Silvana's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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

Archive for category Lifestream

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.

Tags:

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.

 

Week 11 Lifestream Summary

Dec 6

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

This week I have been thinking about my assignment topic. I had a Skype Chat on Monday with Sian which was helpful in clarifying my ideas about a topic area. (see blog)

I have been using my lifestream to collect information, links etc which I may use in my assignment. Tumblr has been useful as a way to add links to my lifestream (as well as Delicious).  I have been collecting information about Twitter and lifestreaming as well – as I am interested in both.  May find a way to weave them into my assignment topic.

I have only been able to work intermittently this week as I had three days when I was running all day workshops – can't really explore the internet when I am doing these 9-5 workshops as I am 'on' all the time – either demonstrating or helping course participants.  I have four days of the same next week but one is an 'away' gig which means I can work on the train and in the evenings as I'll  have no family obligations. 

Tags:

Week 10 Lifestream summary

Nov 30

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

I spent most of the week reading the core texts – Usher and Bayne – as well as some of the secondary readings. This is reflected in my Tumblr listings in the lifestream. I also spent more time this week reading and sometimes commenting on fellow students’ blogs. I have found this process very illuminating and helpful in clarifying my own thoughts. There are no blog posts from me this week – partly because of a technical fault in my WordPress editor – where I have lost all the tools in the visual field and also cannot see what I am writing. I finally got round this today when I wrote a post up in Word and pasted it into WordPress but it still required fiddling to get italics and paragraphs in. I hope we can resolve it this week.

I think this week’s readings made it a lot clearer on how digital culture (and the way we have been working) impacts on pedagogy. Now just to find a final assignment topic!

Interesting bits and pieces I picked up this week were a BBC report on What happened to Second Life? and a blog report that Wikipedia is losing its editors – hailing the end of free user-generated content. The BBC report cites that Second Life is not the great marketing tool that corporate businesses that it would be – with many pulling out. They mention the sharp learning curve needed to learn how to operate in Second Life and to build things. However, Linden Labs claim that the number of new users are growing but the real challenge will be getting a mobile presence, given the amount of memory needed to run SL. However, IBM still are enthusiastic about SL.

The report on Wikipedia states that Wikipedia is still very popular for readers but it is losing its editors. The report ends:

But if users are generally tired of contributing to a site without receiving any compensation, that is a big problem. Similar endeavors, like Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, pays contributors according to the popularity of their entries. In a world where individuals increasingly have outlets to share their opinions, whether it be on blogs, Twitter or personal websites, a business model that depends on free content that does not promote or pay its editors is likely to change if it wants to continue growing.

I think the significance of both these reports is that they may be signalling a change in digital culture – a disillusionment of sites such as Second Life as being a marketing and business opportunity for big business and the beginning of the end (maybe) of the utopian idea of free user-generated content. I don’t know.

This week I also purchased an iphone. So another tool for my cyberself!

Tags: , , ,

Week 9 Lifestream Summary

Nov 22

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

Reflections on cyborgs, embodiment and cognispheres

This week my lifestream reflects the readings I have been doing on Gies, Badmington,  Hayles, Shields, and Muri.  I have continued with my experiment of copying out into Tumblr passages from my reading on which I wish to reflect.  My usual method is to outline writers’ ideas in MindManager – mapping out their logic.  However, in my MindManager approach I also highlight key passages so that aspect is replicated in Tumblr.  I then am able to review my selected passages in my lifestream.  I was nervous about doing this initially but I am finding it interesting.  My gleanings this week are:

Gies:

virtual selves leave many traces, are monitored, and it is difficult to maintain anonymity and multiple identities (see separate blog)

Badmington:

remnants of humanism in posthumanism

Hayles:

the cyborg is now obsolete because it is not networked enough; the notion of the cognisphere captures the dynamic relations and interactive exchanges between global  networks of machines and humans

Shields:

the cyborg can be updated but the scale should not be at the human level but at the nano-scales of biotechnology as a potential counter-space

Muri:

debunking disembodiment when bodies are everywhere etc. – separation of mind/soul from body and distaste of body has routes in Christianity; gives cynical reasons why academics have promoted the idea of disembodiment

soul leaving body 2soul leaving body

The way I decided to pull out summaries of these writers mirror the impression I get of their arguments from just reviewing the lifestream.  However, in my lifestream I also have some links to current developments that I think link  into the  literature I have read this week.

