Tag: social-media

Blogging and Da Chen

Author Da Chen was the speaker at Convocation this past Monday night, and was by all accounts a huge success. He also met  with First Year College students, which was fitting since Chen’s “Colors of the Mountain” was this year’s FYC Summer Reading Assignment.

What I find interesting are all the blog posts by students in response to Chen’s visit on campus. Most (if not all) appear to be on students’ personal blogs and not related to class assignments. I haven’t carefully studied campus culture and attitudes via blog postings, but it was certainly noticable that Da Chen postings dominated the WolfBlog’s “recent posts” list most every day this week. It is great to see students capturing their thoughts in a way that lets the rest of us peek in.

Twitter

Thanks to the Blern blog (which I’ve been enjoying for a couple months now) for providing some quick commentary on Twitter and a link to an article by Wired. I’m struck by the various phrases used by author Clive Thompson to describe Twitter: constant-contact media; almost like ESP; quick-ping media; it’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. I think he aptly captures the appeal of this technology.

 I recently set up my own Twitter account through my experience with a recent EDUCAUSE ELI event, where Twitter was one method of documenting our experiences while learning more about this technology. I only submitted on inital test “message” (twit? update? post? again, the lingo still eludes me), so I haven’t truly used it to it’s fully extent. I don’t know anyone else who is Twittering that I could follow, nor do I know anyone who would be willing to follow me. (What do you call someone who doesn’t really know quite how to Twitter properly? A Nit Twit, maybe?) But I hope to set up an experiment to learn more for myself about this technology and then to adjust and repeat to use as a demo for others.

I first heard of Twitter when Scott Hanselman (a popular blogger on the topics of technology as well as diabetes) decided to Twitter his diabetes for one day. This fascinating activity was designed to help others better understand the impact of diabetes on one’s daily life. But it is also a great example of how Twitter might be used in an educational setting.

In my view, micro-blogging is worth exploring as an educational tool.

Second Life

Time to jump into the world of virtual environments and gaming. This is truly the hot topic I’m seeing for conference programs, listserv discussions, and more. It’s being explored here at NC State, and I really need to learn more about how they fit into the learning environment, and how we can use them in Student Affairs.

Not sure if I’m going to like this, or understand it, but I’m now a resident of Second Life. My avatar’s name is Dare Dagostine, and I currently have zero Linden dollars and no land holdings. I don’t know what any of that means yet.

I also am a resident of Wolfland, which is the NC State-sponsored virtual world, and am known as DareDevil. (I’m not a full citizen yet, just a tourist with a temporary visa.) Everytime I log in, I get this message from the Immigration Officer: “Sorry, there is no world called ‘wolfland’ running at this time.” So nothing is happening. Probably user error since I’m all new to this!

So feel free to stop by and say hello to Dare Dagostino or DareDevil.