identity within an online place. Therefore, I suppose my page is for all those people who I don’t want looking at it. Lame.

The Pen is as Mighty as a +3 Broadsword

As I mentioned on my Twitter feed at some point, after reading Gee I feel compelled to offer students experience points instead of grades. At the time, this was my somewhat flip response to Gee’s “Committed Learning Principle,” where learners spend great amounts of effort and time, extending their real-world identities with their virtual ones, characterized by a sense of developmental commitment. The best analogy that I could think of comes from RPGs or “role playing games” (though the extension of this acronym makes me wonder, “aren’t all games “role” playing games?). Ever since the earliest, nerdiest inceptions of *Dungeons & Dragons*, the RPG has emphasized the role of roles, maybe even to the point of stereotypical absurdity. By “role of roles,” I mean using the idea of roles as a game mechanic. In D&D, players form groups of individual characters, all who (usually) fulfill a specific party role. For example, the aptly named “fighters” are generally responsible for…fighting. Clerics, on the other hand, heal the front-line bloodthirsty fighters. Not all of these roles are combative. Rogues specialize in espionage (and stabbing people from behind) while Wizards focus on learning copious numbers of multi-purpose magic spells (from the most innocuous Harry Potter-style mischief to hellish necromancy). In effect, parties must seek “balance,” a term frequently used in game mechanics, especially when “real life” rage is involved. For instance, a party comprised of nothing but fighters might be really good at beating people up, but not so much at breaking into castles or unlocking treasure chests for sweet, sweet profit. Or healing themselves. In short, they’ll lose the game. There are a number of “jobs” to fulfill in these kinds of games, and if one area is drastically underrepresented, the adventuring party faces dire peril: they’ll quickly become troll-food. Thus, should one or more members of the party fail to fulfill their roles—or fail to take up a much needed role—rage ensues.

Significantly, RPGs offer players a tangible system of character improvement. For example, in many such games, achievement is demarcated by “experience points,” and when a player obtains a set number of points, additional features of the game are opened for use by their characters. For example, a higher level fighter might gain the ability to attack more than once per turn. Wizards learn new spells. Clerics develop better healing abilities. All of these improvements result in greater responsibility: “game masters” (persons responsible for refereeing and developing game scenarios) level greater challenges on a group of players. As the cliché goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Really, this principle isn’t new in games, or even “real life.” We all have expected roles to fulfill in the workplace—for instance—and sometimes people rage at us when we don’t fulfill them. People who perform their roles especially well are often promoted and/or take on greater responsibilities. But those roles, however, don’t adhere to Gee’s “Psychosocial Moratorium Principle”: there are no infinite “re-spawns” or continues in “real-life.” Therefore, the learning curve is steep and the consequences can be permanent. Rage and other emotions ensue, but there’s no resetting to continue from where the gamer last left off. Even in Dungeons & Dragons, party members can create new characters or “retcon” (re-do) a failed quest. They can re-evaluate the learning environment, take into consideration the construction of the game and its rules, and move on to try out another solution. Players, as Alice J. Robison via Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman suggests, are able to engage with their environment, exploring its developmental implications (360). In other words, they can “meta-game.” While “meta-gaming” is generally seen as a bad thing by players of RPGs (“since my character has a high in-game intelligence score he therefore could figure out the theory of relativity even though I the player cannot” or “most of these quests contain a set number of monsters—I bet there’s one behind that door that we can’t yet see”), the principle is sound in a pedagogical context. Gee asserts that thinking about the relationships in the semiotic domain is in itself an exercise in critical thinking. Furthermore, Robison emphasizes, “writing assignments are interactive systems with win states and expected outcomes” (362), but students are very often at a loss concerning exactly what is expected of them. Therefore, she suggests that interacting with the primary design elements *of* the curriculum—the game mechanics—clues students/players in on how one can play the game in more than one way.

Okay, so I’ve pointed out what RPGs do and what a few scholars have to say about the kinds of critical thinking games can generate. Now how can I build a curriculum from these blocks, and present that curriculum in a coherent form to students so that they can meta-think? The following list serves as a potentially feeble attempt at incorporating some of both Gee’s and Robison’s principles.

Frame the curriculum as a game: I think, to start, students have to know the curriculum is being modeled *as* a game. That way, they’ll (hopefully) clue in to its rules, observe the potential for measured achievement, and seek to understand the relationships within this particular kind of semiotic domain. Hey! They can think of the semester as “getting out of the dungeon”! Players tend to see their characters/avatars as measurements of in-game achievement. The course’s final product should do the same—it should be an assignment that *requires* multiple, easily identifiable phases and steps to complete (sort of like gaining levels or progressing onto a different stage in a video game).

Encourage Risk: Develop a writing curriculum that encourages risk-taking. Students should on some level be allowed to fail, and that failure needs to be understood before continuing on the project’s next phases. While this notion presents a potential scheduling nightmare, some leeway should be exercised in allowing students to complete the benchmarks leading up to larger tasks at their own paces.

