Andy's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Part of the MSc in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh

Archive for December, 2009

Andy’s Final Review

Dec 10

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“This comment is little more than a kid playing with all the new toys at Christmas. What does this do? Where does that go? What am I doing here?”
Comment by me 22/09/09

This comment was made by myself in the early days of the Digital Culture course, as I unpacked the range of applications I now had access to. My tutor replied how she liked my playful approach to learning and discovery. The reason I draw upon these comments in my lifestream summary is to illustrate the start point of my digital journey through the past 12 weeks. I have issues with the terms digital natives and digital immigrants since for me, they convey relatively permanent social identities. Although I personally acquired a lot of knowledge and skills before computer technology became part of our daily lives, I consider myself sufficiently competent and confident with ICT to be a digital citizen. By this, I mean I am neither born within nor alien to digital culture. However, back in September, reading the Course Guide and setting up my Wordpress pages, I felt most definitely – a digital immigrant. Web 2.0 applications I was familiar with – but learning via a lifestream and blog was new to me.

As a social scientist, I approached the course with what I considered a clear understanding of culture and education. However, in engaging not only with the subjects of cyber cultures, cyber communities and cyborgs, but socially networking my learning digitally has required me to shift from theorist to practitioner.

Lifestreams is the first general system to treat reminders as first class entities
and to provide a metaphor that naturally accommodates reminding.

Eric Freeman: 1997, The Lifestreams Software Architecture
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/dissertation/etf.pdf

Lifestreaming is the means of aggregating a personal, internet bread crumb trail. My lifestream represents my digital learning journey through the Digital Culture course. This has been a useful application for me since I only have to look at my early entries, and realise my memory perceives them as being a long time ago. This is partly due to the new subject matter of the course; the likes of cyborg studies altered my thoughts to quite dystopic proportions. But the main need for a memory aid has been the substantial amount of tagging involved in researching the course. I feel as though I tagged so much, that I was forgetting what I was finding. My studies have touched upon the subject of unlearning periodically. I reject this concept – instead it’s the capacity of memory to absorb substantial input of data within a short space of time.

As my lifestream matured, so did my competence in using it as a tool for my learning. It is noticeable that from my early experimental days of tagging lots of data, using several applications, my digital practice evolved into using primarily, Twitter, Youtube, Del.icio.us and of course, my blog. Crucially, the weekly summaries enabled an accessible, orderly structure to my digital memory.

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Andy’s Week 11 Review

Dec 7

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This should be my last weekly review of the Digital Culture course, before I submit my final review of the Lifestream. As I type, I am conscious that much of my activity involves review and preparation for relevant to my digital essay. My essay will be a presentation of the merits of producing a digital assignment instead of a traditional essay. Already I appear to be making distinctions because I have just felt the ne
ed to go back over the last two sentences I typed and bold two words I typed before appreciating their significance. In researching my assignment I am gathering data instead of information. As I am planning an essay that compares and contrasts two formats, I would previously have described such an activity as writing a discussion. But now I appear to be making a presentation. The production of a digital assignment may be a different format but I am now sitting here curious to analyse to what this extent this alters my thinking and understanding. Am I communicating differently – or do I now think differently?

Like the last 4 weeks, there are not as many lifestream entries as there were in the earlier part of the course. This is a reflexion merely of the number of web sources I tag, and not the amount of studying I am doing. The bulk of academic work over the last few weeks has been reading. However this analysis causes pause for thought over the lifestream as a whole. Over the first 6 weeks, I felt compelled to show activity almost daily. Having read the study guide for the unit, and noticed the lifestream was an integral component of assessment, I wanted to demonstrate I was regularly engaging with the course. Now I am maturing within digital culture, and developing familiarity with lifestreaming, I believe I consider quality of entries over quantity.

If I did want to illustrate learning activity on my lifestream I would need to tag my lifestream itself. I am evaluating lifestreaming and reviewing prior activity for the essay. Therefore the website I am visiting the most at present is the lifestream itself. Metaphorically, the lifestream symbolises a living flow of my learning. If I was to turn my thoughts inwards and evaluate my own activities and thoughts, would I be creating a whilpool? I don’y think so. Without evaluating my learning path, I cannot measure my understanding. Maybe over the final week of the lifestream, I will tag lifestream entries to demonstrate my point.

In the meantime, here is a blog from the 2nd week of the course, I find relevant to my preparations for the essay. I find it interesting to read and contrast my knoledge now – having subsequently carried out the ethnographic study and researched cyborg culture – to how I felt in the early stages of the course.

Am I a Cyberpunk as well as an Immigrant now?

Bell refers to cyberpunk as providing ‘a cognitive map of human-computer interaction’. For me, this reference adds weight to the stereotypical image of digital culture being populated by personalities more confident in cyber society than mainstream f2f interaction: the geeks, teckies, sci-fi buffs, etc. Watching Week 2’s Film Festival took me out my comfort zone. I admire all the special effects and do feel genuinely challenged by the symbolic messages – but I don’t feel any sense of identity and belonging. I’m a social animal who prefers eye contact.

