Nov
7
Week 7: Some breathing space….
November 7, 2011 | 4 Comments
This week I was in the relaxed position of having posted my ethnography, partly because I misread the timetable and partly because I knew I wouldn’t have time to do much later on in the week. This meant that I could spend the week looking at others’ ethnographies and commenting, but also keeping an eye on anything relevant to my own ethnography. I added LibraryThing to my lifestream, although at the moment I’ve only added a few books that I have just/am currently reading so they’re not really relevant to the course, but it’s interesting to see how it could be used as a kind of community of readers. Previously I have used reading apps on Facebook as a way of recording and recommending reading to friends, but I will need to investigate the advantages of using LibraryThing further in academic terms as well as personal. I’m thinking about my blog and lifestream in the long-term as my line manager has asked that I investigate if it is possible to export content that I’ve generated during this course and extend it to become a regular blog that can be linked to our Learning and Teaching Centre site at Glasgow. The idea would be for me to carry on blogging and lifestreaming on issues to do with my job as an effective learning adviser, and also on e-learning issues.
There was interesting discussion this week surrounding our posted ethnographies. I found it particularly interesting, the way in which members of the course had chosen a variety of ways to present their ‘findings’, with, fittingly for the course, a fair amount of visual content as well as textual. It was also interesting, given the debate within the literature over what constitutes an (online) community (Rheingold 2000; Bell 2001 and Kozinets 2010), the variety of communities that my fellow course-members chose to study. As opposed to Sardar (as quoted in Bell) who dismisses being a member of or posting to an online usergroup as not really constituting an identity, which might be argued as a community indicator, I was more interested in Bell’s discussion of a community being defined by its own members’ beliefs that they are a community, and by the notion of the affective as defining a group. Certainly, in my own ethnography, I felt that there was a feeling of community among the members and this came across in the other ethnographies posted. I did fine Rheingold’s rather ‘downhome’ version of community anathema to my own but this may be cultural with Rheingold referencing the homestead history of the US. A common theme in the ethnographies and discussion was the distance, or lack of, between ethnographer and the community studied (Hine 2000; Gatson and Zweerink 2004). Among us all, I think, there was a certain discomfort in finding our place as ethnographer, but there was good general discussion and, I think, consensus, on the need for a self-reflexive approach.
One of the ethnographies, Daniel’s on Diaspora, got me thinking about the political aspects of the course, from Hand’s views on the dystopian/utopian uses of the internet for political aims to some the possibilities for activism online, particularly in light of the Occupy movement and the role of digital culture in what is sometimes called a corporatocracy.
With the assignment looming large, perhaps this would be an interesting way to go, however, I am struggling to think about how this might include a learning-related focus. Alongside using my lifestream this week to think about our new theme of posthumanities, I’m going to explore some possibilities for the assignment.
4 Comments so far
Carol, it’s fantastic that your blog and lifestream might live on after the course! It is really easy to export blog posts and import them into another WordPress blog, so that’s what I’d recommend. To replicate the lifestream, you’d need to host your own wordpress blog so you could install the plugin. Or you could try one of the services listed at http://lifestreamblog.com/create/ . Anyway, keep us posted about what you decide to do, and if you need any help.
Re the learning focus for the assignment – this could be quite broadly conceived – if you wanted to look at the occupy movement, for example, you could consider how the geographically based communities “learn” from one another, how information circulates, or something like that?