Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

OK, perhaps things are not so dramatic but you have definitely reached the end of my lifestream. As a chronological collection of my digital activities and interests, my lifestream hopefully conveys a sense of my many disembodied online presences. These...

While my activity during this week focused on familiar media and themes, I found myself wondering “Where is it all going?”
Web 3.0 (or the Semantic Web) is almost here, HTML 5.0 and CSS3 are just around the corner and promise to change the way we se...

This week’s great readings prompted a couple of blog posts on cyborg pedagogies, digital technologies as cybernetic prostheses, materiality and what the physical absence of the teacher means for distance education. All fascinating ideas that made me a...

Lots of activity this week, in a number of directions, a fact that’s indicative of how stimulating this course has been for me so far. I watched a lot of videos by M. Wesch, Haraday and Baudrillard, started looking at some other of N.K. Hayles’ book...

McWilliam and Palmer’s paper on the importance of the teacher’s material presence in teaching reminded me of something a colleague once told me: “65% of all teaching is performance”. You might disagree with his percentage or dismiss him as a pro...

The readings by Usher and Bayne on uncanny, dislocated pedagogies triggered a reverse engineering process in my mind and allowed me to lift the lid and examine the inner workings of our course. Among the cogs and wheels I can now see:


In our use of Wo...

This week was largely devoted to the readings by Dona Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) and N. Katherine Hayles (“Towards embodied virtuality” and “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere”) and to philosophical questions on what being posth...

I didn’t notice how this week flew by. I spent a lot of hours working on my ethnographic report (and judging by what I’ve seen so far, so did everybody else on theirs). At the same time I started warming up to Twitter again, as it seems to be a grea...

Informational pathways? Check.
Reflexivity? Check.
Autopoiesis? Check.
Is our course… alive?!

A couple of weeks ago I finally resigned to the fact that I had to buy a small A-Z notebook and record all my social media user-ids and passwords. I now have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, my WordPress blog, Ning and EduSpaces, as well as accounts is D...

“I used to grow lentils in yogurt cups in grade school” FaceBook group with 68,000+ members. Is this a community?
This was a week almost entirely devoted to researching virtual ethnography and online communities. The anthropological aspect of ethnog...

While looking at the list of 50 web-based story telling tools, I came across Gnomz.com, an online tool for creating simple comics. I played with it a bit and here’s the result: “So many tools, so little time” by yours truly. Excuse the occasional ...

We’ve entered Block 2 and our subject is Virtual Communities. I read in Howard Rheingold’s introductory chapter to The Virtual Community that the first BBSs opened in the USA in 1979. My own first experience was the Greek BBS I joined around 1992 us...

Our task for the next two weeks is rather paradoxical: we are supposed to conduct an ethnographic study of an online community. Problem is, it’s very hard to find two cyberculture theorists who agree on what an online community is; In “Community and...

A rather poor week for my lifestream seeing as I focused on creating my visual artefact and commenting on as many other artefacts as I could. It wouldn’t look so poor had I thought to feed my comments; my bad. I was amazed by the multitude of angles f...

Well, not exactly a week, but a 4-day celebration of everything that’s digital, the Athens Digital Week exhibition took place in Technopolis, Athens’ old gaslight factory, a very steampunk setting in itself.

Each of the nine buildings of Technopol...

Here’s what my visual artefact is all about: I wanted to create something about the modes we use to represent and perceive reality. Obviously the human eye (slide 2) is seeing a beautiful statue (slide 3) in the same way all of us can see this same im...

A busy week with lots of reading (Kress, Thomas & Carpenter) as we prepared for the Skype chats. The concepts of genre boundaries, transliteracy and (multi)modality kept spinning around in my head all week long, especially with regard to their impact on...

I always approach text chat sessions with apprehension but in the end I always find the experience rewarding. Or almost always. When our Thursday session finished, I was left with a lot of questions that time didn’t allow to be asked. We discussed the...

Most of my activity was devoted to commenting on the short films via Twitter. Judging by the number of lifestream posts, this was a week that really worked for me reflection wise and learning wise; as Andy said in our Skype chat, it was like visiting a ...

I don’t think I am on my way to becoming a huge Twitter fan. I’ve been twitting for 2.5 weeks and I already miss the DB.
First of all, the 140 characters limit reminds me of subtitling, where you get about 40 characters per line and if your brillia...

In an interesting discussion between Sian and Jen two metaphors about the nature of the lifestream were analysed: curation and automatic writing, which –for purposes of alliteration, I am sure– was dubbed chaos.
I’ve taken another look at my life...

As most of us on the course, I spent the first week trying to get a proper feel of what a digital Lifestream is, how it should look like and what it should contain. During week 1, my locus communis on digital culture focused on Twitter-tips for tools li...

Martin Hand’s chapter “Hardware to Everyware: Narratives of promise and Threat” examines the effect of Digital Technologies and most importantly the Net on the social, cultural, economical and political spheres and presents both utopic and dystopi...