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.

I’ve only just noticed, there is no way to Like or Share blogs either here, or on the EDC main site.

I got used to seeing the comforting little series of avatars at the bottom of posts I’ve written, the thing that tells me I’ve said something worthwhile.

From my professional blog, Research Degree Voodoo

Along with the messy ‘lifestream’ model, this just feels like another way to do work in ‘public’ but be sure what we do is safe in the noise.