Reflection on my facebook groups assignment

Initial response

My initial response when given this task was – “What group should I join?” I searched for something rather generic and did not like the results I was receiving. Can’t remember the term I used right now. I started searching for topics I was interested in like Open Source and tonnes of groups turned up.

It was difficult at first to decide on one but I eventually did choose, a few,  ”Gnu/Linux users” , “Open Source Community” and a few groups dedicated to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation[OLPC] (here is a link of Nicholas Negroponte talking about the OLPC in 2006, it is 18 minutes so view when you have time. click here).

Points of interest

My first observation when I went back to the groups subsequent to my creating them is that facebook (why do I write it in all common letters? This needs further analysis) has two columns with lists of groups, one is a list of the groups that my friends have joined and the second is the list of groups of which I am apart with or without my conscious knowledge. (You know sometimes someone suggests a group for you to join and because you trust your friend you just click the ever present “join this group”)

Well I did that once and ended up in a group that was dedicated to raising the self esteem of young women and while that is a good thing it just felt a little uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I Love the idea but I felt like I was lost in a group of women talking about their own thing and I would be an outsider. Maybe I will grow up some day and see the light.

I digressed, back on topic. So facebook had the left column of the group tab displaying my friends’ groups and the right column. I view from left to right so I would naturally see my friends list before I see my list and although I think it is a great idea to have a list of the groups of which my friends are a part listed there, I would rather my groups to take center stage. It does follow well with the ideals of facebook, which is community – maybe they value the community more than the individual – but that is just my unsubstantiated view.

Inside the groups

Once inside a group I was struck by the fact that many discussions were taking place at once. So I just clicked on a topic of interest. For example I clicked on the Gnu/Linux user group and there is a list of discussions, I entered one entitled “False Linux User Claims” which was not so smart of that person who started that discussion as it was attacking Linux and making really unreasonable claims such as that it is a myth that “Linux is Virus free” and that “Linux is bug free”.  Now this is all good and well as those are ridiculous claims and one should be wary of them anyway, but this writer had links of evidence to support his claim that people are saying these things and that it is misleading for new users. This showed me something interesting about research, particularly in this technological age, and it is that you can find evidence to prove almost any point of view you hold. (except for my dissertation on e-learning in marginalised communities, but that is for my tutor, oh, I guess he is reading this too, sorryLOL).

The response to this “brave” fellow was not very pleasant but in the end it was all engaging and I learnt about the myths and the way people can become territorial about their technology of choice.

Linux window managers

The other post I was following was on Linux window manager. This in very layman’s term is the visual display the graphical user interface that allows you to access the various applications on the operating system. I should have said this before but Linux is not windows. It is another operating system that also uses its own window system and it has a lot of them. This was garnered from the Gnu/Linux User group as well – someone asked what kind of window manager was persons using. Below is an example of what the window manager can do in Linux. Remember this is just one type of window manager and would require a good enough graphics card.

Linux window manager. I definitely will be trying out some of them as I have linux dual booting on my laptop. My only challenge is my graphics card is not as powerful to get all of that, pity.

Here are a set of videos the first one is funny: I got it from the same group as well.

Click [Funny linux/Windows videos] to get to the videos – You will be taken to a new window.

Enjoy.

As a final bit of statistics: The Gnu/ Linux user groups had 28, 559 members as at 3:41pm today, Feb. 24, 2009, and also 307 discussions.

This was my reflection on using groups in facebook. (still writing it with common letters, can anyone explain that?)

Kojo