So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

There has been a lot said about this course throughout the semester and a lot that could still be said. Wow. This is sounding like a eulogy.  Anyway, because I’m not sure where to start I’m going to work through the list of talking points and address them in this here post. This is also an attempt to reduce rambling (I make no promises! I did create a 20 minute long reflection video without realising at the start of semester). So here goes:

Hmm week one… Well we didn’t have class that week so I probably didn’t think about or expect to much from this class. Not a helpful comment sure but I’m making a point: I waltzed into this course (as in the entire masters) after enrolling two weeks before semester started. I hadn’t read any course outlines, I wasn’t familiar with the language and therefor had very little expectations. The little I gleaned from each of my courses before attending was from the names. So with ’emerging tech’ I thought it would be the subject I would struggle most with both in terms of relating to it and how well I could do academically. Turns out I was wrong on both counts. I found this course interesting and engaging and the content well within my grasp… as long as I was keeping up with the workshops and checking both the external site and the google plus community. So I had few difficulties with the content but (as will the whole course) have struggled with the amount and extent of the online engagement. I’m not someone who likes to engage everyday. I don’t always pick up my phone just before sleep and just as I wake up and scroll though Facebook (which by the way are some of the highest site traffic times for social media and news sites). So not having that engagement as part of my day to day habit I ended up missing things or forgetting to check in on the community or spending all of my allowed study time catching up on the various sites we have been asked to participate in. When I was finally engaging to the appropriate level, I found it hard to maintain and exhausting; like a 13 week dinner party. This isn’t a complaint I’m registering with the course, merely something that I found difficult to adjust to. I know that in emerging tech the guidelines say the minimum posting is twice a fortnight which is by no means onerous but I still felt the pressure. I wasn’t all bad. I found that when I was engaging with the google+ community regularly I really enjoyed it and the learning experience was valuable.

I was stimulated and learned something from every weeks topic. In openness I learned about open education and even more about creative commons and copyright. I learned that not everyone is as enthusiastic about open access information and knowledge as I am. Not what I expected. Some people don’t like the idea! SHOCK! HORROR! I found the various perspectives in class both challenging and enlightening. It was a great syncronicitous week because we were talking about what makes information quality in another class and the perspectives I heard became even more varied. It surprised me to learn that people were as vehemently sure that knowledge of a certain type has more value and to keep it that way it needs a price point as I was in the opposite direction. All knowledge has value, it just depends on the context.

Gamification was both the most interesting and the most challenging topic. I found the activity stimulating and people’s fierce competitiveness and anxieties about getting it right fascinating; partly because I was unfamiliar with it. Learning about serious games gave me hope and fear in equal measure. Hope because gamification signifies people dedicating thought and passion to a cause. Fear because the serious games we talked about had no depth. Hunger is not solved by rice or even money. Serious social issues that need solving do not have simple solutions, they are deep and complex and often have ramifications and connections that reach into many strata of society.  People’s competitiveness surprised me: I had no interested in accumulating points bar the need to qualify for playing (why I’ll never play organised sports) but my classmates were fierce! Especially when the story came along and there was a possibility of another persons ‘wrong’ activity would affect their points. The gamification activity was challenging as well because if I wasn’t involved in the community constantly I got fear-of-missing-out anxiety. I didn’t even really make a conscious choice about playing. I checked in as the story was getting started and wanted to be play. I hadn’t even read that weeks blog posts yet.

I really enjoyed this unit, the varied means of assessment, the class interaction, the content, which had surprising connection with social justice, and even the technology. It was way outside my comfort zone but I like that about studying. I would never have come across any of the technologies we used or discussed without this course and its forced me to look at my limitations especially considering my newly chosen career path.

This unit has made me realise how easy it is to pigeon-hole oneself and as a result stunt learning. I have alway thought of myself as competent on the internet in its various 2.0-ness but any further into the realm of technology I was out of my depth. I think this is limiting. I did the same thing with the entire course. I told myself that the IT stuff was out of my depth but the library stuff would be fine. It demonstrates to me a total ignorance, on my part, of the modern world of libraries and information sciences. There isn’t really a distinction between the disciplines: not a straight line down the middle anyway. So I learned to keep an open mind and be prepared… and read the course outlines before week one.

