Comments on: Digital Citizen – Omegle

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:35:20 +0000

Hey Andrew, like Dean had mentioned, I believe that social and online gaming can also be used as ways to build trust and credibility with others, and gaming can also be used as a way to inspire learning in the “microwave”, “I want everything now”, generation.

The reason why I say this is because kids nowadays have LOW attention spans, and because of this, they could always use the “instant feedback” style of learning that playing video games can provide…

Sincerely,

Thomas Anderson

By: andrewch

andrewch — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:46:30 +0000

Hi Dean
Reputation and trust are, as you have noted, key components of social gaming. Without these most MMORPGs fall apart. They are jealously guarded by players. And you are correct that this is probably not included directly within the Digital citizen framework. Its is implied. I would see reputation in with “respecting yourself” and trust fits across all categories whether it is presenting oneself as trust worthy or trust in your relationships with others. All trust fits into validating information sources. Interesting – worth pondering some more.

As educators, we do overlook the significence of gaming. I would imagine that because few of us use games as a core component of our teaching, its easy to ignore/overlook. If we are educating the the whole person then this is something that needs to be considered. That is not to say, set down a set of rules and abide by them, rather that the students are aware of the public environment they are in.

We all talk to strangers, because everyone is a stranger initally. Omegle is a site that actively promotes this (which in itself is not a bad thing) but the feedback I have heard and the reports I have seen lead me to question its value and worth. If there was moderation, who knows.

thanks Dean, as alway you raise interesting questions

By: Dean Groom

Dean Groom — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:08:54 +0000

Andrew, have you thought about how trust and reputation is a core component of social gaming? In fact most of the ‘skills’ we talk about as being desirable, can be learned via gaming – and in most student’s cases probably are. Yet they are omitted visibly from much of the edublogger discourses in favour of text, sound, video, image tools – which ironically are holistic in gaming. Talking to strangers is how I met my wife.