Selfe and Cooper are referring to students in a tech/comm class, so students who are presumably older than my 17 and 18 year old freshmen. That my students are younger and most are ingrained in MySpace culture long before they came to WSU. They have already developed a strong online identity and community, and they mostly live with their peers.
S&C claim that in part due to the use of pseudonyms, and in part due to the fact that "information about gender, age, and social status disappear unless individuals choose to reveal themselves" (852), students in a computer conference can rach a more egalitarian state. What they forget here is that even though others cannot know these things about a person, still, even when behind a computer screen, the individual enacts the roles they've played due to their privileges or lack thereof. But I agree that the fact that anyone can write as much or little as they want without being seen and certainly without being interrupted helps to mitigate the traditional difficulties of power within a classroom. And, the teacher can largely step out of an authoritative role.
Back to the race and gender thing, one huge point of MySpace, conscious or no, is self-exposure. People can display their voice, interests, bodies, and overall identity through a series of rhetorical choices. So, again, w/MySpace, identity politics do not disappear.
"Resisting through discourse means that individuals challenge and attempt to change there predetermined roles to produce alternate roles, or subjectivities, for themselves." (851). "Creating these alternate subjectivities allows students to become active in their own learning process, to become active in their own learning process, to become speakers in a dynamic context rather than being the subjects of a predetermined discourse" (851).
_________________________________________
danah boyd
"Why Youth <3 style="font-style: italic;">MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume (ed. David Buckingham).
"Interestingly, I have found that race and social class play little role in terms of access beyond the aforementioned disenfranchised population ["those without Internet access, those whose parents succeed in banning them from participation, and online teens who primarily access the Internet through school and other public venues where social network sites are banned"]. Poor urban black teens seem just as likely to join the site as white teens from wealthier backgrounds- although what they do there has much to do with their level of Internet access" (1).
"Many began participating because of the available social voyeurism and the opportunity to craft a personal representation in an increasingly popular online community. Just like their older counterparts, teenagers loved the ability to visualize their social world through the networked collection of profiles." (2)
~~~This is how it happens: visualizing social communities, why not visualize the academic community and make it social???
"The practices that take place through the use of the most relevant three--profiles, friends and comments--differentiate social network sites from other types of computer-mediated communication. Furthermore, what makes these three practices significant for consideration is that they take place in public: Friends are publicly articulated, profiles are publicly viewed, and comments are publicly visible" (7).
"A MySpace profile can be seen as a form of digital body where individuals write themselves into being. Through profiles, teens can express salient aspects of their identity for others to see and interpret. They construct these profiles for their friends and peers to view" (13).
What boyd would next attend to here, were she in the field of rhetoric, would be a question of how students use written and visual language to construct that identity, and how uses of language in identity construction vary from comments to blogs to description sections. In MySpace, the space is theirs to use language as they will, construct audience and resonds to the needs of that audience as they deem appropriate.
___________________________________________________
CCCC. "Students' Right to Their Own Language." CCC Special Issue, Fall, 1974, Vol XXV.
"We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language--the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they ind their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity."
"If we name the essential functions of language as expressing oneself, communicating information and attiudes, and discovering meaning through both logic and metaphor, then we view variety of dialects as an advantage. In self-expression, not only one's dialect but one's idiolect is basic. In communication, one may choose roles which imply certain dialects, but the decision is a social one, for the dialect itself does not limit the information which can be carried, and the attitudes may be most clearly conveyed in the dialect the writer finds most congenial. Dialects are all equally serviceable in logic and metaphor" (11).
_______________________________
James Paul Gee. Situated Language and Learning.
In an analysis of how of the video game "Rise of Nations," reveals its assumptions about th learning process of its users, Gee compiles a list of 25 learning principles that could relate to other learning environments as well. Among them are several that connect to what I have assessed as the benefits of writing work on MySpace:
1. They create motivation for extended engagement.
6. They build in choice from the beginning.
8. "Basic skills" means what you need to learn in order to start taking more control over your own learning and learn by playing.
9. "Experienced" doesn't need to mean "expert," it can mean that one is well prepared for future learning.
13. They offer supervised (i.e. guided) sandbox tutorials (safe versions of the real system).
15. They give information "just in time" and on demand.
16. Learning should be a collaborative dance between the teacher's guidance and the learner's actions and interpretations.
17. They let learners create their own unsupervised sandboxes (i.e. let them be able to customize what you are offering).
22. They allow learners to practice enough so that they routinize their skills and then challenge them with new problems that force them to rethink these taken-for-granted skills and integrate them with new ones.
25. They ensure that leaners have and use an affinity space wherein they can interact with peers and masters, near and far, around a shared interest (even passion), making use of distributed and dispersed knowledge.
