Helen – Page 5 – Helen Walker

November 28, 2015

“…make sure you’re connected…”

I wish I’d taken some screen grabs of the stats pertaining to my social media use and rankings just over a week ago because things have changed very quickly. As per my WordPress avowal, I have spent a lot of the last week actively improving my social network presences. I’ve updated my website, refreshed my LinkedIn profile, created a company LinkedIn page and have tweeted daily, using HootSuite to autoschedule these and to also post them onto LinkedIn.

The results – in just a week – have been staggering. In 7 days, my profile ranking on LinkedIn has risen by 35% and I’m now in the top 12% of my (now 500+) connections:

In terms of my ranking in the sector in which I work, I am now #4:

From averaging 3 or 4 views per week, this week my profile was viewed 62 times:

I know a little bit about who’s viewed me too; their companies, their location and their sector:

And my Klout score has risen from 10 to 48.5.

Alongside the stats there have been lots of positive immeasurables: old colleagues have reconnected, clients have liked and engaged with my tweets and my updates, and new connections have been made. I have been able to send links to my website with a little more confidence; rather than be embarrassed about the paucity of content on there, I now know that it looks busier and therefore I appear to be busier and more in demand.

However, as per Velda’s insightful comment, so what? In terms of what these statistics mean, they mean that the social network is creating a social network; it feels a little like a hermetically sealed world. I have played its game and, like any game-player who puts in the effort, I have risen through the ranks. However, the real proof that I will need to convince me that it ‘works’ will be when I can prove cause and effect; when I gain some work as a direct or indirect result of my LinkedIn activities. The problem is, I’ve now created my own social media monster which needs feeding…

“If you make sure you’re connected,
The writing’s on the wall
But if your mind’s neglected,
Stumble you might fall…”

Stereo MCs ‘Connected’

November 27, 2015

Panic

I’m currently writing this (at 21:00 on Thursday night) in OneNote, not in WordPress and, as I write, I’m panicking. I’m panicking because this has happened… I can’t access my blog; I can’t access the course pages, I can’t even access the Edinburgh University webpage.

I guess the servers have gone down and all will, eventually, be well. However, what’s of interest to me is just how disabling this is: I’ve lost all that I need to participate in the course: I can’t access the discussions; I can’t access the links to the useful tools I need to make my adapted version of the dialogue from Phaedrus.

And there’s the rub with online education. When the online disappears, so does the resource, the community, the notes, the links and the content. My class, my exercise book and my teacher have all disappeared. In a week where we’re contemplating and playing with a text which examines the negatives of an over-reliance on the written, my reliance on the multimedia hypertexts that comprise IDEL is exposed.

I’ll just keep shouting for help…

November 22, 2015

Hubert Dreyfus and The Matrix

One of the activities we were asked to undertake this week was to critique ‘found’ contexts by tracking some of the online public personae of the authors whose work we have engaged with so far.

One of those I Googled was Dreyfus, the supposed Luddite enemy of AI. His Wikipedia page threw up the ‘usual’ impressive academic CV. It also contained an interesting deconstruction of some of the criticisms which have been levelled at his stance about the possibility of AI and which have resulted in his harpooning by voices as diverse as Dennett and Robocop:

What Dreyfus’ Wikipedia profile evidences is that Wikipedia allows for the construct – often a debated and tension-filled construct – of a public persona by a plurality of authors; rather than typing ourselves into existence, Wikipedia enables many others to type a version of ‘us’ into existence.

One of the other strands which captured my interest in my search was the second entry on the first page of Google results:

I followed this to the Berkeley site and found what I felt was quite a personal plea from Dreyfus about his condition:

And so, from this, I started to create my own story about Dreyfus, my own construct of ‘Dreyfus’. In this tale, the reason for his own ontological philosophical interests was due to his condition, his prosopagnosia, which meant that he felt frequently disconnected from others and questioned what it meant to ‘be’, to be ‘conscious’ and to be ‘connected’: these personal considerations became academic pursuits which have occupied him throughout his career…

We are, in part, the authors of whatever we read; whoever initially authors it, be it the one on Twitter or the many on Wikipedia, we construct our version, our interpretation, our story out of what we read. And, as Justine Sacco discovered, that can be costly.

