ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a brief overview of online ethnography and autoethnography, while showing why the author prefers doing autoethnography rather than any other methodology when researching people’s interactions on the internet. Doing ethnographic research on the internet “transfers the ethnographic tradition of the researcher as an embodied research instrument to the social spaces of Internet”. It builds on the recognition that rich social interactions can be mediated by the internet, and that they are worth documenting and interpreting to understand human social interaction. Virtually connecting is a grassroots movement that originated on the internet but is a hybrid (online/offline) experience, organizing informal conversations between people participating in conferences and people who cannot be there physically but wish to meet them virtually. The chapter co-designs internet games and open curricula and used them in the author classes where his students interacted with people across the globe.
