My stream is unusually skewed this week, light at the start and heavy near the end. There were several reasons for this, I was at a conference on Tuesday, my MOOC analysis was ongoing and I think my frustrations at IFTTT were beginning to drag me down a bit. My initial response to my feedback was that it was exactly what I had been expecting, however, as the week went on I think it did over shadow my output to some extent.
The week began with an attempt to address the relentless issue of WordPress not embedding any visual content. I chatted with Eli who had Pinterest working and with more experiments still no joy. Finally I went back in and manually added the link to the actual image and it worked. I then went back and stared doing this throughout the blog. More manual over-riding.
Mid-week I joined in a class Skype call which served as a motivational boost. For me this embodied the whole concept of online community: connections, sharing, presence, stories and support.
After this I refocused on community and explored how to include visual representation of this via Pinterest and Vimeo. In doing so I also tried to weave my threads together for example, The Community of Sketchbooks video, tied together physical artefacts, sketching, community and my MOOC. I would have loved to have seen so much more of the project and the richness of the creativity.
My ethnography, on reflection, displayed a level of reticence due to the positive engagement I had with the mentor. Whilst there was an open sense of community and sharing of stories, despite the advice (see screenshot below) the conversations around the actual artefacts could have more. By the end of week 3 I didn’t clearly see evidence of the full creativity cycle taking place.
After reading/watching other ethnographies I now wonder if this was in part due to the vagueness of the process, it was essentially peer review without having the title displayed and in part due to the lack of ‘leading by example’ from the mentors.
All this takes me to my concluding Tweet about MOOC design, have many have been seduced by the impact of high student numbers and replicate a chalk and talk delivery? I don’t think this will ever result in a rich learning community. As always, I am sad to be moving on the next block just as I feel like I am starting to scratch the surface of the current one.
Community is a key element of being no matter what that may be to each individual. Aloha!
Great to see you experimenting with more feeds Clare! It is certainly making your lifestream more visual. You might not stick with all of them, but experimenting and trying out different ways of presenting your participation is what we want to see.
Sorry to hear about your continuing frustrations with IFTTT – its definitely not a perfect solution to what we’re trying to achieve with the lifestream, and we’re using it a little unconventionally. Nevertheless, embedding should be working, so I suspect it might be a theme problem. ‘Manual over-riding’ is fine – this is part of ‘curating’ your lifestream.
Do remember to try and stick to the 250-word limit for these weekly summaries. I think this one is around 435 words. There is some really good reflection here, and you can always separate some of this into an individual blog post.
The ‘full creativity cycle’ sounds, and looks, very interesting! The inclusion of social media in the process might be a way to link your ideas to block 3: I wonder how the algorithms involved in the services play a role in the cycle?