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.

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.