Steph's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Some small achievements have been made this week. The unfamiliar cyberculture jargon is starting to become familiar and thus the time spent deciphering the text, word by word, can now be spent reading and looking for greater understanding. This week has also finally seen me master the ‘simple’ task of text wrapping my blog around a picture and more importantly use WordPress for blogging! I still at this point need to start on my weekly summaries. For other courses I collate information and present it in one final essay. The ongoing assessment and requirement to contribute near daily and summarise weekly is new and requires more structure to my life that is fundamentally unstructured due to shift work.
Baynes (2010) reference to the ‘destabilized classroom’ rings loud for me this week. I was able to participate in the Skype chat this week. The conversations were intertwined within each other and fast moving. Sitting back and following the discussion was on my screen was challenging enough but I made attempts to comment on the readings the best I could in a virtual room of exceptionally knowledgeable and fast typing students. There was a definite feeling of the practices being ‘disorientating’, ‘strange’ and at times ‘anxiety-inducing’ but with perseverance newly learnt skills become practiced and the unfamiliar can become familiar.

Already the beginning of week 3! Whilst reassuring myself that we are still at the beginning of the course I realise that I must remind myself that it is only a 10 week course and the time will fly in. Compared to registering accounts, organising feeds and then ‘playing’ to work out how to navigate my way around them I do not feel I have given a sufficiently proportionate time to the course content this week. However, for now I am reassuring myself that this is essential work as not having the feeds set up properly will restrict me in representing what I’ve been reading/doing. I’ve always been resistant to Twitter until now, with perhaps a dated view, that that if someone really wants to know my opinion (and I want to share it) it is better done on a one to one basis. Having set up Twitter I now realise how dated my thinking was….because you can private message on twitter too! I have followed the advice and organised a Tweetdeck account. This has made managing the course a little easier as I am in a position to follow some of the comments by separating them from personal messages. That said I’m finding conversations disjointed when reading them a day or so later and this makes it less effective to contribute through this medium.

This has been an entirely overwhelming week resulting in failing my personal objective of producing daily contributions, as the week was over before I realised it had begun. Unfortunately, a disproportinate amount of time was spent on the basics that I had taken for granted that I would grasp without difficulty as opposed to course content and demonstrating an insight into the readings. I have set up accounts with Twitter, Delirious and explored WordPress. Hours can be lost sifting abundant internet resources for relevant content but more often being distracted by interesting (though not directly relevant for that moment in time) information. WordPress appears to be the biggest of my distractions as I can easily spend a precious evening rearranging my widgets and creating my avatar with no direct benefit to the course content….lesson learnt here!
I provided a delirious contribution but wish to develop my usage of delirious further as I see this is a very useful tool in online sharing. My tweets allowed me to participate in some way with the film festival (I was unfortunately unable to attend the synchtube session this week) and successfully linked to my Lifestream.
The readings are challenging! There is a cyberdictionary’s worth of new terminology for me and whilst I hope to have drawn some worth from them I look forward to re-reading them in a few weeks (as my experience of digital cultures develops) and having better appreciation of the emerging themes.