The first link raises the issue of whether the cyborg is really obsolete.

Contact lens with built-in virtual graphics (article from New Scientist)

 Contact lens with built in graphics

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.

On the one hand, this development seems to support Shield’s contention that we must look at cyborg developments at a microlevel but at the same time, it contradicts this, as the  lens is to be worn by whole human body and the visual experience will incorporate both viewing the real world AND some projected virtual world.  Will real and virtual intermingle? Is this where the cyborg joins the cognisphere? Driving while talking on the mobile phone seems safe in comparison. The body is in the real world!

IBM Press Release on Developing a Computer that can simulate the human brain

computer brain

IBM (NYSE:  IBM) announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain’s low power and energy consumption and compact size.

The cognitive computing team, led by IBM Research, has achieved significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data — two major milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip. 

These advancements will provide a unique workbench for exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and stand to move the team closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions. The team’s work stands to break the mold of conventional von Neumann computing, in order to meet the system requirements of the instrumented and interconnected world of tomorrow. 

As the amount of digital data that we create continues to grow massively and the world becomes more instrumented and interconnected, there is a need for new kinds of computing systems – imbued with a new intelligence that can spot hard-to-find patterns in vastly varied kinds of data, both digital and sensory; analyze and integrate information real-time in a context-dependent way; and deal with the ambiguity found in complex, real-world environments.

The last paragraph supports what Hayles is saying about the cognisphere – that most of the interaction is between machines.  A cognitive computing chip would accelerate this  process.

Cyberwar is now a fact (BBC News)

cyberwar

“To go to physical war requires billions of dollars,” he said. “To go to cyber war most people can easily find the resources that could be used in these kind of attacks.”

The targets of such future conflicts were likely to be a nation’s infrastructure, said Mr Day, because networks of all kinds were now so embedded in peoples’ lives.

In response, he said, many nations now have an agency overseeing critical national infrastructure and ensuring that it is adequately hardened against net-borne attacks.

Again, the notion of the cognisphere is supported by the statement that ‘networks of all kinds were now so embedded in peoples’ lives’.

I think Hayles is correct in saying that the unit of analysis is not the individual – whether human or cyborg – but in relationships and networks.  And that is where ultimately the cyborg metaphor fails. Individualism has been a mark of the 20th century with roots going back to  the Enlightenment.  I suggest that we are moving away from individualism but it may be painful – and the realities of cyberwars may awaken us to this movement.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Week 8 Lifestream Summary

Nov 15

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | 1 Comment

I had quite a busy week.  Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I ran all day workshops – 9-5 non-stop while in the evening I was fitting in reading Haraway and Hayles. Thursday and Friday I was working with my friend and colleague Judy (face to face as I am in the States at the moment) to fine tune a chapter we are writing together. Judy has also read Haraway and Hayles this week and quite amazingly Hayles proved very pertinent to the ideas we have developed on our chapter – which gives an overview of the development of qualitative data analysis tools and how we see the future in Web 2.0 tools.  Hayles gave us the vocabulary for ideas we didn’t have the words for.  I used Tumblr which fed into my lifestream to pull out key quotes to reflect on. Haraway was new to me and as I didn’t have the time to read her in one sitting. I was initially frustrated as I felt she was really addressing issues about the direction of feminism and couldn’t figure out initially where cyborgs fit in. I noticed in the tweets that others were having problems, too, so I searched the web for material on her and the Cyborg Manifesto and found something that gave information on her background and provided a good summary of the manifesto which I tweeted to the class.  I also benefitted by other class members doing the same and tweeting links to other articles and videos about Haraway or Hayles. I felt twitter worked this week as a good medium to help each other find material to elucidate two challenging texts.

