I’m still struggling to make my preferred choice on a suitable online community for the virtual ethnographic study.
Somehow I am torn between a safe, professional but boring community of which I am a member or some more esoteric communities of more disparate nature. From the latter sort I had a look a richarddawkins.net yesterday and some xfiles-related Web-sites today. Overall the former whilst highly interesting, engaging and interactive seems to be serving mainly as a cult platform for the man himself (and his books) the latter sites were all far to commercial filled with marketing.
As I am now running out of time I guess I have to stick with one of the Ning sites of which I am a member of.
A little gem from one of these sites  is a simple video called ‘The class of 2024‘ – a simple storytelling motif.

One of the recommended reading, Jill Walker’s article on Weblogs:Learning in Public (in On the Horizon, Vol 13, Issue 2, 112-118 (2005) is a personal experience of a tutor who was brave enough to  introduce ‘public blogging’ to a class of UG-students.
Done as part of a small scale study she investigated the experience by students that other Web-users ‘find’ their Blogs by using backtracking or bidirectional links.  TrackBack allows two blog entries to link bidirectionally not only by allowing a blogger to comment on another person’s blog by creating one link on their own blog to the other person’s blog but also by creating a second link on the other person’s blog to the blogger’s blog, thus creating a bidirectional link.

For most student this was an unexpected if not frightening experience who relied on the vastness of the Web to remain anonymous.
In one particular example a (female) student had blogged about the personal comments of another (male) student’s blog, again in a highly personal manner only to find out that the (male) student had not only read her comments but also placed a link to the girl’s weblog thus inviting other students to visit her site.

An important aspect of this work was the consideration of an ppropriate code of conduct when blogging about other people’s blogs, as it is important to repsect other people’s feeling when they write in what they consider their ‘personal space’. In essence the blogosphere is just the opposite a large and open arena, a debating club which stimulates dialogue. The same may be said about the virtual ethnographic project where commnets are made in public about the workings of a particular online grouping.
Just don’t assumet that the people who are commenting about won’t read it.

As announced a couple of weeks ago I decided in the module I currently teach to let students find and present their own media on current topics, in this case the Credit Crunch and Climate Change in an attempt to (i) engage them more with the content and (ii) to encourage and foster their media literacy and skills.
Six groups were allocated slightly different tools such as Blogsearch, GoogleNews, BBC Web-site, YouTube, del.icio.us and Slideshare to find interesting material to share in the class.
On the day only three groups were prepared to deliver their findings; the students exploring slideshare, del.icio.us and Blogsearch claimed not to have found anything.
The remaining three groups presented the following sites:
(i)  the personal suffering in the Credit Crunch:

(ii) Doubts on  Global Warming 
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/10/19/news-media-fall-for-climate-change-hoax/
(iii) the third goup presented a BBC Web-site which I had already put on the VLE, claiming there was nothing better out there.
On inspection I found these sites very shallow (first one) and in the latter case highly provocative and inundated with offensive advertisement. When challenged about the lack of depth the students stated that they liked the funny if not silly aspects in both Web-sites and they where not unduly concerned about the lack of content.

I personally did not learn anything from visiting those sites and felt rather disappointed about the outcome of this exercise as it demonstrated the popularity of the shallowness of tthe Web amongst students. This is particulary worrysome as there are many original and novel sites out there explaining the Credit Crunch in simple language and to proof the point I pointed them to a YouTube video on the ‘Credit Crunch made easy’ (part 1)

The fact that they could not come up with something like this themselves suggests a lack of determination of making best use of the WWW for learning. Maybe students are still looking more for entertainment than education when surfing.
Sadly a missed opportunity – is more training in media literacy the solution?

This week has been somewhat different compared with the previous ones. Studies for the MSc course had to come second for most of the time as I have been in Poland for five days to attend the DARE Conference at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
Although I had managed to login a few times from the Hotel’s PC there was only limited functionality as the interface was entirely in Polish and I could not install any software.
So this week’s summary will just be about my conference experience:
The conference was about raising the profile of disability units at Universities and find ways to enhance the effectiveness of different learner support units.
The program was essentially divided into three main themes:

• Physical disabilities (e.g. wheelchair access)
• Visual and hearing impairements
• Dyslexia and other learning difficulties

Interestingly many of the delegates had some sort of disabilities with several blind and deaf/dumb delegates attending. I managed to talk to a number of them and some of them were lecturers or professors in their relevant subject areas indicative of the potential which resides in those individual. This was quite an unsual experience as I have never really encountered any disabled people when attending previous conferences.
The organiser of the Conference, Ireneusz Bialek turned out to be blind too and I have rarely seen a funnier man.

My own presentation was towards the end of the conference and I was talking about a new, radical Blended Learning approach which may assist in helping disabled people learn more effectively and despite the late timing it was well received and several delegates have expressed an interest to try this peadagogic model out.

