Much of the early stages of the blog, and continuing (though less so) throughout the course, I found were spend engaging with the limits of the technologies I wanted to use. Spam, IFTTT, issues with tags and categories, the design of the blog, the issues of trying to embed Storify, were all challenges that were publicly wrestled with in the lifestream. I also sometimes had issues with synching and cloud storage–I blogged from my laptop at home, but often took notes or photographs on my phone, tablet or other computer, and glitches in synching could mean that trying to upload the images or notes to the blog was delayed.

This wrestling surprised me, because I have been using most of these technologies in my leisure time, or for work, for some time. I think the pressure to blog nearly every day while only having a day or two to focus on my studies meant I was always in a rush, so any lag or glitch could throw the whole thing off.  After semester started in my day job, too, I found it difficult to spend evenings and weekends on the course, since I often had to be at work. I had expected to be able to vary my working days to counteract that, but that was not possible for structural reasons, and that was a challenge.

In the first few weeks, there was too much Twitter and not enough of anything else. I often discuss learning, teaching and technology on that ‘academic Twitter’, so the #mscedc hashtag was a natural extension of those conversations, and fitted comfortably with the people I already follow and the people who already follow me. During the course, I gained nearly 100 followers overall, suggesting that I didn’t alienate most of my audience, and that they appreciated the contributions I was making to their streams.

On the other hand, my Instagram community is small, it’s made up of people I personally know, and they share pictures of their lunch, of their holidays, of their homes. It’s a leisured and personal space, so sharing technology news or reflections on the digital would be less appropriate. I eventually worked out that I could use it to document my own embodied working practices. I could photograph my experiences blogging with a bowl of pie, or reading in a café. These would contribute to my community but also to the lifestream.

I was often unsure about the value of the lifestream as a public blog. The learning journal blog focuses on a very small audience, primarily myself, my tutor, and sometimes the other members of the course. The format of the lifestream is difficult for an outsider to navigate or read.

Instead, I longed to craft things from what we’ve learned in the course to share with the world. I enjoyed live-blogging the readings, and continue to find that one of the most useful ways to engage with the course, the medium and the content. I wonder if this might be a valuable way of thinking about learning in public in the future.

It’s autumn here. Warm during the day, cooler in the evenings. We are just beginning our academic year. We have not yet ‘fallen back’ out of daylight savings time. Scotland is a long way away.

To be ‘with’ the class synchronously, I need to get up very early, or stay up late. But my job requires me to get up early, and stay up late at this time of year.

On Thursday, instead of being at the Hangout, I was trying to complete the tutorial timetable, interview and place new tutors, and do spot checks to check all the classes were running smoothly.

On Friday, instead of being at the Hangout, I was teaching at ArtsWrite, an intensive doctoral writing weekend at the University of Melbourne. (This is a picture of the stamps to reward attendees for meeting their goals).

I wonder if my embodied reality here on the other side of the world is too different, too far away, too out of synch with Edinburgh. I wonder if digital learning can overcome those distances and disjuncts. I wonder if it should.

This year, my job has little to do with online learning. This year, the questions I find raised by the readings make me more critical of the university, rather than more hopeful. This year, the sun is shining, and I am inside on my computer. I wonder if I’ve got that wrong.

Every semester, there are three weeks that are absolute hell: O-week to the end of week 2. Week 3 is busy, but less stressful. Every year, I make sure I see my friends before O-week starts, and then tell them I’ll see them again in a month.

This blog has had the same problem. It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything, but it’s been out of synch, late, or patchy.

I’ve updated the things I was supposed to have done, or had started but not published, in week 8 only this weekend, as we turn the corner into week 9. I managed a couple of tweets in the tweetorial (and neither of them had space for the hashtag, #fail).

