An E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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Lifeworlds / Workplace Transliteracy

Oct 19

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Having finished reading Thomas and seeing the picture of Al Gore’s desk I thought I’d share the photos that were orignally going form the basis of my week 4 visual artefact.

All of the shots are of desks in my office, taken after hours when most people have gone home.  Each desk has multiple screens, suggesting the primacy of digital over analogue in our working lives, but each of them has personal and work-related artefacts and suggests the transliterate way in which we are working.  Many of the articles present suggest different messages about the desk’s main user – whether non-digital text plays a part in their work, how connected their work lives are to their personal lives (presence (or not) or personal artefacts), links to family, links to hobbies and interests etc.

What can you tell about each of the desks’ usual inhabitants by the articles placed there?  The lifeworlds are all interconnected as the desks are in an open plan office – are there any links between occupants, or are they only present when the people are there?  Are the links more digital than real-world, mediated by the unseen networks connecting the multitude of screens?

Lifeworlds / Work

Week Four Roundup

Oct 18

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Bit of a gap in my lifestream this week as I was ill.  Mainly looked at other people’s visual artefacts.

More musings:

Spent much of the week poorly, so have done little more than looked at everyone else’s visual artefacts.  And created my own.  Many of the themes we’ve looked at so far in block one come through very strongly in the artefacts and my couremates all seem to have put an awful lot of time and effort into their creation and have very cleverly pulled together the themes we have been introduced to.  I found the visual artefact task quite challenging as I wasn’t really sure how to represent what I wanted to say visually as it’s not really something I’ve done before.  But, a couple of chats with people and a bit of dredging around in the depths of my mind to remember how to use Flash and I was away.

My visual artefact is a representation of the information overload I routinely have to negotiate on a day to day basis in order to either get my job done, keep up to date with friends and family, study and have fun.  All mediated by the internet in some way.  The multiple screens represent information channels and the screenshots, although quite innocent in themselves, appear and disappear in such a way as to suggest a lack of time to focus on any one task before another appears and demands attention.  It’s information overload, but also isn’t simply a overload as a result of having many streams of information to digest.  There’s also a human element too – missing from the simplistic representation I have given – where a digitally connected world had sped up communications to the point that hitting send on an email is almost the same thing as having the other party read it and do whatever you’ve asked them to do.  If no reply comes then another email is sent to prompt action.  Responses must be immediate and my needs are far more important than whatever else it is you might have been doing before I interupted….  A dystopic combination of information overload and competing/conflicting needs, demands and priotities.

There might be some more references to weeks three and four as I catch up with some reading this evening….

My Visual Artefact

Oct 17

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VA

When I made this, it was a lovely swf, but I couldn’t upload it here as swf doesn’t meet security guidelines.  What you see instead is an animated gif, which has sucked out most of the quality……

Week Three Roundup

Oct 17

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Lifestream postings for week three comprised links posted to twitter (on cyberspace users and other news articles) and blogs postings on punk teachers (edupunk), comments on other people’s blog postings and a link to Niall Sclaters blog posting on allowing students more control over what they can do in the OU VLE.

More musings:

This is a little bit late for a week three roundup, but I have my reasons!

Week three was about transliteracy and how that is affecting cyberculture and learning. The skype tutorial took place a little early in the week for me as I’d only read 4 pages of Thomas’ paper on transliteracy. She and her colleagues gave a good outline of what transliteracy meant, but nothing from the paper seemed particularly groundbreaking. I started with this paper because in the time I had ad with the other things I needed to do at the same time, a paper from First Monday seemed more accessible than articles from Computers and Composition. I found the skype tutorial useful in all the usual ways – connecting with other course mates, picking up new ideas etc. and generally not feeling like I am the only one struggling with certain issues. Our chat moved on to whether text is dead and whether transliteracy is a well adopted concept. Our discussions around the primacy of text, certainly in academia, seemed to suggest that other forms of media are not deemed to be as serious. Our discussion made me think back to an article in THES about transliterate students coming to a university near you and how all sorts of adaptations may need to be made for them. When I was at IBLC09 earlier this year I remeber hearing from someone who said that his students (media studies students) didn’t feel an assignment to make video artefacts was ‘acadmic enough.’ So where does the problem lie? Where does ‘text snobbery’ originate? Is it coming from the academy? Is it coming from the publishers? If either of these is the case, how come this is perpetuated in students, new to both the academy and world of academic publishing? Is it more the case that textual snobbery is ingrained in everything we do? One the news we hear of how a report published by so and so organisation has lead to this, that and the other. The news we are encountering (watching, hearing or reading) is still based on a text artefact. Are we doing this unto ourselves?

