Good day to you all! Welcome to week 10, our final structured week of the course. You’ve spent the last couple of weeks grappling with notions of posthumanism and the cyborg, and some very fine blog posts have been written and discussed. This week we do our final set of readings, and our final course activity. By the end of the week you should have developed your thinking about the relationship of posthumanism and pedagogy, and proposed or found an example of something you consider to be a “posthuman pedagogy”. Please comment on the task page once you have something you’d like to share with the group.

This week, if you haven’t already, please get in touch with your tutor to discuss your final assignment topic and form. Weeks 11 and 12 are assignment preparation weeks, so you will want to know going into them what your topic and planned format will be. A reminder that you can (and we encourage you to) nominate up to three of your own assessment criteria, and you should run these past your tutor as well. All the information about the final assignment is here and in your course guide.

You may also want to begin thinking about your lifestream submission – this is due on Sunday 11 December. The last item in the lifestream should be a 500 word summary, posted in your blog. We would like you to submit your lifestream in WebCT for the sake of formality – you just need to provide a text copy of your final summary, and link to the lifestream, in the appropriate assignment space.

As ever, Siân, Jeremy and I wish you a great week!

The list of ethnographies is here – add a comment with a link to your own when you’re ready to share it.

Try to make sure to leave some time this week for engaging with others’ work, and commenting on it as well.

Have a great week!

There are no “rules” as such, but a few suggestions. One is that while you aren’t required to go completely text free, we suggest that you try to push the boundaries of this for yourself. Make us think about issues of text, image and representation as you use your artefact to explore the block’s themes. This week is all about experimentation, so go for it.

The second is that you want your artefact to appear in your lifestream, and for us to have somewhere to discuss it, so if you aren’t using a web-based tool with an RSS feed, you’ll probably want to put your artefact in a post in your blog. That has the advantage of having an inbuilt place for comments as well.

Try to leave yourself time to engage in discussion about your own and other people’s artefacts. In addition to the core readings, some of the secondary readings for weeks 3 and 4 may be helpful as you come to discuss the artefacts – especially Rose and Spalter & van Dam.

Once you’ve posted your artefact, please post a comment here to give us a link to it, and tell us (if it isn’t obvious) where you want comments.

Finally, just a heads up that next week (Week 5), your tutor will be emailing you individually with some mid-point formative feedback on your lifestream. The purpose of this is to let you know how we think your lifestream is so far meeting the assessment criteria for the assignment (which are described in detail in your handbook).

That’s all for now – have fun this week!

As you probably know, Delicious changed hands last week, and the default lifestream feed for the site is no longer working.

I’ve solved this for my lifestream in the following way (full instructions for customising the new delicious feeds are at http://www.delicious.com/help/feeds ):

Go to your blog dashboard and to the lifestream section. Click “Generic” to add a new basic RSS feed.

Enter the feed like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/username/tag (replace “username” with your Delicious username, and “tag” with whatever tag you want to restrict your bookmarks to. The tag restriction is optional).

Change the title of the feed to something like “New Delicious” or whatever you like.

If you want to keep the Delicious icon, you can use the one at http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/plugins/lifestream/extensions/delicious/icon.png

This will only get you the last 10 bookmarks by default, so you may want to keep your old delicious feed as well.

Comment here if you have any problems or questions!

Jen

The lifestreams are really starting to pick up steam now, fed by the excellent tweets and blog posts from the past two weeks and your other content that is either rushing or trickling in. Your tutor will be giving you some mid-way lifestream feedback in week 5, but feel free to get in touch with us before that if you have any questions about how it’s going.

So, on to the activities, readings and themes for the next fortnight. From today, we shift focus from popular cyberculture to one aspect of its emergence in education: multimodality, visuality and other ‘new literacies’. The readings for this week and next will explore some of these themes as the course in general takes a ‘visual turn’. We’ll be looking at the theory and at the same time everyone will have a chance to represent their own ideas visually, through construction of a visual artefact for the end of next week.

Discussion this week is going to be via Skype text chat. This will be held on Wednesday 5th October, 8pm (BST), and will last about an hour. Please make your tutors Skype contacts before the event:

sianbayne1
jross28
j_k_knox

We will focus on the core readings for this chat session: Bayne, Kress and Thomas et al. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on these!

Please also continue to tweet course-related material to #ededc, which is becoming a really lively stream of course conversation. And remember you can access all the blog postings here if you want to see what others are writing about in longer form.

Have a great week.

1. Logging in: you may have noticed at the start of the course that the ‘login’ links on your own blogs weren’t working properly – they should be now. So if you are not already logged in via EASE when you arrive at the site, you now have the choice of logging in via the main course page (ie: this page) or from your own blog’s “login” link. Let me know if you have any issues with logging in.

2. Spam: if you were getting lots of spam comments on your blog up til yesterday, this should now reduce significantly – apologies for any inconvenience.

3. Time zones: Austin noticed that the time stamps on comments were an hour out from Edinburgh time – I’ve adjusted this on the main blog, but if you want to change the time zone on your own blog (to whatever you like!), you can do this in the “Settings” on your dashboard.

4. Duplicate lifestreams: If your blog has two lifestream pages, you can delete one of these. KEEP the one that is called “My Lifestream” (which organises content by date) and DELETE the one that is just called “Lifestream”.

5. Tags: you might notice on the home page of the site that there is a section in the righthand column called “Tags” – these are keywords pulled from all posts across the site. So, if you write a new blog post, consider adding a few keywords in the “Post Tags” box beside the main blog window, and these will be added to the tag cloud for the site.

Happy tweeting, blogging and lifestreaming!

Jen
photo credit: indigo_girl