8 thoughts on “Digital Ethnography Artifact.

  1. Em, Brilliant micro-ethnography! It is levels above my own; more effective presentation and much more academically-grounded. I’ll elaborate in more detailed comments later this weekend.

    I need some immediate advice on Slidespeech. I was also intending to use it for my artifact, but can’t seem to load my PPT presentation which is 40 slides. I’ve tried 4 times, even overnight, so I surmise that my file is too large (18 MB). I’ve embedded many JEPG (of Scandinavian film images). The download wheel just spins. Did you have any problems downloading? Any advice? Cheers, PJ

  2. Hi PJ, thanks so much for your comments. Sorry that you are having troubles with uploading your presentation. I did not encounter any problems when uploading it but perhaps it is the file size that is the problem. My file was 8MB.

    I agree with you that perhaps the file size is too large but I am sure Microsoft Office has a feature to reduce the size of the file (.ppt). Another option is perhaps reducing the size of the images you used in your presentation. I will have a look for you later and see what I can come up with.

    I was wondering if at some time I could pick your brain about Japan. I just recently came back from a trip to Tokyo and I absolutely loved the place. Considering moving there in the near future.

    Cheers Em

    • Em, thanks for prompt response regarding Slidespeech. I’ve ‘butchered’ my original presentation down to 13 MB now. Still waiting now about 20 minutes (my ?8th? try today) to see if it finally loads before midnight, or try again tomorrow. I wish Slidespeech had better instructions. Is there an alternative speech-to-text platform? Anyway, learning a lot about the process of creating these types of products. I was reverting to Plan B to narrate original 40 slides with lots of JPEGs using Audacity , then upload to YouTube, but that also became ‘troublesome.’ You (and any UoE MScDE peers) can contact me anytime about visiting Tokyo (famelipj@aol.com). I should be here until Aug 2016. More feedback to follow, if/when I post my micro-ethnography. Cheers, PJ

  3. I enjoyed your slidespeech a lot Em (particularly your choice of pseudonyms!).

    I was intrigued by slide 42 in particular where you seem to be suggesting that there was evidence of participants going off into social media environments to form community – you mention LinkedIn in particular. This seems quite odd given that there was almost no interaction in G+. I wonder if you have any sense of why this might be the case? Is there a reason why individuals in this MOOC might have gravitated to LinkedIn?

    Did you make any attempts to ‘follow’ them into these other spaces? Perhaps, as with Nick’s ethnography, this is where the constrained nature of the task becomes frustrating, as I’d have loved to know more about this. It does seem surprising that a MOOC on social media should be so lacking in sociality (and media) : ) Perhaps one of the things your ethnography shows us is that we need to find strategies for making sense of entire social media ecologies when we look at MOOCs, not just individual course spaces.

  4. Wow Em, this is brilliant! Have never seen a SlideSpeech presentation and am impressed by how effective it is. (Fantastic cyber voice btw! :) )
    Thought your focus on community was very interesting and liked the way you used Kozinets’ article as a lens for your research.
    Really great stuff and an excellent model for us!

  5. This is a really substantial piece of work Emlyn, great stuff! You’ve covered a lot of ground here, and so much to comment on…

    Great (and humorous) job with the anonymity! I also wondered about the ‘cyber voice’ that Clare highlights, and this seemed to be a way of anonymising your own voice from the snapshot, particularly as you make a case for being a ‘lurker’ during the participant observation.

    I wondered what your thoughts on this ‘lurking’ were more generally. Is it essential to ‘just observe’, and does it really have no impact on what you are observing? On the slide where you expressed a desire to ‘stoke’ peoples reactions, it struck me that that could have been a really interesting approach: to get involved and then document how your ‘stoking’ changed the community interactions and responses.

    I also found it interesting that the introductions forum was the one with most activity, while the threads for more substantive conversation were very quiet. This seemed to be saying a lot about the kind of ‘community’ that was being formed, and what was acceptable *as* community in this particular course, and you could have perhaps elaborated on that some more.

    You brought some really good sources in here, the Kozinets section on the ‘devotee’ and facilitator, and the ‘1% rule’. These gave some nice contexts to your study.

    It would have been good to drill into one of the spaces a little more. I thought the slide where you highlighted responses showing ’empathy’ was fantastic – a great level of detail. Again that seemed to be a really important factor that deserved more attention. The threads on course topics were not very well populated, yet there did seem to be this interest in empathising with the problems or dilemmas of others. What kind of ‘community’ can we say is emerging there?

  6. Em, again, I thought your micro-ethnography was a standard-setting model for this block because it was: academically anchored, multi-modal, entertaining, humorous, flowed smoothly, well-researched and script was well-written. I particularly enjoyed ‘intersession’ transitions (slides 16, 24, 28, 34, 38, 39, 43). It showed you have clever imagination and resourcefulness (e.g., higher level ‘meta-cognitive’ skills).

    By way of ‘constructive criticism,’ I offer that I don’t think you need periods at end of sentences where you use bullet comments. Also, I was concerned about Slide #41 where you point out the instructor by name and accuse her of not really doing her job. But, this is an ethical judgement consideration, and you may have felt that she deserved calling out.

    In the end, I gave up on Slidespeech. Although you demonstrated the utility of this text-to-speech tool, I couldn’t get it to work for me. I will commit some energy early this week to try to figure out my problem, but I surmise that it was file size issue. I am still excited about the potential use of the tool, based on your presentation. Cheers, PJ

    • Thank you PJ once again for your kind words. Formatting and style has always been a criticism I have received on my writing. I am a scientist and we never think of style that often. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

      As for outting the instructor, I understand that it was probably unethical for me to accuse her of not doing her job. Too be honest I rushed that part and forgot to allocate a suitable pseudonym for her. I will make the suitable adjustments as soon as possible.

      Cheers
      Em

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