My seventeen year old brother is my favorite person in the world. We do everything together, at least, we did until I moved countries to go to college. Even so, he would constantly phone me and we’d chat for hours after hours on the phone or online. In the last year or so, my time with him as been eaten away. I kind of expected this to happen, he’s a teenage boy and I knew girls would get in the way sooner or later. I was ready to bow down gracefully and step aside to give him room to mature and experience the wonders of autonomy – that is, until I realized that the reason he was no longer talking to me on the phone was because he was busy playing an online game called World of Warcraft, not meeting up with girls and other teenagers like I’d thought.
At first I just couldn’t understand it and was quite hurt by his actions. I couldn’t believe that he wanted to spend hours and hours playing a game and talking to people he didn’t even really know, all to slay a dragon or collect gold coins. I thought it was pathetic, especially when my Mom informed me he was online playing WoW until four or five in the morning. I began to worry he was addicted, I began to believe that maybe he was having a sexual relationship with one of his WoW friends. Whenever he got on the phone with me I shouted and demeaned him, angry that I had been given up for a stupid game.
It wasn’t until we discussed Wow in my Writing for Electronic Communities class that I began to understand a little of what was going on. Reading Wenger’s Communities of Practice, I was introduced to a new concept which helped me to look at my brothers situation differently. Communities of practice (CoP)are groups of people that work together and build relationships, even in non-traditional situations such as the members on WoW. If you see below, there is a great video that helps explain why WoW can be considered a community of practice and why then, I should not be criticizing my little brother so much. I don’t understand his actions because I am not a member of his community of practice, but that doesn’t meant that I have the right to put him down – I know that now.
According to the video above, WoW has a CoP, as it fulfills several criteria:
1) The average member dedicates 20+ hours a week to WoW
2) WoW employs the use of a small set of tightly integrated tools
3) The game supports collaborative work (specialized interface)
4) It has a set of worthwhile challenges and rewards
5) Problems that need to be solved are tackled by group work
I’m still reluctant to accept that right now I rate less attention because of an online game, but put into perspective, I can at least now get some comprehension as to why my brother is so dedicated to this game.
This video is a great little piece about how writers should learn encourage emergence and collaboration, using free software such as Wiki. (Did anyone know that Wiki mean fast in Hawaiian? I didn’t…)
This semester in my Writing for Electronic Communities class, each student was assigned to present a book relating to the course. This week it was responsibility of the ever fabulous Famous In My Own Head to produce questions that help the rest of the class members think about the book we read this week, Margaret Syverson’s The Wealth of Reality. After reading the first three chapters and musing over Famous’ comments, the question he asked that stuck with me was this:
”I’m fairly certain that everyone in my Writing For Electronic Communities class has had a freshman comp course. How do you feel it shaped you as a writer? How do you feel our current class is shaping you as a writer?”
I hate talking about what it means to be a writer or how experiences have shaped me, but I must admit this question is a veritable goldmine for creative-non-fiction pieces. I could, no doubt, delve into great detail about how my experiences as an international student learning American English have scarred me for life, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. All I have to say about my 101 undergraduate courses were that they made me regress – I hated them – I could not believe that my teachers wanted me to continue to write traditional 5 paragraph essays with only one point of view. I stopped writing those in England when I was twelve. Needless to say, my freshman comp was frustrating and did nothing to shape me as a writer, other than make me resentful.
Then we have this class, Writing for Electronic Communities. The wonderful thing about this class is that it forces me to interact with the people, to form bonds and take note of other people’s opinions. And as a writer and a self professed loner, this is fantastic for me. On page 9 Syverson states that:
“By privileging the individual writer composing in isolation, we have slighted or ignored compelling evidence that writing, like other cognitive processes, occurs in ecological systems involving not only social but environmental structures that both powerfully constrain and also enable what writers are able to think, feel, and write.”
This is a perfect way to describe how I feel WEC class has influenced me as a writer. In the classroom environment I am constrained and am forced away from writing methods that I prefer, such as being alone and only taking my own views into consideration. Being in an ecological situation where I have to take other people’s opinions into consideration forces me outside of my level of comfort and into new areas of awareness that I would never have experienced on my own. Sure, I restrict myself to certain topics, hoping to integrate my ideas with other students’, but in the long run this helps me to develop social ideas in much greater depth and my classmates perspectives have offered me insight that has spurred a wealth of writing material. I am, and always will be, a lone writer, but I do believe that there is worth in forcing yourself to be a part of a group, to experience the different dynamics and I think I will continue to welcome the changes these experiences can have on my writing.