This exhibition explored, amongst other ideas, the notion that our shadows, our selves, construct and manipulate the words around us:

We project onto what we read, we create what we see. In the constructs which are social media personae, we encounter abstract echoes of the originals, what Baudillard termed simulacra and simulation; the real ‘has become irrelevant if undefinable’:

November 21, 2015

Helen Walker

I had some inclination as to what I might find when I embarked on this week’s task to search for my own online tracks and traces. Having previously been a senior leader in a secondary school, I occasionally Googled myself to check that all was well. I used to be in the local media a lot as I was the lead on a high profile new build project; however, that presence is no longer in the present and I wasn’t sure if those echoes and traces of my past role would remain. In recent years I have adopted a coward’s stance when it comes to social media, so I wasn’t entirely sure about what confusions, absences or presence I might find.

The majority of the first page of the Google search was as expected. I knew about Helen Walker the actress and her car wreck…

However, as I scrolled down the page, I was surprised to see my face:

This was a link to my one and only Google+ post, made earlier this year:

I know that Google are likely to promote posts from Google+ but it was really interesting to see that minor networking activity could result in such presence, especially as I didn’t get to one of my curated personae until page 4 of the Google search; I’m the second one from the bottom in this screen grab:

Clicking through on the Facebook and Linkedin links on this first page yielded the sort of results I would have expected; as these sites know it is me, I appear at the top of the results.

As for the rest of the Helen Walkers out there, they seem to be a very studious bunch, which is useful to me; I’d be happy to be confused with Dr. Helen Walker or to be thought of as an astronomer. If there is identity conflation and confusion, the other Helen Walkers aren’t letting the side down:

I had a play with some of the other search tools which were recommended to us. QuillConnect yielded some fascinating information about my Twitter story:

I found the information about my followers particularly enlightening; as I consider how I can build a more effective online presence, it’s good to know who is ‘influential’ so that my efforts can, perhaps, be more targeted:

It was also heartening to find out that our micro-network is a positive one:

I tried Wolfram Alpha but got a repeated error message:

Klout was interesting though. Klout claims to measure influence based on your activity, connections, etc. across a range of social media sites. I tried it first with Facebook and got a rating of 10/100 (apparently the average is 40):

This, however, didn’t concern me too much as Facebook is very much a personal medium. I treat all my posts with caution (as though I was standing in the middle of my town pronouncing forth with a megaphone) but I don’t use my personal page for professional networking. The Twitter result, when it comes though in 24 hours, will be of greater interest as I see that as my professional feed. I’ll be interested to see what Klout advises in terms of building a presence; I have some concerns that it may just be a clever way to get me to distribute spam.

Given my sense of guilt about my own control of my social media presence, I was relieved by what I uncovered in my searching; my presence wasn’t large but nor was it negative. I found little that was historical and nothing created by anyone other than me. What I did find was recognisable as ‘me’; I didn’t feel the sense of disconnect or disjunct which Clara, Marshall and Nicola discussed. It will be interesting to repeat some of these activities in a few months time to see what impact my efforts to reinvigorate my social media are having.

November 21, 2015

Personae Paralysis

The task this week required us to search for our own online tracks and traces. As my primary feeling about my social media presence is guilt about not effectively maintaining it, I was worried about what I might find. Working as an edtech consultant, my professional life is fragmented: I work as a contractor for a number of different companies as well as running a number of my own. This complicates the construction and maintenance of my online personae: I work in different roles, for different companies, in different places. I am acutely conscious of the convergence of these professional roles when, for example, I update LinkedIn: might my followers be confused about who I work for or what I do? This nervousness around what Meyrowitz (quoted in boyd, 2014, p.31) terms ‘collapsed contexts’ has resulted in a form of social media inertia where I have simply avoided the effective creation and curation of both my ‘formal’ and ‘networked’ selfs (Barbour and Mitchell, 2012). As boyd notes, “the ability to understand how context, audience and identity intersect is one of the central challenges people face in learning how to navigate social media.” (p.30). This challenge has resulted in a form of paralysis for me: I created a ‘formal’ online presence on LinkedIn some time ago and left it at that.

This week’s readings and activities have proved to be a call to action. Ignoring my presence, ignoring the need to develop a professional persona is not an option if I want to maintain professional credibility. As Turkle notes (quoted in boyd, 2014, p. 36), people who went online had to consciously create their digital presence. My presence is currently weak and outdated. Importantly, the lack of busy-ness on my social media profiles indicates (erroneously) a lack of busy-ness in my professional life. I am not effectively engaging in what Goffman (cited in boyd, 2014, p.47) terms ‘impression management’ and the impression ‘given off’ is one of inactivity.

