Poster

I finally got my poster ready!

Guidelines for IE

Make our Community a safer place for children!


This is my IE. In order to make a difference and have my voice heard by people in my community, and also people in different communities, I have done some work. Here are some of the steps I took.


1) Talked to my English class students and their parents about this issue.

2) Got a Livly account and got my message (with drawing) delivered to some of my younger sister's friends

3) Made a IE Homepage and linked it to several communities outside my own. Such as, the "world teachers unite!" and several parent, family links. I am connected to approximately 2000 xanga users by this.

Here are some things I am planning to do in future;

1) Create a chain-mail and deliver my message through email to the PTA of my local community. My mother being a part of PTA and the local soccer club for kids makes this easier.

2) Create posters and post it around the neighborhood


3) make the poster downloadable for people using xanga

4) Do some research on how many kids are kidnapped each year and post it on xanga so that more people would realize that this is an important issue.

5) Hear comments and comment on other people using xanga who cares about the same issues.





I hope I will have enough time to accomplish some of these ideas.

A very brief summary of "how to be a great host"

Basically, the author states that in order to make your HP a safe place for every guest to enjoy themselves is to have good security and clear rules of your blog. Some ideas he gives are 1) update and comment your own blog on a regular basis, 2) Make sure its not hacked 3) Make sure all the rules are followed 4) Maybe have a co-moderator or two, to make sure the HP is under control. Also, having multiple co-morerators benifits the blog by having more active users.

With these tips, it may be easier to keep your blog a great place!

Xanga and my Extended version of the IE Map

By using Xanga and also creating posters to post on the streets where children returning home are likely to take, my message will be spread a lot further and have a stronger impression. The discription of Xanga is below.

XANGA

A website that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles. It is operated by Xanga.com, Inc., based in New York City, USA. Users of Xanga are referred to as "Xangans".

Xanga's origins can be traced back to 1998, when it began as a site for sharing book and music reviews. It has since then evolved into one of the most popular blogging/networking services on the web, with an estimated 27 million users worldwide. As of May 3, 2006, Alexa Internet rated Xanga the 21st most popular English-language website, and the 42nd most popular website in the world.

Here is a new map showing the nodes and connections I will be able to extend by using these new ideas. My message will be spread on geographical, institutional, and vertical dimensions. This will result in great increase (hopefully) in the number of people hearing my message.

Hello Class

Hi everyone. I have decided to use Xanga for my IE project. The link is on my Blogger "Kakko's Space" and you can jump to the site by clicking on "My IE Project" just under my profile picture on this page.

Feel free to leave comments! Thanks.

1. What is the central problem for citizens in democracies?
The problem is that it is difficult to actively spread your own words and ideas effectively in a society of millions of people.

2. What skills do citizens need?
They need skills to participate in the collective production and the circulation of political arguements.

3. What term does the author use to describe the process citizens use to promote their concerns about an issue?
"Issue Lattice"

4. What steps are the four steps in this process?
The vertical dimension, The geographic dimension,The Institutional dimension and TheIdeological dimension

p. 212-214
Write two of your own questions on the ideas and issues raised in this section. Lead a class discussion next session.

5. Which of the four dimensions will your strategy (which you had in mind before reading this text) of spreading your IE messege be catagorized in?

6. How could you apply all four dimensions on your IE? Also, how wider will your messege be spread out if you could use all four?

7. Based on the ideas and issues raised on these pages, what additions, deletions, or modifications suggest themselves to you in planning and implementing your Issue Entrepreneurship? Tell about your ideas.
My IE network idea was limited within only one step (the institutional dimention) involving the PTA of a small local school. In order to successfully deliver my message, I figured that I will need to think of a way to involve a whole lot more people using other steps as well. This reading gave me some new ideas.

My Second Attempt to Spread my Message

I have some good news and a bad news. Which to begin with? Well, since we all say "all is well that ends well", I guess we will start off with the bad news and then go onto the good ones.

:Announcement:
My messenger hog has officially ran away.
My 11 year old sister assumes that this tragic accident is due to the little respect I paid to the hog (my excuse is that I was extremely busy with mid-terms lately) and didnt spend much time taking care of him.


Although the good news is, I have finished delivering the message to all of my sister's class friends via Livly and asked them to pass the message along to their own friends in their Livly network, so my job here with the website was pretty much done. So now it is about time I made new plans to extend my network for passing my message along to an even wider range of people who are involved in this issue. In order to remind of myself of the possible communities I can get access to, I made a visual map of the networks I am linked to (related to the assignment).


My second plan is to get my message delivered through my high school 2nd year sister's community, and also my mom's PTA network which also involves the soccer club. I can pass around my message through the English class I teach as well. Since people in this target group don't use social websites, I am thinking of passing around my message through mobile phone email. I will need to make a chainmail in several variations with each of them aimed at different age groups.

Summary of Kahn and Kellner

February15, 2003 made us realize that the Internet has become a new tool for democracy. This was the day which the public demonstration of millions of people calling for peace was made. The demonstration was organized through the internet, and these kinds of online communities can promote democracy on a local scale, and also on a global scale. The internet is also utilized by capitalists and terrorists for instance, and thus can be a crutial problem and a threat. There are many different communities with various (sometimes opposing) ideas,　and they use the internet for their own advantage.　 Either way, the internet should be more concerned from a political viewpoint.

My First Attempt to Deliver my Sticky Message

With the help of my 6th grade sister, I made my own account of this social network popular among young kids.

This is what the social network site LIVLY looks like. My pet is the black hog-like animal. Seems like those young kids communicate via these so-called cyber pets, and these pets deviler emails to other pets. So it seems like I need to write my message and hand it to my pet hog, and the hog will send my message to my sister's friends, and hopefully her friends would send my message along to other kids in school who use this site. Seems easy, but the hard part is that this pet thing will die if you dont feed and play with it (oh bother). My personal goal for now is to try not to kill my little messenger.

