This final summary will reflect on the whole process involved in using a lifestream to pull together all the digital fragments of knowledge generated by my studies over the last twelve weeks and on the reflection it provides regarding my digital activity and learning process.
I started this lifestream with a high degree of reticence both in terms of the level of public exposure involved in learning in such a public space on the Web and in terms of the lifestream activity in general, not being very technically, multimedia, gadget or application minded or greatly active on the web. I had never engaged with many of the technologies encountered during the course or created much user-generated content myself. The activity initially seemed a rather chaotic experiment which I suspected, when coupled with my own chaotic style of learning, would surely lead to ineffective activity and confusion.
Throughout the whole process I felt generally ill at ease, uncertain and disorientated. Each time I submitted an end of unit artefact to my lifestream I was jubilant and surprised at the level of creativity which I managed to harness to aid my expression, understanding and visuality, only to face yet more discomfort as we moved on to the next part of the course. Feeding the lifestream on a constant basis encouraged me to take a multimodal approach to vary the content appearing there and to make the most of the freedom to experiment licensed by its use and style of assessment. Reviewing the activity each week revealed a certain level of spurious, atomised, fragmented activity which when viewed over a wider timeframe does actually present a relatively coherent presence, where occasional patterns and interests emerged, ideas and like minded individuals intersected and coalesced.
In the early stages activity was orchestrated and controlled, I was keen to feed my lifestream only with course related activity and as I was not a very active ’social networker’ or ‘content creator’ this was a relatively easy task. However when assignments were posted and the interests of my course peers’ emerged commenting and the recording of relevant links and notes via Delicious and Tumblr or Wordpress blog posts began to feed the lifestream prolifically. The inspiration of others and the high level of visibility associated with this type of public learning led to enhanced and expansive activity whilst the lifestream was expansive enough itself to cover the ubiquity of learning that was taking place outside the classroom so to speak, neatly following the geographies, rhythm, tempo, fluidity and modalities of my learning life over a twelve week timeframe, recording when and where my learning was actually happening, my passage, connections, ‘time out’ and periods of accelerated learning.
The whole experience of learning in such open spaces, outside the classroom has been exhilarating, often without fixed compass positions and occasionally rudderless yet because of that all my assignment topics have drawn from ‘the moment’ and not a pre-disposed interest and the lifestream has presented a nexus-like perspective on my learning rather than a container-like output in response to ‘predictable assessment’. If we were to metaphorically construe the lifestream as representing a visionary classroom, following Leander et al. (2010:382) we could consider it a ‘dynamic place-in-the-making’, a space acting as a ‘node in the network’ capable of spawning further nodes as ideas and people coalesce, recording not classroom activity but ‘point[s] along a complex learning trajectory’.
References
Leander, K.M., Philips, Nathan, C., Headrick Taylor, Katherine (2010). The Changing Social Spaces of Learning: Mapping New Mobilities. Review of Research in Education, 34, p.329-394
) I mis-typed the google URL into the address bar of my default home page within my web browser (ie http://www.bbc.co.uk/www.google.co.uk) and stumbled upon the BBC error message! This led to a rather jubilant blog posting (pre this one) on ‘pre-digital’ error messages, linking back to the inspiration which fuelled my very first digital artefact.