As I have noted previously, online identity creation is about words; as Sundén states, creating a digital persona is about ‘people typing themselves into being’ (quoted in boyd, 2012, p.37). Stearn’s point is similar ‘ communicators must consciously re present themselves online.’ (quoted in Barbour and Mitchell, 2012).

So, this week I have:

retrospectively blogged on one of my company websites;
updated my LinkedIn profile (there’s still much to do here);
made a list of everything else I need to do, including:
- set up ‘If This Then That‘ to help in maintaining my social media presence;
- rebuild my current website;
- build my new website for my new company – it’s not looking great…
- get my company Facebook pages populated – they’re not looking too fantastic either…
- somehow do all of this alongside the ‘doing’ of the day job and the ‘doing’ of this Masters course…

However, I’m competing in an arena where my peers are actively creating impressive impressions of themselves and their work. So, for me, it’s now not enough to simply ‘do’; I have to show and tell.

boyd. d. (2014). Identity: why do teens seem so strange online. It’s Complicated: the social lives of Networked Teens, pp. 54-76 Available (full ebook text) from: http://www.danah.org/books/ItsComplicated.pdf

Ronson, J. (2015) How one stupid tweet blew up Justine Sacco’s Life. New York Times, 12th February 2015. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html

Barbour, K. and Marshall, D. (2012) The academic online: constructing persona through the www. First Monday, 17(9) [Online]. Available fromhttp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292

November 13, 2015

SL Macbeth

When I first started teaching English years ago, Kartouche was available in my school. This was a virtual environment which allowed you to construct scenes from various Shakespeare plays and control the characters within them, manipulating their voices and their actions. It was clunky and difficult to use and the students didn’t really enjoy working with it; the UI was difficult, at times impenetrable. The product’s still around but it appears to have moved away from its Shakespearean focus.

Although Kartouche wasn’t a successful execution of a virtual, interactive Shakespearean environment, I have always liked the concept of using VWs to teach English. When I was a teenager, Shakespeare only came alive for me when I finally made it to the theatre to see King Lear. Film adaptations get close but I think it would be interesting to explore whether VWs get closer to evoking a sense of immersion within the action of the play.

I decided to see if such environments were available in Second Life.

Googling brought me to the Metaverse Shakespeare Company (previously the SL Shakespeare Company) which looked wonderful. They staged virtual performances of Shakespeare’s plays within an in-world Globe Theatre.

However, further searching revealed that the company had folded due to funding issues and their virtual Globe no longer ‘existed’.

What a shame that virtual realities are affected by real-world economics.

I eventually found Macbeth, a space inspired by and evocative of the play. It’s an exploratory world, rich in ambient sounds and imagery; quotes from the play whirl around the space, snatches of songs are heard. Upon arrival, you find yourself above the witches’ cauldron and the words of their spell can be heard and seen.

It’s a bleak space to arrive in and it is always night – even if you adjust the time of day within SL. Walking away from the cauldron, I felt a sense of tension. I know the play, its horrors and its violence, and I was concerned about what I might find. The space was coherent in terms of mood: it was dark and echoed the tones of the tragedy throughout.

My first visit threw up some anomalies within the space. There were some boxes which
didn’t appear to do anything and a modern building which was definitely not in the original play; I later realised that this was located on a nearby island onto which I wasn’t permitted to land. Exploration of this space by secondary age pupils would require careful scaffolding and direction: the teacher would need to be an effective tour-guide.

I also found some interesting learning ‘artefacts’ within this domain. Leather-bound copies of the play were scattered around the space and, when opened, presented me with a number of tasks and activities to do ‘in-world’ and ‘out of world’.

In certain spaces I was encouraged to interact with the objects and in others, my actions invoked responses: when I sat on the throne, for example, there was cheering which quickly gave way to sobbing.

macbeth_004 — Touch the objects * Listen to the soundscape * What do you notice? * What can you hear?

It is an evocative space filled with shadows, ghostly figures and hints of chaos.

When I discovered the dagger, I quickly found myself in the ‘Chamber of Blood’ and was asked to think about what it felt like to be in this space but also to reflect on the particular SL experience of what it felt like to lose control of my avatar.

There are also playful and engaging moments of accidental agency; by mistake I sat on a crow and ended up flying in the night sky.

