Into the field – week 5

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Siân Bayne

The visual artefacts/artifacts are all up now, and they’re looking really good – so please do continue to drop by them and make some commentary when you can. I think collectively they do a great job both of thinking with the visual in terms of academic ‘writing’, and providing some takes on our key cyberculture themes which are both critical and very personal. Great job –  as Kevin said on Twitter, the bar was set pretty high on this activity!

We’re approaching the mid-way point of the course, so at some point over this week you’ll be receiving (by email) some feedback on your lifestream from your tutor – just to give a sense of how things are looking for the final mark on this part of the assessment.

We are moving on this week, however, to consider virtual communities – whether they exist, how they might be defined and how we might research them. The plan is to take some time over this week to brainstorm ideas for communities which might be investigated for the ‘micro-ethnography’, and to discuss possible ways of presenting the ethnographies (again, this should be in some kind of digital form). There’s a discussion forum up now in the MSc Hub at:

http://www.elearning.education.ed.ac.uk/groups/e-learning-and-digital-cultures-2011-849141607/forum/

which we can use to discuss and share ideas. This is also the place to discuss ethical issues – we have some good expertise on the course relating to research ethics (thanks Austin) so if you’re stuck with any of the ethical aspects of your chosen ethnography, please do discuss it with the group!

If you’re looking for some extra inspiration, as well as discussing with the group you could take a look at the ethnographies produces in previous instances of this course:

EDC 2010

EDC 2009

Given the quality of the visual artefacts, I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of this block’s work – best of luck with it, and see you on the discussion board in the Hub, and in the blogs.

 

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Week 4 Summary

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Steph Cronin

The week of the artefact. The theme I wished to present was clear from the outset…or so I thought. The film festival has made apparent that different people can love or hate the same film, find it entertaining or disturbing to watch and consider something meaningful or just regard it as existing without meaning. I initially intended to demonstrate the use of digital culture during an average day in my life and how there can be conflict within a digital culture; creating utopia or dystopia. Whilst I initially (and naively) considered these two states to be polar opposite I began to realise that in fact the distinction between utopia and dystopia was guided by application/purpose/acceptance of the digital technology and social context. A slideshow of how the worlds merge seemed an obvious medium for demonstrating this continuum. YouTube was an obvious place to present my artefact as it allowed audio/visual without distorting my artefact and provided an opportunity to practice uploading, at no cost, a product I have created for the mass market.
The artefacts created by the class were brilliant. The variety demonstrates my earlier reference to the way that people have exposure to the same event (in this case course content) but from it draw different conclusion and relate more with one aspect than another…I continued to do this in my commentary on some of the other artefacts though must investigate whether these comments can be fed to my otherwise hungry lifestream.

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Summary: Week 4

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Daniel Griffin

This week we’ve focused on the theme of digital literacies with a particular emphasis on the visual.  We have each explored some really stimulating ideas through the production of a visual artefact, and it has been interesting to notice how each of us interprets one anothers work differently (lifestream 14.10.2011 #1).  The title of my own artefact, We Are The Web, reflects my belief that while the Internet may be produced by people, in many ways it also is people.  It is live and interactive, and for those of us who live and work within it, it is becoming an extension of ourselves.  We are drawing ever closer into a symbiosis with technology, and while this can offer many conveniences, my fear is that we may be blinded by the benefits while ignoring the potential dangers (lifestream 11.10.2011 #6 – music video).

Siân has commented on my emphasis of “the implant and the prosthesis”, while Grace notes the discomfort shown in some of the images that I’ve selected to be part of the piece.  This was a very deliberate choice that I made when creating the image, because for me, our love affair with technology is something that we have forced upon ourselves.  It is an unnatural coupling and something that requires us to actively modify both ourselves and our behaviour if we are to reap the rewards.

