Week 2 – Getting started with Lifestream

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Grace Elliott

I definitely needed the answer to “What is a lifestream?”  This is all very new to me, I’ve had  an extremely slow start and have basically resorted to just adding the suggested feeds. I shall continue to experiment and hope that it wont take me too long to get to grips with it. I am so impressed with the lifestreams of my colleagues.  They have been so busy and their sites look fab whilst mine is uninteresting and looks like I’ve done very little work.

I’ve felt quite clumsy trying to set things up and it has been very time consuming.  I had a problem with Twitter but opening a new account resolved that.  It did mean, however, that I didn’t participate in tweeting about the film festival. There have been some feeds that I haven’t been able to successfully set up, such as Tumblr and YouTube.  I saw a couple of interesting articles whilst surfing and bookmarked them so I know that my delicious link works.

At the moment I don’t really have a clear idea of the shape my lifestream should take.  And knowing that this is open to public viewing makes me feel somewhat hesitant about what should and shouldn’t be shared.    I had misgivings about some of the content in my previous blog.  It probably isn’t very wise to be so candid about some situations.

 

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Welcome to Week 2!

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Jeremy Keith Knox

Week 1 has been very active ,and it is great to see the blogs and lifestreams starting to take shape – congratulations to everyone who’s been able to get their heads round the various course environments! The Synchtube screening was super, and the film festival twittorial has raised some insightful ideas and suggestions. It is fantastic to see people commenting on each others blogs, and it would be great to see this culture of discussion continue and grow as the weeks progress. For those who are still getting started with the course – don’t worry! there’s lots going on, but lots of help on hand as well. Be sure to contact your tutor if you want to discuss any aspect of the course or your participation.

This week we turn to two more film festival themes. From today until Wednesday we are looking at films and clips on the theme of ‘other worlds’.  From Thursday til Sunday, the theme is ‘being human’.  Join us on Thursday night at 8pm UK time for a short Synchtube tutorial if you are free – we will watch and discuss ‘World Builder‘ and ‘The Poetic Holodeck‘ together.

As for your lifestreams, once you’re confident that your initial feeds (posts, comments and twitter) are working as they should, try adding a new feed or two this week – Jen’s fantastic screencast will give some guidance, and you might also visit the pages of other course participants to get some ideas. Also, a reminder that you need to write a short lifestream summary in your blog each week – see page 10 of the course handbook for all the details.

Have a great week, everyone.

Ironman/Twitter update
Creative Commons License photo credit: Undertow851
Creative Commons License photo credit: Undertow851

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Promises and Threats

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Grace Elliott

Hand’s article relating to “Narratives of Promise and Threat’ certainly struck a chord with what is happening in the UAE at present. To ensure the sustainability of their society, great investment is being made in education.   A completely new Western curriculum is being introduced with English, Science and Maths classes being taught in English.  The promise of producing citizens with the necessary skills to  compete in an international marketplace also has the threat of ‘eroding national identities’.   “As educational development progresses, we will learn to embrace new ideas and develop new skills, but we will also remember that preserving and celebrating our culture and heritage are a vital and integral component to our future success.” ( Dr Mugheer Khamis Al Khaili)   Heritage and Culture is now included in the curriculum.

To move the curriculum forward licensed teachers have been recruited, the majority of whom are from America. Most fast-food restaurants are American and American movies are popular. There is an ambivalent attitude towards America and Americana.   The influence is noticeable and is of concern.

” [Culture] is so ubiquitous that it, as it were, seeps out of the superstructure and         comes to infiltrate, and then take over, the infrastructure itself. It comes to dominate both the economy and experience in everyday life (Lash and Lury 2007: 4).”

Hand also mentioned problems of control, circulation and exchange of information and states that “policing of digital information circulation is one of the fundamental forms of political influence and power in the modem world.” The free flowing information of the Web has not escaped state control. Censorship in the form of site blocking and content filtering is common. This makes teaching not impossible but more difficult.  Magazines, books and films are also censored. I find this extremely frustrating.  I had problems accessing Edinburgh University’s vle when I first started the MSc E-learning course.  It isn’t blocked now.  Film censorship is also annoying, often leading to the film making little sense to the viewer.

There is a definite divide of ‘digital information haves and have-nots’.  The infrastructure is being put in place so that most will have access to the Internet but the more remote areas will have to wait a little longer.

The film Bendito machine (Episode 3 – Obey His Commnands) had a definite religious link.  It could have been Moses on Mt Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments or it could have been Prophet Muhammad on Mt Hira receiving revelations of the Qu’ran. What it highlighted was a human tendency to adopt (follow/worship) something new and to just as easily discard when something assumed to be ‘better’ comes along. The film made good use of the colours red and black, which  they are known to represent power.  Although the film eXistenZ  was about a gamer I made a creator and creation connection.   What linked the reading and films for me was ‘power and control’.  Humans are afraid of losing power and control.