These learning principles apply to MySpace as a site for writing instruction just as well as to video games and the general education that Gee mentions.
S&C claim that in part due to the use of pseudonyms, and in part due to the fact that "information about gender, age, and social status disappear unless individuals choose to reveal themselves" (852), students in a computer conference can rach a more egalitarian state. What they forget here is that even though others cannot know these things about a person, still, even when behind a computer screen, the individual enacts the roles they've played due to their privileges or lack thereof. But I agree that the fact that anyone can write as much or little as they want without being seen and certainly without being interrupted helps to mitigate the traditional difficulties of power within a classroom. And, the teacher can largely step out of an authoritative role.
Back to the race and gender thing, one huge point of MySpace, conscious or no, is self-exposure. People can display their voice, interests, bodies, and overall identity through a series of rhetorical choices. So, again, w/MySpace, identity politics do not disappear.
"Resisting through discourse means that individuals challenge and attempt to change there predetermined roles to produce alternate roles, or subjectivities, for themselves." (851). "Creating these alternate subjectivities allows students to become active in their own learning process, to become active in their own learning process, to become speakers in a dynamic context rather than being the subjects of a predetermined discourse" (851).
_________________________________________
danah boyd
"Why Youth <3 style="font-style: italic;">MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume (ed. David Buckingham).
"Interestingly, I have found that race and social class play little role in terms of access beyond the aforementioned disenfranchised population ["those without Internet access, those whose parents succeed in banning them from participation, and online teens who primarily access the Internet through school and other public venues where social network sites are banned"]. Poor urban black teens seem just as likely to join the site as white teens from wealthier backgrounds- although what they do there has much to do with their level of Internet access" (1).
"Many began participating because of the available social voyeurism and the opportunity to craft a personal representation in an increasingly popular online community. Just like their older counterparts, teenagers loved the ability to visualize their social world through the networked collection of profiles." (2)
~~~This is how it happens: visualizing social communities, why not visualize the academic community and make it social???
"The practices that take place through the use of the most relevant three--profiles, friends and comments--differentiate social network sites from other types of computer-mediated communication. Furthermore, what makes these three practices significant for consideration is that they take place in public: Friends are publicly articulated, profiles are publicly viewed, and comments are publicly visible" (7).
"A MySpace profile can be seen as a form of digital body where individuals write themselves into being. Through profiles, teens can express salient aspects of their identity for others to see and interpret. They construct these profiles for their friends and peers to view" (13).
What boyd would next attend to here, were she in the field of rhetoric, would be a question of how students use written and visual language to construct that identity, and how uses of language in identity construction vary from comments to blogs to description sections. In MySpace, the space is theirs to use language as they will, construct audience and resonds to the needs of that audience as they deem appropriate.
___________________________________________________
CCCC. "Students' Right to Their Own Language." CCC Special Issue, Fall, 1974, Vol XXV.
"We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language--the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they ind their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity."
"If we name the essential functions of language as expressing oneself, communicating information and attiudes, and discovering meaning through both logic and metaphor, then we view variety of dialects as an advantage. In self-expression, not only one's dialect but one's idiolect is basic. In communication, one may choose roles which imply certain dialects, but the decision is a social one, for the dialect itself does not limit the information which can be carried, and the attitudes may be most clearly conveyed in the dialect the writer finds most congenial. Dialects are all equally serviceable in logic and metaphor" (11).
_______________________________
James Paul Gee. Situated Language and Learning.
In an analysis of how of the video game "Rise of Nations," reveals its assumptions about th learning process of its users, Gee compiles a list of 25 learning principles that could relate to other learning environments as well. Among them are several that connect to what I have assessed as the benefits of writing work on MySpace:
1. They create motivation for extended engagement.
6. They build in choice from the beginning.
8. "Basic skills" means what you need to learn in order to start taking more control over your own learning and learn by playing.
9. "Experienced" doesn't need to mean "expert," it can mean that one is well prepared for future learning.
13. They offer supervised (i.e. guided) sandbox tutorials (safe versions of the real system).
15. They give information "just in time" and on demand.
16. Learning should be a collaborative dance between the teacher's guidance and the learner's actions and interpretations.
17. They let learners create their own unsupervised sandboxes (i.e. let them be able to customize what you are offering).
22. They allow learners to practice enough so that they routinize their skills and then challenge them with new problems that force them to rethink these taken-for-granted skills and integrate them with new ones.
25. They ensure that leaners have and use an affinity space wherein they can interact with peers and masters, near and far, around a shared interest (even passion), making use of distributed and dispersed knowledge.
These learning principles apply to MySpace as a site for writing instruction just as well as to video games and the general education that Gee mentions.