To express such complex ideas visually is particularly challenging, especially when we consider the many influences affecting the way that we interpret images, combined with the fact that images must be seen in context if they are to be understood at all.  In order to better address these issues, I did some surfing and discovered amongst other resources, a brilliant presentation by Doug Belshaw entitled The Essential Elements Of Digital Literacies (lifestream 12.10.2011 #1) as well as some excellent and free online graphics tools (lifestream 12.10.2011 #2).  Visual literacy is without question an essential skill for todays learner, and definitely something that I’ve become more sensitive to during the course of the last week.

 

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Lifestream Week 4

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Austin Tate

“Digital Artifact – AI – Avatar Identity”
The week’s lifestream entries reflected the work that went into the production of the digital artifact for the Digital Cultures course at http://atate.org/ai/ai/ and related experimentation with non-player character (NPC) production via scripts in OpenSim. I use this to produce avatar clones in various outfits in a fantastical scene that might have elements of utopia in my eye. and that reflected a lot of my personal interests. The ghostly “avatar cloud” that appears in Second Life and OpenSim virtual worlds viewers as an avatar rezzes into its form was appealing to me as a “better” represent on of what it is to be an avatar… and I wanted to capture this strange and unsettling element as part of the artifact. I found suitable script and texture resources to recreate this both as a stand along object as as a partially rezzed, but never fully rezzing version on an avatar clone.

VW Cloud Avatar

VW Cloud Avatar

The Cyberchat between my two avatars equipped with MyCyberTwin chat bot via a web interface was interesting to observe. See http://atate.org/ai/ai/res/2011-10-09-chat-log-ai-and-be.txt. I was very surprised at how well they did with relatively little training, and no FAQ or tutorial sections in their repertoire.. which is possible with the technology provided. They seemed very civil. I tried to manually intervene a few times… but they seemed to chat on quite well, even changing the subject them,selves a couple of times.

IDEL11 in Second Life
The IDEL11 course moved some of its work and tutorials in Second life… which I am familiar with, so I was on home turf a bit there. I observed the other new users and their avatars to see how they got on, as part of my research and project work involves supporting new communities and simplifying the access experience for people collaborating using virtual worlds alongside other collaborative technologies.

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Visual artefact

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Grace Elliott

I was actually enjoying working on this task before my frustrations with technology set in.  The theme I initially chose was Good and Bad and even had a piece of music I thought would slot in nicely (Biffy Clyro’s ‘God and Satan’ ).   I’ll never know though because I’ve had to abandon this idea.

I received this message from Youtube, “Sorry for the interruption. We have been receiving a large volume of requests from your network. To continue with your YouTube experience, please enter the verification code below.”  Which I did but because of my IP address I’d be taken to an Arabic page.  I tried using Google Translate to find the ‘English’ link but wasn’t successful.  For anyone interested ‘English’ in Arabic is:

أنجل

After numerous attempts I gave up!  I then set to work using Tumblr but ran into difficulties there too.  This from my browser; “Safari can’t open the page “http://www.tumblr.com/help” because the server where this page is located isn’t responding.”  It was either that or, “The connection has timed out.”

My new theme is “Interconnectedness”.  I think it only fair to explain a few of my images.  The pic of the ‘tree of life’ and the ‘wheel of existence’ mandala are from my travels and are included as metaphors.   The Cyborg is from Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto:…   http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

I would love to be able to spend more time on this but it just isn’t possible.  The link to my visual artefact is here:

http://gfe8.tumblr.com/post/11468171594/interconnections

 

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Digital communication… or lack of

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Grace Elliott

This has been a week of problems with applications and Internet connection.  It’s part of life here that Internet connection can be intermittent.  Although I pay for higher bandwidth, the connection is extremely slow. Whenever I complain I’m told that everything is fine, there’s no problem. I do what I can offline so I can make the most of my time when I do get connected.  In fact, one of the reasons ICT was taken off the curriculum was because the infrastructure wasn’t in place and the majority of schools had no access.  Of those that did the service normally crashed due to inability to meet demand.  Lack of Internet access was just one of the challenges faced when implementing the ICT curriculum.

