Henry's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

This report provides a personal experience of using the WordPress Lifestream widget during the autumn semester 2009.
The following four aspects will be addressed:
1.  Interface and Technology used
2. The preferred media for lifestreaming
3. Peer learning and peer support in lifestreaming
4. Conclusion

 1. Interface and Technology used
Prior to this module I had no personal experience of using WordPress although I have been aware of it as being one of the mainstream blogging platforms; on the other hand I had never heard of the concept of a Livestream.
Given this prior ignorance I found the software quite easy to use and the written instructions and guidance provided by the course team was enough to help me to configure WordPress and set up the Lifestream plugin. Thereafter the interface was easy to adapt and customise and most importantly the service was robust and did not fall over once.

2.      The preferred media for lifestreaming
At its heart WordPress is a blogging tool and given my linguistic learning modalities this did suit me well. Over a period of about 13 weeks of study I published a total of 52 posts, on average four per week. The fact that the Digitalculture Web-site was open to the Web-community and searchable by Google and Bing did not bother me too much, as I have as part of my studies on this MSc course accrued enough confidence to go public with my writings.
Most postings were precipitated by the course readings, triggering both positive (reflective) and negative (despondent) feelings and both aspects were important to be aired. About a quarter of the postings were dealing with work-related issues, many of them containing news and views gathered at conferences or presentations given elsewhere. Although not always feeding directly into current course discussions they provided a useful platform for broader reflection.
Where appropriate and available digital media (images, videos) were embedded in some of the contributions.
The weekly summaries, a total of 11 plus a final conclusion served as important milestones in making sure to (i) instil discipline and structure, and (ii) provide evidence of formal learning, even when struggling. Writing these ‘e-summaries’, usually Sunday afternoons has not been too onerous as it provided a consistent framework for engagement.
Beyond the blogs the two most frequently lifestreamed media were del.icio.us and videos, the latter originating from YouTube and to a lesser extent Vimeo. The bookmark streaming has assisted me in engaging with del.icio.us more formally and I now use it as my default ‘Bookmarking’ repository. There is also the odd Twitter feed but ultimately micro-blogging does not seem to work for me.
On the other hand I have decided to also syndicate my own and other peoples comments made on the EDC Web-site and on more than one occasion I dipped into these feeds for stimulation and reassurance. I would recommend this setting for future use by other students. 

3.      Peer learning and peer support in Lifestreaming
Potentially lifestreaming can be a remote and isolated experience, possibly more so than a VLE-type discussion board.
However I never felt this way. The Web-site provided a hub of information from which were radiating the activities and ideas of the tutors and the course participants. The fact that all peer learners’ Lifestreams were accessible removed the sense of isolation – reading their ponderings on course readings or their progress (or lack of it) in projects was always comforting.
On occasions I would comment on other people’s Lifestream entries, in particular relating to the visual artefacts and ethnographic studies presented; On the other hand I was pleased to receive the occasional comment although I feel the extent of peer learning was somewhat subdued.
Comments received from the tutors was regular, and the detailed formative feedback halfway through the module (around week 5/6) was most welcome to be re-assured to be on the right track.

4.      Conclusion
This has been an exciting learning experience and to some extent the highlight of my study on the MSc course if only to get a feel for what online community learning may look like in 10 years time.
Although initially this format was well beyond my own comfort zone for learning from a pedagogic point of view the ‘experiment’ has worked very well and I hope that it will receive the credit it deserves. Although it is still rough around the edges I think a large proportion of the IT and pedagogic infrastructure is now in place to move forward.
In my view some aspects could be enhanced for example by putting more emphasis on peer feedback on Lifestream activities, possibly in a more formal manner by aggregating EDC community comments within one’s Lifestream.
This diverse cohort had a lot to give in regards to community sharing and this asset remained untapped to some extent.

This final posting provides a summary of my personal experiences studying for the e-Learning and Digital Culture module during the autumn semester 2009.
The following aspects will be addressed:
1. Interface and Technology used
2. Community activities
3. Digital artefact creation and ethnographic micro-study
4. Online communication 

1. Interface and Technology
This was my first experience of a learning environment outside the comfort of a VLE and admittedly (i) I was very keen on experiencing it and (ii) wondered how it would work within a distance-learning context.
The written instructions and guidance provided by the tutors was enough to get one going. WordPress configuration and setting up the Livestream plugin was relatively easy and the interface was easy to manipulate and very little effort was required thereafter.
I found the Digital Culture-ed  Web-site well organised and frequently updated to account for the progression of learning during the weeks; it also had a nice personal touch of communication. I particularly enjoyed the iconic choice of images changing nearly from week to week.
The only issue encountered was the fact that accessing the institutional VLE was not seamless and required a separate login which as I found out would not work from within Mozilla Firefox.
The fact that the content was set to ‘public access’ did not bother me too much as I found myself confident enough to go public with my blogs after two years on this MSc course. 

