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Thank you, @j_k_knox and all, for a great online film festival tonight. It’s something I’d love to use in my own teaching, sometime. #mscedc

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The ‘Film Festival’ was an interesting cultural experience. Someone on the chat-stream mentioned popcorn: I, for one, cracked open a bottle of cold beverage to augment the occasion. I was fascinated by the focus on chatting while watching, and how much that cuts across the typical cinema experience, but feeds into (and off) the watching-with-mates experience.

Labels make and reflect cultures: calling it a ‘film festival’ links into a long and diverse history, at least back to 1932 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_festival), and a quick Google search for ‘online film festival’ shows up a whole realm of digital culture I wasn’t aware of. Two initial comments here on what I’ve found:

1. How does one uncover the good, the bad and the ugly, and discern one from the other? In part, it’s the case with any new cultural exploration. But, for me in theological education, it’s not good to be going poking around watching short films on work-time without some sort of guide. Suddenly, strangely, I almost want a algorithm to help me. I wasn’t expecting that thought / reaction. How, though, do I explore digital cultures’ film artefacts appropriately, within my particular educational setting?

2. There’s a lot of different educational and social uses for online films, and the educational and the social quickly blur. Just the ‘Our Features’ and ‘Use Cases’ on the frontpage of https://togethertube.com/ demonstrate that. Quite apart from the ‘themes’ in our recent film festival, the forms themselves are fascinating.

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Had a pinteresting morning

Having never tried Pinterest, but with the ‘visual artefact’ in mind, this morning I signed up and had a play. Already, I can see the scope for compulsive collecting of images. I liked Pinterest’s need/option to choose five initial interests to spark the whole thing off. This afternoon, I got an email suggesting some more images for one of my boards and that set me off on another trail, and the setting up of a couple more boards. I feeling – well – if not hooked, at least involved.

In that light, here are two questions for other users:

First, does anyone any good advice on what I do with the images, beyond collecting them? I guess a short answer would be ‘whatever you want to do with them’. Behind the question, though, is an underlying one for education and digital cultures – how we nurture (in ourselves and others) the creative use of a multiplicity of tools, when life is short and attention spans sometimes seemingly not much shorter.

Second, does anyone know how Pinterest ‘works’? Is it simply a sum of its users contributions, or what? Behind this question lurks the ethical / political question of what the technology is doing, especially behind the scenes. I ate a banana for lunch, with (shamefully) barely a thought for the conditions of its cultivation and sale. I feel I risk the same empty-headed move with the multiplicity of technologies at my finger tips.

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Other than https://t.co/i5VBJyP1Fw are there any more detailed instructions about how to join / prepare for tonight’s film festival? #mscedc

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I’m looking forward to tonight’s film festival. It feels like a night out. Wondering, what should I wear? Or, more to the point, do I watch the films beforehand, or watch them cold? Wondering how others are approaching it – even the anticipation creates a sense of community around it. But is that because it’s a date in the diary, a digital event, both – or more?

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@j_k_knox Amplify yes, &also structure/guide human tendencies. Reciprocal engagement b/n humans & human creations. Giving worthship! #mscedc

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I’ve tagged this post ‘unity and diversity’. It’s the final part of a string of four posts discussed here. [If I can work out how, I’d like to get the strings of Twitter interaction within my lifestream too. Can anyone advise how?]

I guess our initial reactions to new issues can be revealing of what we bring to the topic from previous life experience. As mentioned earlier on this lifestream, I’m deliberately working from the assumption that none of us arrive on this course unformed by previous experiences. For me, these four related Tweets are an indication of something I bring to considering education and digital cultures.

It’s the question of the one and the many: how to maintain both unity and diversity within a culture, a relationship, a place, an activity. Without one or both poles eating up the other.

I’m interested in how digital cultures negotiate these poles. Looking at the article by Jeremy Knox supplied for our course’s pre-reading, in different formulations, unity and diversity are negotiated by ‘cybercultures’, ‘community cultures’ and ‘algorithmic cultures’. In the latter cultures, Knox concludes, agencies are “much more complex” in their relationships, with “increased entanglement“.

This is a thread I anticipate re-emerging elsewhere along this lifestream. I’ll try and tag it up where I sense it appears. It’s a live issue for me as one who has studied Aboriginal politics in Australia in the latter half of the twentieth century, as a church minister, and as a theological educator. I sense, too, it’s a life issue for all our cultures, digital and/or otherwise.

 

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@Eli_App_D @c4miller Re. “Posting for the sake of posting”: spot on. The risk of posing by posting: just one character difference… #mscedc

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Possibly a self-defeating Tweet, this one. Was it ‘posting for the sake of posting’? But liking the double-play of Twitter as a maximum of 140 characters, and one’s character brought to Twitter. And, over time and use, shaped and changed by it.

Also liking, within the confines of a Tweet, the decisions one is forced to make. ‘Just one character difference’ or ‘Just one-character difference’? At the moment, feeling that digital cultures are made up of billions of micro-moments, the bytes that have teeth, and chew it all over – us, included?

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A first tweet for my lifestream. All streams begin somewhere: https://t.co/J9lb2HbmHx This one didn’t start here, but here goes… #mscedc

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With this Tweet, aiming to kick off the lifestream, with an acknowledgement that we all come to the course from a somewhere – both in location, and in duration. Years and particular places, brought into the realm of Digital Cultures.

Unlike Job 1:21, we all bring something into these digital worlds.

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Hello world!

Welcome to Education and Digital Cultures 2017. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Aha, good to have a prefabricated first post. Thank you to the person who put this here. A few minutes ago, I sent my first tweet intended to arrive here, and then I hot-footed it onto the blog to see if it had arrived. No sign of it yet.

When it comes, it will be topically appropriate as a start. But how long do IFTTT Applets take to work? How do I find out if I’ve set it up correctly?

Hum. Lifestream… Lifeglacier, perhaps.