Monthly Archives: January 2015

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Recap: Week 3

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The first block on cyberculture is concluded and it’s once again time to look back on what items have popped up on my lifestream.

A lot of my reflection this week happened while reading and commenting on my colleagues’ blog posts. Issues contemplated were filter bubbles resulting from increased algorithmic personalisation, the problematic nature of ideology laden terms or the changing nature of learning in the future, from an active model of understanding to a passive model of information download using technology.

This week I continued bugfixing IFTTT to work out ways to populate my lifestream from different sources. I created this guide to help my fellow colleagues automatically post blog comments to their lifestream.

A very interesting video I saw this week was this TED talk by Ray Kurzweil, a famous futurist and current Director of Engineering at Google, on the future of the human brain. In full transhumanist fashion he describes a future where the brain’s biological neocortex will be connected to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud through nanobots in our bloodstream, allowing us to no longer be constrained by our bodies’ physical limitations. As elaborated in this comment of mine such a hybridisation of the biological and the technological would finally warrant the as of yet problematic terminology of ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’.

The ongoing discussion in the media about whether artificial intelligence will be the harbinger of humanity’s doom inspired me to create this week’s visual artefact. My intentions were to present a dire vision of the future with black humour using memes, the epitome of digital culture.

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Comment on Recap: Week 2 by mkiseloski

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If so much of our assessment strategies are based on the ability to recall information, so where might such enhancements leave us? Is there a link to the Bayne (2014) paper here, with regards to our assumptions about ‘enhancement’ and ‘learning’?

Having further looked at possible future scenarios this week, such as us being one day able to download information in a pill form, with nanobots attaching to our brain’s synapses and uploading information straight into our memory I would be willing to concede that this, for all intents and purposes, could be considered “technologically enhanced” learning. The big differentiator of such technology compared to a Moodle platform, for example, would be its passive nature. Current learning technologies, no matter how sophisticated, are still only able to facilitate the active act of learning and creating understanding within the mind.


Yes, this kind of augmented reality technology seems to be progressing swiftly. However, what if we compare this corporate promotion with the first video you mention, “This Will Revolutionize Education”? Where might the ‘no significant difference’ stand here?

From what I’ve been learning from other MSCDE courses people learn better the more you engage them emotionally and the more senses you involve in the act of learning. I presume that holograms will allow for many novel use cases that make use of these principles. If students can interactively see and manipulate things right in front of their eyes it is much more likely to involve their spatial centres in the brains than if they were to learn about these things from a 2D textbook. Again, it’s not so much about teaching a topic via a new medium, but rather about utilising technology to create the right conditions that allow for a student to be more involved with the topic which will in turn allow learning to happen.

from Comments for Mihael’s EDC blog http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/mkiseloski/2015/01/23/recap-week-2/#comment-22
via IFTTT

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Comment on How To: Add Your Comments on Other People’s Blog Posts to Your Lifestream by mkiseloski

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Yes, Ed, a recipe has to be created for each classmate’s blog, but it only needs to be done once and the only thing you need change for each is the username in the comment feed URL. Hope that clarifies it.

from Comments for Mihael’s EDC blog http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/mkiseloski/2015/01/28/how-to-add-your-comments-on-other-peoples-blog-posts-to-your-lifestream/#comment-21
via IFTTT

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How To: Add Your Comments on Other People’s Blog Posts to Your Lifestream

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While surfing through my colleagues’ excellent EDC blogs I noticed that some where manually pasting the comments they’ve posted on other people’s blogs onto their own lifestream (to have them count towards the assessment).

Instead of copy/pasting or making a collection of screenshots of your comments there is a way to automate this task using IFTTT.

I created a recipe you can use as a template. All that is left to do is to set it up for each blog’s address you are commenting on.

recipe

I changed my displayed name from Mihael to my blog’s username mkiseloski, so that if people were to respond to my comment with a comment of their own, mentioning my name, it would not set off another trigger and post their comment on my lifestream as well. You can change your displayed name to your username in the blog’s dashboard by clicking on “Edit My Profile” in the upper right corner. In my case it now says “Howdy, mkiseloski”, with mkiseloski being the displayed name on all my posts.

Under Feed URL you simply use the username from your colleague’s blog address. For example, in case you want to comment on my blog you’d put mkiseloski instead of USERNAME into the address. The final result would then look like
http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/mkiseloski/comments/feed/

I hope this makes life a bit easier in the weeks going forward. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll be happy to help you out!

Happy commenting everyone :)