Week 6 – Round Up

This week has been about my micro-ethnographic course over on Future Learn. I’ve been thinking about the ASPIRE framework, which is a good attempt at structuring workflow in advance of creating a bottom-up reusable learning object. I don’t know if I should be posting my comments from over there to my blog here or not. Perhaps they’ll be out of context, or perhaps not, or at least no more than some of my twitter posts and discussions with course-mates here on EDC.

I have been reading from the block’s secondary readings and thinking more about ethnography in the digital realm. I’m ready to start pulling together my report.

I’ve added some further videos to my playlist this week, but I can’t get around IFTTT and YouTube, so I’ll have to post them individually as I go, which is an inconvenience. This week’s videos have mostly been about or including virtual reality headsets such as the HTC Vive. One example from China includes the future of shopping. Many communities form around retail experience. I  will take a look at such communities forming in VR sometime next week.

Some of my images have been looking back, perhaps with some nostalgia, over what community was before the internet. With posts I might go back and title “how to community“; “remember when…” and “Is this on the internet of things?” I am enjoying taking time to consider how, after all we claim tech has changed our life, we’re still people, who need to eat, think, be creative and clear snow.

I also have grown to particularly dislike my current blog template (and IFTTT). Having looked at others on the course, my design sensibilities (such as they are) have returned to my blog somewhat offended by the lack of formatting, consistency and all. At this mid-ish-point, I intend to overhaul and extensively tidy my blog next week.

Micro-Ethnography – formation of a community and/or groups

I’ve been participating in the University of Nottingham’s excellent reusable learning objects course, which is actually entitled “Designing E-Learning for Health”.

For my micro-ethnography, I am currently looking at two possible routes.

The first is to take a snapshot of comments from two different stages in the course (beginning and middle, most likely as the course is still underway) and see if it’s possible to attribute each comment in a single activity to a position on  Kozinet’s matrix as I discussed with my blog tutor, James, in the Week 5 round-up.

The course has  also now offered participants a practical challenge. I wonder if it’s possible to look at tracking somehow, the formation of the groups through the comments section of each week. I’m not sure if this will be practical to achieve in the time frame, but I possibly might find that information easy enough to pull together when I’m looking at the Kozinet’s frame work and pulling in some ideas about how the community is forming, its nature and so on.

I also have some ideas about presenting some quantitative information surrounding the discussion analysis in Minecraft, but I’m probably just making a rod for my back. We’ll see how time goes.