Focus was on making connections between cyberculture and visual literacies. A Skype text chat was organised during Week 3 to discuss the effects these have on educational thinking and practice.  “Skype, however, is banned in the UAE and its website, www.skype.com, is blocked by authorities.” (Gulf News). It is a very strange phenomenon that although Skype is banned, this media is actually used in IT courses in colleges. As I already had an account I added Sian, Jen and Jeremy to my contact list, having every intention of taking part but 11pm my time was too late, especially as I had a very early start in the morning. I found I couldn’t stay awake.

The culmination of readings is presentation of a visual artefact. In preparation I searched for images and tried saving them in my Flickr account and bookmarked interesting sites.  However, my Lifestream is showing a number of errors

which are caused by my Flickr and Delicious accounts.  I made an attempt at trying to fix them but was unsuccessful.  Workload is heavy at the moment, I now spend 5 hours a day driving, and as there’s no Internet at the schools I have to work when I get home.  This gives me a limited number of hours in which to study so I can’t spend too much time on fixing problems like this.

I thought about using Prezi for my visual artefact.  My idea was to use the 10 tentacles (arms?) of a squid relating to  cyberculture, communication,AI, VR, cyberpunk, computers, education, medicine, government control and man vs machine. The squid was a metaphor for the many uses of technology and how, because of the slipperiness of the tentacles, it could all quite easily slip out of our grasp. Unfortunately, we were having problems with Internet access in this part of the world (which may have been due to storms) but trying to load the application proved too time-consuming.  This was also true of Glogster and YouTube (though there was an added problem with YouTube which I’ve already mentioned).   My theme changed each time to fit the media.  I eventually tried Tumblr and had to limit the number of images.   Even so I had to make several attempts before completing the task. To be able to say more, but use less, I made use of the mandala and tree of life pics.

My visual artefact didn’t depict Thomas’s transliteracy – no sound or text,  I only made use of image.  Nor was I able to incorporate Bayne’s ‘uncanny’ or ‘ghostliness’ which lends itself to imagery.  My visual aretefact wasn’t what I envisaged in my head but as Kress states, “… the emphasis in multimodal work is very much on the materiality of the resources for representation”.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

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.