Introductions

As we engage in the basics of networking, I would like to look back at the two last weeks, highlight some points and ask some questions about what emerged in the process.

Most participants gathered around blogging/micro-blogging and wikis and the interest seems to be creative writing. We will start working in the focus groups in Week 4, once we have had a quick overview of some of the possibilities for interaction offered in these different environments.

Week 1

We started by introducing ourselves to the others. While Nancy has commented on a post about introductions and the kind of tools to make the process more effective, my focus will be the content/quality of the introductions and the interaction that they get started.

The site

Most EVO sessions use e-mail for introductions, where participants usually post a formal paragraph giving full name, country of origin, professional status and interests, and address of blog or webpage. Usually, as the number of participants increases, your inbox is flooded with introductions, which you generally acknowledge but rarely answer because they are difficult to retrieve. As a result, you basically connect when you recognize a participant from other events, share the same origin/professional status, live in the same city or know a person better.

We used the SMiELT Social Forum for this purpose. Was it easier or more difficult to follow and connect than emailing?

The interaction

While most participants contributed to the Hello Wayfarer thread (79 posts), others opened a new one. Are the new threads different from the other ones? How? Did you participate in them? Why? What kind of interaction do you observe?

Our second venue for socializing was the Magical Chairs game led by Charles Cameron (120 posts). It is very interesting to notice the various degrees of awareness of the context in which the interaction takes place and the degree of awareness of the Other. Are people reading each other’s contributions? How do they connect? Are people talking in parallel or do they converge? What tends to happen when the rules of the game are not observed? What are the most common points of connection? What kind of topics do people seem more comfortable with and which ones do they steer away from? What language is being used?

Week 3

What is the main difference between the way we introduced ourselves in the two different fora and/or emailing and how people introduce themselves in the various platforms we are exploring this week? Does the register change? How do people connect in Flickr, 43Trio, Microblogging and Delicious? What kind of language is used?

Welcome to Week 3!