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Tweet! Cyberpunks are cool

The problem with changing topics over the course of the, well, course, is that you forget things. I went back to look over my blog and some of the readings and now I’m remembering some of the really interesting stuff I’d forgotten, like cyberpunks.Oh no, now I’m rethinking assignment topics, I don’t have time…..

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Revisiting culture in week 11

What is the definition of culture?

Having a bit of breathing space over the next week to go back and look over my blog is a good thing. Mostly, I have forgotten the blog posts I published and I get a chance to review them with fresh eyes, but there is also regret in the ones which I deleted without ever publishing as I have now lost those chains of thought.

One post which caught my attention was my early definition of culture.

My thoughts then were very much with the sci-fi movie genre of digital culture and computing, the dark dystopian tales of the computer geek subculture trying to take down the corporations in control of the “big” computers or of the experimentation of technology enhanced humans going too far, Miller (2011) describing unexpected and ramshackle results which I associate with the subculture underdogs trying to make do with a lot of knowledge but not a lot of access to the high-grade technology of the corporations, much like the edupunk. The opposite is true of the access to technology of the big corporations in this dystopia, where the opposite effect has occurred, one where the results are much more cyborg, where this technology human hybrid becomes almost unrecognisable as human.  This I associate with films such as terminator, depictions of the cyborg which we fear. It is perhaps this view, the cyborg, almost human, but not quite and somehow more, which leads me to a new thought on culture, not culture as in a group who share similar goals, practices and outlooks as I had originally defined culture, but now I can relate these cyborgs to another possible definition of culture and that is from biology, where to culture is to grow and harvest organic cells.

References

Miller, V. (2011) Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology, in Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage.

 

 

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Tweet! connecting

It’s always a great feeling when we connect with our classmates. I’ve never met Philip, he lives miles away across the pond and I probably will never meet him, but there are moments when I feel close to him, that we have more similarities than dissimilarities and it’s a nice feeling.

Thank you technology for helping this happen.

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Tweet! Nuff said

Time is a very precious commodity for me, everything takes me longer to process, to read and to write, so assignments are particularly scary because of the set time factors.

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Tweet! For Colin it was just coffee

This conversation was one of those smiley moments where we connect with each other over the spread of the planet and recognise our joined human traits 🙂

We were jus chatting about comforts, but it also reminded me of a comment Colin had made way back in the fist block where he needed another cup of coffee to get through the Donna Haraway paper. I wonder, did any of us find that easy?

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Linked from Pocket: Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI

 

 

 

 

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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First thought on reading this is how sci-fi and how well this matched to some of the film clips we watched in our together tube sessions. However as the article highlights, we are already implanting devices in the brain, the most successful being a device that can stop tremors in Parkinson’s sufferers. Perhaps because this is not more widespread, it still seems like science fiction, but Musk’s area of interest goes that little further and it’s about writing and saving information to and from the brain. It’s all about cognition, about improving ourselves through a technology link.

In reading this article and reminding myself of the current extent of research in this field, it’s taking me back (in thought) to the beginning of our EDC journey, to the first few weeks where I battled to understand the concept of cyborg, not as in the sci-fi movie sense but from some of our readings like Miller(2011) and Hayles (1999) where I grappled with the concept of cyborg being much closer to home,  where Miller (2011) explains cyborg as “the growing number of ways that technological apparatuses have been used to fix and alter the human body”, which still sounds “out there”  but is actually talking about such mundane things as eyeglasses and prosthetic limbs, body modification and gym membership.

Hayles (1999) however is probably much more relevant to the intention of Musk in this article, in her paper she talked about her amazement that any scientist could genuinely consider the idea that the human consciousness could be separated fro the body. Even in reading this article and hearing that this is indeed the subject of research in 2017, I still find myself agreeing with Hayles on this one and thinking, come on get real!

 

References

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine,  How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, V. (2011) Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology, in Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage.

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Linked from Pocket: The music video that changes each time you click play

The algorithm automatically pulls in short clips from video-sharing sites like YouTube when you hit play on Shaking Chains’ Midnight Oil. The short bits of footage are shown back to back with the band’s track playing over the top.

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After all our talk of algorithms and education, I found this a really nice “smiler” so thought I’d share. A music group using an algorithm to change the experience for viewers watching their music video. A nice change from algorithms pulling information out, instead, algorithms creating art?

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Weekly round up – Week 10 already

With no set readings this week, it has been a thinking week, a week to go through our tweetorial with a fine-toothed comb and try to relate our learnings on algorithms and learning analytics to a real world scenario,  chat to classmates about their experiences of our learning and its relation to their world and even the opportunity to consider how being a part of the MSCDE has become an important part of who I am.

As you can imagine, twitter is still very prominent this week as we chat about the tweetorial and its outcomes but the relevance fairy has also been delivering the perfect reading material this week letting me think about learning analytics in relation to my job and analytics in both the big powerhouses like Nasa and in our schools.

I’ve even found inspiration in some of my own photography this week as I think about digital education as a big picture and see the opportunities it creates for those who want the chance to set their own path as educators.

I’m looking forward to the next two weeks where I can really get my teeth stuck into some extracurricular reading and start thinking about the direction I’d like to take for my final assignment, do I want to push myself to develop my knowledge in an area where I feel my knowledge is weak or is there a particular area which I am interested in and would like to explore further, and that’s before I consider exactly how I will present this.