This week was the first “hangouts”. I enjoyed the session. Too short by far.
My dislike of twitter is growing at about the same rate as my enjoyment of it. So that still leaves me cold.
I decided to get a bit more “visual” with my postings by setting up a Pintrest account. However, I haven’t got it working with IFTTT, so I’ll need to edit out a lot of posts without their image.
I’ve been looking at the issue of cyborgs, AI, robots and jacked-in humans with interest. I used the theme for my artifact. As it was a “low stakes” piece of work, I didn’t quite pull off what I was hoping for with respects to the content, but I enjoyed making it and thinking around what I might do later.
My musical input in to the MSCEDC playlist via twitter was a challenge. I listen to a lot of music, but struggled to find suitable suggestions until this weekend. Once you start thinking about music and the themes, it does become a bit easier.
I created a playlist on YouTube for all the items I’m watching that I think have some merit, and some of those that are not so much, I should be adding meta info against them on my blog too.
I’m thinking more about how this all relates back to education. I suspect I’ll get there by week 10.
Oh, and I failed to do any of this week in VR. I still want to try this. Next week, hopefully….
Hello Colin, looking back over your lifestream this week it seems you’ve been prolific in gathering and interacting with content.
I know you Tweeted about this, however what is it that you don’t like about Twitter? Although having said you don’t like it, do you see how it could be useful in your work around education (and that’s not a leading question)?
You’ve rightly acknowledged that your lifestream blog is becoming more diverse in terms of content, particularly with the introduction of music. Once you’ve had a chance to tinker with IFTT (and I acknowledge your frustration with it) and the pinterest images appear, the blog is going to really look the ‘scrapbook’ approach we talked about during last week’s Google Hangout.
You mention that after some initial difficulty you managed to make some connections between songs and some of the course themes. Out of interest, did you find that a useful way of exploring any of the ideas we’ve been discussing around cybercultures (for instance in the way we sought to do through the film festival)? Did you get a chance to read the Sterne reading from the cybercultures block: as someone with an interest in music/sound I think you’d like it (and I do find his writing more accessible than some).
With all this diverse content coming into the lifestream it would be really helpful to add little bits of metadata to add a running commentary and briefly explain the presence of a particular film clip or article: but you’ve acknowledged that yourself in the summary.
You mention that you haven’t managed to really apply the course themes to education just yet. Not to worry as there’s still time. And of course, some of the course blocks might be more suited to your own practice than others. Perhaps what we’re about to cover in community cultures will enable you to make more immediate connections with your own work? I would certainly be interested to learn more about what you do at Heriot-Watt, if you think there’s a way of bringing that into your lifestream blog. At the same time, you’ve mentioned your interest in virtual reality: could the mini ethnography exercise that we’re embarking on give you a way of bringing the course more directly alongside your educational work and interests? Could you select a field site relating to your work or educational/technological interests? At the same time, you could also think about shaping the final coursework assignment around your practice or interests, although there’s plenty of time yet to think about that.