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Week 11 summary

Not a wealth of variety for a week 11 summary as this week I haven’t really been on twitter etc so much but this has given me time to think about my final assignment and to read through some of the course materials from the previous blocks which were maybe a mistake as I uncovered so many interesting things I had forgotten about.

This last week also saw a real mix of thoughts from all the blocks of the course starting with algorithms in a different light. Instead of as learning analytics, as fun in a music video. I then dipped into the cyborg again with tales of Elon Musk. Week 11 gave me the chance to visit some of my classmates’ blogs again, which I don’t get the chance to do as often as I’d like, and it’s nice to have random chats on twitter just for fun.

Reviewing my own blog was fun as well, I originally thought about going back to try to fill any gaps I have missed, but instead found new thoughts on topics past, like on culture, my week 11 head saw things differently from the Eli of week 1.

A tweet from a friend also saw me take a look at sci-fi culture through a different lens and understand a little more of Harraway’s (2007) perspective and of course, the quiet has let me thing about my final assignment, panic about my final assignment, give in about my final assignment and back to the start.

 

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Week 5 roundup

Week 5 already, where has the time gone?

I’ve maintained my decision to reduce the twitter chatter on my blog as I am not a massive twitter user normally, however, this is difficult as it continues to be the main community interaction for this course, even with 140 character restrictions, instead I have tried to create dialogue using our blogs with some success. This week we discussed our MOOCs and how some of them are really interesting and well created. Some of us are being sucked in and enjoying them a little too much.

Pinterest

I shared a photo to celebrate the continuation of our IDEL community, a small group of us formed a strong bond which continues. This week also saw me on a workshop as part of work with one of them, teaching them how to plan and create online programmes. The community theme was widened as one of the other participants on the workshop was an academic from Moray House. Small worlds, large communities?

Artefacts

Last week saw us enjoy each other’s artefacts, there were a lot of positive comments and questions about mine so I thought it only fair to write a short post to answer these.

Google Maps

I tried something new this week, I created a shared google map and asked people to pin their locations to create a visual identity of our EDC17 community. Some folk joined in. I plan to use this as a visual prop for “community” in the coming week.

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weekly roundup

Block 1 – week 1
This week I have been challenged in my thinking of digital culture and I’ve been genuinely scared by AI.
The challenges have been two-fold, challenging my perceptions and memory and in making me reconsider technology for teaching. Making me relive my eighties childhood by remembering the counter-culture around the early web, the excitement of a new group of people challenging the status quo in a whole new way, a group of people who had a superpower, the superpower of being able to control computers.
In all my time working with technology for teaching and learning I have never thought back to those early perceptions of computers or the belief that they would somehow “bring down” the government.  I have merely accepted the technology we have as a tool to assist. Now I’m considering the counter culture and the rocking of the status quo again and thinking of MOOCs and the media hype that launched them into public consciousness, the promise that they were the technology that would “bring down” traditional education.

And then there was a genuine shake-up, google translate’s AI taught itself something that it hadn’t been programmed to do which massively improved its translations, but… was this the first step of an AI becoming sentient? Is twitterbot going to steal our jobs?

What was good about our twitter feed where the interactions of classmates sharing the google news articles with me and joining in my fear of Skynet’s birth.