All the EDC blog posts

There are still connections in this week’s lifestream with the dystopian/utopian theme exemplified by the juxtaposition of Future Shock which clearly shows that techno-paranoia is not a recent phenomena and Nancy Messieh blog post “How our online connectivity is making us better human beings” which adopts a comfortingly utopian view.

I was pleased with the way my visual artefact turned out this week, the positive feedback from tutors and other participants on the course was a real motivator! To begin with I chose to publish my artefact on Flickr because it provided a better quality view of the image but comments were closed to those who didn’t have a Flickr account so I included a link in my blog too. Working on my visual artefact in tandem with trying to make sense of Sian’s uncanny pedagogies was a mutually supportive activity.

I began to explore the differences between text and visual modalities (Kress, 2005 ) in my blog post of 12th October. I became interested in how ambiguity was conveyed in these different modalities as this seemed to highlight the differences between reading a textual and visual text. It was clear from the comments on all the visual artefact submissions that we each read the same artefact quite differently. I was also struck by the way each visual artefact engaged the emotions. An interesting question was raised about the status of a text made visual e.g. a wordcloud. If we are inviting the audience to read it as an image does the source of the text need to be cited? Does a poem in the shape of an image need to acknowledge the image source if the intention is that it is read as a text.

This week I noticed an interesting paper (Bell, 2011) critiquing Siemens’ connectivism as a theory of learning. Although the theory of connectivism is widely cited and discussed in the blogosphere their are few scholarly publications about it so I was interested to know more. Using four scenarios of learning in a digital age the author illustrates that a variety of theories may be brought to bear for explanatory purposes concluding that connectivism fails to contribute anything further. Rather connectivism is seen as relevant to practitioners in developing their personal theories of learning in a networked environment that includes non-human appliances.
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Bell, F. (2011) Connectivism Its place in Theory Informed Research and Innovation. IRODL 12(3)
Kress, G (2005) Gains and losses: new forms of texts, knowledge and learning. Computers and Composition. 22(1), 5-22.

“If I’m not me… who the hell am I?”

How can information be disconnected from the body?  The message is tied to the medium…  the medium might change, but you can’t have one without the other.  The message must be conveyed by something… Does this tie into the idea of the posthuman?  That we are something beyond human… that our “message” has become more important than our “medium”… that our intellect, our consciousness can be transposed and become apart from our bodies?

If we break down the human consciousness into streams of information, then what does it mean to be a human? Are we the sum of our parts, or can we replace those parts without losing “ourselves?”  If we jack into the system and add new memories as in the Total Recall clip above, how will we know where we end and the new begins?

If we can transfer our consciousness into something beyond our bodies, what happens when the system fails?  If the machine breaks, do we die?  Does death then become akin to complete data loss, illness to corrupt files?  If the data is recovered, are we “reborn?”  Would we be aware of the “after-death” experience?  Will new religions emerge to try to explain what happens when the power goes out?

Or maybe we are too focused on our own lives, on the importance we have given to our own selves that we fail to see beyond our limited place in the world…  Most of us have, as Hayles (1999) puts it, an autopoietic view,  where “we do not see a world “out there” that exists apart from us.”  Is it our own egos then that is spurring our desire to move beyond the traditional human experience, to become something more, to be post human?

Or are we really all just fooling ourselves into thinking we understand our own importance in the grand scheme of things…

This week three distinct thought threads emerge in my life stream. Firstly there are still some thought echos around the week 1&2 readings. I particularly enjoyed Hand’s metaphorical language, I had actually thought about using some of his metaphors as possible starting points for the visual artefact. Hand’s dystopian view of our constant immersion in the digital through data streams, media broadcasts etc. led me to seek comfort in Scott Belsky’s advice for reclaiming our sacred creative thinking spaces in his blog post “What ever happened to downtime?”

My second project of the week was to start to think about the visual artefact task. I found the crowd sourced ‘Draw me a sheep’ artefact particularly appealing, it sparked a mental search into how I might incorporate this idea into my visual artefact task. It also raised questions for me around authorship. Even though each sheep artists was an author, clearly the sum was greater than its parts so perhaps authorship here is multi-layered and interconnected as each artisit is influenced by others.

Another avenue of thought was kindled by some short film clips made to mark Marshall McLuhan‘s centenary. In one clip a digital image is created using a text from a typewriter. (This did rather remind me of the early computer art where images were generated out of 0′s and 1′s!) However I suspect the creator was questioning McLuhan’s famous ‘The medium is the message’ slogan as the typewriter medium was producing an unexpected and rather out of character communication.

Thirdly I’m was seeking to make links between a JISC digital literacies workshop I attended and the EDC course. This workshop is the source of the tweets which mainly capture questions that occurred to me at the time. I’m not sure that I made any specific connections with the course other than in general digital culture implies new literacies and understanding these may help reveal new possibilities or challenges for education. Interestingly the boundary less nature of the life stream enabled items originating in a work context to intermingle seamlessly with course related items, simply by adding a tag two independent flows could be merged into one. Bringing these contxts together in this way may open the possibility of making interesting new links and sparking new ideas. Taking this further, I wonder how re-tagging might be used to capture meaning making with objects in collections of rss feeds.