The Gamification Analysation

**** Before we talk about gamification I’m going to display my badges from playing, all proud like!!

Ok so here are the positions on gamification we have been asked to argue for or against.

Gamification presents the best tools humanity has ever invented to create and sustain engagement in people. […] It’s a proven approach using breakthroughs in design and technology to vastly improve the world as we know it…”
– Gabe Zichermann,The Gamification Revolution (2012, p. xvii)

“Gamification is bulls**t.”
– Ian Bogost, game designer and professor at Georgia Tech

But here’s the thing: I’m a fence sitter, I don’t feel like either of these statements are unequivocal. In saying that I feel like they both have merit.

The examples we learned about in class give merit to the quote from Zicherman. Much scientific evidence points toward heighten levels of brain activity and endorphins when people are playing games. And learning through games has worked for children who may not be receptive to more traditional techniques. So called serious games have been used to look at issues such as global poverty, the plight of refugees and asylum seekers and the issues surrounding ethical food production. the gamification of issues such as these raise awareness, engage people who wouldn’t usually be engaged and perhaps solve problems along the way.

This is all very interesting and exciting but also smacks of a kind of ‘fix all’ miracle solution. Of course your brain produces endorphins when you’re playing games… you’re playing games! They’re fun! That is the very definition of games. We have long known that children who play are happier and have greater creative skills. I feels as thought the electronic games era is a double edged sword. I know that learning apps and games can help kids who may other ways fall through the classroom gaps in our education system. I also know that gaming is addictive and can have adverse physical health affects. There is a balance required that is hard to find in an environment where parents are more stressed and pushed for time than ever. I hate to sound like a total technophobe but one of my most rewarding experiences as a child was being outdoors, going for bush walks and holidays in the rainforest. I was and am a book worm so many of those occasions were forced on me, the last thing I wanted was to go outside sometimes, especially if I had a good book on the go. I remember vividly being on a family holiday and we were driving through the Daintree rainforest but my Mum was pissed off because I wouldn’t look up from reading the second harry potter book which I had just bought in Cairns. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I had a great holiday and I even looked up from my book.

My point is everything in moderation, don’t tout the miracles of gamification without a holistic critical analysis of the phenomenon.

In saying this Gamification isn’t bulshit. I could write a whole treatise in rapture of Ian Bogost’s blog. It’s brilliant; bullshit in the philosophical sense? just wonderful. I think its wonderful how he’s getting us to think, to apply moderation and ask the question: What motivation? Even the word ‘gamification’ hits high on my bullshit’o’metre (as do most made up words ending ‘tion’) and like Bogost says its a buzzword and buzzwords are great folder for advertisers and promoters.

None of this means the idea of games (virtual and otherwise) that assist learning and brain development, help save the world and are, well lets just say it, FUN are bullshit only that (like I say above in respect to the other statement) society needs to analyse any phenomenon with care.

Till next time class,

L

Privacy is a right!

Welcome all to my reflect on privacy for week 9.

I am, unsurprisingly for those who know me, a contradiction in regards to the issue of privacy. I am, simply, a true believe that people have a right to privacy. For myself, however, I am unconcerned.

Okay so lets break that down a little because it is rather unusual for someone to take a stance on something they don’t feel personally effected or connected to. I feel, as citizens belonging to one country or another (or if your really unlucky not belonging to anyone), that people deserve to have the thing they had rather not share left that way. Broken into privacy leads to the gathering of snapshots and you loose the whole picture. In other words there is not context when information is taken from someone without their consent. Without context meaning is misconstrued and ‘people’ end up in indefinite custody without a warrant or rights. I don’t believe people can be so naive to say that ‘well if you’ve got nothing to hide…’. To misquote an oft used saying ‘information is power’ and those who want your information are not to be trusted with that power without strict accountability and oversight.

