It was designed as an open-access, disaggregated learning environment which pulled together content, readings, tweets, blog postings and other social media in an attempt to explore what is most interesting not only about theories of digital culture, but also about the forms and practices of contemporary e-learning.

The site will stay up indefinitely, as will the 2009 instance. Access to students’ blogs and lifestreams, to all course content, to the visual and ethnographic artefacts created during this course, and the final assignments, are all available from here (see the right hand column for links). Only copyright-protected readings are protected by passwords.

For more information about what we’ve been doing on this course, contact the tutors – Sian Bayne and Jen Ross, School of Education, University of Edinburgh.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 1: getting started, adjusting the settings, adding Twitter – http://screenr.com/0lG

Part 2: adding additional feeds, including a ‘generic’ feed – http://screenr.com/ZlG

Transcript 1: the part of the chat that specifically related to the film

Transcript 2: the full chat from Wednesday evening (including welcomes and introductory chat about the course, lifestreams, and life in general)

Tutorial 2
Second: Thursday morning’s transcript – our really interesting chat around the restaurant scene clip from David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ
Full chat transcript

So, just to be clear: there is only one method by which you can access your blog dashboard on this web site, and that is by going to

http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/wp-admin

If you are not already logged in with EASE, you will see a page that looks like this:

Enter your student number and your EASE password, and you should be taken to the dashboard, where you can edit your lifestream, approve comments, create blog posts, and customise your Wordpress site.

At various points in your personal blog, or when you are notified by email of comments on your blog, you may be offered a link which takes you to a non-EASE login page that looks like this:

This page is no use to you at all – nothing you type here will get you access to your dashboard. We will try to sort it out so that this page doesn’t appear, but in the meantime just be aware that you should ignore this page and go straight to http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/wp-admin. You may want to bookmark this link so you can go directly to it.

Hope that’s clear – let us know if you have any questions about it.

Welcome to all University of Edinburgh MSc in E-learning students who are studying this course over semester 1. This fragment of the web is where much of the activity for our work over the coming weeks will be located – link from here to our discussion board, your blog, your lifestream and the course content. And please remember that all of this – apart from the discussion board and the copyright protected readings – is public and open to the web!

The course looks at online learning within the context of the emergence of a specifically digital culture, drawing on theory from media studies, cultural studies and the study of cyberculture, as well as the educational research influenced by these areas of thought. We consider the possiblity of cyborg pedagogy, twitter a film festival on the theme of cyberculture, conduct micro-virtual ethnographies and explore the visual representation of academic discourse, all in the interests of a deeper understanding of how internet cultures and learning cultures are intersecting and changing each other.

The course starts on Monday 20 September 2010, and runs for 12 weeks.

Your tutors are Sian Bayne and Jen Ross. You know how to contact us – but also watch this space here for course announcements and other things you should know about. Best of luck with your studies this semester!