I spent most of the week reading the core texts – Usher and Bayne – as well as some of the secondary readings. This is reflected in my Tumblr listings in the lifestream. I also spent more time this week reading and sometimes commenting on fellow students’ blogs. I have found this process very illuminating and helpful in clarifying my own thoughts. There are no blog posts from me this week – partly because of a technical fault in my WordPress editor – where I have lost all the tools in the visual field and also cannot see what I am writing. I finally got round this today when I wrote a post up in Word and pasted it into WordPress but it still required fiddling to get italics and paragraphs in. I hope we can resolve it this week.
I think this week’s readings made it a lot clearer on how digital culture (and the way we have been working) impacts on pedagogy. Now just to find a final assignment topic!
Interesting bits and pieces I picked up this week were a BBC report on What happened to Second Life? and a blog report that Wikipedia is losing its editors – hailing the end of free user-generated content. The BBC report cites that Second Life is not the great marketing tool that corporate businesses that it would be – with many pulling out. They mention the sharp learning curve needed to learn how to operate in Second Life and to build things. However, Linden Labs claim that the number of new users are growing but the real challenge will be getting a mobile presence, given the amount of memory needed to run SL. However, IBM still are enthusiastic about SL.
The report on Wikipedia states that Wikipedia is still very popular for readers but it is losing its editors. The report ends:
But if users are generally tired of contributing to a site without receiving any compensation, that is a big problem. Similar endeavors, like Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, pays contributors according to the popularity of their entries. In a world where individuals increasingly have outlets to share their opinions, whether it be on blogs, Twitter or personal websites, a business model that depends on free content that does not promote or pay its editors is likely to change if it wants to continue growing.
I think the significance of both these reports is that they may be signalling a change in digital culture – a disillusionment of sites such as Second Life as being a marketing and business opportunity for big business and the beginning of the end (maybe) of the utopian idea of free user-generated content. I don’t know.
This week I also purchased an iphone. So another tool for my cyberself!
