Just Pinned to Education and Digital Cultures: river formation diagram
In Week 10 I posted a picture of the beach which I captioned Lifestream reaches the sea and I captured this diagram as part of my imagining of this lifestream as a river course, associating its early days with the steep plunge of a young river when I was learning what was required and how to set up the ifttt automation before embarking on a fast and furious flow of reading, blogging, capturing and tweeting. This vertiginous drop gave way briefly to calmer pools in which it was possible to momentarily catch breath and reflect on the course before racing downstream again. I could carry on making these associations – tributaries representing ideas and impressions flowing in from my mooc and from other students in the community; rocks set midstream or pebbles thrown in from tutors causing thought-ripples or rapids; taking leisurely meanders through ideas picked up along the way; running aground in stagnant oxbow lakes when losing flow, direction or community.
Where I think the lifestream’s analogy to a river course does work is in the fast-paced nature of the experience, the myriad inputs from outside that have flowed into it, its unique source and the individual landscape around it that will make every lifestream different and the vertical scrolling rolling unidirectional blog form privileging the now and making attempts to wade back upstream difficult.