My first chainmail will have a short message, and a funny illustration / comic strip attatched to it so that the message will be entertaining and hopefully more children will decide to pass it along. It may look something like this:

Message: 最近日が落ちるのも早くなり、すっかり秋ですね！下校時間が遅くなるときは友達と帰るか、人通りの多い明るい道を通って帰ろう！変質者には注意してね！

Comic: どうしても一人で帰らなきゃいけない時は・・・迫力のある顔をすれば大丈夫かも！？

If I have time, I might be able to make this into a series with different illustration sent periodically, to remind the children during this term.

My Sticky Message

My Message
1. What is your sticky message? (Barabasi 3) What is the idea you wish to promote or issue/problem you want to try to 'solve'?

Warn young age elementary school kids that kidnap incidents happen frequently these days, and tell them to watch out when they are out on the streets alone.


Knowledge of social network.
2. Who is your strategic social group? Can you identify and define the organisational base you will need to develop and/ortap into?

Mainly kids aged 6- 12 will be my target. I will try to get access to some local elementary schools.


Strategy for network building.
3. How will work to create your organisational base? How will you spread and encourage others to take up your message?

Firstly, I will find out from my siblings (two of them are within my target area) what is popular among them in school. According to my younger sister (age 11), kids in her class use a social network site called Lively where they pick a cyber pet and use them to communicate with their friends' pets online. I can get my own account there and deviler my message (along with illustrations maybe) and make it like a chainmail. Also I can post the message on the Lively board.

Questions and My Answers

1. What is the principle of six degrees of separation? What number of social links does any one person need to be connected to global society? p. 30

The principle is the idea that we are all a part of a really dense web called society and that it doesnt take much to connect anyone to any other one living in this world right now. (tk)

2. How is the fabric of society today different from pre-internet society? p. 31

It is different in a way that it is a lot easier to have access to information we need, and also a lot quicker. (tk)

3. How many more links separate any pair of web pages compared to people in society? What can explain the difference? p. 34

According to Barbasi, the average from a website to another is 19 links. This is partially because a webpage of one thing is more likely to be connected to sites that are similar or with the same topic, while human in society can have connection to multiple types of people. Also, the number differs.

4. So far, what ranges of separation have network scientists discovered in different kinds of networks? p. 34

5. What does research suggest about the fundamentals of networks? p.34-35

The more the webpages, the lower increase rate of the average links of seperation.

6. What is your estimate of your personal number of connections to society? What connections are your strongest?

My personal strongest connections will be young kids, due to many younger siblings I have and the English classes I teach. Also, I guess I can have access to Medical Institution and Political groups from my parents' and grandparents' connections.

The Third Link: Six degrees of Separation

A Brief Summary
In 1967, Stan Milgram, a professor at Harvard did a research to discover the distance between any two people in the United States. According to his research, he found that the median number of intermediate persons was 5.5. However, when John Guare made this into a Broadway musical (and eventually it was made into a movie), he applied this "six degrees of separation to the whole world, changing it from the research of Milgram, which was limited within the United States. This created a myth among the people.
However, while the six degrees theory maybe a myth considering the whole world, Milgram's theory made one thing clear; that our world is connected in which no one is more than a few handshakes away. Barbasi claims our world is small "because society is a very dense web".

To see if the web society works in a similar way, Barbasi cooperated with Reka Albert and Hawoong Jeong to research how many clicks of the mouse it would take from one web page to another. They found that it took "19 degrees of Separation" for this task.


Personal Reaction
This theory of "six degrees of separation" was extremely interesting, and although it is still hard to believe the medium is 6 people, (personally I think 42 letters out of 160 is too small to make the assumption a theory) it certainly proved that our society is much denser than I'd have thought it to be.

Reading Summary and Reaction

Summary
A 15 year old boy from Canada (who decided to call himself Mafiaboy online) surprised the world by hacking numorous computers and attacking the world widely known site, Yahoo. Barbasi compares this situation with Paul, a man who went from place to place to spread Christianity, and made this his life-long activity. Barbasi insists that the similarity between the two is that they "both use the power of social or computer networks" to achieve what they had done.


My Reaction
I thought this reading was very much interesting in the way that it compared two people who were different in age, achievement, and the time they lived in, and yet saught similarity between the two for using social network. I thought this vision was very unique. I agree to Barbasi that we do live in a world where we can not exist without interacting with someone else, and the strange thing is that most of the people who we interact with today may be people who we have never met or seen. Back in the days when Paul lived, the people who they interacted with might have been people they see everyday in the market place....but how many of us today know who made the wheat and corn of the cereal bowl we had this breakfast? Who was the person driving the bus that we rode to school this morning? We are all linked, and we all co-exist with the help of others. But I feel that we barely know anything about these links we are connected to. Now with the internet spreading over the world, it is even easier to achieve something with the help from another who you dont know about - and we may not even have to move from our seats! What we trade and move around is information, data, and paper money. But before we get too involved with these, I think we should stop for once, and reconsider the dangers that may lie ahead, and also learn more about our social community/ network we belong in.

Techno Biography

I currently use several SNS sites including myspace, xanga, Facebook, and mixi....although for mixi, I barely use it and strongly feel that it lacks in interesting functions. I use these SNS sites to keep in touch with my friends who went abroad and friends who live oversea.

Ive always been the family 'photographer' role ever since I can remember, and I use Photo Impression and several other editing software to edit the photos. I sometimes draw illustrations and edit them with these software as well.

I also do video editing with (oops, I forgot the software name) and burn them onto DVDs.



I guess that's pretty much it.

Getting Started...

I just wanted to know how this will come out in my blog.