Another pretty exhausting week gone by. At the beginning of the week I was working very hard on the ethnography. Again, my major problems were on the technological stage, I was really dreading this and had all sorts of hickups with converting pictures to slides and compression and all the rest. The thing is that everyone assumes I’m great at technology as I’m doing this course, but in actual fact I still find a lot of things very daunting. So, it’s great feeling now that I managed to get this up and running. I don’t think the lifestream properly portrays the amount of work that was put in this. While the lifestream is a nice tool to get everything together I’m starting to get a bit suspicious about how useful it will be for assessment. It’s very easy to “feed” it with tweets and things from tumblr, but you would have to read it quite carefully to actually find out how meaningful the entries are. A lot of work for the tutors…

Since finishing the ethnography I’m really enjoying reading the work of the others. It’s not only the contents which I find fascinating, but also how people have done this technically – a lot of things to learn from. I really like the peer reviews which is where the people on the course come together more closely and you more of a feeling of a “community” -  (in a nice sense).

Right, here goes: I went for the Sleeping Cats at FlickR.

Again, the quality isn’t great, as I had to compress the video.

Looking forward to your comments.

This week the lifestream is mainly showing up the different applications and tools that I have been looking at in connection with the virtual ethnography. I have been thinking about this project a lot as well as trying to find ways of presenting it. The danger is to focus on the technology rather than on the contents, particularly if you are a bit intimidated by the technology. I’ve been reading Bell’s article on community and cyberculture which presents a very interesting discussion about the term community, both real-life and virtual, and also presents some positive and negative views on online communities. I think this will impact on my virtual ethnography by increasing my reflexive point of view. I will be asking myself whether I think negatively or positively about online communities and I am sure that my ethnography will be quite subjective because of this.

It was interesting to read through Rheingold’s very positive account of an online community. The fact that he is an active member of this community will certainly influence his point of view.

The comments on the discussion board don’t appear in the lifestream so there is less evidence of particpation. It was nice to use the discussion board for a change, but I’m also looking forward to the virtual artefacts appearing from next week and the discussion that will take place on the blogs.

Rheingold, H (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. [web site]