Another thing I picked up upon and worth a mention here is the University of the People.  An e-university offering free HE to the general population.  Although their courses are as yet unaccredited (presumably this is where the ‘free’ ethos starts to fall apart) the teaching is offered by volunteers – people who are experts in their subject area and are happy to help the furtherance of others.  Very utopic.  Harnessing peoples’ grasp of the cyber to deliver education.  Once again, the people have to be willing to learn in this way, but by making the courses free it opens up HE to a much wider audience.  Although I can imagine high attrition rates where people choose to dip their toes in the water to see how they find it and then drop out later.  I think also there’s the possibility that free things are sometimes seen as having little value – you get what you pay for, and if you’re not paying, what exactly are you getting?  Dystopic.  I remember having similar discussions around an Aim Higher project in my last place of work.  How cheap can an education product be before its value (regardless of its quality) drops below an attractive level?

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Learners take control of the VLE

Oct 7

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Just read this really interesting blog posting by Niall Sclater of the Open University. Through a new Moodle module they’ve developed, students (and staff) can now add their own discussion fora, blogs or wikis and invite any other VLE user they like to view it.

I cannot stress enough how fundamentally this changes the underlying assumptions of what a VLE is. The institution still sets up course web pages, uploads content, specifies learning activities and assessments and provides formal tutor groups with the right students (and tutor) having access to them.

But now individual students can also form their own study groups or use the system for social networking purposes with others in ways that they decide. There is no need to get permission or involve an administrator in setting up a blog, wiki or forum – just a requirement to click a box saying you agree with the terms and conditions and will be responsible for moderating the forum etc.

It’s a meeting of the user control of external services and the institutional control of the VLE.  Allowing students to create their own groups for study purposes (and select which tools suit them best) is a brilliant – the VLE is becoming truly an interactive learning environment.

Running through the heartless concrete streets… Week two roundup

Oct 5

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This week my lifestream has been made up of twitter postings about the second file festival, reading Bell, a couple of links about cyberculture and cyberpunk saved to delicious.

More musings:

The metaphor Bell proposes in his chapter (I think it was a quote from someone esle) has stayed with me this week and that’s what my roundup is about.

He mentions the metaphorical aspect of cyberculture.  How cities, when viewed from above, are like a network plan of the Internet.  There are tower blocks (data warehouses), arteriel routes (backbones), traffic junctions (routers and switches) and houses (end nodes).  But when you’re at street level, looking at all of these things, they are bigger than you are, imposing – perhaps even scary.  Unless you learn to work with them and use them to your advantage.  You can pop in and out of data warehouses, you’re routed from one place to another with ease (hmmm… thinking utopian here) and you can do all of this as a keyboard junkie, in the comfort of your own home.  You can access government, anti-government (Hand), social, community and leisure.  You don’t have to actively participate.  When I say ‘actively’, I mean you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own armchair.

But on the other hand, Matrix style, once you understand the system, it’s there to be taken advantage of, even broken.  Edupunks follow cyberpunks in subversing institutional and even governmental norms through cyberspace.  The space is almost a construct – an agent – how you interact with the agencies determine your outcomes.  I read Sterne’s Historiography of Cyberculture.  No, THE Historiography of Cybercultre.   He made some very interesting connections between shcolarly investigation of cyberculture and journalistic investigation of cyberculture.  He didn’t put one over as being superior to the other.  Wired had the same validity as academic journals because the authors in each medium had valid points to make.  Poster left me a little cold with his somewhat outdated references in his 2006 paper – “walkmans and portable radios permit a person to listen to music regardless of location.”  Come on…..  Even if he penned this in 2005 he was still very much in a digital music era.

