Sarah's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

The use of technologies during the first week has been interesting tthought my first experiences were a little uncomfortable to say the least. Using the course guide helped to a certain extent, but when I had teething troubles not having someone to turn to in person left me feeling a bit isolated. Some Twitter comments I made prior to the start of the course give a sense of how I was feeling:

sarahp Trying to set up all these bits and bobs is trying to wade through treacle!! [sezpayne2].

sarahp Trying so put an RSS feed for Wallwisher into my lifestream is making my eyes bleed! I think coffee and a muffin is urgently required!

sarahp Studying without a vle feels like tightrope walking without a safety net! #ededc [sezpayne2].

sarahp @damiendebarra working with barriers can be comforting as well as restrictive. total freedom can be a scary place!

Once I got TweetDeck installed I could see that I was not the only one have issues, so I began to feel better about my technotraumas. So after some initial struggles with configuration I am beginning to enjoy the choice of content and immediacy of the technology.

Twitter

I think Twitter takes some getting used to, and have found the short, punchy entries to be both restrictive and liberating. On the plus side, reading a 140 character comment is much easier than a 2000 character blog entry! I have found it challenging to follow conversations using this medium, and am in danger of getting lost over a longer tweet chat, but for focusing the mind on the nuggets that you want to transmit it has been interesting.

Lifestream

The lifestream is turning into an incredibly useful tool that I wish I had discovered earlier. The ability to keep all thoughts and readings together in one place is goingto be incredibly useful going forward, easpecially as i regularly work from 3 different machines and therefore suffer from an occassional mismash when I can’t remember where I read something! So far I have been using Microsoft One Note and PC anywhere to getaound this, but Lifestreams are proving the way to go!

Readings

Hand’s “Narratives of promise and Threat” basically investigates the effect of technology and the Internet on the world we live in in terms of society, culture and politics from both Utopian and dystopian standpoints and Bell’s “Storying Cyberspace”  outlined the ‘mythology’ of cyberculture as a medium for white, middle income, middle class professionals based in the developed world. This I found to be a disturbing vision of the future  because the digital divide or “the  excommunication of the developing world” (Bell, pg 17)  is a concept that is detrimental to what we are educators are trying to achieve. It would all be for nought if the work we undertake is not freely available to all those that need it. I found Foster a very interesting read and all three of these authors have led me on to consider the role of ethics on the Internet, a well as the Internet as a source of pornography (reinforced by the video ‘the Internet is for porn’). These issues all come neatly back to the dangers of the Internet as an anonymous world where the normal moral and ethical codes of conduct that exist in face to face environments may often become corroded. This lack of physical presence and verifiable identity is a concept that we will be returning to throughout the course and quite frankly I can’t wait!