SL Macbeth offers a virtual environment where you could explore the play with students; it is by no means a ‘complete’ space – I have yet to discover the banquet or Birnam Wood – but it is consistent in its rendering of the atmosphere of threat which pervades Macbeth.

It would be an interesting activity to take the students there and explore the micro spaces, discussing with learners, what happened here, who is this and who says this? It also offers a rich space for (re)enactment, with the students’ avatars fulfilling the roles of the characters within Macbeth. The students could, potentially, build within this domain, creating other scenes, vignettes and echoes of the events, themes and characters within the play.

It is, above all, a compelling and immersive place, suggesting the dark tones of the tragedy and offering a creative space within which to explore Macbeth.

November 13, 2015

A thought snippet: all by myself

It has been interesting to spend time alone within Second Life this week and to explore what my identity feels like when not ‘with’ ‘others’ within the space. Fornäs’ notion of ‘identity-producing interactions’ (Fornäs et al. 2002, p.34) suggests, on first reading, that my virtual identity is heightened when interacting with other avatars within the space. However, the whole of Second Life is a construct, a space designed for avatar interactions and thus identity-producing.

My first solo journey was to Sparta where I was looking for the God of War of the treasure hunt. I was relieved to find that the space was deserted – of avatars – but I was in a constructed space filled with a sense of human agency and humour (more anatomically correct ‘bits’ had been added to the statues in the virtual museum for example). I was interacting with others, with the objects they had placed there and with the spaces they had created.

My second journey was to a space created in response to Macbeth. I have detailed information about this journey here.

November 13, 2015

The shivers of teleportation

Navarathna’s shot film. ‘A journey into the metaverse’ playfully and powerfully explores the concept of identity and the supposed boundaries between the ‘real’ self and the ‘virtual’ self, between the real world and the virtual world. It offers a response to Boellstorff’s question, ‘Can the avatar speak?’ (Boellstorff, 2008, p. 149). The narrative focuses on an avatar, abandoned by his creator in Second Life who sets out to find his ‘God’. The avatar initially becomes the master but the film explores how boundaries between virtual and real identities are mutable and shifting; the notion of separation is a false construct and, for the avatar/real ‘self’, ‘chance, reality and virtuality (lose) all sense of definition’. The film blends real world and virtual world footage, further blurring the sense of boundaries between the two domains.

250px-Sannyasin.Indien.Mönch — Sannyasin: a religious ascetic who has renounced the world by performing his own funeral and abandoning all claims to social or family standing

Set in part in India, the film draws some interesting parallels between the fate of the central avatar/self and the Sannyasin, who renounce the material world. Further, meditation, and its power to ‘free the mind and lose ego’ is also referenced. Navarathna thereby alludes to the key concept of what our self, our identity is. Where does it lie? What is it? Is virtuality a way of accessing our true, more authentic self? Is the self without place, without fixity, a concept explored by Dennett. In drawing parallels with meditation which requires us to separate from thought, from ego and develop a different sense of what it is to ‘be’, Navarathna posits exploration and immersion within the virtual is also ‘freeing’ – our self can ‘slip through the crack.’

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Personhood. In Coming of Age in Second Life (pp. 118-150). Oxford: Princeton University Press.

November 13, 2015

Me, myself and I

This week we have again been exploring notions and experiences of identity through immersion within Second Life. I have spent more time ‘there’ this week: engaging in the treasure hunt, exploring learning spaces, having a ‘voice’ tutorial and dancing. The strong sense of presence I experienced in Week 7 has been consolidated and extended this week through further virtual adventuring and through more interactions in Holyrood Park. Although I don’t identify with the physicality of my avatar (I haven’t yet got round to altering ‘her’) I do have a strong sense of being present through her: for example, I visited Echo Beach to test my sound and, when a large, muscular, scantily-clad avatar also arrived, I quickly left, feeling a sense of threat and inappropriateness. Marshall/Pancha’s refrain ‘it’s only pixels’ rang in my virtual/metaphorical ears as I teleported out. I did enjoy dancing later that day though and truly felt a sense of ‘presence enacting itself as an embodied activity’ (Taylor, 2002, p.44), an embodiment powerfully linked to vision (M. White, 2006)’ (quoted in Boellstorff, 2008 p.134) and, in this instance, sound (George Benson…)

