Lifestream 5
I look at my lifestream and see a sea of blue buttons signifying the resources I diigoed on the web. Among them float orange dots and occasionally a more pictorial and so more picturesque youtube video. They are like sequins or gems among the dominant bookmarking activity. There were more of them last week – I really appreciated the recent exercise in creating a visual artefact as it lured me out of my online den and into others’ spaces where I engaged in interaction with the colleagues. That had a refreshing effect on me and on my perception of the course activity in particular. Not only did it diversify the contents of my lifestream but also created a sort of belonging and collectivism as if it validated my presence as a community member. Spurred on by this, I abandoned for a moment my solitary habits of bookmarking and turned to more social tweeting and again engaged in mini exchanges there. Behaviouristic as it might be on the surface, this action-reaction chain in which what you tweet might be fed back to you in a comment or response from another user (human), anchors you in sociality, integrates you into a bigger fabric of connections. Suddenly you become a little dot (sometimes even a gem perhaps) in the überlifestream of the web. You become a node in the network from George Siemens’ and Stehen Downes’ connectivism (diigoed on a few occasions last week too).
A Network of Gems