End-of-lifestream summary

What is a lifestream?

The lifestream functions as a diary of a student’s electronic life (Freeman and Gelernter, quoted in Wikipedia) and in this course it also demonstrated “engagement with the academic themes and content of the course” (Course Guide, p.8).

Categories of my lifestream
Looking back over my lifestream, my entries can be divided into several categories which I have ordered roughly according to the associated workload:

a)      Blog entries
The blog is probably the most reflexive part of the lifestream. For me this is an extremely valid category in terms of evaluation, as it demonstrates authentic writing which needs to be presented clearly. Some of my blog posts are notes and comments on the readings. The other blog posts are end-of-week summaries which describe my work and my thoughts.

b)      Own creations
The visual artefact and ethnography led to some anxiety on my part, but were very rewarding in terms of the learning process and of the discussion that resulted from them.

c)      Communications as comments
This feed encouraged students to communicate with one another. Compared to Twitter the advantage of the comment function was that there was no word limit and you could focus directly on other student’s work. The disadvantage was that the dialogue usually ended after one response. In this respect tweetdeck was better at stimulating discussion.

d)      Twitter contributions
Twitter contributions helped to give a fun impression of the other members. I’m glad I got a chance to try this medium out. I think it would have worked better if the word count was less restricted.

e)      Media contributions linked to the course content (Photos, videos, articles, useful websites from the internet)
As multimodality is closely linked to digital culture it makes sense to encourage students to draw in a wide range of media for the course. I have fed in interesting videos and pictures which I have found or which others have recommended, as well as useful tools for the artefact and ethnography.

f)        Media contributions linked to my work
As a language teacher I constantly use videos and images. They were uploaded automatically when I stored them in Diigo. I have left some of these as evidence of digital culture in the workspace. This maybe pushes the lifestream slightly into the chaos region (Ross, 2009), but for me it is all linked, as the course content has increased my confidence when using digital media for my work.

Limitations of the lifestream

I felt the lifestream was quite demanding on the students. Maybe the statement that there should be “evidence of new material every day or so” could be rephrased for part-time students. I sometimes felt frustrated about having to constantly prove that I am engaging with the contents. I personally need time away from the computer to gather my thoughts, and I didn’t want to produce feeds just for the sake of feeding the lifestream.
I can also imagine the lifestream is very time-consuming to assess.

Positive aspects of the lifestream

Despite the limitations, I do think the lifestream is a great tool to ensure consistency of engagement. Particularly when linked with feedback it motivates students to demonstrate a variety of engagement and gives a very full and retrievable picture of the student’s work.

Course Guide: E-Learning and Digital Culture (2009), MSc in E-Learning, The University of Edinburgh.

Ross, J. (2009). Lifestream: Curation or Chaos? (A conversation between Jen and Sian), http://digitalculture-ed.net/?paged=3, accessed on 11/12/2009.

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestream, accessed on 11/12/2009.