Cheating vs. Collaboration

With the new wave of education that is coming.  Students will be encouraged to use, produse, and learn along side their teachers.  Students will be creating more collaborative projects utilizing the internet.  The collaborative process requires a constant quest of knowledge from others.  Unfortunately this can also be considered cheating.  The line between cheating and collaboration becomes fuzzier to younger students.  This is especially true for situations where education is trying to teach children originality.  In younger grades students have a difficult time giving the appropriate recognition to others who have helped them come up with ideas.  Basically collaboration is the socially accepted way of working with others while cheating is the unaccepted way of working together.  

Think about how many times as an adult you are forced to make a decision truly on your own without the possibility of consulting others?  I do not consider myself an experienced adult in this field, but I hypothesize that situations where one must make lone decisions are diminishing constantly.  We always have a friend to consult, the internet to look up questions, a cell phone to call another for help, etc.  Collaboration is the human way of living.  We work together all the time.  So why is cheating considered such a bad thing?  I understand that credit must be given to those who come up with the ideas, but life is a constant give and take of information sharing.  

How do we teach this new way of thinking in the classrooms so that people can utilize collaboration to its fullest potential?

A new wave of education

The article, 'Education Produsers, Produsing Education' opened my eyes a great deal.  For starters I am stuck in web 1.5 and this article, in my view, is getting to the heart of web 2.0.  The internet for the mass public originally was for email and simply searching for information.  Over time a subtle but clear transition has been occurring.  The difference is that now mass public readers/users can also add to the content of the internet.

The best example of this collective information set up is Wikipedia.  People can, at the touch of a button, add, modify, comment, flag, or read the information that is available.  Personally to me, this forum is like the utopia of the internet.  Everyone can have their say and provide the world with the fascinating knowledge that the specific individual has.  People patrol each other by being able to comment and flag posts.  Data is required to have source information or else it is labeled with a warning about the content.  In the end there are organizers who keep up the site and edit the listings for grammar and writing style.  So maybe it is not quite as simple as people all having an equal say.  At the same time, though, I have not found a better resource that has the vast quantity of information available anywhere else.

This new wave of the internet which allows users to be produsers requires a new wave of education.  People need to understand whether or not wikipedia, for example, is a credible source.  Many times educators will ban students from using wikipedia, but in doing so they do not address the fact that their students will use it anyway.  And now the students do not have directions about how to figure out whether or not the information is credible.  In the new wave of education teachers will be users and produsers and learners.  Teachers will become more moderators and less of lecturers.  This transition is already taking place, but more work needs to be done in order to encourage educators to use, produse, and learn about the internet for the benefit of their students.

Constantly Contradicting

Alliteration, one of my favorite literary devices!! Everyone consistently changes their mind and performs actions that seem to run counter to beliefs or thoughts. This is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs on the internet on a very regular basis. This connects to social activism in a lot of ways. For instance, if you view several facebook profiles, it is apparent that there is an application called 'causes.' My hypothesis is that people who feel a strong enough cognitive dissonance feeling use this application to decrease the contradiction.

Now I am not saying that people who use the cause application do not believe in the causes they sign up for, rather I am saying the opposite. People have beliefs that are possibly not strong enough to take action in RL. The internet, or in this case Facebook, serves as a location that those individuals can use to express their beliefs. Facebook allows a forum to diminish cognitive dissonance.

While this is a personal phenomenon, it promotes a variety of social activist purposes in the process. This is a completely different type of contradiction: doing something for yourself and doing something for a group. This contradiction can be remedied, though. Helping one's self does not necessarily have to run counter to helping a group of social activists. These two can be integrally intertwined. In this case I would argue that reducing cognitive dissonance and promoting a social cause are actually one in the same and possibly not a contradiction at all.

How do you really know someone?

So through all of these readings I have been thinking about the friending process. I have also been thinking about how well I know the people in this class, SSP 402. And to be honest as soon as I friended someone on facebook and was able to finally see a picture, I was able to feel that I knew everyone a little bit better. For those who did not post pictures, somehow that equates to me still not feeling like I know you. I do not know why a picture makes that much of a difference. I think it has to do with the fact that with a picture I have at least some confidence that if I saw you randomly I would be able to pick you out of a crowd. But if I do not have a picture I could potentially have a whole interaction with you and not even realize that I had a class with you.

