In my final essay, I will explore how identity is created and formed in online affinity spaces, which are spaces online where people with a shared interest or purpose go to discuss, share, interact, or create ideas and artifacts related to their interest. That said, in the scope of my paper, spaces such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are excluded because they either more operate first as spaces where friends unite to share things about their personal lives (although they do divert to subspaces about interests and purposes) or because they are too general in scope, as with YouTube. The spaces to be explored in my paper will include spaces centered on a specific interest or activity where members actively participate around it, such as AnimeMusicVideo.org, where they create artifacts that they all can enjoy, critique, and assist each other with, or certain gaming sites, where they interact and compete with each other.
I will explore the activities that members perform in these spaces that facilitate the creation and formation of identity, with a focus on the types of identities they create the interactions and activities they perform to establish their identities there and attain certain levels of expertise or social status, and their behaviors there, which may or may not mirror their behaviors in the real world. I will finally explore how these activities, including online gaming, and the cognitive processes that occur, mirror and even transcend those that educators struggle to teach every day in their classrooms and how these authentic experiences that our students perform voluntarily every day can be tapped into, mirrored, or transferred into classroom settings and activities.
Your paper sounds extremely interesting. We are eager to hear your ideas and research. I am sure we will all gain a lot of ideas and resources that we can use!
ReplyDelete- Daisy and Tania
Sounds interesting! I am interested in learning more about this topic and how it can be incorporated into a classroom. Daisy and Tania
ReplyDeleteI think as part of this you would have to include a discussion of the role of the community in identity formation. That is, although people are free to try and create new identities, this is always within rules and expectations that are beyond their control. We cannot simply create any identity that we want. One implication of this is that rather than being a case where out-of-school identity formation is free and in-school identity formation is bounded, different rules apply in each location. If we understand how young adults deal with these rules outside of school, it could give us insight into in-school rules.
ReplyDelete- Erik Jacobson