 

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Lifestream 1

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Ania Rolińska

Wordle: W1S

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Moveo ergo sum

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Ania Rolińska

I am a human and as such I am rational, autonomous and have free-will, right? Yet, why do I so often tremble, unsure of myself and world around me? Why do I feel I am on a constant quest, unable to settle down, unable to be ‘one’, but undergoing transformation and fragmentation, me being an echo of past selfs and a sum of a number of present selfs and would-be selfs?

***

Among different threats related to the globally rising prevalence of digital technologies, Hand lists ‘liquefaction’ of traditional institutions and practices. The humanistic stability of the self could also be subject to this process. Bauman (2000) pointed at  uncertainty as pervasive characteristics of liquid modernity. He illustrates this further by referring to notions of chaos, fluidity and ambivalence and describes a liquid modern man as a nomad or a tourist, responsible for weaving his life himself. Being in  perpetual motion and executing the freedom of one’s own making have become a mode of being.

The collapse of stability and the never-ending changes a human undergoes through the course of their life seem to be at the forefront of posthumanism (based only on preliminary reading), which also conceives the posthuman as an ‘emergent ontology’, thus emphasising the importance of becoming, hosting multiple identities and perceiving the world from a number of perspectives.

Again rapid digitisation and the transformation of culture into digital culture is possibly instrumental in this process of posthumanisation of a human(Hand 2008) or even their cyborgisation.

Is this liquefaction liberating or threatening in regard to our agency and the choices we make, our free will? If none of the universal truths can be trusted any more in the times of supercomplexity and if reality is to be observed through a number of perspectives, perhaps the notions of agency and ‘free will’ lose their validity, especially when multiple identities are at stake? It appears a whole new mindset is needed …

 

Liquid Man

Pic by Chris Wardle-Cousins.

 

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Summary: Week 1

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Daniel Griffin

Not too many tweets for the first week so I will have to fill in the gaps a bit…

We’ve been discussing two films this week over twitter and in a synchtube session based loosely on the subject of digital culture.  But interestingly it seems that the dominant theme has been the idea of a digital space being a kind of alternate reality or other place that we go to.  The same is true of the many tweeted film nominations being suggested.  So do people think of digital culture as somehow unreal, or perhaps even escapist?  I think there is definitely an element of other-worldliness to the way in which we interact digitally, but for me at least, it’s not about the decorations in the room, but the people at the party and what they are saying to one another.  This motivated me to nominate a sample of the The Visions of Students Today project for our film festival (lifestream: 23.09.2011 #2).  Anything that Mike Wesch and his students produce is always fascinating, but VOST2011 seems like it will be particularly appropriate to this course, given the medium of sharing and the collaboration that is taking place.  From my personal perspective, a culture is nothing if it is not shared; indeed it can not even exist without some forms of interaction.  Experiencing something virtual on ones own is not a cultural event, but the sharing of that experience,  synchronously or asynchronously, in real time or after the fact is what makes it important.

 

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Deus ex Machina

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Ania Rolińska

eXistenZ is advertised as a statement about how humans and the surrounding technologies interact with each other and the most common interaction pattern seems to be that of constant blurring and penetration, including ‘surgical penetration’ in the form of a ‘bio-port’.

 

These bio-ports are quite interesting in a sense that they are linked to the spine via a sort of a umbilical cord, which is a metaphor in itself referring to the relationship between a mother and the foetus (physical interdependence, nourishment) and then a child throughout his/her life (more emotional). The relationships between the mother and the child, especially a grown-up one are complex, from unconditional love to control , jealousy, hatred. In this intimate relationship between the gamer and the tech, who assumes the position of the mother (nurturer but maybe a controller) and who that of the child (the nurtured, the controlled, possibly the rebel)? Allegra being the game designer could be perceived as a mother at first but quickly the roles seem to revert as the natural and machinic spheres start to blur to an extent that the characters cannot distinguish between the actual and virtual reality, and their agency gets affected (this is a big question for me this week, the influence of the tech on humans’ free will). So, the blurring is also visible in how the game characters surface more strongly in the main characters and persist in taking over their actual selfs (interesting links to Gee’s theory of self in gaming – it seems to me that the projected self being the bridge between the virtual and actual selves undergoes rapid shrinking in eXistenZ and is thrown into non-existence?) So for example, Pikul starts abusing and killing people. Interestingly enough, he resists the temptation of killing Allegra but it is made clear that the relationship has been built around trust. Is it the old human trust that prevents Pikul from pulling the trigger of the organic gun when for fun he pointed it at the Demoness of Armageddon?

 

The sequence in the restaurant is interesting from the point of view of nature vs tech. The organic bones (mind you the ‘two-headed friend’ cannot be 100% natural, it’s another example of cross-contamination between nature and tech) are assembled very naturally into an organic gun. Is that dystopic, in a sense that tech corrupts nature? Or rather utopian – after all the tech, physically at least, assumes the organic, natural form. Does it become sacred? Does it become god as the previous film (and the title of the film, Isten meaning ‘god’ in Hungarian) would indicate?

