…the bags of gold, that is. 

I am suffering from RSI on my left hand after spending far too much time on the computer with DS106 creating. My body is saying I need to manage my excitement and spend the bags of gold I am getting wisely.

For this weekly summary post I decided to select from all the notes I made this week – see tag cloud above (you need Silverlight to view) – and write this summary post to help me reflect on the biggest bag of gold I found and how it relates to my teaching:

As I started to work through this week’s materials, I set out to read Gardner Campbell’s article.  I thought I would just scan it as I have read it many times before. But then I had the idea to use Tapestry for a second time this week to get some of those nuggets of gold we were told to keep for future weeks of learning,

Keep track of a key sentence or sequence in the video that generates interest or questions for you, […] Gardner calls these “nuggets” and will be launch points for our discussions.

So I started a Tapestry story instead of highlighting text. This seems important in the light of the metacognitive strategies we develop as  a result of the tools we have available to us. The ways we start to re-imagine learning. I had used Tapestry before to respond to a question by Talky Tina and had moving feedback from her about it. I always like to use a tool a few times to get a sense for what is capable of.  I added the beautiful summary by Julia Forsythe as my opening screen and left a comment on Flickr for her – as I thought this was a beautiful artefact. I kept on reading. I highlighted and copied onto Tapestry key nuggets – not before going into Gimp and stealing the little bag of gold from Julia’s drawing for use in the Tapestry!

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Seeing the quotes on Tapestry and organising them made me think about the content of the article differently. I saw a theme I had not seen before – the idea that in the construction of a cyberinfrastructure we are composing a life in the sense Mary Catherine Bateson means it – in a life of discontinuity we need to compose a life rather than plan it. The nature of the web is such that it affords purposeful composing. I looked for the book and found out that she has now written a book called ‘Composing a further life’ and though it is a book about life after retirement, I thought it applied equally well to the ‘further’ life we begin to live online as we decide to put down a few virtual identity markers.

I added this nugget to the Tapestry. My Tapestry was looking decidedly linear and non-arty. I had the idea to select images on the basis of what Gardner said on the video we were also asked to watch. I got Flickr advanced search for CC images and Savvy Gimp free images finder ready and started the video. I completed the Tapestry that way. 

Images were all creative commons, although I should have got attribution written down under each – I was simply too tired to do so. In that sense creating openly is more time consuming that just making notes privately. Here is a link to view fullscreen.

I developed a new way of ‘studying’ using the tools of the open web. I guess this is what Gardner means when he says the old sometimes gets in the way of the new – if I had used my usual mental models I would simply have scanned the article and left it at that. As I had the frame of making art for DS106 and I was on the open web, other ways of studying presented themselves. 

I can already see how my own teaching will be changed by DS106.

I will want to include some of these ways of learning as options for my students. These are the bags of gold….but wait, is it safe? Can we do the same thing behind the firewall of my organisation? Here comes the illusion that the digital facelift is the same thing as composing a digital life. It is not. Wish me luck trying to persuade the powers that be in my world to spend the gold. I am encouraged by some digitally subversive action from other DS106 participants:

This week will be work in progress for several weeks. There are so many nuggets. I will pace myself and right now I am trying VideoNot.es, having tested Vialogues along the way, I prefer it because I can just keep notes on my Google drive. Vialogues is more like a visual Voicethread and more a sharing tool than a note-taking tool. I will work with the video for a while and keep reflecting on the ways in which taking steps to build a cyberinfrastructure challenges the way we teach in non-digitally aware institutions. The faculty may be up for being open to the world, they may consider opening up to each other with ready processed material, but how could they ever be persuaded to open up to themselves and be willing to critically reflect on habits of mind to increase self-awareness? And share these vulnerabilities with their students?