This week’s readings make explicit links between learning and teaching, and the cyborg and posthuman theory we’ve been discussing over the past few weeks. Along with the readings, we’d like you to complete a small ‘posthuman pedagogy’ task – please post a link to your idea or example on the task instructions page, which we’ll collate in one place as the week progresses.

Also this week – if you haven’t yet discussed and confirmed your final assignment topic and medium with your tutor (either directly by email, or in your blog), please do so ASAP – we’d like to have communicated with everyone by the end of this week. Weeks 11 and 12 are assignment preparation weeks, so you will want to know going into them what your topic and planned medium will be. Please also consult your tutor about any additional assessment criteria you wish to nominate.

Finally, a reminder that your lifestream is due for submission on Sunday 12 December. The last item in the lifestream should be a 500 word summary, posted in your blog. All the information and instructions about how to prepare and submit your lifestream is on the lifestream assignment page. Let us know if you have any questions.

Have a great week!

You should all have had your mid-point formative lifestream feedback by email last week – if you haven’t received yours, or have any questions, let your tutor know.

This is the week to begin work on your micro-ethnography. You should now have decided what to focus on – if you are still in any doubt, please email your tutor to discuss. You can continue to use the Holyrood Park Hub discussion board space, Twitter, and your blogs to discuss your plans and emerging issues with each other.

Remember as you proceed that this is a small and low-stakes project – it needs to appear in your lifestream, but it is primarily intended as an opportunity to be creative and to understand in practice some of what’s discussed in this block’s readings. It’s also a way for you to provoke more fantastic conversation amongst the group, so do feel free to be experimental and questioning in your process and presentation. Not that we need to say that to this group!

Have a great week, everyone.

This is where we begin to investigate the notion of ‘online community’, and virtual ethnography as a research method. The end-point of this block will be your own piece of ethnographic micro-research to be posted up by week 7, but as a first step we will spend this week discussing ideas for communities that you’d like to look at, and sharing thoughts on media you might use for presenting your ethnography, while also doing the readings.

Discussion will take place in the EDC forum on the Holyrood Park Hub. You’ll find the discussion forum topic here. If you haven’t already done so, please sign up to the group first before trying to post. This is a public forum so let’s see how it goes – if we feel we need a more private space for this, Jen and I can set one up. No doubt ideas will migrate from the discussion forum to blogs and to Twitter anyway.

After this week, you’ll be working largely alone in conducting and presenting your ethnography, though in week 7 we should have some good exchanges going on around the ethnographic representations as they start appearing. This seemed to work really well for the visual artefacts.

One other thing – Jen and I will be giving some feedback on the lifestreams by email sometime this week, so you’ll each be hearing from us with some thoughts on how this is going in terms of the final assessment. Please drop us a line if you’ve any concerns.

Block 1 has seen some really great work – thanks for all the time and creative energies you’ve given to this – it all bodes very well for the ethnographies!

(inspired by Martin…)

This week the main activity will be creating and discussing visual artefacts which help draw out themes, issues or ideas from across Block 1 of the course.

Remember that you want your artefact to appear in your lifestream, and for us to have somewhere to discuss it, so if you aren’t using a web-based tool with an RSS feed, you’ll probably want to put your artefact in a post in your blog. That has the advantage of having an inbuilt place for comments as well.

Try to leave yourself time to engage in discussion about your own and other people’s artefacts. In addition to the core readings, some of the secondary readings for weeks 3 and 4 may be helpful as you come to discuss the artefacts – especially Rose and Spalter & van Dam.

Once you’ve posted your artefact, please post a comment here to give us a link to it, and tell us (if it isn’t obvious) where you want comments.

Finally, just a heads up that next week (Week 5), Sian or I will be emailing everyone individually with some mid-point formative feedback on your lifestream. The purpose of this is to let you know how we think your lifestream is so far meeting the assessment criteria for the assignment (which are described in detail in your handbook).

That’s all for now – have a great week, everyone!

Discussion this week is going to be via Skype text chat – most people have signed up to a time now – could the few who haven’t try to do this sometime today or tomorrow by commenting on the week 3 page? If you can manage Thursday that would be ideal to keep Noreen company! We’ll split the Wednesday into two groups though, so don’t worry if that’s the only day you can do. At present it’s looking like this:

Wednesday 6^th 8pm:
Martin
Michael
James
Dennis
Jeremy
Hugh
Linda
Sharon
Mark
Sindhu
Liz
Ali

Thursday 7^th 10am:
Noreen
Sue

Remember to make Jen and I contacts first if you haven’t already – sianbayne1 and jross28. I suggest we focus on the core readings for these chat sessions.

Please continue to tweet course-related material to #ededc, this is becoming a really useful stream of course conversation. And remember you can access all the blog postings here – the blogs are looking really terrific.

This week we turn to two more film festival themes. From today til Wednesday we are looking at films and clips on the theme of ‘other worlds’. Join us tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 8pm UK time for a short Synchtube tutorial if you are free – we will watch and discuss World Builder together. From Thursday til Sunday, the theme is ‘being human’.

Along with the film festival, continue with the core and secondary readings for this fortnight.

As for your lifestreams, once you’re confident that your initial feeds (posts, comments and twitter) are working as they should, try adding a new feed or two this week – the second screencast I made last week will give some guidance, and you might also visit the pages of other course participants to get some ideas. Also, a reminder that you need to write a short lifestream summary in your blog each week – see page 10 of the course handbook for all the details.

Have a great week, everyone.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(tweet tweet tweet – YEAH)

Welcome everybody to the start of ‘E-learning and digital cultures’.

As you know, this is one of the more experimental courses on the MSc, in which we’re using a ‘radically open’ course design to explore some of the most interesting and exciting ideas and practices emerging in the study of digital culture, and what they might mean for educational practice.

There’s a lot of lifestreaming, blogging and tweeting activity already, which is great! It can take a while to fine-tune the lifestream to get it doing exactly what you need it to do, so please seek out help from me or Jen if you need it. Communication on this course may seem strangely ‘disaggregated’, with the absence of a discussion board, but as the first few weeks pass it should all start to hang together and the group will start to feel more like a coherent community. The blogs are key to this so please do spend a bit of time reading each other’s words when you can, and commenting when inspired to do so.

We’ll all be meeting this week in the synchronous tutorials in synchtube. The synchtube rooms are now available on the Film Festival page. We’ll be watching and chatting about Bendito Machine on Wednesday 8pm, and a clip from ExistenZ on Thursday morning at 10am.

Bendito Machine stands alone, but if you don’t know the film, you might find it useful to read the wikipedia plot summary of ExistenZ before the tutorial to get a bit of context.

Try to get along to at least one of the synchtube tutorials so we can do some socialising as well as course discussion – and remember we’ll also be tweeting on the film selection for this week, between Wednesday and Sunday.

Finally – best of luck with all your studies this semester – we hope you enjoy Digital Cultures!

It’s great to see some early experiments with the look and functionality of your Wordpress blogs, lifestreams, and with the Twitter tag for the course (which is #ededc).

You may have already noticed all the links down the right side column of this page. These contain all the course information, as well as links to everyone’s blogs and lifestreams, tweets and comments from the course. I thought I’d draw attention to one link in particular, which is the “Everyone’s blog posts” link at the top of the “Course Participants” section. This is a collection of all the posts across the whole site, and is one quick way to see what everyone is blogging about. You can also add the RSS feed from this page to your feed reader if you have one.

See you around this week, and in earnest from Monday!