For some reason the PM system here is telling me I can’t send PMs. It’s kind of ridiculous, so I wanted to respond to some questions here from PMs, which may additionally clarify my project for some people!
@ Noppy – I am happy to hear that not everyone is native English speaker! I see that as a great opportunity for a multicultural experience!
@ DEKeyzToChaos and nottsgman
It’s great to talk to another doing graduate work!
The curriculum I want to teach focuses on the etiquette and roles and responsibilities people take online, and I’m hoping to use Guild Wars 2 as an avenue through which students can experience real conversations online and discuss responsibilities they have to take, along with what they think is and is not appropriate for online interaction. Being an English classroom, I want to connect this to a sense of identity and personal character that can be linked to novels and compared (GW2 has such a great sense of individual story line).
What I’m considering with the ethnography and interviews is to pose some research questions that ask about whether this is a good environment to do this in and what are the benefits and detriments. Since I’m still forming the lit review, I haven’t solidified any research questions, but I may be pulling from Henry Jenkins’ idea of participatory culture and linking my research questions to show how GW2 is or is not that sort of environment and how that applies to digital citizenship.
It’s a relatively untouched area, the idea of digital citizenship. Everyone has a different idea of it and it’s so ambiguous that often school districts say as long as a kid can do an online research project, somehow he or she knows how to react online. I look at digital citizenship as a form of character education. Not telling a student who he or she should be, but asking a student to think critically of his or her surroundings and from that create their own moral code.
I hope that makes more sense!
