This class has been great all semester and the one class I feel I have actually learned new content. I feel like today’s class was so engaging and because it allowed so much “participation” among all of us as we synthesized the whole semester.
I have always felt like I was a computer and internet wizard but this class has completely opened my eyes to all the complex and niche areas of the world wide web that I honestly did not know about. One of the key things I will take away from this class is the realization that “Wikipedia is not a bad source”. As students, we hear so many times to not use Wikipedia as a source in academic papers; that it is unreliable. However, from this class I’ve been exposed to the concept of collective intelligence and that is basically the whole essence of Wikipedia. All of us cannot be experts on all the topics and concepts in the world, yet if there are a few individuals who know different and specific information on one topic then they collaborate and collect all that information to create full range of content on that topic. Wikipedia has allowed for those individuals to share that knowledge with the world that others may not have ever known.
The second element that I will take away from this class is the actual participation in participatory culture. The Internet is this realm where we have the ability to place whatever we like or create out there for the entire world to see. Once we place that content on the web we want others to like it with us and we are full aware whether they do or do not. This realm is place where people can freely express their opinions through comments, “likes’, retweets, mentions, ratings, ect. without exposing their face. As the producer or consumer of the content we tend to react based on those opinions. I have mentioned it before but my experience came from the Wikipedia and our Media 2.0 projects on the graduate end. I was proud of the content I created for the Wikipedia project and wanted others to see what I had produced; yet in the end my article barely has any of my original work. (oh well, learning through participation, right?) I have created a YouTube page for my Media 2.0 project but it still has low number of views, due to others not being interested or lack of exposure. But of course people on YouTube probably don’t want to see some amateur documentary on her dream job and would rather watch some cheerleader freak-out as she won some competition. I just don’t get it.
I’ve enjoyed this class and look forward to taking Communications in the Internet next semester.
I think it is interesting that you, like many of us, think you are a computer wizard, but realize there are so many worlds left to explore. You may be a master at the sites you regularly participate in, yet completely clueless in another realm.
ReplyDeleteI always think of the xkcd image of the map of online communities.
http://xkcd.com/802/