2.      Community activities
The tutors set up a couple of quite interesting community tools, the Wallwisher app right at the beginning to serve as an ‘icebreaker’ and for that it worked quite well and then again towards the end as part of a reflective ‘summing-up’ exercise. I personally liked the Wallwisher tool as it provided an opportunity to put something personal online which satisfied my requirements in regards to visual/graphical learning modality.
The second activity known as the Film festival was undertaken as part of the Utopia/Dystopia theme by way of several YouTube clips of well known movies such as Bladerunner or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It provided a rather original introduction to this topic; they were entertaining, thought provoking and an appropriate connector to the topic of study – a very original idea. 

3.      Digital artefact and ethnographic microstudy
These two activities were at the heart of the module. They consisted of individual project work of one’s own choice relating to the themes of Popular Cyber Cultures and Virtual Communities respectively.
Although it did require a disproportionate amount of time to create both of these for me they were the highlight of the learning experience, emphasising the importance of social constructivism, i.e. ‘learning by doing’ by way of peer learning via sharing and critiquing by the class community. 

4.      Online Communications
A mixture of open (Twitter, Skype) and institutional online communication tools were deployed. Unsurprisingly perhaps the WebCT Discussion board remained very much on the fringe with most communication relocated on Twitter albeit by a minority of participants. Not being a ‘Twitterer’ myself this may be seen as an ‘opportunity lost’ but nevertheless this module was also about new and potentially ‘uncanny’ learning spaces and in order to experience this the VLE had to remain ‘outside’. 

Conclusion
Clearly a lot of thought and effort has gone into designing and implementing this learning experience and the tutors should be congratulated on this.
From a pedagogic point of view this has worked very well for me despite the fact that it was ‘early adopter’ territory and for that reason still experimental’.
Given those circumstances I would state that it was a full success and my thanks go to both Sian and Jen for demonstrating that there is life beyond the VLE; and they must be greatly relieved about the outcome of this ‘experiment’.
There remains the question from a tutor’s point of view: How does this project compare with a traditional VLE-type offering in regards to staff time required, not necessarily in setting it up (this is largely a one-off investment) but in maintaining it, providing feedback and monitoring student learning and the overall requirement for formative and summative assessment.
And yes some aspects have been uncanny – but then again I guess the same could have been said about the VLE about 10 years ago.
In conclusion the format chosen could well set the stage for things to come in online distance learning.

Last week I finally managed to get into the nitty-gritty of the digital essay although at this stage its ‘digitality’ is still restricted to being a word-processed document.
How the digital component will enter into this project I’m still not too sure and may require some clarification from Sian.

On the positive site I now seem to have a good understanding  on the cyborg concept and I have found a couple of articles which describe how this can be applied within a particular teaching practice, in this case teaching Geography. In fact I now even enjoy reading around the subject area and I do get a feel for the ‘genre’.
And tI realise that he concept of  the cognisphere is a pretty powerful one.
All pervasive cloud computing via high-bandwidth media-rich mobile device-compatible content will show the way. This will be the rise of the cyborg…

As part of a workshop on ‘New methods in Blended Learning’ which I gave together with a colleague of mine at Bangor University I introduced to the audience rather peripherally the concept of ‘cyborg learning’ only to observe that perhaps not too unsurprisingly it was greeted with astonishment if not bemusement by the 20 or so staff in attendance.
From this I gather that this pedgogic approach has failed so far to penetrate the North-Welsh HE establishment.
Apart from that our ‘the best of six -pick and mix’ approach to learning has been met with great interest.
A good day out.

With a slight delay here are my reflectionsion the last week:
10 weeks is a rather long time in an online course and admittedly some sense of fatique has set in by now. It has certainly been a rather strenuous walk up a mountain of learning with a myriad of things to do, (artefacts), a lot of terminology to take in, to read and to reflect and to blog on the way.
The entire experience feels more ‘involving’ and engaging compared with participating in a VLE,  or maybe it has just been the subject area in general.
Now is the final ascent to the top in the shape of the digital essay but the ‘cairn’ not in sight yet. Hopefully the idea of what  (although not necessarily the how) to present my work will finally crystallise out. 

After having spent a large part of the weekend to delve deeper into the wonderland of what is cyberia and cyborgs I seem to have been elluminated in what all this means using philosophical and socialogical ‘cyborg prosthetics’ (virtual specs) to look beyond the core definition of  ‘human with articifial enhancements’ .
In fact it appears to refer to pure symbolism, an allegory for something much grander and much broader namely of a society of humans whose capabilities are extended within a larger virtual network of (effective) communities, cross-fertilising ideas, busy to ignore binary boundaries of gender, race and age.
With this in mind it is easier to see the connection with teaching and learning and how it fits within the context of our MSc course – and also easier to write about in the digital essay…

In one’s lifetime one is inevitably visiting a number of learning spaces, some formal, others more informal. I would argue that most of those, even the traditional ones, are often unfamiliar and sometimes even uncanny.

