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Lifestream Blog – Final Summary

My lifestream blog contains a blend of sourced and composed resources that reflect the key themes of Education and Digital Cultures. To fully explore each theme I conducted a series of practical exercises to gain insight from both an institutional and individual perspective. The content of my blog highlights many different points of view on each theme and is reinforced by experimentation that ultimately allowed me to construct knowledge of each topic through experience.

I was intrigued by cybercultures and the concept of posthumanism. It would appear that the human race is no longer satisfied with colonising digital territories and now seeks to infuse technology with our minds and bodies. I learned of an ethos that digital is better and that mechanical intervention will inevitably lead to progress whilst acknowledging the antithesis and realising that this may not always be the case.

The political and economic factors (Lister et al 2009) influencing digital education also intrigued me. This was most evident in my micro-ethnography where economic gain was the driving force of the MOOC in which I participated. My micro-ethnography would suggest that there are indeed limitations within a LMS that contribute to the perception of online community cultures, but that they only exaggerate circumstances that often originate out-with digital spaces.

As with most scenarios where the physical and digital worlds intersect there are inevitably ethical considerations to acknowledge. I noticed that ethics was a recurring theme throughout each block of the course, be it the ethics surrounding cyborgs, online communities, and analytics and big data. I learned that that no matter how great and efficient digital cultures make us, we are still human beings with qualities and principles that cannot be expressed digitally – ethics and responsibility being the two most relevant to the course.

Throughout the course I have questioned if, as human beings, we are supposed to benefit as individuals from digitisation – particularly when studying algorithmic cultures. In studying my own performance and analytical data from an online learning activity, I gained experience of the impact that exposure to learning statistics has on students. I realised that whilst big data and analytics support the notion that digital is better, within education this may only ring true for the institution and not the individual. This was an invaluable experience in connecting my understanding of the course themes to the content of my lifestream blog.

My lifestream blog shows the ubiquity of digital cultures in business, politics, education and everyday life. Our internet browsing trends, shopping habits, and social media interactions are being shaped and influenced by digital trends set by computer interpretation of our behaviours and actions. Education is merely another strand of life that is being made more efficient, accessible and available by digital intervention.

On conclusion, one could also observe a shift in digital culture over time. In the early stages the purpose of digitisation was to assist humans to do basic tasks. This gradually evolved into doing machines performing complex tasks and exceeding the limitations of human form. In the present, we are using technology as an alternative form of intelligence and as a tool for efficiency and predicting the future. Certainly, if transhumanism and cyberpunk ideologies come to pass, then the human form will play a lesser role in both education and the wider society.

References

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In New media: a critical introduction. M. Lister (Eds.) (London, Routledge): pp. 163-236.

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Liked on YouTube: Global Digital Culture: Cultural Differences and the Internet

I stumbled across this video and in my opinion it is like watching a documentary version of the Lister et al (2009) reading. The themes, story, facts and issues are exactly the same.

References

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In New media: a critical introduction. M. Lister (Eds.) (London, Routledge): pp. 163-236.

YouTube description:

Global Digital Culture: Cultural Differences and the Internet
Now, from portraits of individuals painted on canvato that vast virtual image of modern society that is the Internet,journalist Alexs Krotoski looks into the evolving face of the web,to find out what it says about who we are.

The founders of the web had a dream: they imagined the global cyber-utopia founded on the ethos of free information for all. But the problem with this vision is that it assumes that we’re all one people with the same shared ideals. But we’re not. The web isn´t neutral.It mirrors the values of those of us who go online and it reflects the ideologies of the people who design and build the services.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia believes shared information promotes democracy. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, says privacy is dead. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google have decided that the most valuable information should be determined and filtered by the crowd. These are profoundly political positions, immersed in western democratic ideas. The web that the majority of us recognise and use, here in the English speaking western world, has characteristics of our ideological and cultural values, but the Internet centre of gravity is quickly shifting away from the West.

A new Internet world is coming online. Of the 2 billion Internet users, 272 million are in North America: that´s more than three quarters of their population. But China has 485 million Internet users, the biggest number of any country. And that´s still only a third of its population. This burgeoning and colossal online community does not access the western web but it’s developed its own home grown websites like Baidu, Tencent and Sina Weibo. But perhaps the greatest difference, at least from our western perspective, is the degree to which China´s Internet is controlled by government censorship, referred to as “The Great Firewall”. It´s the perfect example of how technology can be imbued with an ideology, in this case of top-down control.
That perception of censorship…How aware are the Chinese people of this?
via YouTube https://youtu.be/UNwnQkGpKPE

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Week 4 – Lifestream Synthesis

Week 4 has been my quietest week of lifestream activity yet but the week has certainly been one of the busiest. This is largely due to me tackling two of the core readings by Knox (2015) and Lister et al (2009).

