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The life(stream) pursuit – (final) Week 12 summary

quote from earlier post

This was my summary at the end of Week 1. There’s a rather sweet prescience to the quote above, especially about randomness. Back then, I was apologetic; by comparison, last week I wrote about the uncertainty and variety of lifestream content, about the artificiality of imposing themes onto its heterogeneity.

The use of ‘extension’ cements a sense of otherness back in Week 1. It carries an inherent implication of being added on, attached but not part of the original structure. I’m over here, engaging; the lifestream is over there, blinking, nudging. This has changed too. We haven’t quite hybridised, but as the flexibility of the lifestream, and the mobility of its boundaries, have become apparent, so has its centrality as pedagogical apparatus to represent my confrontation with course themes.

Striated and smooth space come to mind as I consider the shifting role of the lifestream: its smoothness has become more evident to me. It has come to represent a mooring for the contestation of ideas.

a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p494).

Both of these observations – the heterogeneity of lifestream content and its integration in practice – speak, I think, to the nature of digital culture as a ‘subject’. They speak to its fluidity, its infiltration, its rhizomatic nature. With that they speak to the struggle of forcing it into a recognisable mould of subject. It’s like shoving a sleeping bag into a briefcase.

Here there is little conflict between content and ‘subject’: the content too is multifaceted, multimodal and diverse. As I read it through it, I’m struck by how much of it I have not written, how much is the work of others, passively gathered in, reappropriated. This points to the shifting tectonic plates under our definition of ownership of digital content.

There is, however, evidence of my attempt to engage actively with course themes. In particular, I have tried to layer ideas of digital culture on top of my professional practice. But the vulnerability of that practice is clear to me: it is the earth’s crust, digital culture is the magma, cracking through. Our main defence is critical thought, and it still needs work.

I would be remiss were I to exclude from my final summary ideas around the sociomaterial, which have fundamentally changed the way I think. Critical posthumanism is a constant later theme in the lifestream, and I’m taking it into the final assignment. I’m starting to see the lifestream as a representation of the coming together of the discursive and the material. In this conflict between active and passive gathering of content I’m starting to see myself as decentred – after all, it has done much of the gathering itself. I’m starting to notice and comprehend its biases and subjectivities: assessment criteria, its public nature, institutional structures, the traditional educational rules to which it must be seen to adhere.

So, lastly, the lifestream is an entanglement: of networks, technologies, algorithms, bots, software, bits of code, institutional structures, texts, communities. These are active, generative and performative (cf. Scott & Orlikowski); they have qualitatively changed what I have come to understand of digital cultures. I hope that the lifestream reflects this.

References

Bayne, S. (2004). Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces. E-Learning and Digital Media, 1(2), 302–316. https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2004.1.2.6
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., & Massumi, B. (1988). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone.
Edwards, R. (2010). The end of lifelong learning: A post-human condition? Studies in the Education of Adults, 42(1), 5–17.
Scott, S. V., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2013). Sociomateriality — taking the wrong turning? A response to Mutch. Information and Organization, 23(2), 77–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2013.02.003
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Imitation of life(stream) – Week 11 summary

The content in my lifestream this week feels disordered and unquantifiable, It’s kind of all over the place. I’ve written about a couple of current political events, about a genuine David of a technological problem which led to a Goliath unsettlement, about statistics and TV. I’ve written about what I’m reading, reactions to and rants about the stuff I’m encountering, and some of the more tangential things I’m considering as I plan to get the lifestream ready for submission.

One of the things I’ve read this week is Bayne’s chapter on research and posthumanism in the SAGE Handbook of E-learning. She provides a couple of examples of how research methods are used to privilege order over difference:

This desire to stabilise essence is an attempt to produce order and regularity in the guise of categories that erase difference and privilege identity among seemingly similar things (Jackson, 2013, p. 742; in Bayne, 2016, p. 89)

In my lifestream summaries over the course I’ve attempted, sometimes artificially and sometimes not, and sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to unify content. I’ve tried to gather ideas, to identify themes which resonate in a variety of posts. Privileging order over difference. This week, I think I’ll privilege difference instead. Perhaps the lifestream’s uncategorised, uncatalogued messiness and diversity can function as an anti-theme. Or, given what I’ve read this week, a post-theme.

I can’t resist a chance to theorise, though. The lifestream, in its happy medley of heterogeneity, has been untethered, much like we have. We have been released from a weekly cycle; it’s as though we’ve been swimming lengths for ten weeks and now the lanes have been abandoned. I’m floating along, unshackled but still bounded – still with the edge of the pool or the fixed deadline in sight. So maybe the lifestream this week represents me: bobbing along, treading water, flailing occasionally, but definitely waving, not drowning.

a person in a swimming pool, underwater, racing

References

Bayne, S. (2016). Posthumanism and Research in Digital Education. In C. Haythornthwaite, R. Andrews, J. Fransman, & E. Meyers, The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research (pp. 82–99). 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473955011.n5
Jackson, A. Y. (2013). Posthumanist data analysis of mangling practices. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 741–748. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788762
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Always look on the bright side of life(stream) – Week 10 summary

Interpretation is the theme this week, wedded strongly to recognition of the need to make space for cognitive dissonance, for the pluralism of truth, for the concurrent existence of multiple and conflicting interpretations.

