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Web Identity Project

Page history last edited by Alex Reid 15 years, 2 months ago

Description

Most college students are familiar with social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They may also have experience with other kinds of online communities with blogs, online gaming, file sharing, and so on. The purpose of the Web Identity project is to expand your encounters with the rich variety of social networks that are out there. In particular, we will investigate social networks that may have more use for intellectual and professional purposes.

We are going to work with five applications: LinkedIn, Delicious, Blogger, Second Life, and Seesmic. I will add information about each as we move forward.

Week One 2/2-2/6: LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com

LinkedIn is a professional networking site. Essentially you create an online resume and then you "friend" people that you know (and maybe people that your friends know) in an effort to build a network of professional associations. Depending on the career that you pursue you might use LinkedIn to get a job, to build up a list of clients, to find people to work with, and so on.

Your assignment is to create an account for yourself and then make connections with people that you know, including me, your classmates, faculty at Cortland, and maybe others. We will be discussing our experiences and thoughts about LinkedIn in our discussion.

Week Two 2/9-2/13: Blogger or Delicious

www.blogger.com

www.delicious.com

Blogging and social bookmarking (wikipedia article) are two of the oldest forms of social media. I'm sure you know what blogging is. Social bookmarking is essentially the practice of sharing your bookmarks with others online. There are many different blogging applications out there. Blogger is one of the free ones and is easy to use. Another popular option is WordPress. Similarly, there are several social bookmarking sites out there. To the best of my knowledge, Delicious is the most popular of them.

This week you can choose between starting a blog and creating a delicious account.

If you start a blog, it can be on any subject that interests you. Your task, for the rest of the web identity project (until 3/6), will be to write 8 blog posts (about two per week). They can be on any subject and be of any length. The idea though is to try on the practice of blogging for the purpose of understanding why people do it.

If you create a delicious account, your job is to share 25 sites by 3/6. You will notice that when you post a link to your delicious account, you are prompted to offer a brief description and tag the site with keywords. I expect you to do both. The sites you share should be relevant (in your mind) to the class. Every site you tag for this assignment should include the tag PWR209. It will then appear on this page, with all the sites I have tagged for this class.

Week Three 2/16-2/20: Second Life Avatar Creation and Orientation

www.secondlife.com

Second Life is a multi-user virtual environment (or MUVE). As a user experience it is somewhat similar to World of Warcraft or the Sims, if you have played such games. But Second Life isn't a game. It's a social networking community. Check out these pages on the wiki for an introduction to Second Life:

Since Second Life is a virtual world, as a user in that world you are represented as a character that is called an avatar. One of the first steps in getting into Second Life is therefore creating your avatar. You will begin the avatar creation process as part of your orientation into the world of Second Life, but once you have gone through Orientation Island, as it is called, you will have further opportunities to customize yourself.

So your task for this week is simply to