I did have a fascinating conversation with Nicholas and Jeremy earlier:

https://storify.com/katrinafee/foucault-and-algorithms

I had trouble finding an algorithim I could play with, so after a few abortive attempts, I finally worked out I could look at Twitter’s Discovery timeline. I commented on Jin’s and PJ’s bogs.

Posting less often means that some of my posts have been longer. I’ve been continuing to document the places where I study (and increasingly, the food I eat as I study), including my first video:

Anyway, week 3 is coming up. Busy, but no longer crazy. Hopefully that means I’ll have a chance to catch up.

I know exactly where it fell apart, and why. Orientation Week in a residential college is brutal. My arguments about time off in lieu, or varied working hours, or flex-time were not successful. I wandered around for two weeks in a miasma of insomnia and unhappiness. A friend died suddenly and her funeral was on last Sunday. It was my birthday. I am now exactly twice as old as our new students.

I did collect things and tweet (thank God for Twitter when you can’t sleep at 3am), so I have retrospectively inserted them into my blog as a reconstruction of the week.

I collated my tweets via Storify. I collected mini-scrapbooks of images, via screenshots, drawings on Paper, and photographs. These images considered nostalgia; alogorthims, furturism, bodies; and bots, spam.

I submitted an essay for Research Methods, and it was late. I finally got around to looking at the Research Methods page for Social Network Analysis, only to find that I’d re-invented the wheel in my blog on MOOCMOOC in the wild, it’s called ‘ethology’ and has been widely used (as I reflect on here).

On the one hand I wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew doing two subjects, but I’m learning so much by bouncing between them, and finding so many parallels in what I’m doing in both. That’s why so many of my blog posts on the Research Methods blog are starting to talk about what I’m doing in Digital Culture and vice versa.

Usually I spend Thursday and Sunday focusing on my studies, but this week work ramped up, so I feel really behind.  This post is late,  I couldn’t make either of the Hangouts, and the Twitter roundup didn’t happen this week.

What did happen

This week was intellectually quite heavy, and there were two readings that I live-blogged as I try to get my head around ethnography. There was then a long reflection blog where I discussed my struggles around the whole genre of a mini-ethnography. Finally, there was a post where I explored what a more quantitative analysis might give us, using one of the Twitter analytics tools and some very brief network analysis.

On the Lifestream side, I looked at the MOOCMOOC Scoop.it page, and their live hangout. I also played with a new collage tool on my iPad–thinking about nostalgia, the digital, manual, ethnographies (native/indigenous terminologies).

Looking forward

Being so busy, I thought a couple of times this week that I’d like to get IFTTT back up and running. I need to rethink how I’ll use it, so that it does what I’d like it to, but I’m hoping to have some of it back in my stream in the next week.

I might also do a Storify of my Twitter over the last few days.

O-Week starts next week, so I’m going to have to think about balancing my studies when the students are back.

The lifestream has therefore had space to explore a little wider: I looked at visual representations of cyborgs and robots on Tumblr, and I collected audio/video recordings of ‘the sounds of the historic internet’. I wrote my reflections from the Skype by hand, so I uploaded that as a photograph. I continued to live-blog the readings. I found a MOOC to study next week.

I’m cheating a bit on the temporality to keep things tidy. I’m reflecting on that–it seems to go against the real-time notion of a life-stream, but it stops me having to contort my daily online activities to do the right actions so that IFTTT would pick up the right mix of content to display in my stream.

I guess I’m more interested in digital culture and digital education and digital communication than I am in digital anything.

What hasn’t made it onto the blog this week is the thinking I’ve been doing about my final research assessment. In the hangout, I described my visual artifact as a kind of ‘nostalgia’ and I’d like to explore digital ‘histories’/nostalgia further (‘watercolour’ Paper, vintage filters on Instagram, the Hanxwriter app), comparing idealised authentic or glamourous pasts with a utopian and dystopian technofutures. It needs focus and clarifying, but it’s starting to come together.

In many ways, the blog had become too post-human. It collected things automatically, in ways that made sense to the machine.