Measured objectives: Assignments should logically increase in difficulty, and ultimately lead to more complex, better composed products. Provide students with a ladder to success—measurable objectives that lead to tangible gains. They can think of it as “gaining levels.” Okay, too nerdy, but the sentiment is the same. These objectives should lead to…

Tangible yields: Besides completing measured objectives, student projects should have a shelf-life beyond turning them in for credit, something more than vague promises of junior writing portfolio greatness. In the past, Dr. Delahoyde had his students work on encyclopedia articles, many of which were published. Perhaps Wikipedia itself would be a good public avenue for the display of student work.

Most games have an “ending”: Cue final credits montage—the ending of the course should have an overall goal, a final project that’s being worked toward. Students who complete the project and all steps in between “win.”

Party-time: Should students work as a group on projects, framing the venture as a “quest” in Dungeons & Dragons might lead to many a rolled-eye. However, the mechanic can be present without the nerdery (or with…just saying). If students take on their roles as a part of their identities, they become at least on some level invested in their individual representation and work. For instance, instructors can create “classes” (or roles) from which students can choose from, outlining what tasks are the responsibilities of each class. Should groups wish to modify these (officially), they’ll be required to engage with the discourse and requirements (the game mechanics) of the project in question.

Identity: The most compelling connection between RPGs and writing is authorial identity. Players focus on narratology, the process of writing her/his character, and the social telling of those tales. Truly, the journey is what counts in this case—otherwise, there’s nothing to tell. “We started and then we got to the dungeon” makes for a pretty pitiful story. In a way, developing student writing needs to be the same. They must be just as invested in the process leading up to the final product as the final product itself.

Naturally, this method isn’t without its dangers. Primarily, it relies to some extent on variable scheduling. Benchmarks must be evaluated by the instructor for students to continue; therefore, the instructor has potentially more reading to do. On the other hand, if those benchmarks are attended to, end-commentary on the larger paper assignments might be sufficient, effectively spreading out the grading workload. Really, only a test run would tell. But, sadly, such a test run cannot be conducted within the confines of a no-risk learning environment (aka, a game). That’s a rather nasty catch 22.

A Chat about Chat, on a Blog

Now it’s October, and I’ve gone mad. "I never thought I'd be on a blog, it's a big electronicky road." Therefore, I divide this blog post in twain.

The Shorts:
I liked our chat session when we were able to pursue individual threads of discussion while simultaneously watching other conversations. Interface issues aside, I disliked it when we tried to impose sterner order (though I understand the impetus). Such order seems to run counter to the conversational advantages that chat allows for.

The Longs:
I’d like to think of chat like how I think of funk music. There’s “the one”—the singular groove that holds all of the variation together. You can’t make the “the one” too tight, else there’s not much room for improvisation. But if you make “the one” too loose and ill-defined, the rhythm falls apart. Easier said than done—I’ve been in plenty of totally bombed jam sessions (and in bombed chat sessions). Though sometimes when one jams (uh oh—this metaphor is on a runaway train), an instrument change is in order. Those changes—which in online synchronus chat we could maybe assign to threads—can help facilitate group strengths. Too many guitar players? I’ll switch to drums. Though this way we’re not necessarily all talking about the same thing, we can still be in conversation with one another. The threads will start to weave in more logical (if at first subconscious) ways. But doesn’t that mean we’re just participating in isolated corners? No, not really. We can still see the chat feed. Having to only reply to a few people at a time makes it easier to look and see what’s going on in other conversations, not harder. The advantages to online synchronus chat are speed and volume—while not necessarily effective in their own right, a quite a lot can be said in very little space. When one angle of a conversation logically concludes (I use “logically” loosely), move on to another, and engage there in focused ways. Really, these are organized patterns of chaos.

For the past few years, I’ve been teaching a creative writing class for Cougar Quest—A summer program where students enroll in college-like courses and stay in the residence halls—and we employ the use of chat technology called a MUSH (which stands for multi-user simulated hallucination…yeah, it was developed during the ‘70s). When teaching this course and using the MUSH (an online chat environment set in a text-world replete with objects and non-player characters), I admit to feeling similarly frustrated. Though our technology was more reliable (amazing that 30-year old chat tech is better than ANGEL with more functions, but I digress), middle and high school students are more difficult to herd than cats. It’s impossible even with two instructors actually, especially when they’re armed with chat technology. Eventually, my co-instructor (Jim Roach, a former art and religious studies major here at WSU) and I figured that we couldn’t *make* our students stay on task. At the time, we were working on adding dialogue to one of many events in J.R.R. Tolkien’s *The Simarillion*. The only way for us to get students to stay on task was to add our own compelling text, hoping that students would respond. Normally these came in the form of environmental variables, though we did write for our own characters. In general, many students would respond to our writing, but others (who were very often working on decent storylines of their own) would ignore us until they were finished. Some ignored us altogether. When we posted these “world events”, it wasn’t to halt action and entirely shift gears, but rather to provide more creative fodder. In later years, Jim and I would start off by separating students into smaller chat communities, eventually introducing them to the larger group for the grand finale. Even still, students who tried to read absolutely everything became overwhelmed. I told them frequently not to sweat it, to just continue on as best as they could. After all, the conversation was being logged, and they could all go back and revise plot elements and other story details as they wished. Several students have sent me their revisions over the years, which invariably look quite different from the original texts.