This weeks lifestream collection uses mainly diigo sources but includes a blog post and a single tweet. I’m clearly going to have to join in with the groups tweets a little more if I am going to fulfil my aim of being more active than in IDEL. The blog post picks up the distopia/utopia theme that we explored in the film festival sessions. This was mainly sparked by an article offering an explanation for the polarisation of views and the lack of middle ground with respect to visions of the future with digital technologies. Sian added an interesting comment that offered another perspective which caused me to revisit the ideas put forward in the article.

The rest of my life stream seems to branch into many disparate areas. I think the reason for this is that I am still trying to clarify for myself what constitutes digital culture and what the implications for education might be. My collection includes a variety of media. This video about contemporary creative online culture gives examples of how image or video memes are created then propagated around the internet. Memes may be thought of as units of culture whether they be tangible objects of contemporary art as illustrated in the video or less tangible items such as ideas. Whatever their nature the internet provides a medium through which memes can propagate and transform with great rapidity. Arguably the open nature of this course also offers the opportunity for local ‘idea memes’ to emerge, be remixed and propagated around the group . It would be interesting to analyse the course blogs and lifestreams to see to what extend this is actually happening or not.

My interest this week was also captured by the work of a group of artists that seek to relocate digital artefacts from the virtual into the real world space thereby drawing attention to the differences in norms of interaction in these two different locations. For example this performance uses computer play-worlds as a means of calling attention to the changing ways people deal with privacy and identity in the public sphere.

Looking back over my life stream this week I am acutely aware that it is prompting questions such as why did I capture this, why was it significant/interesting and are there any patterns and connections between the various items. Sometimes the connections are strong and sometimes less so. This week it seems as though I have several thought threads in progress at the same time.

Setting up my lifestream at the beginning of the course seemed to go pretty smoothly. I am a regular user of Diigo the social bookmarking tool, so that was my first choice for a stream to include. I like the richness of metadata that you can attach to a Diigo bookmark although I sometimes skimp on descriptions, and highlights. I resolved to make better use of those features in this course as I’m well aware of the old computer programming adage – “garbage in, garbage out!”.

I tweet from time to time, mainly in connection with conferences or events. Twitter useful for noting down a question that I want to follow up on later or for sharing and harvesting links but it is a fast moving stream and if items aren’t plucked from the ‘flow’ and stored elsewhere then I find that they are lost in the ‘froth’. I noted that there was quite a lively twitter stream with IDEL so I resolved to try and participate more in this course and included a feed from Twitter as well. I also wanted to try out mobile Flickr uploads so included that in my lifestream too. The lifestream seemed to me to be offering an opportunity to try out new technologies so I responded to Jen’s recommendation and set up a Tumblr account and tagged a talk by Maria Anderson.

In ‘Where’s the “learn this” button?’ Maria speaks about the sheer volume of information that bombards us all the time and the fact that it rushes past us without really giving us a chance to think about it let alone learn anything from it. Her proposal is for adding a learning layer to the internet that would enable us to not just note down questions and answers around a source of interest but also have these items pushed back to us for review and reflection. The lifestream on this course seems to be trying to achieve something similar, by funnelling the flow of sources that have caught our interest, including notes and tags, back into our blogs we can revisit and reflect on them. Perhaps this lfestream will help me to ‘drink’ from the hydrant of internet information without drowning.

I was enthusiastic to make and early start with the course and my lifestream as I knew that in a few weeks time things would get busy at work and finding time for the course would be more difficult. I began to establish my lifesteam by making collections of examples of digital culture, in order to clarify in my mind exactly what is meant by the term. I also looked for broad connections to education. Even before the course officially started I was drawn to Leetaru’s (2011) article about Culturomics and fascinated at what new insights could be extracted from digital archives of news stories. “Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events.” It seems a small step from there to advising about what to learn in order to function in the world that is just around the corner. I wonder what predictions could be made from analysis of our lifestreams amassed as a result of this course – both individually and collectively? What future prediction/guidance could be made available for individuals about their future learning? Interesting stuff indeed!
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Leetaru, K.H., (2011) Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large–scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3663/3040

Welcome all to week 12, our final week of the course. Some fantastic ideas for the final assignments have been coming through, and we’re really looking forward to seeing the final products. It’s been an excellent semester and, though it’s not quite over yet, we really are on the home run now.

A couple of reminders about assignments and dates:

1. The lifestream is due this Sunday – 11^th – by midnight. Jen has prepared a screencast to help you edit it and prepare it for submission. And remember that detailed instructions for submitting the lifestream are all available too.

2. The assignment is due by Sunday 8th January, midnight. The final assignment page tells you what to do – you’ll need to indicate the location of the assignment in the WebCT space, but the assignment itself should be all-digital as you know.

We can keep up the Twitter chat over Christmas and beyond, and there’s the EDC Hub group discussion space which might also be a good place for support. Remember you can contact your tutors over the next week if you want to continue to discuss your assignment ideas and assessment criteria one-to-one.

So – have a good final week, and best of luck with the final stages – it’s been a real pleasure.