In my play activity this week I talked about being surprised there wasn’t more information on me. Either that or it’s not easily searchable. I shouldn’t really be that surprised, the Internet isn’t psychic. I have not put anything online that I would care if the world knew, except my bank details and even then there isn’t much there so I’m not really worried. I am not concerned about my personal privacy, in some ways I am a private person but those are the parts of me that don’t go online. My image is not private and is online in a variety of places (and states of undress) but I have the medium and legitimacy of being a life model which guards me against feeling exposed by this.

The discussion surrounding the data retention laws just passed by the senate is an interesting tension. Much of the conversation I encounter against data retention centres on trust. Do we trust the legislative bodies of this country not to exploit this power and to hold this collected data safe against anyone who would take it? There is much argument among interested parties about what constraints where added or not added to these laws. Having not read the legislation I could not say definitively that the warrant process for obtaining data on whomever ASIO of the AFP deem untrustworthy is rigorous. The fact remains: I do not trust the current government to draft legislation or ASIO to enact said legislation that is strong enough to withstand the sort politicised fear mongering and talk-yourself-into-it style of corruption that these sort of laws are so susceptible to.

I have deliberately avoided talking about the elephant in the room: Terrorism. Nor am interested in getting into that discussion. I realise that this is the motivation for the new laws, national security seems to be the only thing this government ever seems to win on (and even then I’m not sure the public are buying it mush anymore). I do know this though, data retention would not have stopped the Martin Place hostage situation from happening. It may or may not stop young muslims from joining ISIS, it is hard to say. I do know that unfair targeting based on race or religion will make these same young people more likely to go to place where they feel less marginalised and more powerful. And unfair targeting is just what these laws have the potential for.

Signing off,

L

(sorry if its a bit rough, I got excited and it’s too late in the day for a decent edit)

You might know my name Google but do you really know me?

So I started by googling myself…

  

Mostly it bought up the things I expected, majority of these accounts I’ve made since I’ve joined this course.
Then there were less obvious hits…

After this I tried the other search engines Kathleen suggested and they came up with very little that was interesting. My abn and the fact that used to live in westend and that’s about it. Pipl was totally wrong, that hadn’t just found someone with the same name but my detail were actually mixed in with another persons, I’m not sure how else they could have come up with this.

Clicking on my Facebook link doesn’t give you anymore info than a couple of ‘likes’ and my profile picture.

I’ve no criminal record so that found nothing and my phone number turned out zilch too.

To be honest I’m surprised there wasn’t more information on me. I’m not that important or that interesting but I’ve been nude on national television! Several times! I figured that would be something Google would know. I’m sure if I were a professional at knowing other people’s business or even a journalist for the Daily Telegraph I would probably be able to find all the things I’m not trying to hide on the Internet.

This was my play, stay tuned for my reflect.

Signing off,

L

Does Creative Commons help the chaos that it is attribution on FB?

Naive but wonderful quote

As the tittle of the blog suggests I’m going to talk about what role Creative Commons plays in attributing content that people share on social media. For this week’s play I decided to embark on my own adventure and conduct an online survey (a.k.a I asked people on Facebook a question) about whether people attributed the creator when they shared content on Facebook and what they thought Creative Commons’ role was in protecting the intellectual property being shared in social media. I’m going to conduct this conversation through screenshots I took of the online conversation, partly out of lazyness, partly out as an experiment in attribution for myself. I asked the people who contributed to the discussion if they minded their thoughts and names being used in my play activity. Not many of them replied. Unsure of how to handle this in the blog I took one persons request to have only their first name mentioned and applied it to all of those who comments I used in the activity. All those who are members of this course anyway. I also posed this question on my personal FB wall and my parents and a friend responded. Not quiet the deluge of animated conversation I’d hoped for but I appreciated their comments. I’m leaving my parents photos and names intact in the screenshots because I know they couldn’t care less and the friend who responded doesn’t have her last name on FB or a picture of herself.

It seemed that the majority of people attribute the source of the content they share and would feel uneasy if they didn’t:

       

And not always for the reason you think. My Dad is rather a modest man.

There was a discussion about how artist feel about indiscriminate sharing on social media.