I had to keep reminding myself that Haraway was writing in the mid-eighties before the World Wide Web and with her background in biology, a lot of her notions of cyborg come from medical developments of the time, organ transplants, pacemakers etc. I have always been sympathetic to arguments that challenge dualisms so her vision of the cyborg as taking us out of dualistic thinking is attractive – although I find also a bit fuzzy. I understand that the cyborg is outside of the male/female dualism as being neither and that our relation with machines is intermingled with us – we create machines, we use machines, they do not dominate us, they are us – an aspect of our embodiment. And I guess while the thrust of her argument is about feminism, what we can take from her for digital culture is that the notion of  cyborgs can support an embodied view of digital culture.

Brain Machine Interface

I found Haynes more accessible.  Her mapping of the history of cybernetics, the politics involved, the erasures of certain ideas, the re-writing of history illuminated for me the background to some of the dominant ideas of digital culture

By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the posthuman into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places, I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were far from obvious. Many factors affected the outcomes, from the needs of emerging technologies for reliable quantification to the personalities of the people involved. Though overdetermined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, any more than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea that we are essentially informational patterns. p. 22

For me, the most illuminating quote was from an interview with Hayles earlier this year – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhFYkaift4

…what we see with digital media is not so much the death of the author, as the distribution of the author function in new ways. …if you create a digital work, you are collaborating with the software you are using to create that work. And the people who created the software, in a sense, are your remote co-collaborators. And you are also collaborating with the computer hardware. And all of these have constraints and possibilities that you can explore. Hayles, N.K. (2009) Interview with Stacey Cochran, YouTube – 28 March 2009

It is the idea of distributed cognition, which Hayles mentions later in the same interview, that makes us posthuman.  We are interacting with machines, with software, with applications which shape and are shaped by us.

Tags: , , , ,

Week 7 Lifestream summary

Nov 8

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

This week was spent mainly analyzing and constructing my micro virtual  ethnography on YouTube’s Davidsfarm.  On Monday I flew from London to the States where I am working over the next two weeks.  While on the plane I didn’t have access to the internet (someday it will be possible), I spent most of the time outlining the structure of my virtual ethnography in Word.  Last week I had been tagging relevant Davidsfarm videos to my Delicious account and copying selected comments on the videos into Tumblr – both of which fed into my lifestream.  When I finally had internet access this week, I had my lifestream open in one tab of my browser and the WordPress pages where I was constructing my virtual ethnography in another.  I found the lifestream a very effective organizing tool. It enabled me to find the relevant videos for me to embed into my ethnography as well as pull out the comments from Tumblr. I was still collecting more information about Davidsfarm while I was constructing the ethnography so these were fed into my lifestream this week.

xray

The challenge for me was to take advantage of the affordances offered by the internet in the representation of an ethnography. A major criticism of qualitative analysis in the past is that the analysis process is not transparent so not subject to scrutiny.  With the introduction of software for qualitative analysis, such as ATLAS.ti, MAXqda and NVivo, the process is transparent but despite this software being around for 20+ years it is still not part of the toolkit of many social scientists (although this is changing) and it is certainly not something that can be easily picked up.  However, a virtual ethnography if constructed well, offers the possibility for anyone to explore the logic of the representation and have access to the same data the ethnographer works with.  And there is the possibility to interact with both the ethnographer and the elements of the ethnography – as well as contributing further elements (or data) – and interpretations.  Although there is a linear argument in the ethnography I constructed, I encouraged readers to dip into the ethnography, mirroring the experience of visitors to Davidsfarm who initially come across any one of the types of videos he produces by chance and who then elects (or not) to explore further Davidsfarm and become an active fan, commenting on videos and interacting with other fans and with Dave himself. 

