“This comment is little more than a kid playing with all the new toys at Christmas. What does this do? Where does that go? What am I doing here?”
Comment by me 22/09/09

This comment was made by myself in the early days of the Digital Culture course, as I unpacked the range of applications I now had access to. My tutor replied how she liked my playful approach to learning and discovery. The reason I draw upon these comments in my lifestream summary is to illustrate the start point of my digital journey through the past 12 weeks. I have issues with the terms digital natives and digital immigrants since for me, they convey relatively permanent social identities. Although I personally acquired a lot of knowledge and skills before computer technology became part of our daily lives, I consider myself sufficiently competent and confident with ICT to be a digital citizen. By this, I mean I am neither born within nor alien to digital culture. However, back in September, reading the Course Guide and setting up my Wordpress pages, I felt most definitely – a digital immigrant. Web 2.0 applications I was familiar with – but learning via a lifestream and blog was new to me.

As a social scientist, I approached the course with what I considered a clear understanding of culture and education. However, in engaging not only with the subjects of cyber cultures, cyber communities and cyborgs, but socially networking my learning digitally has required me to shift from theorist to practitioner.

Lifestreams is the first general system to treat reminders as first class entities
and to provide a metaphor that naturally accommodates reminding.

Eric Freeman: 1997, The Lifestreams Software Architecture
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/dissertation/etf.pdf

Lifestreaming is the means of aggregating a personal, internet bread crumb trail. My lifestream represents my digital learning journey through the Digital Culture course. This has been a useful application for me since I only have to look at my early entries, and realise my memory perceives them as being a long time ago. This is partly due to the new subject matter of the course; the likes of cyborg studies altered my thoughts to quite dystopic proportions. But the main need for a memory aid has been the substantial amount of tagging involved in researching the course. I feel as though I tagged so much, that I was forgetting what I was finding. My studies have touched upon the subject of unlearning periodically. I reject this concept – instead it’s the capacity of memory to absorb substantial input of data within a short space of time.

As my lifestream matured, so did my competence in using it as a tool for my learning. It is noticeable that from my early experimental days of tagging lots of data, using several applications, my digital practice evolved into using primarily, Twitter, Youtube, Del.icio.us and of course, my blog. Crucially, the weekly summaries enabled an accessible, orderly structure to my digital memory.