Web 2.0 & Stress Management

Like many of my fellow graduate peers, we experience periods of high stress when family, work and personal life events occur at the same time. Some good, some not so good. While doing a Google scholar search, I found an article on stress management techniques suited to engage individuals with web 2.0 tools. The authors, Åsa Smedberg and Hélène Sandmark (can be found here):http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:386481/FULLTEXT02 highlight several areas of need in stress management healthcare including a conceptual framework for treating patients with web based programs. The authors outline multiple design principles needed to engage patients with healthcare programs suited to the information age mirroring many instructional design principles in education. Specifically, the authors suggest incorporating multimedia to engage patients through synchronous and asynchronous communication, with an emphasis on visually immersive content to treat patients. In addition, the authors emphasize continuous and iterative support therapies for patients and suggest having more collaborative platforms (wikis, blogs, conversation threads) where patients and medical professionals express motivational issues. Also, embedded feedback and self-report measures help doctors track patient progress. Overall, a good read when feeling that mid-summer malaise.

Knowmia - The Digital Teaching Tool

A great web 2.0 tool for produser's everywhere, this handy iPad app affords teachers/students/educators/enthusiasts the ability to create and access video lesson plans that can be shared from YouTube, Edmodo, Google+, Twitter or other collaborative content sites.  One of the new tools on the market, established almost a year ago in August of 2012 by the same individuals who developed the flip camera. The blog post responsible for highlighting this app can be found here: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/08/knowmia-create-share-and-watch-video.html#.Ud8jDkG1Hh4 by the author Richard Byrne. The app provides a great benefit to students who need to review learning concepts and enhances the personalization of the learning experience for students needing digital access to course content due to time/geographic/course/personal constraints. In addition, all information students enter when signing up for access on the site is confidential and any collaborative comments made to lesson plans are identified by a pseudonym. I am going to create a lesson plan for the produsage assignment this week, hopefully it will be a success!

Blogs & The Classroom

What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in your chosen (current or desired) work environment? How would they support learning and/or performance? What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort?

As an instructor and technology enthusiast, blogs are used by students in the class to reflect on their learning experiences with new technology tools and share their thoughts as to how technology empowers individuals to achieve their academic goals. Students read about various assistive technology tools like Dragon software, which provide individuals with the ability to speech to text. Students understand the value of technology for special education research and practice. Other highlights of using blogs in the class include students recognizing strengths and weaknesses of ability with technology and demonstrating proficiency with basic computer literacy concepts. Students create web pages, wikis, blogs and videos throughout the course culminating with an interactive final project presentation using PowerPoint. The only challenges associates with blogs is managing the reading and assessment from a grading perspective and matching blog topics to learning objectives. With guidance on the conversation, this keeps the discourse focused on educational topics whereas, if students were initiating the blog assignments the content may not always be educational.

Reddit

In addition to videos, games and communicative technology, the way in which we browse, comment, communicate, share and elicit information continues to evolve with user-led content creation sites like Reddit. This site is a platform for online communities such as citizen journalism where users post the latest breaking news, and form sub-threads, launching new communities designed to narrow the focus on a particular topic while broadening the scope of discourse. Each thread has a set of rules for users to negotiate before participating, and some threads inform users of content which may be inappropriate giving rise to the popular NSFW tagline. Popularity of each topic is determined by user participation, up-voting or down voting, similar to Google's Page Rank system. The collaborative filtering of content by users helps spawn thousands of communities within one domain, often providing some individuals their entire selection of information in one space. Think Walmart for the online prosumer of knowledge and collaborative media.

Video Produsers

One of the best ways to become a produser involves creating movies with a simple tripod, green screen and editing tool. In this video, I wrote, directed and produced the movie as part of a school project. This exercise represents my first foray into acting and it was an absolute blast. Not only did I get a chance to create an original product but also experience the work involved in creating the final cut. By engaging in video production and sharing with my peers on YouTube, I am able to express my own creative content. Even as a video amateur, YouTube offers an excellent community for cultivating new collaborative projects for users engaged in video design.

Smart Phones (For the User by the User)

One of the challenges for smart phone users transitioning from one smart phone interface design to another (IE, Apple iPhone users to Samsung Galaxy s4) is adapting to new software and features. Users who are accustomed to auto-correct features (iPhone) may find it difficult to type and text when presented with a stock keyboard (Galaxy s4) that lacks auto-correct. While this issue seems somewhat negligible in the grand scheme of  overall phone usability, it presents a problem to users that want to customize their phones to meet specific needs. Thus, what can users do to overcome the
the lack of uniformity of smart phone designs?

Google play market represents a solution for users who want to download apps, develop apps, and market them accordingly to earn profit but also engage in a community of practice to improve resources available to users. Given the desire for users to customize their phones, users have become produces and designers of the smart phone app community. The rise of this community changes the smart phone market, in that users no longer buy phones for firmware or software but instead its hardware capability like weight, aesthetics, and likability. Online communities and forums have become a one stop shop to troubleshoot problems, improve design features and enhancing the overall smart phone experience.

Produsage

Currently, I am a produser of games and gaming culture given my involvement in creating multiplayer (multiuser) maps in games such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Portal 2 and Starcraft. Sharing these maps for others to MOD (modify and remix for a new collaboration of a map) defines my role as both a user and producer of content meant to be distributed through a large community of gamer networks. These networks range from internet fan websites to game interfaces like STEAM and Blizzard Maps required to access community maps for other Portal 2/Starcraft produsers.

My earliest experiences as a produser hearken back to playing M.U.L.E. from the Commodore 64 gaming system. The game afforded players the chance to amass wealth by colonizing and terraforming resources of an alien planet. The game while visually challenged, offered the first experience of multiuser content given that each user had to adjust their strategy and resource management based on other player's decisions in the games. One of the best paths to victory included a collusion feature in which players would set abnormally high prices for goods in demand, forcing players to adjust accordingly and make equally dubious partnerships to counterbalance the terms of engagement.

While most of my professional career focuses on games and education, social media produsage interest includes creating some podcasts, videos, and blogs for creative practice. Many of the themes in my creative projects focus on technology use in education, the rise of mobile device usage by students in the 21st century and the need for instructors to meet the demands of students that lust for instantaneous access to content.Some of my future goals include designing a course curricula that aligns learning objectives with gameplay, mobile devices and web 2.0 tools as well as developing community networks for students to collaborate/reflect on work to better facilitate course content.