The Education and Digital Cultures 2015 course has finally come to an end and I would like to take this opportunity to look back at the last 12 weeks and thank my colleagues and my tutors Sian and Jeremy for this highly interesting journey into the land of cyborgs, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Keeping a lifestream blog has been a new experience for me and while it did take some time, effort and, dare I say, frustration to set it up correctly, over the duration of the course it has grown into an excellent collection of resources for me to come back to.
Adding tags to every post was an incredibly helpful way to organise my lifestream according to different parameters such as source, type or topic. The tag cloud on the right shows a nice visual representation of this endeavour and gives us plenty of insights into the lifestream as a whole.
As we can see IFTTT is the biggest tag, meaning that around 3/4 of my posts were automatically populated from social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Pinterest with the help of the IFTTT service.
In terms of types of content I shared a variety of videos and articles that I thought were really interesting and relevant to the discussions we were having during the course. In addition to the weekly recaps and my comments on my peers’ and my own blog I also posted two how to guides to help my fellow students set up their lifestream. Furthermore there are one-off postings like the digital artefact from block 1, the mooc ethnography from block 2 and my reflections on the tweetorial from block 3 of our course.
I didn’t really know a lot about the topics covered in this course before the semester started. It was therefore a very pleasant surprise for me that the themes we discussed were extremely fascinating and they challenged me to think about issues I had never considered before. I’ve been hearing about artificial intelligence all my life but I had never actually contemplated how vast its implications are going to be, not just in the field of digital education but for humankind in general and society as a whole.
This course has made me think about what it means to be human in an age where the lines between biology and technology are being increasingly blurred with biohackers substituting and even adding new senses to our biology. We are living in a time where computer algorithms are not just taking over more and more tasks that humans used to do (such as trading in the financial markets) but thanks to big data are now able to do things that weren’t even possible before, like personalised search results and video suggestions based on profiles of people similar to you.
Technology does an exceptional job in connecting people and I see a lot of potential in it to facilitate education for everyone, as shown by the development of MOOCs. Moreover, thanks to learning analytics algorithms could uncover as of yet unknown patterns in how the mind works. All this, however, comes at a hefty price: Privacy. The more information we are willing to quantify about ourselves the more we allow certain entities to know about us. If we don’t ever want that knowledge to be used against us we have to become much more conscious about the issue of privacy and data security going forward. How we will react to these issues will be one of the defining moments of the 21st century.