It took a little bit of tweaking but I’m now happy to report that the feeds in my Lifestream are working. It does feel good to be able to bookmark sites, save interesting quotes, videos and images.
Our focus this block is on posthumanities. Although I had read Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ a while back, it definitely demanded more than a skim read. I found a couple of videos of lectures by Haraway that helped give me a better understanding and saved the videos to my YouTube account. I liked a few quotes and saved them to Tumblr. One in particular struck me, “To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable.” The reason this struck a chord is because there is a drive over here at present to ‘feminize‘ the Cycle 1 schools. It is hoped that eventually all teaching posts will be filled by locals, at present they are filled mostly by expats. Unfortunately, the teaching profession is not seen as desirable by males. However, this being a patriarchal society, it is they who have the power to give or withdraw consent to female workers. I think this is a topic that can be further explored in a blog.
I am still a little perplexed with the form my Lifestream has taken and wonder if an ‘onlooker’ can make sense of it. Should I be matching the content with the weekly topics, giving a brief explanation? Should I be trying out more applications? I have yet to try out my Vimeo account, it was opened when I was having problems with YouTube. And if I had to do a Lifestream again, how differently would I do it? Thoughts to ponder.
Excellent news on the lifestream Grace! Its looking great, and the tweaking has certainly paid off.
I think you would be right to match the content of the lifestream with the weekly topics. So, for example, this week you might want to include your explorations and research into posthumanism. The You Tube and Tumblr additions from last week are fantastic in this respect. As for providing an explanation for including a particular lifestream addition, this would ideally be done in your Weekly Lifestream summary. Remember that ‘rather than reflecting directly on the course content, the purpose of these weekly postings is to synthesise and review the content of your lifestream. It is expected that each will contain references to the links, tweets, blog posts and any other content from that week’ (from the course handbook).
As for more lifestream feeds, as long as you are happy and comfortable with the ones you have, then you should definitely experiment with some others. It sounds like you have just got a few working recently, so make sure they are working as you’d like them to. Vimeo is indeed a good feed for videos, and you might want to also try ‘Library Thing’ for books.
‘And if I had to do a Lifestream again, how differently would I do it?’. Superb question! I would definitely ponder that one, and remember it when your final lifestream summary comes around at the end of week 12…