davehora.com

I think I can say that I’ve finally reached a turning point in my education. I realized this during a talk in my Privilege, Responsibility and Community course, given by CMU’s Vice Provost of Education, Dr. Indira Nair. The talk was on the ideas of Identity and Authenticity, discussing the identity the university tries to build for students, the challenges that the university faces by allowing students to bring their own authenticity, and reconciliation of the two in a learning environment. As much enjoyed this perspective on education–one that was certainly interesting–it was actually a short offshoot of the talk about asking questions that stuck with me.

I’d thought about what I was interested in before, I’ve written about it here, but not really in the light of figuring out what it is that makes me ask questions. And what it is that generates questions that are worth my time to explore and try to answer. Leaving students with these types of questions, the ones that interest you, and lead to more, similarly interesting questions, are in a way the goal of a higher learning institution. Anyway, phrasing my questions in the form of what I want to know, here are my goals for further study:

-I want to achieve a lucid and astute understanding of the social interactions that develop friendships and generate trust, of the interactions that lead to social cohesion.

-I want experience and familiarity with the media that can help foster such interactions, and to study how mediated interaction adapts the above interactions to their new contexts.

-I want to explore how these technologies change the way we think of ourselves as individuals and groups, and how new information communication technologies create novel social interactions that lead to meaningful relationships.

I’ve always had an interest in the community fostered by online gaming, I think that a specifically exciting area to study would be to examine MMOs from a sociological standpoint. I’m not sure how much that’s been done, or to what extent, but it certainly bears looking into.