People seem to feel as though the creator looses out in social media environment but everyone I know is saying they acknowledge the creator. So who are the people not attributing the creator? Is this there even a problem? It may seem the height of hubris to question this after only asking a select group of people but it important not witch hunt with out really evaluating a situation but also not to be too quick to apply blanket moral judgements in a social media context where values and norms can be wildly different for some than the physical world (I’ll unpack my personal feelings on this a little more when I reflect).

Katherine obliged me by mentioning Creative Commons – a concept I was dying to discuss.

I would add to Katherine’s words that CC is a useful tool for those who are already respectful of the source. I doesn’t seem that it would encourage people who do not attribute information online.

According to an article in Slate magazine one of the biggest offenders are the historical pictures themed twitter accounts -apparently there is a few of them and they are wildly popular. According to Rebecca Onion, author of the article, these accounts often don’t attribute the source, often mis-name the subjects or wrongly  date the photo and don’t add any link or information that might help a person find out more.

    Screenshot an Article by Rebecca Onion published in Slate Magazine featuring a quote by Sarah Werner.

Article by Rebecca Onion published by Slate Magazine featuring a quote by John Overholt 

I include these points made by people vastly more intelligent than me not only to reassure my readers that I do think respect for the creator of information in the form of attribution of a source if important but I think accurate attribution is more than just respect for the author. Like Werner and Overholt say in the above shots naming the source gives information a context for that piece of information which, beyond giving that information depth, is vital for our mental filing systems. It enables us to put that information in the appropriate place. I say this because part of conversation we had in class involved someone expressing the idea that open education is watering down ‘proper’ knowledge. I would argue that there is no such thing. Thant knowledge and information are neither good, bad or ‘proper’ merely different. Context gives us place to put knowledge and helps us understand where it fits amongst everything else.

I’m going to reflect a little now (not to worry I’ll keep it brief considering the above marathon)…

I decided to conduct my ‘play’ activity in this fashion because I love the concept of Creative Commons and wanted an opportunity to talk about it. I first heard of CC when I was studying in Brasil and we watched a documentary in class whose basic premise is that all creativity is recycled. I fell for this idea partly because I’ve always felt that and anything that tries to be original for the sake of label originality has no depth and partly because I was born on a commune and have a tendency to romanticise  the idea of sharing (hence the opening picture). CC seems to me like the only thing that comes close to addressing the problem of art vs the internet. It is certainly not going to be solved by shutting down pirate bay and suing users. What good does that do an artist? Do they get the money? NO. I know I come across like a idealist but there is something in the idea of giving (with acknowledgement) away something creative to enrich the world and it not being about the money. I do understand that we would have to live in a very different world with very different values for this to be possible.

Moving on to Facebook and attribution of source. Its not at all simple and we can’t just apply an academic lens (or a copyright law lens) and say ‘this is bad, whats happening here on FB’. Look at this (insert appropriate expletive here) ahem person:

David Avocado Wolfe

He (whoever he is) posts these brain-grindingly-generic memes half of them, I am sure, have quotes stolen from other people or maybe he made them up but WHO CARES! He has made the words meaningless by his own context. Surely this is something our mental filing system can put in the ‘vapid crap you read online’ box and burn it.

Of course a valid counter argument to the above rant is that if he is appropriating other peoples words then this is a problem because he takes their intellectual property and ruins it but its late and I’ll let someone else have a go at that one.

I’ll leave you with this food for thought: What do you think of the way I attributed the people who helped me with my FB ‘survey’. Academically it is very inadequate but I was trying to protect their privacy. Also do my readers feel there is anything problematic with the way I reference the State article? Are screenshots of someone else’s work problematic? I’d love to know your opinion.

Signing off,

L

Week 4/5 Play and Reflect – How to unfuck the planet.

Hi Everyone,

Here is how this is going to work. I’ll introduce and explain the app I had a play with and then I’m going to embed my reflect video down the bottom. Also the tittle  of the blog is in ref to this Facebook page, not just me being rude.

So I had a look at apps that track co2 output. The one I found that was really comprehensive and seemed like it would be really intelligent and user friendly was Oroeco and you can watch a little clip they made here. I read an interview with the creator and felt really affiliated with his views and his reasoning behind the creation of the app. I explain that more in my vlog. However this app has not been released in Australia. Yay for us… not. So instead I had a look at CO2 Fit.

