Ok I can’t resist I have to formally weigh in on Jen and Andy’s Cabinet of Curiosities discussion (and I have loved and been inspired by the interactions in this block – an idyllic learning environment indeed).  To summarise, the metaphor of lifestreaming as curatorship poses several ethical questions regarding the collection of items of interest. Quoting from Tony’s blog:

Cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammern are collections of ’strange’ and ‘primitive’ artefacts – some natural, some hand-made -  acquired and displayed by mainly wealthy collectors. They belong to a culture of aristocrats, gentlemen or aspiring gentlemen and are also part and parcel of the phenomenon of the grand tour. To be one of the curiosi, is to reveal a fineness of sensibility, an appreciation of the sublime but also an understanding of what’s really art – and what’s just … well …  ’strange’ ( a ‘curiosity’).  So, I see them as being one of the ways in which a particular class of men distinguished themselves aesthetically, and through this, socially.

The ethical question posed here is the power inherent in being associated with a collecting elite.  Whether the prestige garnered from owning a collection is social, economic or (in our case) intellectual we are involving ourselves in a power game – and potentially gathering influence by having the ‘right’ things in our collection. In the world of material artifacts whether items are gathered for private  or public collections there is often an issue of legality in their appropriation.  This too has a parallel in our digital collections.  None of the images I gathered for my video were from creative commons sources, though I did relent and use Audioswap to remove my copyright non-compliant soundtrack, replacing it with something from You Tube’s library.  However I think the illegal appropriation of copy-righted images (and sound) is an important topic as is the ethics of collecting.  What about the future? Will the dynamic user-generated momentum of Cyberia carry us into a a virtual lifeworld everything is up for grabs? If we can all own everything will prestige come only our apparent discernment over what we have included (and chosen to exclude) and the consequent approbation from our cyberpeers registered in hits and comments?

If so will be be moving forwards or backwards?

After a quick hit and run mission on google to appropriate images for this post (see below) I notice that this topic has many miles yet.  Ethnography is just as much a controversial and power riddled issue as the collection of visual artifacts. So don’t put your pith helmets and shrunken heads in storage just yet!

Ladies who collect, from l2r: Alexandrine Tinne, Mary Kingsley, Delia Akeley and of course Lara Croft (below)

Oh well.  I tried very hard to stick to my intention to do all of my reading 100% digitally with no printing, but here in week four after 2 days of headaches centred around my eyes I gave up and printed off my texts.  Sorry guys, I’m just not ready to embrace an entirely digital world.  I miss the caress of paper and the smell of highlighter.  And my eyes hurt.

I have neglected my blog and lifestream a bit because I have been immersed in visual artifact creation.

[Interesting aside: the work of artifact didn't naturally flow into my lifestream because once 'in deep' I didn't think to digg or reference my sources and wanderings. One of two things need to happen for lifestreaming to be a real record of my learning journey - either I get better at placing my learning into a archive-able form (like tumblr or delicious) or lifestreams have the functionality of working with your browser history.  The former is unappealing as it would seem artifical and break the flow, but the latter would be pretty cool as long as I could filter it of course.]

Anyway I thought I would make a quick post about Twitter before I forget what my main breakthroughs were.  When I started this course I was a bit anti Twitter, but eager to give it a go as so many people had bought into it.  My original reservations we that all the tweets I received were boring.  Not individually, but as a stream.  I like Facebook status updates as they are part of something bigger – like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.  But Twitter is just… all chorus.  As much as I tried, I couldn’t find a place for it in my online life – it didn’t add value.

Now I understand it a little better.  I ‘get’ how hashtags work, and why we might retweet, reply to, and direct message.  However my improved understanding has simply given me more confidence to eliminate it as a contender in the ‘must have’ social networking compendium that our lives are undoubtedly gravitating towards.

Why?

Twitter only really works if you don’t have anything to say.  Once you have something meaningful to share 140 keystrokes just doesn’t cut it.  Yes you can attempt to be succinct, but 140 keystrokes requires you to do this to the point of glibness.  Valid and interesting points loose their clarity and relevence.  They even loose their appeal, and for me appeal is an important point of sharing anything on the net, where messages must be appealing in order to get (and retain) an audience.  Yes I can follow bloggers who will kindly tell me about their new post thanks to the shortened url and phrase combo, but by the time they have tweeted their update  (and I have read their tweet) I already know they have posted because my Google Reader / Feedly combo has told me.

