This week’s adventure has had 3 main focus points: community, IFTTT and our ethnography task.
Community
I have tried to tie the theme of community into my thoughts by exploring those I’m part of and relating them to our work on this course, so YouTube got an outing. I shared a video called numa numa which was one of the very 1st viral videos on the web and is something YouTubers still recreate 10 years later, the 2nd is a brilliant lecture on the anthropology of YouTube. On the post where I shared this video I have also tried to give my thoughts on how YouTube is directly connected to our studies of community for this block and even to my netnog.
IFTTT
I am still battling with this for blogging, however, I accept that we are using it outside the context for which it is meant and therefore testing its limits. I shared a request on twitter to ask for advice from our group on tools for IFTTT sharing which have been successful to help the group (as in our skype chat this week we discovered we have all been advised to use more tools). New tools I’ve tried this week are YouTube and Pocket. I shared some useful articles about IFTTT using Pocket (oh look more community).
Netnog (as we are calling it)
Wow, my netnog on Adobe Spark created a heap of discussion and so there is a wealth of wordpress activity in the form of a stream of discussion using comments.
Tools used
- WordPress
- YouTube
- Evernote
- Adobe Spark
Off lifestream tools
- skype
- facebook chat
- onenote
- evernote
Nice round up of the community cultures block Eli, and great to see you experimenting with some different feeds. You may not find all of your new feeds useful, but experimenting is definitely one of the things we want too see. I’m also starting to use Pocket, it seems to be a relatively easy way of bookmarking stuff – finding the time to go back and read, though, is another problem!
Posting the Numa Numa video got me thinking about community – in the sense that viral videos seem to draw people together in indirect and sponteneous ways. Lots of the ways we seem to frame educational communities (online) are rather forced and centralised in comparison. There is something interesting about the way viral videos can bring people together, and those connections can quite long lasting perhaps, even if just in the sense of remembering the video. Translating that idea of connection into an educational one doesn’t seem to work, does it? In education, we always need a ‘purpose’ to the community?
Further, it reflects a very different idea of ‘massiveness’ than the ‘scale’ which you discussed in your post on Michael Wesch’s lecture. ‘Feedback on feedback’, as you rightly point out, is a much better way to think about peer review, particularly in terms of community building. This seems to be something much more constructive that the ‘one way’ orientation of ‘scale’.
“I’m also starting to use Pocket, it seems to be a relatively easy way of bookmarking stuff – finding the time to go back and read, though, is another problem!” –
I’m not sure I’ll keep using Pocket, I really like Evernote and just find it a much more user-friendly interface for me, but I gave it a go to compare and see what uses it might have.
“Posting the Numa Numa video got me thinking about community – in the sense that viral videos seem to draw people together in indirect and sponteneous ways.”
This is what I was trying to say but just couldn’t seem to find the words. YouTube feels very organic, almost like individuals took things and ran with them and it all grew from there rather than someone trying to create a community cause they had a purpose for it and then does the purpose always suit the technology or is there sometimes a little bit of squeezing in technology for the sake of being seen to use technology?
I’m not sure why, yet, but YouTube has gripped my imagination a bit, so I think I may explore this a bit more. Thinking cap on.