The lifestreaming process was an interesting one and the concept was something new to me. I have kept blogs before for assessment purposes but the idea of collecting all related content on course themes together was a useful one. I didn’t run with the idea of adding content from lots of different areas of online communication to the lifestream simply because I don’t really use an awful lot. I liked the idea of being able to add content to Flickr and have that appear in my lifestream, but worries about copyright prevented me. For instance, if I found someone else’s image summed up or represented well something I had been thinking about I can’t have it appear in my lifestream without their permission. After all, it would not have been my work. Although I did link to some YouTube videos. Through the process I found my digital life to be more that of a receiver/collector of information rather than a producer/collaborator.
My lifestream mainly consisted of blog postings, items tagged using delicious and twitter updates. Occasionally there were also comments I made to other people’s blog postings. The lifestream became something of a chore and I felt that sometimes I was posting things to it ‘just because’ and towards the end it mainly became a content holder for items I’d tagged in delicious around various course themes. To start with my weekly summaries were reflections on my engagement with course themes, but my mid-way feedback from my tutor suggested I was doing the wrong thing and I should really be posting a summary of the items that made up my lifestream for the week. This seems to be a reflection on the volatility of the media we have been using for the course – some bits may have gone missing over the course of the twelve weeks and therefore ineligible to count towards an assessed piece of work. At times the technology itself was a little bit frustrating, as although I always add descriptions to items tagged in delicious, they have not come through to my lifestream, meaning I am left with uncontextualised links. The metadata is nearly always a highlighted section of the article I found which in turn gives more meaning to why I tagged it, but for whatever reason this metadata didn’t ever show up even though I had the stream set up to ‘show full description for events’. A search for the tag ‘edc’ in my delicious account shows fuller metadata (http://delicious.com/tozzle/edc).
In conclusion, the lifestream appears to be an ideal way of presenting a collection of digital research and goes beyond what is offered through a single tool. I like the way the objects and artefacts collected are displayed in full (for instances images from Flickr are shown, videos form YouTube are displayed) and it’s not always necessary to leave the lifestream in order to get the point about why something was added. I can see this being a useful tool for groups of learners to present their collective research on a topic. For instance, if a group had to create a wiki on a particular theme and show in some way their collected research, a group lifestream (groupstream?) would be ideal as sources can be added as an ongoing process, providing evidence of the work a group of students have been doing as they progress through a project.