 

Deus ex Machina

Pic by ekud on www.deviantart.com

 

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Cyberculture: Bell

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Daniel Griffin

In my summary this week I note that we seemed to be focusing on the unreality of cyberspace, and on how it is a type of shared fantasy world in which our connections are taking place.  The chapter in this weeks reading from David Bells Introduction to Cybercultures illustrates these interactions through different types of story.  Since I’ve just started a new job, I’m picking out his section on Work Stories as the subject of this post.

Bell notes Andrew Ross’ observation that many ‘people work in cyberspace or work to make cyberspace possible.  It is not simply a medium for free expression and wealth accumulation; it is a labor-intensive workplace’, (Ross, 1998, quoted in Bell, 2001).  My first reaction to this was an offhand and idealistic rejection.  I considered the ease to produce and mash up media and the many thousands of sites which enable sharing of content; the supposed fact that anyone can freely become a web designer, developer or multimedia author.  But continued reading reminded me that despite the ubiquity of such enabling tools, the free time and skills required to use them come at a premium.  Freedom of expression is a luxury when your time is better spent feeding your family.  Let us not forget that the real winners of such enabling tools are those who live comfortable first world lives.  For many other users, the connection to the world wide web (if it exists at all!) is an enabler of a different kind, namely access to international labor markets.  Services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which provides crowdsourced, on demand, low paid digital workers to western businesses, are becoming increasingly popular and more visible online.  Bell goes on to quote Luke (1999) as an illustration of this point, telling us that  “thousands of poor women in Jamaica, Mauritius or the Philippines [work] in low-paid, tedious data entry or word-processing jobs for firms in London, Paris or San Diego”.  When viewed in this light, cyberspace becomes a much darker place and very different to the vision promoted by the free libre open source movement or by remix culture.  But the fact remains that cyberspace is simultaneously created by both the dark and the light forces, and perhaps in that sense it accurately mirrors our physical reality more than we realise.

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Reconnection

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Daniel Griffin

Suffering from a sense of disconnection is one thing but actually being out of the digital loop is proving to be very awkward.  As you may know, I’ve just moved to Dublin where I have only a few contacts, all of whom live some distance away.  But the geographical disconnect hasn’t really bothered me too much because, until now at least, working freelance and from my home office, I have often gone days with my only communications being wrapped up in network protocols.  So to be without a personal internet connection has been surprisingly frustrating.  I’m aware that my class mates are actively pushing their lifestreams up onto the web but I haven’t been able to do the same.  Ok so that’s sorted out now and I have a mobile broadband dongle thingie, flakey as it is.  But the downtime has given me pause for thought.  With so much of our social, business, political and practical interactions moving into the digital realm, to be disconnected for any length of time, or Tim help us, permanently, is becoming nothing short of cultural exclusion.  Kevin raises a similar point in relation to the Hand chapter from this weeks reading, check it out.  Plus I’ve just finished the Bell chapter and find echos of the same theme there… its interesting and important that we should preface the module with these ideas, because it would be all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking “always on” means “everyone always on”.

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Lifestream Week 1

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Austin Tate
My Lifestream was set up on Monday 19th September 2011, and allowed to import activity in a number of feeds backdated to 1st September, so there were quite a few initial records. I blog and tweet as myself and as my virtual words avatar “Ai Austin”, often for very different purposes and roles, so I included feeds from both “characters”.  As well as the default EDC11 WordPress entries, my initial feeds include:
  1. Twitter feeds
  2. Blog entry feeds on the Drupal-based OpenVCE.net – the Open Virtual Collaboration Environment – which I use for my technical blogging for much of my research on collaboration, virtual worlds and intelligent systems
  3. Various MSc in e-Learning blog posting and comment feeds on the Holyrood Park Hub and Holyrood Park Blogs
  4. WallWisher Wall feeds
My blog entries from week 0 on the Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning (IDEL11) and the Understanding Learning in the Online Environment (ULOE11) were tidied up a little to establish better categories and tags. I made initial entries in my EDC11 WordPress blog and again modified them a little and added tags to improve the way they present to others.  I altered the appearance of my EDC11 blog, and completed the “About” page under a header tab.  I added a custom tab for experiments on a “Life Wall” for experiments I have started to complement the dynamic Lifestream. I added custom widgets to the right side to give a personal tag cloud, a short “message of the day” I can easily edit to give information directly on my blog front page, and a “search my blog” box.

It was interesting to look over the feeds sorted by each day, and via the useful icons types and realise that there were already a number of different types of interaction I make on the Internet and with the communities I work with. Educational technology is figuring a lot in the last few weeks, as is work on OpenSim.
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