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”.