When I was young my very first day at  primary school was a daunting experience as I found myself surrounded for the first time by a crowd of children much older than myself, running along echoing long hallways or across over-crowded play areas.
I perceived this as scary, but also possibly uncanny and it was only through the guidance of an older mentor pupil that I prevented from running away.
Similarly for many learners the jump from Primary to Secondary schooling or from there to Colleges or Universities can be uncanny experiences, in particular if one’s friends are not also attending the same institution – loneliness is not restricted to virtual spaces.. Sometimes this isolation can trigger the sense of spookyness and many physical places provide this perception.
For me a VLE now is not uncanny (as it may have been all those years ago when I did my first online course on OU’s FirstClass) but to some extend a reassuringly homely place. My WordPress blogging space now feels homely, as does my video site on Fliggo but strangely this does not apply to Twitter. Second Life nor del.icio.us,
Is it the lack of perceived community in those spaces which is disturbing, the lack of adequate embodiment, the absence of ‘textual reassurance’ for a person with a clear ‘linguistic’ learning modality, or even the sense of ‘unproductivity’.
One thing is for certain it can’t be lack of familiarity as I have used those tools for a number of months, if not years.
This failure of acceptance of some learning tools by a technophilic educator might in itself be ‘uncanny’..

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education.

A particular aspect of K. Hayles’ paper ‘Unfinished Work – From Cyborg to Cognisphere’ made me think:
on p.164  she ponders over co-evolutionary processes in which fundamental changes in the design in two unrelated areas such as biology and culture can have a profound effect on the evolutionary fitness of the organism, in this case H. sapiens.
She was of course referring to the the evolution of bipedalism and the opposing thumb, with the latter of course being associated with the advent of manual dexterity allowing the creation of simple stone tool and other artefacts.

In a further example she described another investigtion by Ambrose (2001)  an anthropologist who was researching the emergence of compound tools, consisting of for example wood, stone or horn tight together to a single instrument with plant fibrous material. He argues that the evelopment of this skill has been occuring at the same time as the accelerated development of an area of the brain (Broca’ aresa associated with language development.
He speculates that the particular skills invovled in complex tool making such as sequential and hierachical ordering of elements (stone sharpening first, handle making next, treating fibres next etc.) is also a quintessential way of learning a language. and as a result the two may have driven each other in a co-evolutionary spiral.
Tentative as this statement may be and there is little evidence to proof this it sheds some interesting light on current thinking on human-technology interaction, cyborg-type.
Are we now at a stage where the two are becoming so intertwined that one (human mental capacity) drives the ‘evolution’ of the other (complexity of technology), with the possibility of a positive feedback loop.
Clearly speech turned out to be the transformative skill over the last 20,000 years or so - and tool making remained a necessary but secondary side issue; what will dominante the current co-evolutionary event?

Ambrose, SH (2001) Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution; Science 291 (5509), 1748-53
Hayles, NK (2006) Unfinished Work – From Cyborg to Cognisphere 23 (7-8), 159-166

It occurred to me (and probably others) that the description of a Cyborg in the media is usually defined as a alpha-males with superhuman capabilities, as for example portayed in Frankenstein, Roy Batty in Bladerunner and in The Matrix.
On the other hand Androids tend to appear rather on the female spectrum, often representing and satisfying male sexual phantasies of beauty and youth, perhaps most signified in the creation of Japanese robots called Fembots.

Is this asymmetry in the public portrayal of human/machine interaction another piece of evidence of gender bias transgressing into the virtual modern creative arts and engineering design?

On another note:
I was pleased to learn that when listening to Katherine Hayles on YouTube, that she has been in her previous professional life employed as a Chemist by Xerox and IBM, before moving into her current field of research.
She appears to be a rather rare example of a cross-cultural Doppel-Ganger, moving effortlessly between the natural and social sciences; bless her.
BTW does this make her a special subspecies of a  ’cyborg’?

This week has been shaped by a desperate attempt to identify a topic suitable for the digital essay assignment.
The initial choice was based on L. Grieves article on ‘How material are cyberbodies’ but unfortunately after some further probing for content it did not yield (at least in my view) sufficient material of substance.
In general I found several of the primary articles in our reading list not only hard to read but virtually incomprehensible, as exemplified by D. Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.
It found it heavily politicised and abstract, which did not go well together with my rational fact-based way of thinking.
I do accept that it is one of the genre’s key articles, but unless one has a sociological/ philosophical mindset this paper is at such an advanced level that for a novice (immigrant) into this area it is beyond reasonable comprehension (and my wife can certify to this).
Kathryn Hayles’ way of writing, whilst still hard, was easier to follow and if at all I will try to centre my digital essay around one of her themes, the Cybersphere. Whether it will come to anything only time will tell.

The Cybersphere Project