Silvana's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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

Archive for December 13th, 2009

Lifestream Summary

Dec 13

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | 1 Comment

I was attracted to the idea of a lifestream as an adaptation of the 17th century practice of ‘commonplacing’ but I had no idea how a digital version of this would work in practice. Before I started the MSc, my digital presence was very limited. Since starting the MSc, I started to use Delicious as a tool as well as a wiki for collaborative writing. To a much lesser extent I was using Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. My perception was that I was not very digitally engaged.

In my second week summary, I had blogged that I was still grappling with what the stream could technically capture and that I felt that it could not capture my process when I was reading course material. However, reviewing my lifestream, I feel it gives a good account of my engagement with the course. At the time it seemed a bit chaotic but reviewing it I can see a logical account. I am surprised how even my tweets seem coherent. Perhaps it is just the process that appears chaotic – when you are in the middle of collecting a range of information – but reviewing it I can see my progress. The weekly summaries were a good discipline to make me reflect weekly on my stream but I think they are ‘in the moment’ of the process. Going over the last 12 weeks of my stream is giving me another perspective. Maybe over time the chaos coalesces into an archive – a curation as Jen called it.

I learned to use the lifestream to:

Process my reading

I had realised early on that I could use Tumblr to capture my reading, but while I created an account in the first week, I did not have the time to figure out how it works until Week 5 when I added it to my feed. I stopped mindmapping the articles I was reading and used Tumblr as a tool to reflect on key quotes. I would right click on the links in the lifestream to open them up in a new tab (because of technical problems in getting the content into the feed). I could then review them and write up my thoughts in my blog albeit in a different format.

Collect information and data

During the virtual ethnography I started to use the lifestream as a data collection tool – holding the videos and other information that would make up my ethnography. I copied selected comments from the videos onto Tumblr. It proved an effective tool to construct the ethnography.

I had blogged that while the lifestream aggregates the disparate information we collect as we traverse the digital world, it is our minds that make sense of it: The ‘machine’ provides no interpretation or sensemaking of the material it aggregates. Our human mind makes the connections and provides the context for why this information was noted in the first place (see blog relating Giorgi’s phenomenological approach and the lifestream).

Link to my lifestream.

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Lifestream, phenomenology and being public

Dec 13

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | 1 Comment

Before summarizing my lifestream experience I want to reflect on two insights I had while reviewing my own lifestream.

Lifestreaming and Giorgi's phenomenology

As a qualitative analyst, I was struck as I was reviewing and in a sense analyzing my own lifestream the similarities between the lifestream process and Amadeo Giorgi's approach to analysis.  I am not a practitioner of Giorgi's existential phenomenological approach but I have worked with a few people who use his methods.  I am aware of the basic principles and have quickly added to my lifestream some quotes that illustrate his technique. 

His method is to first capture the experience of the individual as a whole – create a 'life-text'.  In a sense, the lifestream is a kind of 'life-text' – the difference is that rather a researcher producing it, the individual his/herself selects bits of information and the lifestream application aggregates it together. 

As Von Eckartsberg
comments (1998, P.21) about it:
We go first from unarticulated living (experiaction) to a protocol or account. We create a “life-text” that renders the experiaction in narrative language, as story. This process generates our data. Second, we movefrom the protocol to explication and interpretation. Finally, we engage in the process of the communication of findings.”

-  Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

The key to Giorgi's analysis process is to divide the account into 'meaning units'. 

Once the researcher has read the protocol and has a sense of the whole, she/he has to divide the protocol or description into what Giorgi calls Meaning Units. The task in this step is to discriminate the different units or blocks that express a self-contained meaning (Polkinghorne, 1989, p. 53). It is appropriate to bear in mind that we have to look at and understand these units or blocks in terms of the whole meaning, as Sokolowski emphasizes. Giorgi comments that the units are divided by looking at the different key terms, aspects, attitudes or values that the co-researcher expresses in the description. In this way, the researcher has to be aware of the changes in topics and meanings in the description. When the whole text or description is divided into meaning units, the researcher can analyze each of them easily because shelhe has now manageable units.” – Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

In our use of the lifestream in this course, we were analysts in the sense that we extracted from the vast amount of information available on the web, the information or data that related to this course; that helped us to understand digital culture and ultimately how it could influence a digital pedagogy.  Each element of our lifestream could be seen as a 'meaning unit'.  However, 'meaning units' do not make sense on their own (hence the chaotic feel some of us expressed while in the process of constructing our lifestream).  It is viewing the meaning units as a whole that we get sense of the whole experience.  I know I am adapting Giorgi because we are not having an external 'analyst' extrapolate meaning from the lifestream but we are doing it ourselves – as lay analysts.  This is a very recent insight so I need more time to reflect on it.

On the public nature of the course

I am not aware of anyone outside the course viewing our posts (except for those like my friend and colleague Judy Davidson who were invited onto the course).  So the public nature of my posts and lifestream did not feature in my consciousness when I posted on my blog, or Twitter etc.  However, what I have appreciated is the public nature of fellow course members'  posts. I have learned a lot from reading other course members' contributions. And it made me reflect on the nature of education.  As students our assessments have been a private matter between us and our tutors and external examiners.  As students we are in 'competition' for grades. To view another student's work is considered 'cheating'.  The academic world is structured so we are rewarded for individual contributions to knowledge – to producing an individual doctoral thesis; to the number of articles we have published in high prestige journals.  But if our objective is learning for learnings sake, surely we learn so much more by sharing what we individually have found and thought about and collectively build upon it.  I think the structure of this course enables this. And in my final assignment I hope to explore this more in looking at virtual communities which encourage learning but which are not formally educational.