End of Lifestream Summary

arthurh — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:21:50 +0000

Introduction

I decided not to go back over my summaries but to attempt a search for the deep structure behind them. In that endeavour I came up with six questions which require answers for me to be satisfied with what these weeks brought me; a kind of personal accounting procedure.

End of Lifestream Summary

in a nutshell

1. Which range of input have I received?
I have experienced tightly written academic texts intended to impress experts (e.g. Hand and Haraway) which failed to do more than needle me and provoke an irritated response which surely detracted from their message in my case. I have met texts which speak to me at an academic level which is sophisticated yet not gratuitously verbose and from which I have learnt (e.g. Rose and Bayne). I have received refreshing visual input in film or cartoon film form during the film festival which encouraged me to dig deeper into film as a medium of both personal learning learning and the creation of learning materials for others.

2. From the input what did I learn about how I operate in digital environments? I learnt that I cannot learn efficiently or effectively from a particular kind of academic writing and that I can recognize that writing almost immediately and thus can spare myself the pain. Similar to the five minute test that all face to face lecturers get from me before I walk out.

3. Which new techniques did I practice and with which degree of learning? I learnt that I enjoy interspersing my writing with visual materials and that I believe it is effective. I suspect that I overdo it at present like a kid with a new toy…but I’ll learn to control that. I learnt that storyboarding is an effective tool and that getting the balance between sound and visual is an art that requires more practice for me to master. I learnt many new techniques in ethnography from my peers especially and that there are many more highly creative people out there than I ever suspected. How extraordinary that You tube has so many more accomplished directors than television has…

4. What did I learn from the key cyber themes? I learnt to evaluate the cyberworld, to feel comfortable in reading about cyberculture, to asess its utility as a concept and to appreciate the directions in which it is heading.

5. How do I now see the future of learning? I see a space in the cyberworld which potentially is waiting to be filled but I do not yet see sufficient academics and teachers to effectively people and police it outside of the military-industrial-academic complexes. This may be a grass roots revolution where the digital world changes from the bottom upwards. Yes we can but with the same resistance Obama faces.

6. What were my learning outcomes?
Extremely successful; I learnt about cyberspace and ethnography and realized that there is far more opposition to the growth of multinational controllers of the ether than I ever imagined and I learnt to let go and trust myself with new technologies in the web 2.0+ environments. I also learnt what stresses there are in balancing three jobs, a household and an academic course; the tightrope requires so much concentration that one fit of vertigo can throw you.

Culture, cultural artefacts and community acceptance

arthurh — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:59:13 +0000

We are adding to culture in what we post or otherwise contribute albeit by way of nano increments. Sometimes those increments can be decisive and influential – out of all apparent proportion to their value. This is often apparent in the media world and previously in the publishing world. This may be because the artefact is an object of it’s time like Playboy magazine, the Atari computer or Star Trek.

To become a community artefact it requires certain properties:

Kofman on artifact

I understand this simple diagram from Kofman to explain those properties more or less as follows:
It must be part of an artificial system or the whole artificial system, it can be an objective tool or a social object or a conscious product and it requires acceptance as a cultural object.For me an objective tool of our time could be a Web 2.0 application like the ‘tool’ I am using now. A social object could be twitter. A conscious product could be a tweet.
What the definition doesn’t account for is any concept of duration. Is it an artifact simply because it is produced? I think not. I believe it requires some feeling of enduring community value. Perhaps that is what Kofman means by ‘cultural object’? Or is a cultural artefact value neutral; a pop hit song for example? Or does it have to have the status of ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles?

Aboriginal artefact - community interpreted

I think the ‘artifacts’ we are producing only become cultural artefacts when they are accepted and widely used or quoted. This would mean that Haraway’s manifesto, for the reasons given – oft cited etc., is a cultural artefact in the way that my blogging isn’t (yet)!

Arthur's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog » transition

End of Lifestream Summary

Culture, cultural artefacts and community acceptance