“Max? I hope you know what you are doing”
Loading ...Hey. I need a little help. Let me explain.
So with great apprehension, Mushon has allowed me to alter our little blog outside of his controlled experiment. As you may notice to the right of every page, just below the tags, but above the authors and calendar, a chatbox, which looks something like this:
You may be thinking, “zOMG! not another required method of online communication for this class!!” but just give me a moment to try and explain my reasoning.
Last week, in my rather light-ideaed post, I asked a bunch of geeks why they still extensively used chat rooms , when there are tons of other newer, sexier, ways of communicating online. In case your forgot, their response were, in a nutshell,
- chat is instant
- anyone can understand how to use it
- its portable, so it can be put anywhere on the web
- what’s better than chat? nothing!
Now granted, these are complete power users, people who write programs for personal use, people who use computers to automate every last facet of their lives. However, I think there is some truth in “sticking with what works” kind of attitude.
So in attempting to go “meta” on ourselves, I decided to go meta on the entire class. If you think about the structure of the class, while our content is relatively self selected, our mode of presentation is quite structured. It is named, dated, rated, and discussed, and submitted on some semblence of a deadline, and never to be posted during class hours. Ultimately, while I am sure that no one sees Mushon as the evil puppet-master of information at http://www.mushon.com, (dare I say, Webmaster) he truly does control all information which is vetted through the space. We, as students, participants, and creators, submit out own works under our own names and hope that Mushon sees them fit to NOT censor.
There are a few benifits that I think the chat room could aide in helping us, as students, communciatie:
- Anonomoyus posting: We talked about how do with deal with charity vs. doing something for a deliberate reason, and on our blog, we are never given the choice NOT to be recognized for our particicaption. The chat has the capability to be completely anonomoyus (if you want to), so you can add to the conversation at hand for the good of the group, rather than for the good of your grade.
- An alterntive space to discuss what is happening in class: the chat window is a place that everyone can talk about what is currently going on, how they are feeling, whatever you want. It is Y(OUR) space. Now there can be symotainious converstations happening in the classroom, both offline and on.
- The Webmaster loses control: short of pulling the whole widget, what we say and do in the chat plugin can not be censored.
Lots of things can happen in this intervention of our class, so feel free to use that chat module any way you see fit!
Thanks, Max
Comments
I think its a cool experiment; but on that note not being able to direct comments can be confusing as well. I guess u can do it by guest # but should be interesting. Is this the only uncontrolled environment on the site?
Haha, nice. This is definitely a great way to kind of expand the scope of the class and provide an opportunity to see how different interfaces affect the same group of people. Hopefully people will use it, although I don’t know how many people will be on it ant any one time. Except for right before class, which is now-ish…
this is very interesting, and I think a great addition to the blog. I noticed the box as soon as I logged into the site, but didn’t initially pay enough attention to it to see what it actually was..a chat room. For me, the best and most helpful aspect of this widget is the ability to communicate in real time. With normal posts on the site, one must refresh ever so often to see if there has been any response or additions to the content of the blog, (and I am personally always nervous that something will be altered while I am in the midst of commenting, or that someone will be commenting on my post when I decide to edit something in my post). This feature works very well to allow for immediate response and updates among users, so long of course that someone other than yourself is currently interacting on the blog.
very interesting! i wonder what kinds of conversations are going to develop. i like that it gives us a little bit more autonomy and control. it will be cool to see how it’s going to be used (if its used at all)