The lifestream….my Digital Cultures story?
December 12, 2010 by Noreen Dunnett
The lifestream summaries, for me, have been a chance to create the ‘story’ of the Digital Cultures module. The lifestream itself, an aggregation of feeds, was a ‘bricolage’ of content encountered and included to enhance the weekly themes of the module or a method of collecting links, articles and references for my areas of interest – narrative, identity and communities. However, as John Seely Brown (2000) says
“Judgement is inherently critical to becoming an effective digital bricoleur.”
Once a week, my judgement about the output from the lifestream feeds for that week gave it a shape and focus, by the ‘weeding out’ or inclusion of content which fitted the ‘story’ I was creating.
As Hlubinka (2003) says
“Storytelling is a natural avenue to reflective practice.”
In line with this idea of the summaries being a ‘story’ I changed the titles to reflect ‘chapters’ in the story, starting with ‘Once upon a time’ and ending with ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ Telling the story of each week’s activities on the course had multiple benefits. As Baumeister and Newman (1991) points out
“Narrative accommodates contradiction……provides for a way to account for inconsistency”
An example of this is the weekly summary entitled ‘Skeuomorphic Christmas’. The virtual Christmas party for colleagues, a social activity, became convincingly integrated into the academic debate. However, Baumeister and Newman (1991) also reminds us that narratives are ‘precursors of abstract, propositional knowledge’. Weekly narratives enabled me to progress to a higher order of knowledge and achieve a deeper understanding of my activities.
The act of writing the weekly summaries also provided a tool for reflection. Hlubinka (2003) quotes Schon (1983)
“Through reflective practice—that is, making a habit of taking a close look at their own work and their motivation and relationship to it—people clarify their ideas and come to better understand what they have learned.”
What I was doing in each summary was reflecting on action that had taken place during each week in the lifestream feeds. The action in my lifestream began rather haphazardly but by week 3 I was beginning to ‘promote my knowledge’ and ‘enrich the (collective) conversation’ as Mark Krynsky (2008) says in his blog. The ‘constructed narrative’ of my lifestream, blog postings and summaries came to ‘serve as a personal mythology’ or as Hlubinka (2003) says, an account which helps me understand myself and represent myself to others. Personal representation was a recurring theme, not only in my blog and lifestream but those of my colleagues, for example, the Cyborg name decoder, which created an acronym and image for your cyborg identity. With the exception of my visual artefact, which is genuinely multimodal, my representation of both myself and my academic activity has largely been restricted to words and the occasional picture, which meant my Flickr feed was rather parsimonious.
However, I did gain an enhanced appreciation and understanding of Delicious and Twitter, to which I had been introduced in the IDEL module. Being forced to use them in a more sustained and focused way in the lifestream gave me true insight into their value as digital tools. As Edwards (2010) says
“Knowing is not separate from doing”
References
Baumeister, Roy F & Newman L.S (1994), ‘How Stories Make Sense of Personal Experience: Motives that Shape Autobiographical Narratives, Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 20: 676)
Brown, J.S (2000). “Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work”,
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/Growing_up_digital.pdf
Last accessed: 12th December, 2010-12-12
Edwards, R. (2010). The end of lifelong learning: A post-human condition? Studies in the Education of Adults, 42/1, 5-17.
Hlubinka, M.I (2003),”Behind the Screens: Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Reflective Practice”, Dissertation, School of Architecture & Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Krnksy, M (2008) “Why should you be lifestreaming?”, Lifestream Blog
http://lifestreamblog.com/why-you-should-be-lifestreaming/
Last accessed: 12th December 2010