All a bit reflexive because its about academic 2.0, and I have been trying to immerse myself in the digital world in the spirit of a latter day Margaret Mead - coming of age in the ether ;-)
My twitter feed has been going full tilt, and I am trying to get to grips with Plaxo. I am using del.icio.us, blogger, emailing from my mobile phone (and browsing) but that's so expensive I won't be doing that long term.
I signed up for a blog to post from my mobile, and I have read that I can post to blogger from my mobile. Its practical for sharing pictures, but not sure about anything more than stubs.
I have a NetVibes account, will be running a workshop using CrowdVine, think that SimpleSpark to keep track of the growth of 2.0 applications. I have a picassa account (but have not put much on it yet), and a Flickr account although I am pissed off that I had to get (yet another) Yahoo Mail a/c because they lost my old one :-(
When I get into the office I find that my university has just established a ning group called sotoneducators (the title of which I keep misreading).
For quality assurance purposes we have a shared university repository for QA evidence and documents (no 2.0 aspects yet). For research outputs, we mandate that academics use a repository, and continue to add further Web 2.0 functionality with each revision.
In my free time I run with Southampton Running Sisters, and we use Google Groups and Facebook to keep in touch with each other. I use Fetch Everyone intermittently.
We have a project called EdShare which is based around tagging educational materials. Our project funders expect us to blog as well as write reports, our research group has its own set of blogs for external and internal purposes, and I find myself beginning to wonder when we will be able to do anything aside from writing.
My school has a media wiki for the students, uses a knowledge base for FAQs, and a repository for important and shared documentation which sits alongside our intranet where we have many pages which allow dynamic editing.
In writing this account I become aware that the term/perspective I prefer to 2.0 is "a life online"; the account of the role of 2.0 in any users' experience, I think, has to encompass all aspects of technology interactions (justification also for the seamless integration of my mobile experiences into this account)
So now I am realising that some of the tagging which takes place is actually just in my mind, and that the rest of the sharing and publishing is much more visible! So it must be for the rest of humanity - most of what people think is not on the web, it is in an ether, but its another ether!
I have been reading The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. Rivers who worked with many 'shell shocked' soldiers from the 1914-1918 war, had been an anthropologist in Melanasia.
The accounts of the Ghosts in the book, and the differences in perspectives between the various societies (south sea, western european, upper class, working class, milatarist, pacifist, soldier, civilian....) seem to be relevant to some insights on knowledge and understanding, and therefore, inevitably what we understand about 2.0 - what it means for the web, and what it means for academia.
COOP is a well established european CSCW community, this workshop has attracted a significantly wide range of participants which reminds me of the inevitability of inter-disciplinary approaches.
the act of writing makes me realise that my own processes of reaching conclusions is somewhat chaotic (but not to say that the perspectives which emerge are not valid)
Tech to do:
This is meant to track my journey, not sure what margaret would call it!
Get onto last FM
Get to grips with Plaxo
Get rss feeds into my web page
Put up the recent web page which I revised ages ago, but have not got round to doing
Tech gripes, notes (as above)
Been trying to paste material into the page, but it does not seem to work - hey ho, what do I know??
Internet is good here, but the recurrent issue is down to maintaining power - all grist to the mill of the current argument about how 2.0 technologies impact on academic and higher education. Another part of the ethnographic perspective. I observe that via twitter, some people are online big-time, and others are intermittent. Motivations will vary with time.
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