Electronic Journal, Week Two Prompt

Week 2 How might the concept of produsage be applied in your life (personal and/or professional) as it stands today? Are you already a produser? If yes, what do you do? If no, why not?

I suppose that I have applied the concept of produsage in my personal life through my interest in music. For instance I enjoy learning to play music on guitar or ukulele. I found tablature, musical notation for stringed instruments, on the internet which I have used to learn to play tunes on my guitar or on my uke. I have distributed links to tablature I found -- along with reference recordings -- with friends who share this common interest.

I think that I have applied the concept of produsage more in my professional life. When I started out in my present occupation as a faculty support representative, I had to learn about a learning management system from scratch, and so I consumed massive amount information from the LMS’s instructor guide which I compiled and transposed (produced, mashed-up) into new content in the form of cheat sheets for myself and canned responses to instructor requests for assistance. As my service desk developed over time to a team of two and then three service reps, I distributed my cheat sheets and canned responses to my new team mates. Hence, within a techno-social environment I was a consumer, I mashed-up informational content into something new, and distributed it to my associates.

This in turn contributed to my group’s approach to probabilistic problem solving. If I don’t have the answer to an issue I am addressing I can contact either of my team member’s to compare notes. There is also equipotentiality in our group, instead of a hierarchy there’s a heterarchical model of organization in my team where all members have pretty much the same view of our mission and of our challenges.

As a team we receive and address the greatest number of requests for assistance on course start dates. So it’s understood that on a course start date all hands are on deck to address known peculiarities and perform specific preventative maintenance functions. So as a team, we perform granular tasks.

My team members and I share informational content with one another, and this is easy to do as there are just three of us. I imagine that if our team were to expand in number that it could become more difficult to consistently perform produsage this high level of sharing without instituting policies and procedures.