Andy's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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

Posts Tagged lifestreams

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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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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