However because of the significance of both the different behaviours and cultural identity, I do respect the value and relevance to including clips like The Matrix. I confess to being enthused and extra motivated to participate in this course – more so than any other course. Thanks to the wonders of the Dongle, I’m typing on the train right now, capturing my immediate thoughts – and posting them.

But am I any different to the real me? Are other passengers looking at me – Twittering, surfing and blogging – as a real computer nerd? I don’t feel different. I know why I’m here. I know what I’m doing.

The key point of this blog is I may not know what territory digital culture is going to take me, what I am going to learn, or exactly how I’m going to behave. But provided I retain site of who I am – ie. an e-learning student and developer – I believe I can apply my cyber interaction to the real world. I am not a cyberpunk – I am a learner.

http://digitalculture-ed.net/andym/2009/09/ Sept 29

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Never mind the culture, what about digital tools?

Dec 4

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As I approach the end of the Digital Culture course, I am reviewing my learning to date and preparing for the final assignments. Naturally, the prime focus is on course readings, interactions and activities. Apart from tagging weblinks in my lifestream, and offering brief comment in blog posts, I feel I have I have provided sparse analysis of an important component of my capacity to function within digital culture. Over the past 2 months, I am now aware how competent I have become in using a varietyof software applications.

I have never been a teckie – I’m a social scientist. I always see myself as a user of technology – although I am aware of impending dystopic society when I may well become part cyborg before I die. What is significant though is I now have the capacity to create reasonably good quality, digital content. This bodes well not only for me, but for any technophobic practitioner who feels threatened by digital applications. Basically, over the last few weeks, I have noted what my peers have been using, downloaded them and played around with them until I created an acceptable end product. Apart from my phone, all of them are completely free.

Here are my new found digital allies -

Wordpress. I’ve adapted the appearance, changed settings, posted on my blog and lifestream with no hastle. I read recently the VLE is considered dead. Having used Wordpress without hassle, Moodle feels restrictive.

My Sony Ericsson phone. When it came to making video, I had thought about treating myself to a small camcorder. However, the output from my phone has been so good, I don’t really see the point. The great thing about your phone is it is always there with you. At times when you suddenly feel inspired, it’s there in your pocket.

Moyea FLV Downloader. You Tube and Bing offered access to thousands of videos, but Moyea provided the means to download them to my laptop. This gave me the opportunity to edit and insert in my presentations. Like many of the applications I have started using, Moyea is no more complex than iTunes.

Videosoft Convertor. As I am not a teckie, finding videos came in a variety of formats was a potential obstacle for me. However, a quick Google search took me to this application. No matter the format – MP4, WMV, FLV – I simply copied the file into this, and it gave me what I needed.

Windows Movie Maker. This has been a revelation to me. And to think I’ve had it all the time. It’s part of Windows OS. This is what I have used to compile video from different sources, edit clips to fit, narrate and put soundtrack on. It also helped upload to You Tube. I found the Timeline especially easy to use. Once I realised I was not actually cropping the original file, I became more bold with my experiments. If I got it wrong, I simply clicked Undo. This has been my best find.

Desktop Activity Recorder. I found this the least user friendly. It tended to make actual activity slow and shaky. I also had to crop the start and end of each clip to remove the recorder screen. If I was going to be doing a lot of desktop simulations, I think I would invest in buying better software – unless someone knows of better freeware.

Prezi. I saw classmates providing presentations on Prezi and liked the look of it. So I gave it a go. I confess, it took me a few hours of trial and error to get to grips with the menus, but I have produced and presented with it now. I feel so competent, I am going to put my final assignment on it.

All of these have been new to me, but in the space of 12 weeks, I have become proficient enough with them to produce digital content. It makes me wonder how much more I could learn and do if I was producing digital content all the time.

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Final Assignment – proposal

Dec 3

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Copy of my proposed final assignment synopsis and feedback from Jen.

Title: The merits of the digital essay.

Synopsis: For the course Digital Culture, candidates are required to submit some form of digital essay for the final assignment. For me, this represents a first. It is an opportunity for me, not only to experiment with digital applications, but also express myself via  different media. I am conscious of my enthusiasm and how my motivation compares to researching notes to compile a traditional, text essay. This leads me to ask questions that relate to various aspects of the Digital Culture course. What does digital media offer education? What is media  literacy? Is there any difference to the information being conveyed in my essay that would be any different in text format? Finally, in assessing the essay, who am I?  Is this a genuine product of my understanding and knowledge of digital culture? Am I still quintessentially Andy Murray the postgraduate student of education, or is this the work of my new posthuman self, a student who functions only with digital facilities?