Also, in the context of our #ededc experiment I live on the other side of the world from my fellow tweeters.  Therefore when I am chirping away they are sleeping and vice versa.  At times I felt like a budgie talking to my mirror (and if I want to talk to myself I can do that at length in my blog).  Twitter seems to straddle synchronous and asynchronous communication.  Tweeting to me felt like getting up in the morning, reading a really interesting Skype convo that some friends had had last night and then trying to join in.  Yes I got responses to my tweets but they often got buried so what could have turned into an interesting discussion on a forum, became a bit of a “look at what we could have talked about” anti-climax.  I would also find a very interesting response to a previous tweet and rummage through the past several days looking for what it was responding to because we didn’t always use the ‘reply to’ function or our replies were complex and related to several tweets, or an emerging theme. If you could slide tweets into past, more pertinent, points in the convo it would be helpful.  Google Wave will, I believe, offer this kind of structuring.

So although I enjoyed this part of our Digital Cultures course Twitter isn’t for me.  But this is a valuable lesson. I get it now, and I still don’t want it.

This ability to eliminate is an important skill, and one we can all aim to teach our students.  As citizens of this brave new new digital lifeworld we are being bombarded by more and more tools that offer new ways of connecting and communicating.  Selecting the ‘right’ ones sometimes feels as scary as choosing the right stocks for your portfolio, yet we can’t use them all so the ability to test, evaluate and reject (without anxiety) is going to be valuable.

This little budgie is ready to hang up her mirror.

Using a method of counting host computers and then multiplying by a projected number of users , Jordan states with reason able confidence that there were between 40 and 70 million Internet users in mid1998.
James Slevin (2000) , meanwhile, cites the figure of IS{;-180 million users in 1999. though he does not discuss the re liability of his sources. Whatever the number of users in total, however , what matters more to our analysis is their distribution spatially and socially. Here again, however, the numbers vary – though the overall picture is pretty clear. Jordan writes that, in July 1998, the US had 65 per cent of all Internet hosts; Slevin (2000: 40) states that ‘almost 99 per cent of all Internet connections were in North America, Western Europe and Japan’ by the late 1990s. (Bell 2001, p17)

Bell, D (2001) Storying cyberspace 1: material and symbolic stories, chapter 2 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp6-29.

A more recent picture from Internet World Stats (click for larger image)

Although the % of the population shows that Western countries are still more connected, growth shows how the developing countries are catching up.  For me the connectivity of the internet will be far richer and more meaningful when I feel connected to those new users in Africa and the Middle East, when I can read their stories, tweets, blogs and status updates.

Snippets on granularity

Granularity is the extent to which a system is broken down into small parts, either the system itself or its description or observation. It is the “extent to which a larger entity is subdivided. For example, a yard broken into inches has finer granularity than a yard broken into feet.”^[1]

Coarse-grained systems consist of fewer, larger components than fine-grained systems; a coarse-grained description of a system regards large subcomponents while a fine-grained description regards smaller components of which the larger ones are composed.

The terms granularity, coarse and fine are relative, used when comparing systems or descriptions of systems. An example of increasingly fine granularity: a list of nations in the United Nations, a list of all states/provinces in those nations, a list of all counties in those states, etc.

The terms “fine” and “coarse” are used consistently across fields, but the term “granularity” itself is not. For example, in investing, “more granularity” refers to more positions of smaller size, while photographic film that is “more granular” has fewer and larger chemical “grains”.

Webopedia:

The extent to which a system contains separate components (like granules). The more components in a system — or the greater the granularity — the more flexible it is.

A definition from a guy who read the whole of Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past

More from Wikipedia:

Data granularity

The granularity of data refers to the fineness with which data fields are sub-divided. For example, a postal address can be recorded, with low granularity, as a single field:

1. address = 200 2nd Ave. South #358, St. Petersburg, FL 33701-4313 USA

or with high granularity, as multiple fields:

1. street address = 200 2nd Ave. South #358
2. city = St. Petersburg
3. postal code = FL 33701-4313
4. country = USA

or even higher granularity:

1. street number = 200
2. street = 2nd Ave. South #358
3. city = St. Petersburg
4. postal code state = FL
5. postal-code-first-part = 33701
6. postal-code-second-part = 4313
7. country = USA

Merrian Webster:

1 : consisting of or appearing to consist of granules

(no really, thanks guys)

learning object granularity

In credit portfolio risk management:

In credit portfolio risk modeling, granularity refers to the number of the exposures in the portfolio. The higher the granularity, the more positions are in a credit portfolio, providing a higher degree of size diversification, which in turn reduces concentration risk. This is colloquially known as “not putting all your eggs in one basket”.