It emerges, for example, in considerations of what does, or should, constitute restricted content on YouTube. It’s there in questions around whether learning analytics might help or hinder the development of critical reflective skills on learning gain. And of course, it’s readily apparent in responses to the analytics of the tweetorial last week. In my padlet, my point wasn’t to indicate that some conclusions are better than others, though clearly sometimes they are. It was to demonstrate the potential co-existence of varying, contradictory interpretations. In my blog post analysing the data, I argue that it is the stability of data which gives pause, rather than its scope for misinterpretation. The data remains fixed while its meanings change, an ongoing annulment of data and meaning.

In many ways, this seems to conflict rather than cohere with EDC themes. In cybercultures, I questioned whose voices we hear and the ‘black boxing’ of the powerless or unprivileged. In community cultures, I discussed how singularity of voice or shared experience might engender community development. Here, though, I’m finding that interpretation is ceaselessly multifaceted.

Knox (2014) discusses the ways in which learning analytics might be a means of ‘making the invisible visible’. Perhaps this is happening here. The data is visible, where it once might be hidden; this permits a multitude of interpretations to be visible too, where once only the dominant interpretation would have been. Perhaps learning analytics elicits a shift in power.

Or, perhaps, the dominant interpretation has become this multitude of voices. The dissonance is destabilising, and so in the end only the data is rendered visible, stable, victorious.

Or, perhaps, both.

References

Knox, J. (2014). Abstracting Learning Analytics. Retrieved from https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/abstracting-learning-analytics/
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I’ve had the time of my life(stream) – Week 9 summary

There are twin themes to the lifestream this week: the first, a desire to engage critically with the content of the block, emerges through plenty of references to critical texts and articles. Learning analytics, and the omnipresent ethical debate which surrounds it, is a key component. For example, I included Anderson’s brilliant Wired article (mentioned in the lecture we heard this week), a short reading list on learning analytics and ethics, and a JISC report, which I found to be quite uncritical: I included some of the notes I made while reading it, and my responses.

There’s a keen sense, then, of ‘what I’m reading‘. The phrase, chosen as a blog title over two months ago when I set up IFTTT to work with Evernote, encapsulates the second of the twin themes: an emerging issue of temporality. This, I think, is present in several ways. With regard to learning analytics and Big Data, temporality incorporates ideas of the currency of the collection of data: methods of data collection and analysis will improve, but this will not necessarily account for the patchiness of past data, upon which decisions will continue to be made. This, for me, problematises our historiographical understanding of how Big Data might help us to become more self-aware, especially with regard to the “timeless quest” to which Cukier refers in this Ted talk. But temporality is present too in a personal sense: in my reasons for missing the tweetstorm, which was locked into a specific point in time, but also in a keenly felt fixing of attention to forthcoming assignments.

The themes converge with a slightly more substantive blog post on Big Data, learning analytics and posthumanism which, I think, may be a fruitful topic to consider further in the digital essay.

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It’s a wonderful lifestream (or is it?) – Week 8 summary

Value is the main theme of the lifestream this week, both in the sense of a principle which governs our behaviour and something regarded as important or useful. Both definitions intersect in the development of algorithms, as well as in the ways in which their usefulness is communicated to us.

In a quite brilliant article about algorithms and personalising education, Watters asks the pertinent question:

What values and interests are reflected in its algorithm?

It’s a big and important question, but this Ted talk suggests to me that it would be propitious to change it to:

Whose values and interests are reflected in its algorithm?

Joy Buolamwini explores how human biases and inequalities might be translated into, and thus perpetuated in, algorithms, a phenomenon she has called the ‘coded gaze’. Similar considerations are taken up in this article too, as well as in this week’s reading by Eynon on big data, summarised here. I also did a mini-experiment on Goodreads, in which I found results which could potentially be construed as bias (but more evidence would definitely be required).

It isn’t just a question of the ways in which values are hidden or transparent, or how we might uncover them, though this is crucial too. My write-up of Bucher’s excellent article on EdgeRank and power, discipline and visibility touches on this, and I explored it briefly in the second half of this post on Goodreads. Rather, one of the ways in which hiddenness and transparency are negotiated is in the ways in which these values are communicated, and how they are marketed as having ‘added value’ to the user’s experience of a site. The intersection of these issues convinces me further of the benefit of taking a socio-material approach to the expression of values in algorithms.

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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.

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Did you ever see such a thing in your life(stream)? Week 6 summary

WEEK 6?! How has that happened?! Sorry, I digress.

