Thanks for this weekly summary, Helen – you’ve really nicely managed to weave the content of the Tweetorial discussion around the Siemens article, the Williamson lecture and also Sian Bayne’s ideas around entanglement and also work by Orlikowski on sociomateriality – really nice synthesis drawing on different courses.

By the way, I love the marginalia and other scribbles on the scanned piece of the Bayne reading: there’s something suggestive there of the way that sociomateriality reveals the ‘messiness’ of education.

‘In the second half of the week, we engaged in a two-day ‘tweetorial’ and I found myself communicating with Ben directly about LA.’

Thanks for your input to the Tweetorial – the exercise was really dependent on the contribution of the group and along with other members of the class, it really made for a compelling and captivating exercise. I’m really glad to see that you managed to entice Ben Williamson into our tutorial! Along with a contribution from Ibrar Bhatt on Friday morning (who also does interesting work around sociomateriality and digital literacy practices) it was great to see how Twitter enabled these other voices to momentarily ‘join our class’.

‘The data generated by our discussion were, to an extent, captured and ordered by the algorithm, but the results are simultaneously ‘messy’ and require human agency to make sense of the ‘cheese’ in the data.’

I enjoyed a wry smile at the way this unfolded and will enjoy looking through the data like everyone else to see whether it comes to the fore! Curiously, on the visualisation in your summary my eye was drawn to ‘STUDENTS GOT SPAM’ which might or might not be an accidental critique on the eating habits of the class (I doubt it).

‘The sociomaterialist perspective of the ‘the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material’ (Orlikowski, 2007) and, therefore, the technical, is a seam which has run throughout our blocks of study and was highlighted in both the Siemens and Williamson readings.’

Like you, I feel this has been a thread that has run through the course, although it has particularly come to the fore around cybercultures and now algorithmic cultures. I think it very helpfully challenges us to move beyond critiques of digital education where we are ‘done unto’ by technology, or simply use technology as the means of production. As you acknowledge, it more complicated than that, more entangled.

I’m going to look forward to reading you blog reflecting on the learning analytics from the Tweetorial. And before that of course, I’ll hopefully see you in a google hangout in the coming days, Helen.

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