Jagiellonian University located within the old centre of Krakow is by far the oldest University of Poland, founded in the 1364 by Kasimier the Great, a very powerful Polish-Lithuanian ruler at the time, initially under the name Krakow Academy. One of its most famous Alumni were Nikolaus Kopernikus and in the 20th century Carol Woytila alias Pope John Paul II.
As a very  traditional and proud institution centred around liberally minded and deeply religious professorial staff  the Jagiellonian suffered terribly under the reign of the communists with most resources funnelled towards the University of Metallury and Engineering . It was only after the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989 that its full status had been reinstated and since then its delapidated buildings have been restored to its former glory.

Below is a short clip which demonstrates the prgress which has been made over the past 15 years of restoration. Using the Flip HD camcorder I have made a few short recording from the inside of the Auditorium of the Collegium Novum where the lectures were held and the Collegium Maius where the first Conference Dinner was hosted.
http://www.vimeo.com/7253222

I am currently at the DARE conference at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland for four days.
Lovely medieval town centre, lots of culture and churches.
To my horror though no Internet connection at the Conference – only in the guest house but not via own laptop but from a PC with everything in Polish…
Does not help with uploading things as everything needs to go via USB stick – and this one would not even fit.
So no photos on Flickr yet but will try tomorrow – I’m afraid it’s conference dinner time now.
Nastarowje…

Having grappled for a while with the concept of Virtual Ethnographical study, as indicated in the course description Sian’s message has provided some clarity as to what is required namely the investigation into an online community of one’s choice.
And there is the snag – what sort of choice? The first postings on the DB suggest that fellow students struggle in a simialr way.
Damien with his venture in American right-wing politics is obviously where no reasonable person will go…

This week was mainly concerned with the creation and submission of one’s own digital artefact followed by the inspection and commenting of fellow students’ digital artwork.

On the formder yes I did enjoy the video creation which provided the incentive to explore one’s own artistic capabilities. Overall the production process was much easier to do than I thought thus lowering the threshold of doing similar projects in future.
It also made it clear to me that many students will probably be savvy enough to produce similar material themselves, given the ease of access to rather powerful media creation software including product such as Prezi or Jing.
As to the other students’ work first it was interesting to note that most did pick either a Flickr-type slideshow or some sort of media production there were still some others such as Slideshare, Photoshopped image or Prezi.

Content-wise topics cere mostly centred around course-related aspects such as u/dystopian views or the comparison of value of digital images versus text.
For me this exercise was another way of a) getting to know my fellow students a bit more (after all cultural expressions tend to be personalised expressions of the self) and b) getting an appreciation of the dversity of applying art in the expression of opinion.
Whilst I am still not convinced that digital art is a replacement for text-based discourse I still think it has shown me a lt more than I would have given credit for at the outset.

This week I have given the first lecture on the topic Credit Crunch to about 20 fresher students taking the module ‘Current Affairs‘.
This dury did come towards me rather unexpectedly after a temporary appointment had dropped out on short notice. I accepted on the basis that I will be using it as a platform to experiment with new teaching methods.

First I had a look at what other colleagues teaching on this module were offering on our VLE and found to my horror large quantity of unedited recordings of the BBC Newsnight program plus some other footage with most clips often 30-45 minutes long. Even I was unable to hold my attention for more than 15 minutes or so – clearly unsuitable.

After a few minutes of hunting on the internet I came across this video:
http://www.vimeo.com/3261363

It was snappy, lively and to the point, and about 10 minutes ling. I decided to show it in the classroom and everybody was impressed…
I then decided to put the class into groups of 3-4 and asked them to search for their own preferred source material (about the Credit Crunch) using the following Web2.0 tools (one per group):

1. BBC Web-site
2. GoogleNews
3. Google Blogsearch
4. YouTube, blib.tv
5. slideshare
6. delicious, diigo

Will they be getting the right mix of source material which we can be used in  class, what will they like, pick and present? We”ll see next week.

After having seen Sian’s presentation at the SRC seminar on ‘Literacies in the digital university’ using the visualisation tool Prezi I immediately felt obliged to give it a go.

And I’m total impressed – this is a platform which raises the concept of Visual Culture to new heights. It transforms any traditionally linear presentaiton into a exciting visual journey where people wait for the next adventure round the corner.
It is very easy to set up and coincidentally redefines the concept of the traditional menu buttons at the same time in a highly interactive manner.
The real challenge however lies in the Design phase which making the structuring of content and media so much more difficult.
In conclusion Prezi is very much in line with the current thinking of Visual Culture, as expressed by G. Julier statomg that in this day and age of design culture  ‘cognition becomes as much spatial and temporal as visual‘.

It remains to be seen though whether this new medium, after the initial burst of enthusiasm by early adopters, can demonstrate to be a communication tool superior to its predecessors.