The final post: a reflection and a farewell …

The end of the module and time to reflect on the lifestream.

I’ve already made some summarising comments in an earlier post in which I describe the course as an example of ‘loosely coupled teaching’ and, to a lesser degree in an even earlier one on my tweet cloud. However, I don’t think I’ve taken the time to reflect on my lifestream proper.

I understand the broad idea of a lifestream – aggregating content from dispersed sites – a favourited YouTube video, an annotated Delicious bookmark, blog posts and  tweets  – into a single news feed-style stream as a record of twelve weeks of engagement with digital culture and e-learning.

The lifestream might be viewed as an unmediated record of participation (as reader, writer, bookmarker, commenter, creator of multimodal texts) over a particular period of time. However, I’m always suspicious of the word ‘unmediated’ and however artless a lifestream may seem in its streaming of data, it too is a construction. I allow interactions from some sites to be made visible but not others. For example, I’ve been quite selective and, in some ways, secretive – creating a new Twitter account – digitalanthony – instead of using my anthonymcneill account, excluding the Delicious account I use for work and so on. I’ve kept details of my iTunes purchases hidden too. My lifestream is as carefully an arranged selection of artefacts as anything else on the web (e.g. my blog or my Facebook profile page).

Rebecca Black, writing of identity performance in the context of young people’s fan sites  writes of the importance of being recognised as a particular ‘kind of person’  within a particular social context (2008). I think this is what we do online all the time: project a preferred identity through a performance that involves selective omissions and inclusions. I’m tempted to go back to a now old essay by Paul de Man called ‘Autobiography as de-facement’ (1979) I first came across when doing a PhD on French autobiography.  In stablising identity through textual (also visual?) representation we simultaneously create a ‘face’ (or, indeed, a Facebook profile) but also ‘de-face’ by creating a false front. Self-representation “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores” (de Man 1979: 930)

mallix: My Twitter class of ’08

As my belated retrospective weekly summaries suggest, I see the blog as being the dominant tool in my lifestream with other technologies in walk-on roles (Twitter to advertise blog posts, YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr to host the media I will embed in them etc.). Does this reveal a tendency in me to view Masters-level work as primarily textual and of more than 140 characters in length? Is there a residual reluctance – in spite of my love for Twitter – to view microcontent as no more than notes that will be later developed into more expansive prose rather than as text that is valuable in itself?

It seems fitting that I should end my summary and, indeed my lifestream for this course, with questions.

References

Black, R.W. (2008). Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction. New York: Peter Lang.

de Man, P. (1979). Autobiography as de-facement. Modern Language Notes, 94(5): 919-30

The deadline for the submission of our lifestreams approaches – just 90 minutes left as I write – and I realise how important the blog has been to my lifestream with other technologies in walk-on roles (Twitter to advertise blog posts, YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr to host the media I embed in them etc.). These retrospective summaries will focus primarily, then, on my blog.

Week 1: 21 September

Other than a short post on the Wallwisher ice-breaking activity (an idea that’s already been used on a KU course I’ve had an influence on), my first blog post was Walking the walk on the technologies used on this distance learning but VLE-free course. I was intrigued by the idea of a course that allowed us to use a range of technologies of our own choosing – a PLE if you like – whilst retaining something of the centralising, pull-it-all together in one place characteristics of a VLE. But who needs a VLE when RSS can pull together disparate media? I also had a go at a film review – not quite pulling off Pauline Kael – and a third, slightly superficial blog post bringing together my reading of Hand, Twitter and Iran.

Week 2: 28 September

Week 2 began with one of my early reflections on visuality with a blog post on the polysemous nature of the visual image. I enjoyed writing it – and name checking artists I enjoy – and the comments of Sian and fellow students. This post, like the next one, We’re (culture) jammin‘, was written in response to another student’s reflection. That week I took a rare foray into the multimodal – uploading a short film made on my iPhone to YouTube. Finally, I had another go at a film review – Girlfriend in a coma. At the end of week 2 I did a rare and beautiful thing and wrote one of my few of-the-moment summaries of my lifestream (http://digitalculture-ed.net/tonym/2009/10/04/reflections-on-my-lifestream/) which has some comments on the lifestream I’d still stand by.

