Tweets: IFTTT, Twitter, and that binary again

It’s an emotional moment. (OK, not really.) The IFTTT strings are cut forever between Twitter and this blog. Between everything and this blog. It’s a good time, I think, to reflect on my use of Twitter and IFTTT throughout this course. I get the impression that the way I’ve used Twitter differs from a lot of my cohort. Earlier today, for example, the other Helen asked why we might’ve used Twitter more than previous course cohorts, and I was interested in this answer, given by Clare:

By comparison, my use of Twitter has been largely terse, laconic and unsustained – though the platform might be partially responsible for at least the first two. Looking back over my lifestream, I can see how rarely I’ve started or entered into conversations on Twitter, how aphoristic my tweets have been. They’ve been purely functional, one-offs to prove that I’m engaging with this or that, that I’m following the social and educational rules of this course.

At the beginning of the course, I wrote a post where I said I thought I’d find it weird to contaminate my social media presence with academic ideas. This turned out to be either a pretty accurate foretelling, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps I should’ve set up a new Twitter handle, specifically for this. Or perhaps this would have simply masked my behaviour.

I write this not to excuse the pithiness and infrequency of my tweets, fortuitous though it may be to do that as well. Instead, I write this because my reflection about my use of Twitter is revealing to me the potential polymorphic, inconstant forms of agency that technology acts and performs. It’s a kind of unexpected technological determinism, one which is misaligned with the ‘goals’ of the platform. Twitter might be designed to ameliorate communication, but the massive and complex sociotechnical network within which it exists actually worked to silence me.

IFTTT presents a different sort of challenge. It was part of the assessment criteria to use it – to bring in diverse and differently moded content from wherever we are, whatever we’re looking at, and however we’re doing so. We were instructed to be instrumental about it, to use IFTTT in this very ‘black boxed’ sort of way. But of course we didn’t. IFTTT failed to meet the aesthetic standards of many of us, including me. So we’ve let IFTTT do its thing, and then gone into the blog to make it better. It’s instrumentalism, still, but again, kind of misdirected. Maybe we could call it transtechnologism.

What these two (flawed, I’m sure) observations do is to underline something fundamental about the themes of this course that I think, until now, I’d missed. Consider the two approach to technology often implicit in online education, according to Hamilton and Friesen (2013):

the first, which we call “essentialist”, takes technologies to be embodiments of abstract pedagogical principles. Here technologies are depicted as independent forces for the realisation of pedagogical aims, that are intrinsic to them prior to any actual use.

the second, which we call “instrumentalist”, depicts technologies as tools to be interpreted in light of this or that pedagogical framework or principle, and measured against how well they correspond in practice to that framework or principle. Here, technologies are seen as neutral mean employed for ends determined independently by their users.

These ideas have permeated this whole course. Don’t fall into these traps, into this lazy binary.  And yet there’s nothing here that rules out determinism, essentialism, instrumentalism. Calling out the binary tells us to think critically about the use of technology in education: it doesn’t make the two edges of that binary fundamentally false or impossible. We ought not to make the assumption, but once we haven’t, what we might have assumed could still turn out to be true.

References

Hamilton, E. C., & Friesen, N. (2013). Online Education: A Science and Technology Studies Perspective. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 39(2), https://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/26315

Comment from Cathy’s blog

Cathy, this is great! Nice work, and an innovative way to question what data is captured – it’s important to balance our interpretation of the meaning of data with what is captured (and what is missing). Thank you!
-Helen

from Comments for Cathy’s Lifestream http://ift.tt/2ohg295
via IFTTT

Life(stream) comes at you fast: Week 7 summary

The most remarkable thing about my lifestream this week is the massive increase in content, particularly compared to the past couple of weeks. In a deliciously meta twist, the reasons for this are also, weirdly, the themes of my lifestream: reaction and community.

The mid-course feedback I received quite rightly suggested that I consider additional ways to feed content into the lifestream. I wrote about a specific (albeit rather miniature) dilemma I faced in response to this. The feedback also encouraged me to reflect further on how I’m using IFTTT. Adding posts from Pinterest, for example, like this one, require readjustment to make them fit, and the time it takes to fix them often feels double the time it would take to add the content directly. This helped me to shape a presentation given to grad students at work, focusing on employing IFTTT in a far more instrumental way than I am here. [Click the image below to see the slides].

Reaction and community intersect evidently in terms of the response of EDC community to the micro-ethnographies posted by me and my supremely talented classmates. This is demonstrated in a series of comments (here, here, here), many tweets, and follow-ups to read in our post-netnography haze (here, here, here). I also included my personal reaction to tweeting a piece of academic work. One particular thing I was intrigued by is the way our expressions of community on Twitter were often non-verbal; they were endorsements, RTs or favourites. I considered this further in a blog post about a viral meme.

It’s been a week of reconsidering what ‘community’ can mean, and the assortment of ways in which cohesion might be considered in relation to it. It isn’t necessarily active and present; the question might be ‘to lurk or not to lurk’, but this affects your community status, not membership.