Daniel's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog » Eben Moglen http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/danielg part of the MSc in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:22:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 Summary: Week 6 http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/danielg/2011/10/29/summary-week-6/ http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/danielg/2011/10/29/summary-week-6/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:15:22 +0000 Daniel Griffin http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/danielg/?p=3361 Its hard to believe that we are already half way through the term.  The life stream is a great way to review my journey through the course content and I really have the feeling that the content I’m pushing into it is becoming more focused each week.  This week I continued my arrival story into the Diaspora network.  In last weeks post I speculated that the arrival into a social network is more about making connections than something as simple as account creation, and I’ve definitely made some very interesting connections thus far.  Of course my interactions are filtered by the hashtags that I’m following, and no doubt there exist other groups who follow different ideas within the overall Diaspora network.  Indeed, since each user chooses to follow their own personal set of hastags, each belongs to an overlapping set of interest groups.  But I still get the feeling that there is a common shared identity amongst Diaspora members, an identity characterised by politically and socially motivated (lifestream 26.10.11 #4), technically literate and (from my perspective at least), interesting people.  The excellent quote in Bardzell & Odom (lifestream 24.10.11 #5) reminded me that if one member of a group likes film trivia while another prefers astronomy, any sharing that takes place between them is more meaningful that the actual content being shared.

As an aside to my own arrival story, I wanted to get a picture of Diasporas own arrival story (ie its inception) for use in my ethnography.  The motivation to build the network followed Eben Moglens excellent Freedom in the Cloud lecture (lifestream #2, 21.10.11), something that also affected me very deeply on my first viewing.  I also collected some other videos (lifestream #2, 21.10.11) on this subject as well as one interesting competitor.

Immersing myself in technical subjects and conversing with technical Diaspora members prompted me to do a little investigation of the software underlying the technology.  This introduced me to Collaboration Graphs and the game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (lifestream 24.10.11 #2) which reminds us that the real power of social networks and graph databases is the uncovering of connections we never imagined existing before.

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