Week 3: 5 October

This week began with a bang: a longish post on one of the set readings, another go at the multimodal (another video) and a quick swipe at Prezi (ed techies’ new preferred presentation software). I posted quite a lot that week (a lull at work perhaps or real enthusiams for readings and tasks?) and managed to select the visual artefact I wanted to share. I also thought of the phrase that best sums up why I love Twitter: “ambient collegiality”.

Week 4: 12 October – literacies

Well, this too looks like another very busy week. Looking back I’m clearly much more into the readings and ideas explored in block 1 than perhaps any of the other blocks. I took another stab at creating more visual artefacts (still and moving images) and got into an interesting discussion with Sian about Kress (who I find interesting, but disagree with – especially about the decline of the textual). I enjoyed engaging with fellow students’ visual artefacts – and their engagement with my own. I also found debating the hidden cultural politics of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ with Jen to be really stimulating. So, sort of a week of disagreeing with the course team but in an intellectually rewarding way. You know, without disagreement, there’s no learning … sort of thing.

Block 2: Virtual communities and online identities is another really exciting course chunk. As with Block 1, we’ve an artefact to produce: a study – in whatever format we choose – of a virtual community. As with Block 1, there are some terrific energies being released here.

week 5: 19 October

Twitter seems to be abandoned at this point in preference to more traditional discussion boards. There’s no doubt it’s a better way to have a debate but it feels a rather backward step. Never mind though, as there’s plenty of activity going on in the blogs.

week 6: 26 October

This week saw me getting to grips with the concept of community – not a term that I feel one should use to describe two or more people doing stuff on the web (Yes, Michael Wesch, I’m talking ’bout you: a bunch of kids riffing on the Numa-Numa song is not a community!). I’m also fretting about the idea of the virtual ‘field site’ (I think I’m the only course member who thinks they might exist!) and the ethics of online ethnography. There are lots of good debates going on here.

week 7: 2 November

Trawling through my blog I can see no posts this week. I suspect this was the week we spent making our ethnographic study – mine on a section of the political blogosphere – or commenting on other people’s.  I know it was a lot of hard work, a lot of fun and hugely rewarding.

I think it may be fair to say that, like many, I found Block 3: Cyborg learners – critical perspectives on digital culture to be the toughest of all the blocks and the one I least enjoyed. I think I find the whole idea of cyborgs and the posthuman to be a bit, well, silly.

Week 8: 9 November – cyborgs and the posthuman

There’s a 10-day period of inactivity at the start of this block. In part, it was work-related (lots going on) but also I think I was guilty of a certain amount of reading avoidance and a certain reluctance to properly engage with the content.

Unlike Blocks 1 and 2, there was no requirement to produce something – other than reflections on the set readings. I felt this led to a blunting of intellectual appetite. There was something about the tasks in the earlier two blocks – a visual artefact and a study of virtual community – that brought the theory to life. In contrast, the theory in Block 3 felt rather disconnected. I also felt a bit disconnected from my fellow students (ok, this is partly about the ten-day vacation) but think that not having a task to share with others may have had a role to play.

Week 9: 16 November – cyborgs and the posthuman

By the 19th November, I’ve returned to the course and blogging about my resistance to the idea of the posthuman. I’m easing my way into readings I want to leave unread by starting with those that take a critical position on the posthuman (I am drawn to Muri). However, Shields turns me on to Haraway and, having read Haraway I’m totally blown away. I still feel unsure where this block is taking me conceptually. Where does Haraway fit for example?  I’m much less interested in the posthuman than what cyberspace means for the development of ‘oppositional consciousness’ and new forms of affinity that are no longer based on fixed notions of identity (e.g. class, race, gender).

Week 10: 23 November – cyborg pedagogy

This week seemed to be mainly filled with reflections on Sian’s paper on uncanny pedagogy. As with Kress and Prezi, I find myself not agreeing with Sian’s position but learn a lot while articulating why. I come away from this block with less of a feeling of acheivement and engagement than with Blocks 1 and 2 though.

