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Commenting on Stuart’s blog

I really love this. Great find 🙂

I wonder if the move from MOOCs to spocs is a bit like the move from albums to streaming, bite-sized chunks.

Eli

from Comments for Stuart’s EDC blog http://ift.tt/2nmDAbT
via IFTTT

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Tweet! Twitter bomb, light the tape and run

Twitter had been a bit quiet this week, so knowing some of my classmates, I threw a tweet bomb and ran 🙂

It didn’t wake twitter up quite as much as I had thought it would, but then I forget that we all work in different areas and so this maybe wasn’t as relevant to everyone as I had originally thought.

Always a fun topic though and one I enjoy the debate on.  Do UG students get the best out of lectures? Or is it time for a change in our educational practises?

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Tweet! Feminist perspective on sci-fi fiction

Interesting article about the feminist perspective of sci-fi fiction shared by a colleague from New College which reminded me of Harraway’s (2007) approach to highlighting the need for a feminist perspective to a field which is dominated by research and writing by men.

Harraway (2007) took a really interesting approach to using the cyborg as a metaphor for bridging gaps and ignoring boundaries, not male or female but evolved and with reduced biology allowing the possibility of eliminating male versus female. This is quite different from other feminist perspectives which accentuate the need for a balance of male and female views in research and academic writing as either will see things differently and be influenced by society differently. The perspective of a woman on sci-fi versus a man’s view on sci-fi was the main idea behind this article.

References

Hawaray, D. (2007) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and social feminist in the late twentieth century’, BELL, D; KENNEDY, B (eds). The Cybercultures reader. London: Routledge, pp. 34-65.

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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.