Since the beginning of this semester, I’ve struggled with that. It was ugly. It was hard to read. It was unfriendly to the audience I was trying to reach–primarily the rest of the MScECD cohort, who are humans… and me.

The machine reading was glitchy too. The tags didn’t work, there were no analytics. I had no idea if the bots are crawling over my text and finding useful metadata to feed into search engines and algorithms.

And there there are my very human glitches. I wear glasses, partly because I’m short sighted, partly because I have strong astigmatism. I’m also slightly dyslexic. And I get travel sick very easily. I usually have great coping strategies, but I can’t bear it when things flicker or move. Or when it’s hard to scan the text, and the text starts to move on its own (or rather it moves somewhere between my retina and my brain). That makes me feel ill.

So we have a truly embodied reading experience. A human reading experience. A flawed reading experience at the centre of this.

And so this week I moved to curation, to clickbait headlines, to careful selection of a broad stream of sources. I think that will help.

<a title=”Permalink to Comment on Comment on #mscedc How come this doesn’t count as cyborg-wear? by Katherine by Old-fashioned cyborgs | Katherine’s EDC blog” href=”http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/kfirth/2015/01/25/comment-on-comment-on-mscedc-how-come-this-doesnt-count-as-cyborg-wear-by-katherine-by-old-fashioned-cyborgs-katherines-edc-blog/” rel=”bookmark”>Comment on Comment on #mscedc</a>”

I’m enjoying the collaborative-ness of blogging in public, even as continue to feel my work is being hidden in a cloud of white noise.

I’m now up to 56 posts, including 29 comments. I posted something to the blog every day but Saturday. That’s a lot of posts. (By contrast, a blog I’ve been working on for two years has less than double that).

Every time I try to read my lifestream, I feel vertiginous (or sea sick… there is a literal queasiness to it).

The tag links aren’t working on the blog, so trying to see what I posted under ‘Weekly Reflections’ or tagged ‘Blade Runner’ isn’t working. Instead, I get a page that says:

Oops! That page can’t be found.

The noise refuses to be ordered into any kind of ordered sound.

***

Some things aren’t quite there yet.

I tried to post from Instagram, but I couldn’t get the picture to display. I’ve asked for help, so next week might be less text heavy.

@j_k_knox How do I make my Instagram pictures appear in my lifestream? This is my ifttt recipe: https://t.co/QMBKf0lv02 Thanks! #mscedc

— Katherine Firth (@katrinafee) January 25, 2015

I also can’t find my analytics on the dashboard. I love that on my other blogs I can see that people are reading from all over the world. 

Today, much to my surprise, Research Degree Voodoo is big in Brazil.

So, this first week’s reflection is practical as much as intellectual.

Rather than reflecting directly on the course content … the purpose of these weekly postings is to synthesise and review the content of your lifestream. It is expected that each summary post will contain references to the content from that week. (EDC 15 blog).

The obvious way to do that was to look at my IFTTT analytics:

• Instagram #mscedc, set up but never run.
  • I will start adding some visual aspects to my stream, which is currently very text and hyperlink heavy.
• WordPress comments, run 5 times (and failed 3).
  • I read through everyone else’s blogs. There was a great variety, from people who hadn’t even started, to people who had beautifully crafted lifestreams.
  • The theme I’m currently running was used by PJ, and I really liked it’s clean design. I also liked Ed’s use of his graphic design background, and Nick’s use of Pinterest. (And I said so in their comments).
  • I was grateful for Sian’s useful comments on my blog.
• Twitter #mscedc, run 26 times.
  • I tweet a lot (43 non-#mscedc posts since 12 Jan).
  • So I have changed my IFTTT recipe to “If new tweet by @katrinafee with hashtag #mscedcls, then create a post on your WordPress blog”.  This allows me to talk to the #mscedc group seperately from posting on this blog, so we don’t drown in tweets here.