The anthropologist, Nancy Fried Foster, gave a presentation a couple of years ago to a small group at my institution. She talked about a variety of things but, as a manager, one of the things that stuck with me the most was about helping people cope with change. Her key message was that you need to allow and acknowledge a period of mourning. This pretty much reflects the main theme of my lifestream this week: a definite absence of content, ensuing from the transition from cybercultures to community cultures.
This transitory, momentary grief – a result of this change in focus – accounts for the lack of a richness of detailed, conscientious grappling with key ideas in this theme, or those revealed in the core readings. It also accounts for the attempt at preparedness exhibited in the lifestream, tempered by a general sense of disorientation. I put together, for example, a short and desirous wishlist of things I’d like to read; I’ll add to this throughout the theme. I spent time picking a MOOC, and wrote up my reasons for my choice: something interesting enough for me, but with a clear eye on the ethnographic project which would be based on it. This resulted in me looking for something that I perceived might be emotive and evocative enough to generate cool and engaging ethnographic observations and conclusions. But there’s also been a sense of connectivism about what I’ve written: in a post about MOOCs and folksonomy, for example, I tried to orient some of the new ideas I’d encountered in the article by Stewart with another topic with which I was already familiar.
So it feels as though my lifestream this week has been a set of islands. The topography is the same, and the climate comparable. But the ferry schedule between the islands could do with improvement.
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Really superb writing here Helen!
‘This pretty much reflects the main theme of my lifestream this week: a definite absence of content, ensuing from the transition from cybercultures to community cultures.’
Yes, I think there is definitely something of a transition period, but hopefully the time to explore MOOC options is welcome after what may have been an intense first block. A ‘quieter’ period is certainly something that I’m sensing from other lifestreams, and it is useful and important to acknowledge the peaks and troughs of engagement that our blogs might represent, which you’ve done here.
‘This resulted in me looking for something that I perceived might be emotive and evocative enough to generate cool and engaging ethnographic observations and conclusions.’
Yes, keeping one eye on the task at hand is useful. However, I wouldn’t let the rigours of the ethnography get in the way of experiencing your MOOC community. I think that is both a practical and methodological point: it is a low-stakes activity in terms of your overall lifestream, so don’t be too concerned with the need to present earth-shattering conclusions about your chosen community; and you might also want to think about fully immersing yourself in the MOOC, before you worry too much about documenting the experience – approaching this with too much of a predefined framework might limit the kinds of things you end up ‘seeing’.
‘So it feels as though my lifestream this week has been a set of islands.’
Great to see spatial metaphors being used to articulate the lifestream! It’s interesting to consider the lifestream items as a kind of ‘grounding’, hitting the safety of land in between less assured explorations, on the water. It says something about how we record our learning perhaps: that we only feel we’ve achieved something worthwhile when it is tagged, favourited, tweeted, and recorded in our blogs. The ‘tyranny’ of assessment maybe?
Thanks for your comment, Jeremy. The tyranny of assessment, yes!
It’s interesting how easily I (and possibly others) have been conditioned, in just a few weeks, to seek to provide evidence for learning at every stage.