(in the interest of full disclosure I only really used over 2 days and it need a little more of in depth look and play)

CO2 Fit track the output of each journey you make, awards you points for the green ones (bike, walk, public transport) and offers you the chance to offset the dirty journeys (car, plane).

 On the left is the home page. You select the method of transport your are about to embark upon and it will take you to the next screen where you press go and it begins recording your output depending on the method transport. You cannot record output retroactively, you have to remember to press go when you leave… a bit of a draw back for me.

 This is the screen from after completing my car journey from here it takes you too a screen offering you to buy carbon offset for these journeys with Recoins you earn when you are traveling carbon free or on minimum outputs.

You could view your activities (below left), see your ranking compared to overall users and compare your out put to the total community output (below right)

There are a few reasons I found this app a lacking complexity and I detail those reasons in my reflection but it is on the whole very user friendly and it does look great… whatever my scepticism about the role of pricing carbon in the fight against climate change.

Below is my reflection vlog. I mentioned last time that I was going to try something a little different from my last raw unrehearsed rough and ready video. The plan was to do something more professional: more thought out setting, hair and make up, written and rehearsed speech etc. It didn’t quite work out like that. I wrote out my reflection so there is less rambling but the rest didn’t happen. I mean I had a shower but thats about it. Let me know  what you think and I’ll try to build the concept by levels… as I go.

p.s The app I talk about wanting to create in the vlog has an function where you can program in how many emissions you allow yourself to use each week and if you get to your limit you are no longer allowed to drive… Self imposed but a better behavioural tool then just buying your way out of your emissions guilt.

Reflections: Vid attempt… several of them

So I have been recording my reflections today. I’ll not spoil here, follow the links and you’ll find out about my adventures. My decision to try vlogging was about setting myself a new media challenge. Turns out the biggest challenge was to stop talking. I have made a long video (20 mins) and then attempted a shorter one (7 mins) for those of you who don’t have time to sit and listen to me yammer on for 20 minutes. N.B. There is going to be an imbedded hyperlink for the 20min video tomorrow for anyone interested in viewing. It took hours to upload, which I didn’t  factor in and I want to go to sleep.

Recording my thoughts was interesting and as I mention in the video it was partly an experiment in raw and uncensored. I have made a lot of notes over the last couple of weeks regarding my reflections and I used these to philosophise on but apart from that did little preparation in regards to the physical setting. Next post I think I will try something different.

Finally, I don’t have a common name but check out this movie thats coming out! My doppelganger??

Cheers

L

In The Beginning…

Hello World! (sorry couldn’t help mimicking the supercilious greeting adopted  by wordpress)

This is just an intro. I’m not going to tell you anything about myself that would be doubling up on information. Once I work out how to put a post into the ‘About’ page I’ll do a little bio.

As most of the readers here will know this blog will contain the reflections of my time studying the subject ‘Emerging technologies’ for a masters of Information Science and Library studies but I’m not planning to make this private so anyone may stumble upon it. This may morph into the platform for my e-portfolio but I have no specific plans and will build as I go.

This is not the first blog I have run or written for. I set up a blog for my university’s student-run zine FREE and a travel blog when I went on a exchange to Rio de Janeiro and then my subsequent adventures in America (because they are so close! not) called goingoingtorio. Neither have had any activity in years but your welcome to go and have a look… especially if your planning a trip to Brasil. These have been a means-to-an-end content driven experiments. The FREE voice blog was a boost and a compliment to our monthly publication but we didn’t really use it well, partly because my inability to keep maintaining it. I feel like this blog has a purpose beyond its content and look forward to building it with that idea in mind.

I will be reflecting in both written and video format. I decided to conduct my first reflection as a video and had planed to do a sort of raw-just-go-for-it-no-edit kind of thing and ended up talking for 20 mins. I’m going to post it because this is as much about the process as the content. Don’t worry though I’m about to re-shoot (with a timer on) and cover try to cover the most important points.

Cheers

L