It’s good to be back after a year away from the MSc. This is my 4th course having completed IDEL, ‘Games’ and ULOE.

I manage and develop a digital academy for a multi-national pharmacy-led retailer, focusing (forgive the pun) on the Opticians part of the business in the UK.  I’m a qualified optician but have not worked in professional practice for many years, having spent over a decade leading internal communications and moving across to learning and development about four years ago.

I seem to remember that our tutor Jeremy Knox isn’t at all fond of the type of corporate mugshots I’ve included here, so there you go Jeremy, just for you 🙂

Today I jumped ship from the Assessment, Learning and Digital Education (ALDE) course to join Education and Digital Cultures (EDC).   Although I had thought long and hard before deciding which course to take this semester (my last before Research Methods) I still managed to get it wrong.

Thanks to the kind cooperation of the MScDE team I now have all the tools needed to catch up, although as a latecomer it all looks a bit daunting at the moment.  That said, I love the contentedness of it all and it sits well with my love of connected technology and the ‘internet of things’.

I’m a little apprehensive given that I expect to be an outsider for a little while and also because I’ve had a look at some of the other Lifestream Blogs and I can see how much some of the other course participants have achieved already.  I had based my best guess of the amount of catching up I’d have to do on how much we’d done in ALDE so far, but it feels like we were only just getting going over there.

I spent most of this evening deconstructing and digesting Jeremy Knox’s pre-course reading.  I’ve learned more ‘ism’ words in one session than I think I ever have before, such that what looked like five and half pages of reading turned into something of a marathon session, that included finding out more about Humanism, Universalism,  Autonomy, Structuralism, Deconstructionism, Post-Structuralism and Post-modernism, but only really skimming the surface.  Jeremy’s paper also helped me understand the way this course follows the broadly chronological evolution of cyber through community, to algorithmic cultures.

I’ve  deliberately written this before getting up to speed on what Lifestream Blogging is all about.  It might be completely off track but to me it’s always useful to be able to look back and reflect on where I’ve come from.

Right now I know I’ve made the right decision to join this course and, even though it might sound clichéd, I’m genuinely excited about what’s to come.