My lifestream this week has been predominantly concerned with finding and filtering information on ethnography. I like Michael Wesch’s website based at Kansas University, http://mediatedcultures.net/ which look at different aspects of digital ethnography. I particularly like his Digital Ethnography of YouTube project. I have also started to use Tumblr more often in my lifestream. I find that has a vastly improved interface.

I have just purchased some land in Second Life and have started building what I am going to call an Imaginarium. This will be a museum of the digital artefacts and ethnographic fragments that I am gathering. I am also beginning to think of my final assignment and how I can use second Life. I have created a short video and uploaded to youtube to chart my progress with this project. I have also created a video of this review using Xtra Normal, http://www.xtranormal.com which I cam across reading one of Nicola’s posts on the discussion boards. It is mainly a text to speech engine with 3-D graphics and avatars.

The following video is created using Camtasia and it shows me on my new land begining to experiment by building an imaginarium.

The second artefact was just a testament to the lack of progress in how we create physical spaces within schools. I think Henry’s comment summed it up well: ‘There is hardly any other walk of life which has seen fewer changes’. Over the last 18 months I have visited over 80 schools and have found it very disheartening to see the lack of technology at the heart of the young people’s learning spaces. My views on this were nicely backed up by the study http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/dice/nmolp/pdfs/stage2webquests.pdf which Jen pointed me towards, and yes, I do believe that it is wound up in issues of power and trust. The two images of London at the end were there to show that outside the cocoon of classrooms much had changed. I was going to extend it by somehow representing the notion that if a surgeon from 1874 was transported forward in time to a modern operating theatre that she would be totally lost and confused by all the technology. I was going to juxtapose this with  the same thing happening to a teacher. The teacher would know exactly where he was.

 The artefact which affected me most was Tony’s visual artefact, ‘Attachments’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/27361344@N08/3996239228. I found this deeply moving on a personal level as I have been trying for a few years now to digitise my entire mother and father’s thousands of pictures spanning about 100 years. However my mother has absolutely refused for this to happen as she sees these as a deeply personal record of our family history which can only be made sense of by sitting down with her as she explains the story behind each picture. To quote Tony: ‘This image exemplifies one of the ways the digital brings the private, closed or forgotten into a more public domain’. Reading Tony’s analysis has brought me a lot closer to understanding and respecting my mother’s reluctance at digitising the family history.

The first artefact is a combination of three pictures; the opening scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a disembodied Marshall McLuhan and a broken television.

The second artefact is a more simplistic, obvious and linear expression of evolution.

I found the readings fascinating this week and the whole notion of literacy as a mode of information. The one thing I have always like about webpages was the multiple access points and the non linear way in which we can construct our meanings or order our information based on this.

 The aspects of cyberculture and the film festival that have had the most pervasive effect on me has been the notion of humanity and what it really means to be human. The excerpt, ‘Tears in Rain’ from the movie Bladerunner displays an evolution from the metal enclosed HAL. In Roy batty I think we have the embodiment of what HAL strived for. However, where HAL lacks any emotional empathy, the embodied Roy Batty ‘seems’ to develop empathy. I feel all the films have shown the theme of evolution, not just technological evolution on its own but in parallel with notions of humanity and how it can be recreated using technology. This creates a real sense of a dark dystopia which these films convey.

The twittering has been fun, and it has just been like waking up to the cacophony of birds twittering away. I found it useful to record my immediate thoughts on an issue. I would have preferred if I was in a twittering group as there were so many tweets coming in at once.

I have always loved this video, GOOGLEZON, and find it prophetic in many ways. I was thinking about this whilst reading about James Murdoch’s annoyance that the BBC does not charge for its news service on the web, he complained that he finds the BBC ‘chilling’ in it approach to news and the power it has. James Murdoch is of course the son of Rupert Murdoch and is currently the CEO of News International.