Week 4 roundup

Quieter on my lifestream this week but had lots of fun seeing the visual artefacts of my classmates and chatting about them.

It all started with a tweet from Matthew about the fun of reading my personal blog and getting a bit of an insight into his classmates which raised a discussion about how comfortable some of us are in being ourselves online whilst others have created a persona just for this course. I wondered what the impact of this was in the sense of communities, does it hinder the creation of community to have people hold back? Or does it only hinder if you know they are holding back?

I pinned a bit of an experiment this week, I am trying to go paperless in comradery with the academic community at work who are being forced to go paperless.

Twittersphere this week is awash with our ethnography project, is it good to have previous knowledge of the subject or does that hinder? I instagrammed a photo of my desk showing my chosen mooc and my camera as a prop.

A change to this chain of thought was Helen’s post about technology in education sparking a conversation between us about how technology has always had it’s nae-sayers and the same arguments regardless of the technology, from blackboards to printing presses to computers.

Philip has been exploring self-directed learning and I commented on my need for connection to my peers.  Linzi felt the same way so we broke the isolation with a skype call.

2 Replies to “Week 4 roundup”

  1. Good summary here Eli. I think a ‘quiet time’ on the blog is interesting, in the sense that our intensity with the course may go up and down as the weeks progress. Perhaps a ‘breather’ after the cybercultures themes was needed!

    ‘I wondered what the impact of this was in the sense of communities, does it hinder the creation of community to have people hold back? Or does it only hinder if you know they are holding back?’

    Interesting points here. I wonder, is *not* holding back actually possible? Are we able to always present our true selves? It is interesting that the concepts around community often lead us back to notions of individual identity – they seem to be very much linked. A cohesive ‘community’ is a group of specific kinds of people, right?

    I was also thinking about ‘openness’, and how that seems to accompany lots of the ways we think about communities online. Is expressing our identities part of that ‘openness’ for you?

    Would a new kind of feed be useful for exploring community cultures?

  2. Or to add an extra question, does holding back hinder the experience for the person in question? Are they fully participating?

    I’m not sure that openness is something I’d associate with online community, not in the sense of the open education movement anyway. My experience has always been that you have to join the community, register, log in etc. so not necessarily open in that sense, although more accessible than signing up for Uni for instance, so more accessible?

Comments are closed.