The videos of the film festival were interesting, although I have to admit to not having watched those in part three of the film festival.  The Internet’s For Porn made me think of Daily Mail readers and the view of the world sold to them by the paper.  I read last week that it’s the secondmost read newspaper in England behind The Sun.  A paper with that kind of readership ought to be more responsible in producing unbiased, factworthy news.  But then that also makes me think about the Bendito film and the media being more worshipped that the message.

So, all in all, I’m left thinking about a song.  Two songs, in fact, but this one in particular.  It resonated with the metaphors of using real objects to describe the virtual.  And I think the Edupunks are in there somewhere, although not specifically named.  It’s a street level view.  I leave you with this:

YouTube Preview Image

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Punk teachers

Oct 4

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Just chatting to my Girlfriend about Edupunks and she found it quite funny that teachers are now considering themselves punks – she never thought she’d see the day :-)

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Thank you, David.

Oct 3

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I’ve spent a bit of this afternoon reading David Bell’s highly accessible chapter on cyberspace in An Introduction to Cybercultures.  Phew.  I’m pleased I read this as after Hand I was really wondering what I’d got myself into.  Bell writes with the flow of a storyteller, something I find incredibly refreshing when trying to get to grips with a new subject.  In undertaking this reading I have a better grasp of what I’m seeing in the clips from the film festival.  Yay!!  I found particularly interesting the comparison of virtual worlds to cities when viewed from above.  The idea of office block simulating a database, arterial routes the backbone.  But more importantly new knowledge in the form of Gibsonian and Barlovian forms of cyberspace.  The one I found particularly relevant was the Barlovian view and the way Bell sums this up in his conclusion:

 

“Barlovian cyberspace is a way of naming and describing the ways we experience computers and the Internet, in recognition that our experiences sit at the intersection of material and symbolic understandings.”

 

Following on from that, my extrapolation for e-learning would read something like this:

“e-learning, or learning in cyberspace, is a way of naming and describing the ways we experience education in the realm of computers and the Internet, in recognition that our experiences sit at the intersection of material and symbolic understandings.”

So we have education, in its typical face to face, asynchronous form as experienced through the mediation of the electronic.  Our current relationship with technology is likely to colour our view of e-learning.  Likewise, our current (or previous) experience with education will colour our view of learning mediated by technology.  A symbiotic relationship.  Perhaps not groundbreaking, but a breakthrough for me nonetheless and helpful in situating what I know about cybercultures theory in the world of e-learning I routinely inhabit.

When Bell talks about cyberpunks, it made me think of the people I who call themselves ‘edupunks‘ and the emerging DIY ethos of e-learning, where mainstream tools such as institutional VLEs are abandoned in favour of third-party, often publically available tools.  Much like what we’re doing here.  A particular proponent of the edupunk ethos who shall remain nameless makes me wonder if it’s actually another bandwagon to leapt aboard – a bandwagon or termingology, rather than the actual going out and doing it part.  Think about the rise of the PLE.  How is that different Humanist education?  It seems pretty much the same, only now we have a word for how it works in digital learning.  I can’t help thinking that although the underlying philosophy matches up pretty well to what I believe is good and helpful in the world of education, the term itself may have been adopted by those who want to hark back to the good old days on the ‘old’ King’s Road in London.  Days when to be a punk was to reject the maintreaming of society and to live outside the norms.  Or those who missed out on it entirely, along with the opportunity to be a cyberpunk of the era Bell describes in his brief history of cyberculture.