The end – as Sian and Jen’s lovely found Flickr image reminds us – is indeed near and it’s time to do those end-of-week summaries I never got round to doing during the course proper. Gulp, that’s my social life gone until Xmas.

Here’s my end-of week summary for this week (week 11?) which is going to be a reflection on the course technologies used or its particular hybrid digital environment.

A few colleagues have commented on how Sian’s paper on digital uncanny pedagogy informs the design of this course (e.g. learning activities, technologies used etc.). However, my take is that it feels much more like an exemplification of Scott Leslie’s idea of “loosely coupled teaching”. Leslie uses this term to designate the assemblage of a range of third-party apps to facilitate the business of learning and teaching. This differs from the idea of a PLE insofar as the provision of the toolset used remains the responsibility of the course team and not the individual student.

The course has been a really imaginative exemplification of loosely-coupled teaching: enabling access to resources, activity briefs, announcements as well as aggregating student content in the form of blog posts, blog comments and tweets.

It reinforced for me the need for a course to have a ‘hub’ – a single space to check in on the  ideas, texts and links that have been exchanged or the conversations or arguments that have taken place. Just as one might argue that every room needs a focal point – usually the hearth or fireplace (see this modernist example) – every course (online or f-2-f) needs a hub. I don’t imagine for a moment that enabling this was easy to – although from a student perspective it was made to look so. In short then, as Clara would say, kudos to Sian and Jen for creating such a great hub (and its noisy, social hubbub).

Strangely enough, in the context of an ed tech blogosphere still chatting about the VLE being dead or, worse still, among the ‘undead’, the experience almost validated the need for VLEs which generally provide a similar hub-like user experience. Sian and Jen though showed that it a VLE could be bypassed and, more interestingly, that alternative tools (e.g. WordPress blog) could make a better job of aggregating diverse content from numerous sources.

A pretty ‘canny’ (take that whichever way you like although it will help if you’ve lived in Scotland or the north east) digital pedagogy of you ask me.

References

Leslie, S. (2007). Your favourite “Loosely Coupled Teaching” example?. Edtechpost: Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating. Retreved 4 December 2009, from http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/10/29/best-loosely-coupled-teaching-examples/

J’aime les nuages … les nuages qui passent … là-bas … là-bas … les merveilleux nuages!
C. Baudelaire: L’étranger

Bill posted about a cool site that creates a word cloud (’word clouds’ and ‘tag clouds’ are different beasts) for your tweets.

I have no idea what to make of mine, based on 100 tweets over three months:

I think I can see evidence that I’m using it for acknowledgement (”thanks”), comment (”nice”) and maybe dialogue too (”sian” appears in my word cloud as an addressee). A couple of bits of technology appear – Prezi and WebCT – but both as objects of frustration (”feeling” and “cross” are in the cloud). Twitter as spleen-venting tool perhaps?

I can see some of the topics that have caught my interest – “field” “community”, “picture”, “visual” etc.. There’s no “uncanny” or “ghosts”.

There are no elephants in my cloud which is a shame as is my hunch that, good as it is, it hasn’t really caught how I’ve been engaging in the course via Twitter.

I was intrigued by a reference to Boon and Sinclair (2009) in Sian’s paper so went off and read it.

This bit caught my eye:

Facebook user profiles are obvious constructs: there is truth in them, but invariably artifice as well. Thus, to some, these digital selves become fractured, confused reflections of a person, never wholly unreal, but never wholly real either—a seeming half truth. Disquiet arises then in having to ask the questions how much truth exists in a profile and how much trust should one attribute to the individual behind it? Even real world friendships can be confused or diminished by interactions with a digital self which seems to contradict the known real world self. The intermingling warp and weft of the real and the unreal can lead some to increased feelings of distrust and isolation.

I passed it on to a younger academic colleague interested in Facebook who disagreed totally. Here’s what she wrote:

I have never felt more connected to my friends all over than i have with facebook, skype, etc. I think in fact, instead of fracturing, these sites bring parts of your life crashing together, your boss, cousins, friends, colleagues all come together. In some senses, for me, it brings my fractured “real self” with different groups of friends or people all together in one space.

