It’s been quite a journey, these past twelve weeks. I’ve been exposed to new ideas, concepts and applications.  I entered into Sian’s ‘uncanny’ space.

When applying for this course and reading the blurb, my first question was, “What is lifestreaming?” I hadn’t encountered it before so I came to it with no preconceived ideas, only with the information offered in the course guide. Likening it to ‘commonplacing‘ was very appealing.  Basically I’d be keeping an online scrapbook, a  record of places I’d visited, text and images I found interesting, giving a taste of my online activity at that moment. A snapshot of my life as an #ededc student.

I was ambivalent when I first began setting up feeds, it was both exciting and daunting. I felt unsure exactly what was required of me and apprehensive that anything I wrote was open to public viewing. Visiting the sites of my colleagues‘ unnerved me.  Theirs looked fantastic, showing creativity and experience, in comparison mine looked dull.  The practical side of organising feeds was problematic and much time was spent tweaking the feeds; or waiting while images were uploaded; or until Twitter became available; or indeed if Internet access became available. However, the content in my lifestream shows progress has been made. I admit to only feeling comfortable with lifestreaming towards the end of the course.

I did ponder on the purpose of the Lifestream. Would keeping a record of my online activities enable me to become a better learner? And if so, in what way?  Edwards (2010) says, “to learn, humans have to gather and experiment.”  An initial glance of my Lifestream shows an eclectic collection. Like a Magpie, I would gather and store anything interesting.  It may have been related to earlier, present, even future course content so it wasn’t always done in a linear way.  The RSS feed set up for the Female Science Professor feed led me to do my ethnography on science bloggers although this wasn‘t part of my thinking at the time. How the collection was used has been a surprising feature of lifestream.

Feedback has been an important part of my learning. Comments from tutors and colleagues have been regular and invaluable in helping my understanding, as have the blogs.  The different interpretations given to our visual artefact task was amazing. The lifestream has been helpful in engaging in, and understanding, the course but I agree with Carol’s view that our lifestreams are only to be made sense of in retrospect.

On reflection, if I had to do this over again how would I do it?  I would make notes about why I selected each piece and my feelings at the time. An injection of  humour to my ‘online presence’. is needed, I don’t recognise much of the ‘real’ me. My entries don’t show how much fun this course has been.    Creating ‘presence’ as a distance learner is difficult.  Ania mentioned that she’d like to see some pics of my location, and Jeremy commented on “how our ‘virtual’ experiences are always permeated by, and enmeshed with, the ‘real’ world around us.” With this in mind I tried to upload pics of my journey to work. The road I take cuts through the desert, with sand dunes as as high as hills.

Other vehicles are few so it feels like it’s just me, sand dunes, date farms and camels. Remote. Solitary.  Isolated. Not unlike my experience of online learning. Access problems just add to my ghostly presence, “the ontological blurring of being and not-being, presence and absence online.” (Bayne)

Whilst writing this I am exhibiting signs of being posthuman.  I’m listening to iTunes and uploading images; there’s a couple of tabs open on my browser so I can quickly check things out; I am constantly flicking between this document, my Lifestream, and pdf files; and I’m downloading a video. My Mac has become an appendage, it is part of me. Technology is a big part of my life.

Edwards states the need for learning to challenge us and this experience is definitely challenging;  #ededc staff and students have taken the ‘road less travelled’.

References

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education.

Edwards, R. (2010). The end of lifelong learning: A post-human condition? Studies in the Education of Adults, vol 42, no 1, 5-17.

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

The good news is that the majority of my feeds are working well.  One that has worked from the very beginning is my Female Science Professor RSS feed. I see that the articles I posted in Reddit are showing up in my Lifestream, so pleased about that.  My information gathering on humans/posthumans took me back to the film festival and I added another couple of YouTube videos to my favourites.  However, it looks like I may have messed up on one bookmarking attempt with Delicious.  I’m a little hesitant to remove it in case I end up deleting all my entries, especially as I’ll be submitting my Lifestream soon.

I attempted to save a video to Vimeo but don’t think it has worked.  It can take several hours for it to show through on my feed.  I would assume that all feeds should be necessary and workable.  If Vimeo doesn’t work at my next attempt I shall have to delete it from my feeds.

I am still unable to get the full benefit of Twitter.  I have been able to tweet but I’m rarely able to open the links my colleagues tweet as my Internet connection is so slow.From the standard of blogs and comments made by my colleagues I know that these links will be very interesting. It’s so frustrating not being able to follow through and I get heartily sick of seeing these signs.

I have spent some time thinking about my assignment and how I should present it.  With this in mind I had a look at Weebly.  Jeremy emailed the link to the assignments of last year’s cohorts and I see one of them used it.  I need to play around with it before making my decision.

I’ve had a look around this site but cannot see any sign of comments I’ve made on my colleagues’ sites. Hoping that it is something that can be easily resolved.

The focus this week has been on data collection, some of which I had hoped to add to my feeds, and to giving some thought to the choice of media I’d like to use to present my ethnography.  My plan was to keep it succinct but the more information I gather the bigger it’s becoming.  At the moment I feel like I’m walking along a corridor that goes on and on.

Like one of my colleagues, I have also had to spend some time doing a little Lifestream ‘troubleshooting’.  I have no idea why some feeds are causing me problems but it’s clear the problems have to be remedied. My Tumblr account seemed to have ‘frozen’ on me and I decided it was easier to open a new one than to work on a resolution.  I have tried and tested the new account out; it appears to be working fine.   Delicious and Flickr are still causing problems.  Clearing the error log is my way of handling it at the moment.  I’ve bookmarked a couple of articles to my Diigo account and they are thankfully showing up in my Lifestream.  As I wasn’t able to use YouTube for the visual artefact task I have opened a Vimeo account.  I just may want to use this media for the ethnography task.

We’re now half way through the course and my Lifestream is starting to take shape, I think.  It’s certainly looking busier.  One of my colleagues commented that this is not a true reflection of how his time is spent online.  I too get carried away checking out links colleagues have tweeted, or finding something interesting in one article that leads me to another, and another.  And I am still wary about what I say and do, knowing that this can be viewed publicly.  I actually ‘googled’ my name to check what does show up.  An on-line diary does appeal to me but with restricted access.

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”.