Facebook Groups

I already joined some groups before this activity. However, I had to search for more groups that relate to my current interests, that is Education and Emerging Technologies. I searched for groups in Educational Technology, E-learning and also Digital Divide. Surprisingly, it was hard to find a group of my interest and some groups were surprisingly small (three members), others were too dormant (had not been active for more than a year)

Eventually, I settled for two new groups; the Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment and (E)ducation - ICT and Modernisation, which I followed for almost a week. Surprisingly, the groups were not active for the period I was following. I had to follow their past discussion, but unfortunately, the discussions were not to my interest (there were personal chats and links to movies or fashion news; contrary to the descriptions of the groups)

For this activity, I will reflected on a group I joined sometime back; Global Lives Project - Malawi. I joined this group because I was one of the first people involved in the beginning of the Global Lives – Malawi Chapter. However, I did not know it was on facebook up until a year later when I joined facebook. Through facebook everyday people (like you and me) are now involved in voluntary collaborative effort to document the wide variety of human life experience and share it through a unique video installation that can be assembled anywhere on earth, while at the same time producing a dynamic online video library of the human experience that offer audiences a chance to experience other realities they would otherwise never have witnessed.

In the beginning, my involvement in this project was to provide technical services to transcribers and translator. This did not produce effective results as it involved getting the transcribers and the translators at one point to do the work (which also meant extra expenses to host them). Apparently, the web2.0 (Social Network) technologies like facebook offered a solution to this. With 2,002 Malawian members (as of today) who act as transcribers and translators, it is possible to collaborate regardless of time and where they are and they transcribe/translate the videos (which are posted online) from and to almost any of our local languages including English or French. I see this as a thing that could not have been possible if the project was to stick with face to face network.