Silverback’s new avatar

We explored this sense of connectedness with our avatars further in Thursday night’s tutorial. Paul/Silverback appeared as a Gorilla: he had spent 600 lindens (£4) on this as he had such a strong reaction against the set of default avatars which Second Life offers. He mentioned that, when his avatar initially appeared, he felt like he was ‘lying’ and so was willing to invest real money to change his virtual self. He had invested in his ‘projective’ identity, projecting his own ‘values and desires onto the virtual character’ (Gee, 2003, p.55) and seeing ‘the virtual character as (his) own project in the making’ (ibid, p.55). As Boellstorff notes, avatars are ‘the modality through which residents experienced virtual selfhood’ (2008, p.129); if I end up spending more time in Second life beyond this week, I too will invest more in developing my avatar and, probably, changing its sex.

Like all of our learning on the course so far, because we are engaged with the spaces we are reading about and exploring, loop input methodologies were at play this week. This was strongly felt when our tutor Rory/Algernon Twang.asked us to explore Gee’s concept of virtual spaces offering a more risk-free environment: a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ (p.67). In the discussion which followed, I highlighted that I felt that our interactions within this virtual world and in our other tutorials felt more risky that real-life more sustained interactions as they were irregular and therefore more imbued with a sense of import. This was, I felt, especially true where voice was concerned as this felt more like the ‘real’ me spilling into the carefully curated, virtual ‘me’. Cultivating a community of inquiry through ordered and controlled discussion forums is different to ‘exposing’ a facet of one’s identity through voice. I certainly feel more comfortable, as I have touched on before, with an identity constructed from text. As the virtual opiniontator showed, I wasn’t the only one to feel like this. The gorilla disagreed.

This is of real interest to me at the moment as I am currently devising and delivering a sequence of webinars for teachers at the schools I work with. They will be asked to interact with me and with each other via voice through Skype for Business and I will now be attuned to how unsettling this can potentially be. To have a facet of yourself, of your identity disembodied can be disconcerting, even if it is re-embodied within an avatar.

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Personhood. In Coming of Age in Second Life (pp. 118-150). Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Gee, J. P. (2003). Learning and Identity: What does it mean to be half-elf? In What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (pp. 51-71). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

November 7, 2015

I like the way you MUVE

We had our tutorial this week within Second Life (SL) a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE). Prior to the tutorial, we had an orientation session and undertook some key readings by Warburton (2009) and Dawley and Deede (2014).

Warburton’s exploration of the ‘profoundly immersive experience’ of SL and his assertion that one has ‘a feeling of being there and a strong sense of co-presence when other avatars are present’ (p.419) echoed my experience within the orientation session. I felt like I was an extension of myself (p.417) and experienced a stronger sense of being ‘with’ my peers and my tutors than I have in previous weeks via the other media we have explored. As Warburton notes, co-presence is a central tenet in Garrison and Anderson’s definition of successful learning transactions within a community of inquiry. The tutor ‘Frank’ asked us at one point during the orientation session to follow him to one of the tutorial spaces; the sense of following him and walking next to my colleagues enhanced and extended my sense of shared presence.

The tutorial session started in the same way as the orientation session: we gathered near the fountain and there was time for trouble-shooting questions and casual discussion. Dolly Mix taught ‘me’ how to dance and I chatted one-to-one with Sarah Roguish about the readings.

We then moved to the tutorial space and, sitting around the camp-fire, we began to discuss the readings.

Superficially, this IM chat discussion could be argued to have offered the ‘same’ experience as the chat in Skype however it did feel different; the mood and tone was more relaxed. This might be because we all ‘know’ each other a little better now or maybe it was because of the SL environment and the more ‘natural’ modes of interactions; as Warburton notes, ‘avatars behaved very much like their real-world counterparts’ (p.419).

The playfulness of the media, the ability to add visual gags – such as Dolly Mix eating her popcorn throughout the tutorial – all helped to make this environment one which was less formal and more absorbing; I was focused and present throughout.

As Warburton outlines, some of the many affordances of SL include ‘extended and rich interactions’, ‘immersion’ and ‘community presence’. My experience of what Dawley and Dede term ‘situated embodiment’ (p.728) meant that I felt psychologically present within the discussion and within the space.

Warburton, S. (2009). Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(3), 414-426.

Dawley, L., & Dede. C. (2014). Situated learning in virtual worlds and immersive simulations. In J.M. Spector, M.D Merrill, J. Elen, & M.J. Bishop (Eds.), The Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (4th ed.). New York: Springer.