The punk thing to me seems to be a reaction against something – a reaction against government, elitism, whatever.  What is so ’punk’ about taking useful tools and services, ones that offer more than those in your institutional walled garden and applying them to your way of teaching and learning?  Is it considered punk because those near the top of the hierarchy are losing their sense of control (or having it taken from them – yes, that’s the punk link – ‘taking back’ control) over the educational experience?  Is the problem also one of quality (decline thereof) if the tools and systems lie without the reach of the number crunchers and bean counters? (I shouldn’t say that really, as that’s not how I see institutional hierarchy).  I don’t think it’s helpful.  I won’t be standing up and proudly claiming to be an edupunk.  Rather, I’m more likely to promote tools and services that are fit for purpose, be they institutional, third-party or transitional in their nature.

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Twittor for tutorials

Sep 30

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As part of the project I run we’ve been toying with the idea of using twitter in some way as an additional stream of communication. Our first stumbling block was, if students are overloaded with communications from the university now, why add another one? what’s the benefit?

From my experiences here, the benefits are the brevity of messages.

The downside seems to be the disconnected nature of the messages. It’s a bit like chucking comments up in theair. If someone replies to one of my tweets, I have to search back and find out what I said. I twitter client that allows you to see threads would be great, but I can imagine would add a whole new dimension of complexity to twitter. And probably would be seen as unnecessary given so many people laud twitter for its simplicity.

So why would I wnat to convince the academics and students I work with to use it? We already know students can spot a badly used or badly implemented technology a mile off and will then take steps to exclude it from their learning lives. Whilst it’s good to have been given the opportunity to try twitter in an academic setting and I’m now much better placed to comment on it, I am so far not much of a fan.

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Wrap up of week one

Sep 29

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Lifestream this week has consisted of postings to twitter getting to grips with the course technologies, week one readings, and engagement with the first part of the film festival.

Other musings:

I’ve been thinking around what digital culture means to me as a person and have been having a little count up of all the things that make me digital.  I’ve got numerous profiles on different web services and use a number of them quite heavily to enhance my personal, social and working lives.  I’ve got around five memory sticks of various sizes, each with different information on them.  I’ve got a more than one computer.  My CD collection is now digital.  I carry  a pretty large amount of data around with me.  My phone has GPS, can talk to the internet, can send emails and tell me what stars I’m looking at as well as sending text messages and making phone calls.  At least it did, until an unfortunate accident with a cup of tea last week.  Not having all the facilities of my phone at my fingertips isn’t good.  How will I find my way from A to B?  How will I stay in touch with family and friends?  Probably the same way I used to – but having got used to having everything in my pocket or bag it’s not an easy adjustment to make.

H0w does that relate to being a digital learner?  I’m used to everything coming to me, or me going to find things, through the Internet.  I can view content on mobile devices from almost anywhere.  The tools I use are not particularly personal – I’m told which ones I will make use of – but a big part of my personal learning environment is the easy aggregation of all my digital feeds.  Something the EDC module has made a lot easier because of the tools we’re using.  Everything can come to me on my iGoogle homepage, rather then me going out to find it at a number of different websites.  In many respects I can see the messages independently of the media.  This kinda makes me think about the chats we were having on Twitter last week about agency and how in some ways people are more receptive of messages that come to them through technology – whether the message is to eat this, buy that, upgrade to the latest one of these or whatever.  Technology as a mediator kind of masks the agent sending you the message, be it ideological, consumerist or whatever.

This was echoed in the Bendito clip and I have already blogged about this.  The other two clips I found a little strange.  I’ve never watched 2001: A Space Odyssey but I’m familiar with Hal and his work.  Is the dystopian point here the issue of putting too much trust into a machine?  I think so.  The machine lives and wants to control.  And doesn’t want Dave to do whatever he was doing in the clip.  OK.  And the other one, ‘the Internet’s for porn‘ just made me think of the Daily Mail and there recurring attempts to ban the Internet.  And pretty much anything else their readership doesn’t like.  Are they more clued up to the issue of agency than the rest of the population?  I think not.  But they are very dystopian in their view of the Internet.  It’s a bit like mixing John Donne with technology.  I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from watching these.  I’m struggling as ever to pull these threads together into some kind of coherent whole, so I guess I’ll have to see what happens after I’ve watched the next batch.

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