I spent some time browsing and considering a wide and varied range of MOOCs to enrol on that I will ultimately base my work throughout Block 2 on. Eventually I settled on ‘The Internet of Things’ facilitated by Kings College London and delivered via FurureLearn. I chose this course as I felt I had at least a little prior knowledge of the subject to make sense of things as I progress through the course.

I blogged about my first impressions of the MOOC and my observations on the (large) community that has already formed within it. Already I am wondering if my observations are clouded by my own experience of the tight-knit community that my peers and I enjoy on the MSc Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. In comparison the MOOC students seem largely anonymous and insignificant to each other.

My Lifstream blog also includes some relevant news stories that have coincidentally appeared on the BBC news app throughout the week. I have explained why I think they are relevant to the core readings that I have completed so far.

I was late in accessing the EDC17 group on the hub, however I started communicating as soon as I was able to. Next week I hope to continue my readings and further consider how I am going to approach my ethnography.

References

Knox, J. (2015). Algorithmic Cultures. Excerpt from Critical Education and Digital Cultures. In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. M. A. Peters (ed.). DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_124-1

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In New media: a critical introduction. M. Lister (Eds.) (London, Routledge): pp. 163-236.

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Google coding champion whose Cameroon hometown is cut off from the internet #mscedc https://t.co/1WSxVcZ9pX

I stumbled across this article on the BBC news app this afternoon and thought of it as a great example of the “Digital Divide” that Lister et al (2009) describes. Most notably when he says:

“More importantly, the central claim that we all live in an ‘information age’ is also open to question on the basis of the actual spread of technologies and access to them and the nature of the content of new media”

and

“the dissemination of  communication technologies has still not reached the level of penetration that would suppose the globe is encompassed in a complete web of interconnectedness”

These two quotes come from a chapter where Lister is explaining technology’s influence over global economies where he suggests that wealthy countries are reaping the benefits of digitisation whilst the poor are still struggling.

It was also interesting to compare the example he gives of the Chinese government blocking access to the internet to control democracy, and the case in the BBC story where the government of Cameroon imposed a block as an act of punishment. Perhaps they consider the Internet as a luxury rather than an embedded way of life.

References

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In New media: a critical introduction. M. Lister (Eds.) (London, Routledge): pp. 163-236.

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‘The Internet of Things MOOC’ – First Impressions

I tweeted earlier this week that I had registered and joined by first ever MOOC. Having spent a short while investigating my options I decided on ‘The Internet of Things‘ delivered by King’s College London via FutureLearn.

I have been aware of the idea of the MOOC for some time but for one reason or another never quite got round to trying it for myself. I also recall a reading from the IDEL course (I’m still trying to find it) highlighting that MOOCs have a very low completion rate as people dip in and out of the course to learn about specific topics rather than bother with the full course in its entirety.

Anyway, my first impressions were quite good. I immediately thought that the FutureLearn resource could easily be described as a Learning Management System (LMS)/Social Networking Site (SNS) hybrid. On one side of my screen was the course content and on the other was a comments log with striking similarities to Facebook (comments, likes etc).

Though I am not actively participating in the MOOC but instead observing from a distance, I noticed some course characteristics that I could relate to Lister et al (2009) when he considers the construction of self. In writing about the construction of identities in CMC and post-structuralism, Lister suggests that “identity is constructed through discourse”.  Throughout the first week of my MOOC there has certainly been a considerable amount of students leaving questions and comments on the topics described by the tutor. However, of the 607 students who have left comment I have yet to see any replies or further conversation or discussion. I would best describe it as digital cacophony.

I’ll stress again that it is only Week 1 of the course and perhaps things may change as we progress. However it is hard to imaging an effective learning community forming based on what I have witnessed so far. I have completed my profile and posted to the discussion thread. I am there, I am participating, yet I feel largely anonymous.

Perhaps my observations are a result of the influence of Web 2.0. There is evidence of newer web media and formats similar to popular online services within my MOOC and the participants seem to be displaying behaviours that are typical of social networking (use of emojis, word abbreviations etc). It could also explain the dip in/dip out approach that I mentioned earlier.

Finally, my MOOC certainly seems to be connecting large volumes of people from a large number of countries throughout the world. It will be interesting to observe their differing experience and knowledge of the “Internet of Things”. I will certainly be looking for further evidence of the “digital divide” partly caused by geographical and economical differences that Lister et al (2009) describes.

References

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Kelly, K. (2009). Networks, users and economics. In New media: a critical introduction. M. Lister (Eds.) (London, Routledge): pp. 163-236.