My aim is to structure my arguments around the text v. digital discussions covered in Block 1 and the Cyborg Manifesto of Block 3. Having played around with Prezi last week for a work presentation, I’d like to produce my assignment on that. I’d like to develop the essay upon text slides, quotes, video excerts and personal video commentary.

Reply from Jenny

Hi Andy,

Thanks for this – you’re proposing quite a complex idea – a reflexive account of your own process of creating an assignment, drawing on multimodal, cyborg and posthuman theory. I can see that it could work, and I think you should go for it using Prezi as you suggest.

Are you thinking of a structure whereby you run the semi-traditional academic discourse in parallel with your own reflexive account? So, for example, a few paragraphs of text (or video, images, etc) drawing on the literature and making an argument, sitting next to a video commentary of your own experience? And so on through the piece? Or would you be looking to integrate these two aspects more closely? Either could work, but the former might ensure that you definitely hit all the core criteria for the assignment (see the course guide for more information – but an outline is here – http://digitalculture-ed.net/?page_id=233).  Also, keep in mind the 2000 word guideline for the assignment – obviously how you construe ‘words’ will depend on what you’re doing, but it should give you some idea of the approximate size of the thing so you don’t take on too much.

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Andy’s Week 10 Review

Dec 1

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I feel a lot of analysis of my learning journey this week was covered in my last post – The Fog Clears. Although this was essentially a discussion of Sian’s paper – Uncanny Digital Pedagogies – it really helped me get my head around Block 3. The Cyborg Metaphor of Haraway, and subsequent research has been extremely challenging for me, not just in understanding and analysing the subject, but the actual subject matter of potential cyborg culture itself. Dystopic images of the future was not something I had signed up for on this course. But because of Haraway’s inclusion in the course, I now feel in a position to evaluate to what extent digital technology is shaping my thinking. This in turn has obvious relevance to e-learning and the impact upon teaching and learning.

When I look back over my week’s lifestream – and indeed the previous 2-3 before that, it is noticeable there appears fewer entries. I identify this as having more to do with reading core and secondary texts rather than reduced activity. What I do see in the lifestream though is a developing maturity and acceptance of technology in my thinking. Two particular issues stand out for me – embodiement and situated learning.

” If embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience, then studies under the rubric of embodiment are not ‘about’ the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world.”
p. 143Thomas Csordas in Perspectives on Embodiment by Weiss, G. and Haber, H., (eds.). Routledge; March, 1999

If I draw upon a before and after scenario, I could potentially identify my academic self as being embodied in both my mind and text books, notes and essays. Now, my embodiement encompasses a lifestream and blog. Yet somehow, my lifestream and blog feel more personal. Whether or not this is to do with the fact digital culture is the actual subject matter of my studies, but I now feel I think of my learning in relation to the time chronology of blogging. The development of my lifestream correlates with my comprehension of the the subject. I wonder if this relates to classmates feeling because they hav not been feeding their lifestreams, like a tamagochi, they get a sense of under-nourishment. The lifestream encompasses the embodiement of our learning.

This now brings me to the issue of situated knowledge. The only shared activity I have been involved in over the last three weeks have been commenting on other blogs, and the Skype tutorial. There appears to be a consensus on cyborg metaphors being challenging but worthwhile, and learning in digital environments new, exciting but unfamiliar (uncanny). I now perceive my situated knowledge as being on the cusp of somewhere new – but definately not at its destination yet. This is because I am not convinced there yet exists a distinctive boundary between a subjective and objective understanding. For 10 weeks I have studied the subject – Digital Culture. I have done so within the confines of digital environments, using digital applications with participants who already possess a positive stance on the use of technology. Through a combination of the course readings and social interaction, the class appear to have developed a consensus view that digital culture can enhance learning. But does this make our stance objective?

Objective When we say that knowledge is objective we are making authoritative claims about its standing. Actually, objectivity is an essentially contested concept in the philosophies of science and the social sciences; it is usually invoked to convey a sense of truthfulness and to offer a cloak of legitimacy for a particular story – it is a mark of authoritative knowledge.

Open University: Learning Space – The Social in Social Science http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2055

At present, I feel conscious of my own situated learning being subjective. When I discuss digital culture with individuals outside the course, I am naturally confronted with their “uncanny” unfamiliarity and scepticism. I can identify with the merits of lifestreaming and blogging, but ti what extent is that because I have not only been studying the subject – I’ve been practicing it too? In order to properly evolve onto the realms of objective, situated learning, I believe I have to test the hypothethis of digital learning within the context of another subject. So take for example,  Social Care students. A crucial element of their training involves self-reflective practice. I perceive lifestreams and blogging as appropriate mediums for Social Care students to practice. But it is only by supporting their engagement with digital technology, and seeing other individuals develop using them successfully, will I feel truelly within the realms of objective learning.

I now suddenly feel aware I may have subconsciously produced a part, first draft of my assessment summarising my lifestream.

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