So then I start to think about why people do not want to post pictures. Boyd discusses in her Social Network sites articles the idea that your list of friends on a social network is your imagined audience. So then this makes me think that for some reason people do not want their imagined audience to see certain sides of them. I am also thinking that online I am more egocentric than most of the rest of the class. I am the only one to post a picture on this blog. I am not sure why, but as soon as I was setting up my profile that was one of the first things I thought of doing. But no one else did. What are the differences in how we are perceiving our 'imagined audiences?'

I was also trying to understand the differences between friends online and friends in RL. As I was searching the web I came across a site that talks about how making friends online is a lot easier than making friends in RL. Being friends online in a social network has less meaning and therefore it is easier to make that jump. This is backed up by Boyd's article on 'Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8.' She talks about how there are many different reasons that people make friends online. Some include actual friends, but others include simply trying to make as many friends as possible, and that its easier to accept someone than deny them [p. 8 of 20]. Anyway back to this site that I found. It is promoting the idea of making friends online over RL because it is easier. What do others think of this?

Transference in online relationships

Transference is the phenomenon where someone projects preconceived notions upon another. Suler discusses transference in online interactions. This discussion led me to think about how transference can alter an interaction and an eventual relationship. I think that from the case study with Alexis and Craig it is possible to see that Alexis only wanted to see good things in Craig. Everything that he did was to a positive end. I think this portrays the notion of transference quite well. Alexis wanted Craig to be the perfect guy. So she only looked at his actions in that light. Anything he did could only add to that image. His actions that could be counter, Alexis either disregarded or interpreted in a positive light. The fact that Alexis met Craig while he was in a relationship was not looked at badly. She only focused on the fact that he was being abused in the relationship and was willing to reach out to her for help.

So taking all of that into consideration, I am wondering whether transference can add to or detract from a relationship, in particular an online relationship. Through my contemplations I have come to think about several things. First I think that the type of relationship is important. If the two people in a relationship only have a relationship online then that would be very different than people who begin online and eventually meet. I think that transference becomes more obvious in the latter case. The people who never meet in real life will possibly never be able to realize how much they have transfered upon the other. So I think that transference can add to a relationship when it is only online more often than it can for a relationship that eventually becomes an in-person relationship.

I also think that transference can be visible online when people re-read the written records of their relationship. In this respect transference can add to a better understanding of the person doing the transfering, but I am not sure how much that helps the overall relationship.

What do others think about transference?

Representation of the Self Online

Suler's text provides an interesting perspective on the issue of the self online:

Compartmentalizing or dissociating one's various online identities like this can be an efficient, focused way to manage the multiplicities of selfhood

You can find the quote in context here

Suler discusses the fact that one can express part of one's interests in a certain online community and another part in another one. This helps to fully express all of the different roles that each person plays every day. For example, I am a daughter, a sister, a student, and a lifeguard all in one. These are just a few examples of what popped into my head, but sometimes my roles conflict. Or sometimes I am just not able to express each of these roles to their fullest. In an online community I could pick up on the role that is most important to me or any of the roles. I could focus on an interest of mine and the online community could be the forum for that.

Suler also discusses the idea of integrating online life and offline life. These two parts of a persons life can be very disassociated [which has a negative connotation as Suler points out]. I think that hiding the two parts from each other can cause problems. It is interesting that in one part Suler is talking about how the internet can allow for compartmentalizing. And yet at the same time this can be unhealthy if it is overdone. I think that generally online life and offline life can be and should be integrated. Each one provides different mediums for expression. The mediums should be used to compliment one another instead of limiting each other.

Internet as a Metaphor

So far we have discussed the metaphor of the internet and then what it means to be a person online. I think that the metaphor of the internet is very relevant to the latter discussion. Understand how people think about the internet plays into how people think of themselves as a person interacting on the internet.

To me the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis exemplifies this point very well. While I was reading through this I came across some examples in fiction where the idea that language determines thoughts and consequently behaviors. I am not sure if any of you have read 1984, but if you have not you definitely should. Any way in the novel there is a language called Newspeak which was created and implemented using the logic that if people can not express something in words then they will not think about it and will not do it. In this case the words being eliminated are about revolution. So the question is then, is it their language that keeps these people from rebelling or is it something else. Obviously this is only a fictional example, but I think it is one to ponder.