After finishing my ethnography, I enjoyed very much exploring and commenting on fellow students’ ethnographies. I was amazed by their richness and the number of issues that they raised about virtual communities.  There seems to be a range of types of communities – from loose associations or what Tony calls ‘digitally mediated networks’ to communities where people are very open about personal issues and give and receive support – such as Sarah P’s quilting community.  Another issue that comes out clearly is power and control – examples are the communities that Sibylle and Bill explored.  This seems to be related to the motivations and personality of the founder members.  And for me in my ethnography in Davidsfarm, there was a real difficulty in discerning what was real, what was constructed and what was imagined. And I was puzzling about whether something constructed or imagined becomes real and what is ‘real’ anyway. I look forward to reading more of the ethnographies.

Tags: , , ,

Week 6 Lifestream Summary

Nov 3

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

My lifestream this week reflects my work on the ethnographic project.  As a sociologist and research methodologist I spent time earlier this week reflecting on how I would approach this project after having finally decided to look at YouTube’s Davidsfarm.  I posted on Tuesday my research design  for the project following my own research design checklist which I developed with my co-author Judy Davidson.  The lifestream reflects my use of Delicious to book mark key videos on the site and the use of Tumblr to record my research journal and to store extracts of comments on the videos I bookmarked.  I wanted to get the big picture and an overview of Davidsfarm rather than focusing on a very microlevel on a selected video, for example. I managed to look at Davidsfarm at a very crucial point in its history which will be evident from the ethnography and I wanted to sketch out the territory for a possible full scale ethnography which would explore the elements of a virtual community, the construction of community and the impact of other constructions and the ‘real world’.  So the focus was to collect the range of information I needed and the lifestream reflects that this week.

I had a quick look at the suggested online tools we could use to present our ethnography and I played with OurStory without much success – partly because I wanted to focus on getting the material I needed rather than learn a new tool. I had already decided that I wanted to experiment with the presentation – and to use a wiki or WordPress to create a ‘non-linear’ approach to exploring the ethnography.

Tags: , ,

Week 5 Lifestream Summary

Oct 26

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

I started off the week in Cardiff (Monday and Tuesday) and found that I had more time to work on the course when I am running all day workshops away (as opposed in London where I live).  That is because I can work on the train (ala Andy’s artefact) which I can’t do on the tube (ala my dystopic day artefact) and I can fill my empty evenings away with work/study.

Sian’s feedback was very helpful as it indicated that I was on the right track with the lifestream.  It is useful to reflect back on the week as it is easy to forget, for example, what I bookmarked in Delicious  and the range of things I explored.  This week I finally figured out Tumblr and have added it to my lifestream.  In previous posts I had mentioned that the work I did reading was not reflected in the lifestream.  I was inspired by Sian/Jen’s original description of the lifestream as an adaptation of the 17th century practice of ‘commonplacing’ – where individuals collated sayings, quotes, proverbs, images and thoughts in a single scrapbook.  I felt that the quotes bit was missing from my lifestream. I have started to use Tumblr as I read in order to extract key sentences that I want to reflect on in the reading.

Tumblr image

So as the focus of this week turned to thinking about our virtual ethnographies we will each be conducting my lifestream reflects some of the tools I checked out for reporting the ethnography, some links to ethical issues including an IBM video on what they are doing about cryptography.  I actually already had done some reading on internet ethics for a paper on Web 2.0 research which will be published in January.  My focus then was on the analysis of data online of which there is little published (as opposed to conducting research online) but I had read some of that literature. Unfortunately what I read was not digital – I had to go to the British Library to read the material – so I couldn’t add it to the Delicious tag that Sian set up.  But the issues I had focussed on were to do with privacy issues, ownership, copyright, security and the differing situation between the EU and the States.  Ethical issues were brought up in the Discussion Board and I added my thoughts about that before Sian and Jen blogged about their guidelines which was helpful.

