Another week has gone by. I’ve started to “feed” my lifestream from work as well. I thought it might be interesting to see how I make use of digital tools when preparing lessons, etc. I had been looking at quite a few videos which I was thinking of using in my lessons and had stored them in diigo.  I ‘ll probably just keep a few in for the end version of the lifestream. I like the way the lifestream keeps hold of all these different threads. It’s quite reassuring, as I’m usually the sort of person to take notes here and there and leave them lying around or save them on the computer somewhere. With the lifestream I know everything is there (somewhere – that’s the only drawback that it might get a bit unmanageable over time). The lifestream includes various sites I’ve been looking at with the visual artefact in mind. It includes my notes on the readings I’ve done and some video clips which were suggested by other students in the course.

The skype session was good this week as it was a chance to communicate more directly with the other students. My only problem was that I had only read one of the texts, but the discussion still helped me when I finally read the texts.

I read the three core texts this week and I found them all really interesting. I think these are questions that we are constantly grappling with as we make use of digital tools. How we are expanding our skills to deal with different types of communication and represenatation. What place these new forms of communication and represenation take up in our lifestyle and in our perceptions. When I was a student first time round we had to visit our lecturers during their visiting hours if we needed to speak to them. Now I get a constant flow of emails from my students. And even though there are no official “email rules” I do somehow judge my students on the way they express themselves in the emails. And even though emails are much more laid back then other forms of written communication there must be some underlying code that most students are aware of, for instance not to use texting abbreaviations in official emails etc. The genre of emails is changeable according to which activity system it is being used for.

I was also interested in the opposition between pictorial representation and representation through language as described by Kress. I’ve been on the outlook since them of examples combining the two as in picture dictionaries, signs etc.

Kress, G (2005) Gains and losses: new forms of texts, knowledge and learning. Computers and Composition.