ENGL 680M: New Media

I recently created the following assignment for my students and given the subject of our class and recent discussions of avatars and social networking, I thought that I'd share This is actually three (related) assignments in one. The first has students analyzing their own Facebook entries; the second requires them to locate and annotate two articles pertaining to Facebook; the third requires them to create two avatars to represent different aspects of their self. Since these are business writing students, I asked them to create one avatar that represents their "personal" identity and a second one that represents their professional identity. (We've discussed the emergent popularity of social networking sites as tools for business networking. In class conversation we've at least mentioned Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SL, and LinkedIn.) I'll share the results with you. Feel free to borrow and adapt the assignment. It will also be located on our Student Avatar site, so putting our url [http://www.studentavatar.com] in any online posting of the assignment would be appreciated.

Creating Avatars in the Business World

Many of you, I know, have accounts on Facebook and recently I've read quite a few articles about how folks are using Facebook. Of particular interest are the articles that discuss Facebook as a business networking tool. Not only are young professionals continuing the networking that they began when using Facebook in college, but many people in older age groups are also joining Facebook. A search on the Business Week website pulls up fifteen pages of content dating back to 2005. You can find the list of articles, sorted by date, here; and this is barely a drop in the bucket compared to all of the articles available in other publications. Just in the past two months I have read, in print publications, several articles concerning Facebook, including: Wired magazine, MIT's Technology Review, and Newsweek. These are just a few examples out of many and the number of articles found published on the web far outnumber these. Quite a few of these concern the negative repurcussions of some Facebook content. For example, the colleges who have used photos on Facebook to locate and then charge underage drinkers, like Brad Davis at Emory or students who are rejected for internships as a result of Facebook content. As business writing is very much concerned with ethos, I'd like for you to consider your Facebook entries in the context of both your present and future.

This maybe off topic of the readings, but I reckon the board will eventually become a free-for-all of new media stuff, and I’m simply fascinating by something. Born sometime before the death of disco and old enough to have bought an original Atari and Commodore 64 off the shelves (or, at least, by parents did for me), I’ve lead a fairly tech-heavy existence. And with a long history of fan boy/geekdom I’ve been in my fair share of internet bulletin boards and community posty-type places.