The most difficult decision for me was to decide on the topic of my virtual ethnography. I blogged about my indecision.  I think I have decided now.  The criteria I used was ethical considerations about choosing a site that was public, that people were aware and happy that their posts were online, and a site where I did not belong.  For such a short study, I do not have the time to negotiate permissions and I was uncomfortable in doing so covertly – particularly as my presentation about the site would be so public.  So that ruled out Methodspace – http://www.methodspace.com/ which was my first choice. I think I will look at Davidsfarm – http://www.youtube.com/user/Davidsfarm#p/a a YouTube phenomenon – and I will blog about that separately.

On the Discussion Board they was some talk about looking at a site vs community and what was a virtual community anyway. I found the Hine and Bell readings helpful in that respect as well as the examples of virtual ethnography that have been recommended in the reading. 

By focusing on sites, locales and places, we may be missing out on other ways of understanding culture, based on connection, difference, heterogeneity and incoherence…the field site of ethnography could become a field flow, which is organized around tracing connections rather than about location in a singular bounded site. p. 61 Christine Hines

I like Hines’ notion of a ‘field flow’ rather than a ‘field site’ with a focus on connections.  If I think of studying my own household it would be very limited if the focus was just on the physical house itself and its inhabitants. It would be missing the connections to my mother and brother in the States, my sister in Italy, my step-son in Epping and my step-daughter in West London – all of whom impact on my household relations.

the texts that consitute the shared space of [a virtual] community…’enable participants to imagine themselves part of the community’ Bell, D. (2001) citing Baym (1998:62) p. 102

In relation to online communities, I found the Baym quote which Bell cites very illuminating.  The text of chat, comments etc. replies are ‘physical’ evidence of interaction, of a community which can be imagined.

I am not sure that Davidsfarm is a community but there is plenty of evidence for people to imagine it as one.  And that is what I think I shall explore.

 

 

 

Tags: , , , ,

Week 4 Lifestream summary

Oct 18

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

This week has been focused on creating my visual artefact and viewing and commenting on other fellow students’ artefacts.  I have been really impressed by the quality of the work we have produced as a group.  This week I felt more connected with other students by viewing their work and commenting on their blog – and reading other people’s comments.  It was an excellent exercise in getting the group to interact.

My own artefact was a video (or rather two videos) but it was not purely visual.  I agree with Sterne that it is easy to focus on the visual and neglect sound.  Music played an important part in getting the message across in my videos.  Without the music, the visual by itself has much less impact and, I think, makes much less sense.  The music sets the scene and emotional tone of the visual.  Plus I added text at selected points in the video to get across the message I was trying to make in the video.  I suppose I could say that as author of the videos, I used a multi-modal approach in order to ‘control’ how my video was interpreted.  This is counter to what Kress is arguing.

 “Speech and writing tell the world; depiction shows the world. In the one, the order of the world is given by the author; in the other, the order of the world is yet to be designed (fully and/or definitively) by the viewer.” p. 16

Years of academic training made it difficult for me to let go and let the viewer decide.  Reflecting back now, maybe I should have tried to make a piece about the digital world that could be interpreted as either utopic or dystopic – depending on the predisposition of the viewer.  But I don’t think I am capable of doing that at the moment.

Andy commented about the skills I possessed in creating the video and felt he was not as skilful.  (Ironically, I thought his video was very well produced – which I think I commented on his blog).  I know the faults in my production! I couldn’t get things synchronized the way I wanted and the transitions got out of place when I speeded up the video so I did the best I could in the end.  It is true, that I already had a Flip video camera (and have bored my family endlessly the last few months videoing them) and I have Camtasia Studio which I got to produce training videos but I have never produced such a complex video before.  And I am glad that this course made me stretch myself.  But I chose tools that I was at least a bit familiar with.  I really like the look of Prezi but I quickly decided that that is something I’ll explore in my own time rather than experiment with for this exercise.

Tags: , ,