My focus this week has been the micro-ethnography task, so the lifestream has taken a bit of a back seat, which probably isn’t the best use of my time, but I’m enjoying it. And I also realised that I’m definitely falling behind in terms of contact with the other people on my course so this is my note to self to get going on that this week. (I started, by the way, with a couple of tweets; this one to Dan, for example). Sorry, I digress, again.

But to the lifestream. There have been two main themes this week, I think. The first, and probably the dominant one, converges around the notions of publicness and privateness; I’ve been thinking about disclosure and exposure, and how these might be seen to intersect with power and privilege. There was an article in the Independent, for example, about the ‘protected speech’ rights of AI, and it raised issues around the collection and distribution of personal data, and framed it in a corporate context.

There’s some crossover here with the micro-ethnography work I’ve been doing – a sense, perhaps, that responsibility for the protection of personal data lies with the potential distributor (with Alexa, or with me as researcher), regardless of how willingly it is shared by the person(s) to whom it relates. This linked into my consideration of the ethical and human ramifications of my lack of self-revelation in the discussion boards I’m studying.

The second, but connected, theme centres on assumption and presupposition, and how this might impact upon our views of disclosure and exposure. An article in The Guardian, for example, focused upon the revelation of prejudice even in situations where we’re anonymised; and I spent some time considering my own biases as a researcher in the MOOC.

Both themes were brought together, ultimately, in a blog post about MOOCs and what openness means in relation to them. At the core is the sense of how nebulous and multifaceted the concept of ‘openness’ can be, and the perils, perhaps, of being swept away its more positive connotations.

An open door, looking out onto historical monuments

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Just the bare necessities of life(stream) – Week 5 summary

My lifestream this week is focused on community. This was partly in response to my reading of the chapter by Lister whom, I felt, took a fairly traditional stance on what we might understand by ‘community’. While Lister stopped short of othering online communities, and while he helpfully argued against the binary of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ (p. 209), there was still a sense of assessing the new as part of the continuum of the old. Old wine in new wineskins, rather than the other way around.

This week I’ve looked at the make up of MOOC participants, and included a couple of screenshots based on the survey conducted on entry to the course. I started to explore the nature of the community, focusing on the stated motivations of participants to join this MOOC. The variety of explanations might be expected, but I found an interesting mix of fairly passive responses and some which strongly mirrored the expectation of socially constructed knowledge, to which Knox (2015) refers.

Following from this, but sticking with the theme of community, I had great fun attempting to bring a critical perspective to the use of gifs and memes. I even tried creating a few of my own, but found it much harder than expected; there’s a message there about the roles of consumer and producer. I wrote about the impact that memes and gifs might have on community development, and the implications of their ability to be both the object of a community and its vocabulary. There are critical considerations around their currency, their political influence (for example, see here), their relationship to text, the effects of their de/re-contextualisation, and – librarian hat on, sorry – their ownership.

References

Knox, J. (2015). Critical education and digital cultures. Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Singapore: Springer, 1–6.
Lister, M. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In M. Lister (Ed.), New media: a critical introduction (2nd ed, pp. 163–236). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, N.Y: Routledge.
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Islands in the Lifestream – Week 4 summary

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.

Queen Charlotte Sound New Zealand

 

References

Stewart, B. (2013). Massiveness+ openness= new literacies of participation? Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 228.
Image credit
CC-BY. Queen Charlotte Sound New Zealand, by Patarika, on Flickr.
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Whose lifestream is it anyway? – Week 3 summary

This is a visual interpretation by Jen Maddox of one of my favourite songs from the amazing musical, Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and throughout this week I’ve kept going back to this song and its message about history. Or, maybe George Orwell was right when he wrote that “history is written by the winners”.

Cybercultures, or the history of the internet, is relatively recent history. Most of us have lived through it, and we may feel some sense of ownership over it. We might experience the kind of nostalgic determinism that The Buggles exhibit both in Video and in The Age of Plastic. My lifestream this week has been a reflection of my attempt to question this. I’ve been preoccupied by whose voices we hear. For example, I’ve questioned the ‘cultural sensitivity’ appreciated by care robots, and whether this is agitated by the fact that we’re approaching this from a strictly Western perspective. In my digital artefact, and influenced by Sterne’s project, I tried to expose one or two of the narrative nooks and crannies when we’re presented with new technology: commercialism, consumerism, the bottom line.

This is leading me to the conclusion that the socio-materialists have got it right: there’s a need to account for the affordances of technology as a complex assemblage, and it’s crucial to ensure that voices other than those of the Western, privileged classes aren’t black-boxed in these interpretations. This too should help us to keep sight of the culture of cybercultures, and the ways in which our chronicling of the history of the internet is influenced by culture, in practically every sense of the word.

 

References

Silver, D., Massanari, A., & Sterne, J. (Eds.). (2006). The Historiography of Cyberculture. In Critical cyberculture studies (pp. 17–28). New York: New York University Press.