Maybe interesting in connection with our lifestream experiments …
References

Boon, S., & Sinclair, C. (2009). A world I don’t inhabit: disquiet and identity in Second Life and Facebook. Educational Media International. 46(2): 99-110.

A really exciting and thought-provoking paper from Sian. A manifesto for this course? Maybe, though I’d say  it was more philosophical blueprint (the spectre of Sian’s argument haunting the dispersed spaces of our own reflections?).

In the Skype chat session Sian asked if we thought it was over-theorised. For me I think it was. Sorry Sian – I did enjoy it though and would welcome your replies.

The appropriation of Freud’s theory of das Unheimliche – I’ve always liked the French translation:  l’inquiétante étrangété, worrying strangeness – was interesting and raised a smile (the spectre of Sian’s literary theory past?)

However, I wondered how different Sian’s use of it was from many educationalists’ conviction that  learning is about coming out of – or being taken out of – one’s comfort zones?

In other words, what’s gained or added to in terms of complexity in employing a psychoanalytical concept instead of other terms? For example, I might use terms like displacement, deracination or disorientation to describe some of the effects in which learning – in its most far-reaching form (what Sian calls “a
 genuine
 higher
 education”) – has on students. Alternatively, I might describe learning as unsettling sedimented modes of thought, behaviour, belief, speech and, ultimately, identity.

I like Land and Meyer on liminality and troublesome knowledge and Barnett on awkward spaces and strangeness. For me though, they pointed to other related, albeit with their own differences, conceptualisations of pedagogy as making strange or unfamiliar. Uncanny pedagogy then doesn’t have a monopoly on the idea of intellectual uncertainty as core to learning.

Similarly, I wasn’t sure where the ‘haunting’ metaphor took us; isn’t it just a way of saying that in HE, like the little boy in The Sixth Sense, we “hear dead people”, our texts, spaces and practices informed by the past (call it ‘tradition’ if you like). I also wondered just how unfamiliar the temporal disjunctions of technology-mediated communication now is to say, those in the 18-25 age group. I suspect they deal with the “chaotic
 textual
 tapestry” of synchronous, asynchronous and inbetween-chronous (Twitter but also possibly Google Wave) rather comfortably.

Just before reading Sian’s article, I read a piece in The Observer called Inside Broken Britain. The author, Robert Yates, a working-class boy made good from Liverpool, is writing about Liverpool’s economic problems – as viewed through this home neighbourhood of Walton and a highly personal perspective. Towards the  end of the article, he describes a visit to a school, Alsop, which had recently received massive investment and a conversation with its head, Mr Jamieson:

Should not a school like Alsop – the largest in Liverpool, one of our great cities – be producing a host of regular candidates for Oxbridge, say? There hadn’t been any in recent years, said Mr Jamieson. On a previous trip, as we walked around the school, we came to a board listing recent school leavers who had gone on to university – mostly local, I noted, quite a few to the “new” universities.
The handful of us who went to university when I was at the school would never have dreamed of staying at home, I said; leaving was part of the adventure. Economic reasons, Jamieson figured, a reluctance to incur too much debt – you had a grant, he reminded me.

At first Yates’ argument irritated me: Liverpool’s bright working-class kids were going to the local ex-poly instead of aiming (’higher’) for Oxbridge. However, the key issue for Yates was the staying at home and not leaving home bit; this was the key part of the HE “adventure”, leaving friends and family, becoming a fish out of water, having to reinvent oneself. I like the word ‘adventure’ here and its suggestion of engagement with the strange and unfamilar, taking risks, exposing oneself to danger. And, of course, coming out of the adventure changed. Generations of people – the first ever in their families – are going to university and yet are not experiencing the same intensity of upheaval – necessary upheaval – as a part of their higher education learning experience that is occasioned by the leaving home part of ‘going to uni’.

I wonder, to end on an optimistic and more consensual note, if digital spaces can compensate in some way for this loss (and I think of it as a real loss)?

References

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]

Given this course’s boundary-busting characteristics, I’m going to carry on in a similar mode and discuss my assessment 2 ideas in public. Sian – hope that’s ok?

