I’ve been approaching all of this “Pool stuff” the wrong way. I’ve been worried about how well I can stimulate activity on Pool as an “SMP” — purely because I thought I’d get a bad mark if I was an “unsuccessful” SMP. I thought the task lacked any meaning or purpose because we weren’t encouraged to extrapolate broader meanings from our work as SMPs on Pool. But really, that’s not the case. This is all an exercise in understanding online communities and user-generated media — through using Pool as a case study… a model. And that’s something that I can understand and work with. We’re placed in this real-world online environment and interact with real people — and all this collective online interaction constitutes the “text” that we are attempting to understand in this subject.
This sounds much better than what I previously understood to be the situation. I guess that when I read the course guide, all the talk about “you’re now a producer working for ABC and you’re going to do real-life media work and pretend you’re all professional media people” got to my head… I thought that doing well in PP1 meant impressing officials at the ABC because in the real world, that’s all that matters. But yea. In week 9, I discovered that PP1 was not solely about this.. great job by me. In any case, I’m feeling more comfortable with what this assessment task is actually about, and that can only be a good thing.
[...] one of Kyla’s students has put it in a blog post analysing the learning focus in PP1: This is all an exercise in understanding online communities [...]