In Social Networking

I was just reading Hand (2008) and pondering how:

Power in digital culture indexes an increasing tendency toward the total surveillance and administration of society, now conducted through globally gathered and sorted digital information. The results of this will paradoxically be greater insecurity, an intense amplification of existing social divisions, and the consumerization of democratic citizenship. (Hand 2008, p39)

Hands comments that:

But such regulatory machines may be user-generated in wikis, or subject to top-down political intervention (as in China). Indeed, Poster (2006) observes that the territoriality of the subject is minimized in digital culture, but it is not eradicated. (Hand 2008, p38)

This reminded me of a colleague had posted on his Facebook status updates (not sure how) that he “cant see anything thats going on in Facebook as he is stuck behind the Great Firewall of China!” and I thought I would share it with my #ededc colleagues:

lahirondelle #ededc a friend of mine can’t view FB as he is “stuck behind the great firewall of china”; Thai gov blocked U-Tube for months – thoughts?

This was posted at 16.08 and at 16.37 I recieved the following tweet from 12vpn:

@lahirondelle We can help your friend access FB in China, also U-Tube in Thai, https://12vpn.com

That is just plain spooky.  Feeling a bit insecure now.

Well, I am enjoying myself collecting things for my lifestream, though my collecting is still very experimental as I am not sure a) what to collect or b) why I am collecting (other than because it says I should in the handbook).  However the pleasure of collecting has already superseded the desire for obedience, so I feel like I am amassing baubles and trinkets.  Which made me think of magpies “oh shiney” and then bower birds:

Bower birds and magpies have good reasons for their obsessive collection of pretty things – they do it to attract a mate.  Is that our reason?  Are we just trying to attract attention?  I suspect this is the main reason for almost everything we do online (apart from education of course).

When I am not thinking of things all e-learning I can sometimes be found thinking of things artistic.  The two sides merged for a moment today when I realised that I was pouting a little over the drab look of my Lifestream.  Yes, I have (for the moment) picked the plainest theme.  But that was because I wanted my content to be highlighted.  The problem is the nature of the beast means that my stream is composed of lines of links, tiny quotes and teeny thumbnail images.  I had this sudden desire to be able to strew my lifestream with fairy wings, sunflowers, buttons and paisely.

Where did this urge come from?

Well I think the subconscious association for me is the very twee and decidedly girly world of digital scrapbooking – which according to wikipedia shares a common ancestor with lifestreaming the commonplace book.

There is nothing scholarly or dystopian about scrapbooking.  The only terrifying future vision imaginable in the world of cute collections, baby books and recipes is the realm of the Stepford Wife.  Ok that is pretty scary, but the worst thing that could happen in this world is  dinner is late because Ms Scrapbooker has become so absorbed in editing her images in Photoshop CS3 she lost track of the time.

Scrapbooking, however, develops the idea of my last post (honest) in the sense of a collection of moments or ephemera.  The fact that we can delete the unsightly and hunt out the appealing means we aren’t offering a glimpse of our reality, but rather a snapshot of our idealised selves.  The good student (in our context), or possibly the doting mother (in a scrapbook world).

Anyway, for anyone who is like me longing for a prettier (if slightly tackier) world, some links:

blush butter

scrapbook flair

raspberryroad designs

I thought I would snag that quote first. It is one of the first thing that came to mind when I looked at my newly flowing lifestream.  Actually the real quote  (by Heraclitus 540 BC – 480BC) is:

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

Except of course with a lifestream, you can, which makes me feel like we are going against nature.  Tweets and Facebook status updates are, surely, ephemera.  I feel like the process of lifestreaming is (possibly – after all I have only been doing it for one day) clinging to something that shouldn’t be clung to.

I should insert here that I am seriously into Eastern belief systems so, as far as I am concerned, living in the moment and letting go of the past is where it is at.

I don’t like stockpiling stuff, that is my husband’s department (both of them now I think about it – my first husband saved the cinema tickets from every film we went to see).  Once I decided I didn’t want to be one of life’s hoarders I threw away a suitcase of letters (remember those? they were cool… came in envelopes with stamps and postmarks and everything).  I had years’ worth of letters from friends,  love letters from… well that is none of your business who from, plus every letter my dad sent me while I was at university.  Even now dad is gone I don’t have a moment’s regret for letting them go.  Although I don’t remember what was said those letter filled moments made me, they are me – I am, in pranic form, every letter that has ever been sent to me.  I don’t need the little paper corpses shrouded in envelopes to tell me who I am.

So if letting go is good and clinging is bad, lifestreaming can’t possibly be healthy as an end in itself.  So why do it?

Well, I am willing to keep an open mind, and I am sure we will all come up with a ton of reasons  (other than to prove to our tutors that we aren’t just sitting around browsing Lolcats) and I admit I am really excited to be at the beginning of a new e-learning journey, as long as I am able to let it all go at the end of it.