A work project moving from the planning phase into full on delivery, together with commitments over the weekend, left precious little time for blogging last week. However, I did manage to find several periods of time over the week to write the required analysis of the Tweetorial. I’ve since had a few more thoughts on the use of Twitter for education and I will either add these to the analysis or create a separate blog post.
The fact that I have what amounts to some self-imposed analytics on my Lifesteam, in the form of the calendar of blog posts, hasn’t escaped me.
I included the calendar for two reasons, firstly because I thought it might be helpful to future students of this course who visit my blog and secondly because it’s a reminder to me of the course requirement to ‘add to the Lifestream almost every day’. The irony of this is that the Tweetorial analysis I worked on over several days only shows as a single post – another example of analytics not necessarily ‘making visible the invisible’.
As part of my current work project I’m using Articulate Storyline to create a tool that will enable our practice managers to review their current knowledge and use their input to point them to resources that will help them. This has involved creating a means of filtering their input, which has required a multi-stage approach and several hundred conditional triggers. In effect I’m writing my own algorithm and it will be interesting to apply some of the thinking I’ve done around Algorithmic Cultures to how the tool might be viewed by those it’s intended for, and by others in the business.
The Tutorial on Friday was lively and useful. It was interesting to hear everyone’s views on the Tweetorial and the Algorithmic Cultures block. In common with my fellow students my thoughts are now turning to tidying up my blog, continuing to add metadata and starting preparation for the multi-modal essay.
Interesting reflections on the calendar in WordPress. I hadn’t thought of it in this way before – it’s also a visualisation of a particular way of measuring your week. I think you’re right that the calendar tends to manifest as a ‘how much have I done this week’ measure, which is I’m sure not what was intended by the designers. This is an important point about automated measurement tools though, that one isn’t really able to predict what kind of contexts they might be used in, and therefore what ‘sense’ people will make of their outputs.
I thought your analysis of the tweetorial was really great too – a super post. Perhaps a topic to think about for the final assignment?
As a general point, remember that we want to see you referencing as many lifestream items from the week as you can in your end of week summaries, in the sense that these posts are summarising your lifestream activity rather than being general reflections. This might be something to bear in mind when looking back through your lifestream before submission this week.