I won’t go so far as to say that our method “worked.” We’d really have to ask ourselves, “to what end?” first. Though I do hold a short lecture on the context of Tolkien’s work and spout some VERY basic tenants of creative writing, for the rest we ride by the seat of our pants. And it’s pretty normal for some days to bomb terribly; at least it seems that way. Effectively participating in an online chat environment (as with any other) takes regular practice. I’d say that I’m a pretty experienced with such communication technologies, and I felt pretty out of countenance this morning at first, even after I resolved my tech-troubles. I was only really able to engage after I latched onto a point and then tried to ride out the conversation. I’m not sure if we can or should see these types of rapid fire discussions as completely linear. As I said before online, we have to use the right tools for the right jobs. Neither synchronus chat nor asynchronus discussion should be seen as a replacement for face-to-face interaction, but they can be advantageous and useful in their own rights.

Keeping Students at Distance

Though her article is by now dated, Patricia Webb Peterson is (was) right to point out the necessity of carefully considering distance learning’s impact on education. Not only must institutions consider the needs of students who can’t (for a multiplicity of reasons) live on or near campus, but how to bend under mounting budgetary pressures which seem to call for increased digitizing of classroom environments.

With the following goofy images, I’ll attempt to answer some of her key questions. If not answer, then at least consider.

Part 1: Teacher’s Roles in the Online Classroom



Without the traditional space of a classroom, online teachers won’t necessarily serve as lecturers. While they may indeed record presentations and distribute them widely between sections, students are unable to react with them in real-time, asking questions as they arise or requesting the speaker to expand/clarify particular points. In a way, this aspect of the online class environment is read-only. Peterson points out that critics fear what she terms as “unbundling”: “This process of unbundling means that the faculty member who writes the course is not the one who will teach the course; hence, the student and the content expert are further separated, not brought closer together by the technology” (374).

But aren’t we locked into certain content somewhere along the way, online or off? Shakespeare will still be taught in Shakespeare courses, and instructors’ perspective will still manifest, just in different ways. The same applies for other courses across the curriculum. Though students won’t always have real-time access to instructors, they *can* interact in discussion and real-time chat environments. In this manner, the instructor becomes more of a facilitator, helping to connect students with their resources, learning materials, and engagements with assignments. Ultimately, students are responsible for engaging themselves in the learning process, inside of the classroom or out. Instructors have always been facilitators (in most contexts), but distance learning changes the aspect of that facilitation.

Part 2: Educational Goals



Peterson points out that proponents of distance learning often consider ‘lifelong learning’ as being positively facilitated by the apparently increased access to educational venues (377). Furthermore, this apparently increased access will explode diversity levels in the classroom. Their opponents, however, worry about who gets to decide what education means (378). Primarily, they fear for-profit entities having control over the educational medium—manufacturers will come to dictate the structure of education based on how well they sell their products to learning institutions. Furthermore, as Peterson articulates, “Critics claim that this large-scale delivery of courses strips the learning experience of any social and cultural effects that traditional face-to-face learning offers. Worse, we are still contending with the digital divide, which potentially seriously blunts this hoped-for diversity.

However, again, aren’t all institutions corporately bound in some respect or another? If we assign books in the classroom, somebody buys them. Campus facilities are built by contractors, and other resources are purchased from a multitude of sources, some of which enjoy some rather exclusive privileges (AHEM—the Bookie—COUGH). And, depending on the computer-savvy of the instructor in question, can’t we get around going through ALL of the normal channels? There are ways around ANGEL, we just have to utilize them. In terms of access, surely not everyone can afford a computer, but owning a computer and knowing how to use it might be a shorter economic leap than having to uproot and move to campus (where one will probably need a computer at some point anyway).

Part 3: Student Learning



So, how do we evaluate if distance learning works, if students are able to digest the material? Well, how do we go about evaluating if in-class learning works? Granted, the venues are different, but aren’t the goals equivalent? No cookie-cutter solution will work for any educational environment much less one online, but institutional student retention reports focusing solely on distance learning might give us a better idea of where the numbers are going. Exit discussions (surveys, counseling, etc.) could provide insight into student’s motivations for staying or leaving. Peterson mentions stronger inclusion of student feedback (382). I hear, though won’t/can’t confirm here, that more distance students drop out of class than on-campus students. Undoubtedly, students who seek out distance learning opportunities have salient reasons for doing so, and sometimes those reasons may peel them away from class obligations.

We shouldn’t always assume that students who drop out aren’t “getting” the material. There could be a number of other factors. While some of those factors aren’t within an institution’s range of control, others are. For instance, how do we factor in technology problems to overall learning problems associated solely with course-content? Does the interface interfere?

It could.