Michael Wesch and Digital Ethnography

Michael Wesch is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and he is doing some innovative and significant work on the impact of digital media. Many people probably had their first exposure to him through the YouTube sensation The Machine is Us/ing Us that beautifully illustrates what Web 2.0 is and its implications. The last portion of the video poses that scenario that we need to rethink some things. Two particular aspects of change for this post are scholarly communication and pedagogy.

Social Networking in Education

The speaker, Andy Carvin, is the Senior social media person at NPR. He spoke at Computers in Libraries in 2006 and it will be interesting to see what is different.

Establishing what social media is

Interactive Web – well established. He says 1.0, non-interactive, is almost gone, especially in professional space.

Three types of Networks

• personas
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
• discusssions
  • Facebook Groups – I Heart NPR
• blogs
  • Facebook “news feeds”
  • Flickr
  • YouTube

Discusssions

He featured Facebook

There is already a group of users that may be creating a group about your organization.

NPR fans created one before NPR did.

Blogs

Facebook’s news feed is roughly a blog

Some people use social networks as their blog platform – www.digitaldivide.net/blog/acarvin

Explained RSS for those not familiar- allows for content to be disaggregated and sent all throughout the web. DDN subscribes to Andy’s blog.

Great history of Social Networks! They have been around, especially in education, since the 1970’s

Recent developments – Friendster (2002), MySpace(2003), Facebook(2004), Bebo(2005)

But – USENET has been around since the 1970’s as a text-only, topic-centered discussion board.  Teachers were using it to have discussions outside of class. (list names in the U’s)

Email Discussion Lists

Listserv is a software created in 1986 that automates email discussion. (Kleenex effect)

Good examples

TakingITGlobal

• students around the World that discuss global policy
• have a relationship with the UN

Tapped In

• text based platform like Second Life
• One professor created a space that was so well done that it was accepted for CEU’s

New Tools

• YouTube 101
• TeachJeffSpanish.com
• Facebook Apps
• Facebook Groups
• Twitter
• Ning
  • specific closed online networks

On his comfort level with the technologies based on his age:

“Between being digital native and an immigrant, I was born on the boat coming over”