I think I’m only really going to finish the course if I produce something that connected to my current professional practice. For IDEL a couple of years back I did something completely unconnected (We have never been digital) and suffered for it in spite of finding the experience intellectually stimulating.

So, I think I’d like to write something on a small Twitter project I’m leading. It’s got a some funding from LearnHigher and I’m going to need to produce an evaluation in March or April 2010. It would be nice to do some work on it now.

How would it fit the themes of the module?

Well, I think discourse on Twitter exemplifies the utopian and dystopian narratives that characterise the reception of new technologies. It is, alternatively, ‘perfect for the always on/always on you tech-savvy digital native’ as well as  ‘another sign of HE going to hell in a hand cart as yet another faddish tool is used to further degrade students’ writing skills, attention spans and cognitive abilities’.

My  project is also interested in the ways  Twitter might support the development of  learning communities through:

• the public posting of questions, comments and reflections (quasi-lifestream)
• resource sharing
• dialogue (student-to-student, student-to-lecturer)

One of my projects is working well and there could be some interesting analysis of the interactions taking place. However, another is a complete failure and I want to interview a sample of the 90 + students to explore why Twitter doesn’t work for them. Privately the module leader and I are actually quite cross with them (why don’t they get it – they’re doing media audience studies for chrissakes!) but publicly we’re interested in understanding the dissonance between staff and student conceptualisations of Twitter.

Finally, part of me is interested in exploring the use of Twitter on this course as well; there were some interesting comments on Twitter’s lack of suitability to dialogue (140 character limit but also disrupted turn adjacency issues).

All comments gratefully received.

I printed Haraway off to read later but couldn’t resist a quick peek. Got hooked though and had to blog.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I really loved Haraway’s Cyborg  Manifesto. Why haven’t I read it before? Actually, I know why – I thought it was about cyborgs; but, as Haraway explains, her “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities” (37). That sounds much more exciting.  So, thanks Sian and Jen for the steer.

The Cyborg  Manifesto evokes memories of obvious earlier political manifestos (Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto an obvious reference point as too is Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto). However, for me it has other echoes too – for example of Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa in its mix of lyricism, fantasy, polemic and provocation. Oh, and its unashamedly utopian stance (it’s a text about liberation).

Strangely, Haraway acknowledges the influence of the ‘New French Feminisms’ – “French feminists … know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery if embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies” (52) – but doesn’t name Cixous.

It’s really hard to summarise such a dense and complex text. I hesitate to decribe it as a ‘feminist’ manifesto as it’s more an ‘oppositional consciousness’ manifesto, an argument for the development of permanently shifting affinities no longer based on the perception of shared class, race or gender ‘identities’ . Haraway rejects wholeness, essentialism, stability of identity – her cyborgs are “wary of holism, but needy for connection” (36). What we might think of as being the foundation stones of our identity – as woman or working-class -  are historical impositions:

Gender, race or class consciousness is an acheivement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism. (38)

Liberation can’t be acheived unless we move beyond such fixed notions of identity. Haraway argues that “[t]here are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender and class” (51).

Although Sian claims it’s a good text to help one think beyond binaries, it’s the boundary metaphor that struck more most. Haraway is arguing for permanent boundary transgressions. For example, she breaks from the Cartesian separation of man from the animal world (Descartes, like the Bible, argued man had dominion over animals) and articulates sympathy for the animal rights movement (”not irrational denials of human uniqueness … a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture” (36)).

I found myself drawn to the section on the ‘homework economy’ outside the ‘home’ (46-9) and its claims of a New Industrial Revolution creating a “new worldwide working class”:

Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workeds than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited working day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place and reducible to sex. (46)

Although The Cyborg  Manifesto is a Reagan-Thatcher era text – I enjoyed the reference to the “so unnatural Greenham women” (37) – it feels very relevant to today (rising unemployment, growth of super rich, casualised labour, G8 protests, Climate Camp etc.). The emphasis on new forms of political action based on affinity had a resonance for me too – just think of the different kinds of people who protested against GM foods a few years back.

Gotta go. Great stuff though; need to read it again as I skimmed bits (e.g. skirmish with Katherine MacKinnon).