The concept of shared digital spaces interests us because of how users speak and interact in these spaces, which you hit on in your comments on Farmville. Lack of direct interaction wastes the power of the space. All of my grad classes have blog components where we discuss the readings and such before class., which helps get our ideas out there for people to comment on and debate, but the real action happens in class when we’re in that shared space. Before, the Internet was fun to visit, but now it has expanded into a place where you can set up camp and stay awhile. We tend to define space by borders, and we all can set up these borderd spaces that are our own online. MY website, MY profile, MY house, etc. But, much like in Animal Crossing we can only get so much satisfaction out of having that space defined for just us. We want others to read our posts, comment on our blogs, and draw pictures on our wall.

That’s why we define these “spaces.” It’s human nature to ground, so-to-speak, where something is happening. We want learning and discussion to happen on the class wiki, so we call it a digital space. Just like the classroom is a space we designate for learning, we define digital spaces to give them meaning and ground them in a purpose.