Month: March 2017

In a bid to stop the spam, if you see a password request for a post, it’s the same as our module hashtag on twitter

It was getting a bit out of hand. Without any control over the plugins on this wordpress site, none of the usual means are available to combat the spam.

So, I’ve started to stick posts behind a password to see if that has any impact or not.

think of the hashtag letters we use ….

From Twitter

On one hand, we fear that AI will follow us to the extent of the known universe to hunt us down, on the other, we work on connecting the human brain to merge with computers to “keep up” with advanced in AI. There’s a nuance in this that I haven’t picked up. To me, if I was genuinely scared that AI would be our ultimate downfall, then I wouldn’t go about plugging technology in to my brain. Perhaps there will be good and bad AI. Perhaps, come the singularity, some will choose the side of humans, and others will go rogue. Maybe the comic (and many movies) in the “Transformers” series may yet become valued as a highly prescient work of literature, where one side of sentient robots chooses to enslave humans, whilst the other chooses to work with humanity so it can be free…..

Week 10 – Round Up

Week 10, and my final weekly round-up post, chronologically at least. I’m still missing at least one somewhere back a few weeks which I’ll take time to pick up along with the general tidying up of my lifestream blog that will take place in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve added a new category of posts this week entitled “Algorithmic Culture and Turnitin“. I had intended to use these to record my activity toward my digital essay, but as I pause to reflect over the task at hand in preparation of this blog for submission, I’m not sure if that’s actually advisable. I may have to pick up my own blog somewhere else to continue with this.

This week was also one of the busiest periods of the year at my work, with the Multilingual Debate 2017 happening on-campus (Heriot-Watt University) and streamed online. The afternoon debate was around the subject of robots, so there was plenty of discussion coming up that I saw as relevant to the #MSCEDC which I combined with #MLD2017 (the event hashtag).

This was also the week of the final Hangouts session, for which I managed to use a chroma key filter to create a backdrop of a selection of images I used for my Block 1 Artefact. This went down well, but the novelty did not detract from an excellent discussion with the class, though it may have etched a resilient memory in the minds of some. I thoroughly enjoyed this session, and took a lot of notes that will be most useful in my Digital Essay.

This was also the week to reflect on the analysis conducted on the tweetorial. My official response is written, as requested. I also put together some thoughts to help me get started writing using video.

 

p.s. The idea of an EDC playlist still entices.

 

 

Tweetorial and TweetArchivist – my thoughts

How has the Twitter archive represented our Tweetorial?

TweetArchivist has represented our “intensive tweeting” period as a series of graphs, tables and word clouds. It has used quantitative measurements such as a sum (e.g. total number of tweets per user), averages (e.g. word clouds) and counts (e.g. number of hashtags used). It has done so with a tool that is not specifically designed to offer learning analytics. Not say that fact precludes its presentation from being used in such a manner, which I’ll get to later in this post.

Continue reading “Tweetorial and TweetArchivist – my thoughts”

From Twitter – delegating to the machine

I *think* I probably got to this point in the write up of the tweetorial, but basically, the level of interpretation identified by Helen does suggest that there is some merit in academics being more explicit in feedback, lest students take an altogether different reading….

Some thoughts down on video ahead of my tweetorial write-up

Never sure how to get video to embed properly in this blog from the media service, and I’m out of time, so here are a couple of links to the same thing:

https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/Week+10+-+some+commentary+around+the+tweetorial+exercise/1_pf9xf2ig

https://media.ed.ac.uk/id/1_pf9xf2ig

From Twitter

Given Haraway raised the issue of gender and sci-fi earlier in my blogging, I thought that this collection could be relevant. I haven’t purchased it, because I’m still working through a bunch of Christmas and birthday books. There is a mix of male and female authors in that list. Are there noticeable differences between sci-fi written by either gender?

Digital Essay Component via Twitter

 

from http://twitter.com/c4miller

From Twitter – If you ever need an example of the need for thorough preparation…

And here’s the image in question:

From Twitter – Multilingual Debate 2017

“This house believes that robots will soon be a positive and defining feature of our daily lives”.

I was part of the organising committee for a large event the Multilingual Debate 2017 which happens every year. It’s actually TWO events morning and afternoon, both on-campus and streamed online. Our students simultaneously interpret the entire debate in to multiple languages (including British Sign Language). Capturing this online is no mean feat, and we used a variety of social media to try to engage our online viewers, including Twitter.

From Twitter

Robots, AI and algorithms are heavily intertwined. The use of education has been discussed, but someone brought up the implication of using advanced technology in war. Thsi is harking back to the dystopian future revealed in Terminator and other such movies, but is becoming a very real concept, so much so that it’s brought up during a debate where the audience on-campus consists mainly of high-school aged children. It’s hard to imagine what sort of world our sons and daughters will grow in to. Certainly I doubt my parents would have imagined anything like we have now.

Week 9 – Round Up

All of my life-stream posts this week came from Twitter. I need to get some space from the discussion, to see how much contextualization is required for each post. Not every post I made is covered in the life-stream, at least.

The Twitter Tutorial was surprisingly taxing. Keeping track of multiple threads of discussion; trying to get across your point of view in just 140 characters, or far fewer when factoring in the Twitter furniture than comes with every post. This reminds of why I have previously decided not to use Twitter.

Examples of the themes that I picked up on during the tutorial are:

I felt the benefits of discussing my ideas with the class. Their feedback was helpful. There’s plenty to digest and consider. I haven’t reeled it all in as much as I would like. Having installed Twitter on my mobile phone, I do find that it’s quite invasive, so maybe something will pop up that I’m hard pressed to ignore. I would like to spend a bit of time reflecting on the themes raised during the tutorial and pulling in some images and videos.

Also, I have decided to pursue the use of Turnitin, similarity and plagiarism as my piece of assessment. Some form of video as suggested by James in last week’s feedback. Perhaps a mini-documentary of sorts.