This recent problem I have was due to a storm.  We don’t get them often but they are very dramatic when they do occur.  Road or building work also seem to cause problems and then there are times when no explanation can be found.  There isn’t much we can do about this, other than be patient.

Knowing that anything I do in this part of the world takes twice as long as it would if I was at home, I thought I’d make an early start on gathering images for my digital artefact.  The plan was to store them in my Flickr account with the idea of using photostream.  And here I encountered my first problem.  Whilst waiting for the images to upload I prepared dinner, cooked it and ate it and still the ‘wheel’ was spinning. I abandoned the task with Flickr and gave Picasa a try. It didn’t prove to be any better.

My next problem was with Delicious. Although I tried updating my account I noticed that bookmarks made were not showing up in my Lifestream.  I spent some time trying to resolve the problem, unsuccessfuly.  In the meantime I reinstated my Diigo account. I need  to figure out how fix it.

I feel that my Lifestream is boring and lacking in content compared to those of my colleagues. Thought it may help if I added a couple of RSS feeds. One of the sites I chose was like a weed, it grew so quickly and crowded out any real content.  I quickly deleted it. I now know to be more selective.

So far I’ve tried Tumblr, Glogster and YouTube for my digital artefact but abandoned attempts when it took so long.  The only thing I have to show for time spent is my responses to the digital artefacts of my colleagues.  Now it’s Friday and I’m still having problems.  Insh’allah, I’ll be able to complete my task tomorrow.

 

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Visual artifact

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Kevin Shawn HUDSON

Androids in OZ

 

After reading the comments I thought it appropriate to provide a closer view of the elements I chose for my artifact:

Johnny 5 Artificial Intelligence Data Marvin
Johnny 5 A.I. DATA Marvin
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Lo and behold …

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Ania Rolińska

My visual artefact on the theme of dystopia and technology ….

YouTube Preview Image

A bit of background:

To paraphrase Lennon, my visual artefact is what happens while you’re busy planning something else.

The original idea was to be neutral -something that would combine dystopic and utopian views and possibly blur the dichotomy of the opposite outlooks in the vein of the rhisome theory (which really resonates with me). A very initial attempt can be seen as my ‘Virtual Mediation 2‘. My visual artefact was to be a follow-up on this idea but instead of pictures it was to make use of videos.

However, after spending a day trying to work out the video editing software I gave up and hence the rather pessimistic clip. It still needs tweaking – I could spend hours if not days syncing the audio tracks, captions and two videos, something I’d love to do but can’t afford at the moment.

So, there you are - what can I say – grim as it is, enjoy it!

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visual excellence!

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Siân Bayne

The visual artefacts that have come in so far are really great – remember to take a look and give some feedback, and also to try to get your own up over the next few days, if you haven’t already. They are all collected handily on the page:

All the visual artefacts in one place

so please do drop by and add to the discussion which is already growing around these excellent pieces of work!

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Week 4 Artifact: Worlds Divided

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Steph Cronin

Here is the link to my artifact:

I initially named the piece “Worlds Divided by Conscience” but feel the “Worlds Divided” is perhaps more appropriate. “…by conscience” was perhaps a more personal motivation.
Let me explain. Throughout this course, I find myself thinking back to a talk given by Robert Winston during the Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this year. He presented from his latest book titled ‘Bad Ideas’. What stayed with me from this presentation was that for every positive advancement in science people are able to use it for a negative. Arguably, utopia and dystopia are not worlds apart. However, the benefit of embracing science (or more specifically cyberculture!) should not be avoided because of fear of creating a negative action. Instead, judgement must be appplied. The rapid expansion and development of the cyberworld leaves little time for assessing the risk…so do the benefits justify the risk?
Here is a link to Robert Winston speaking on the same subject to the Guardian

I’d welcome any comments or suggestions for a title of what my artifact means to you.

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