Month: April 2019

Participating in the digital presence mapping exercise was valuable and illuminating. The experience has changed the way I view my own digital use and presence, and helped me see ways in which I can be more deliberate in my online interactions. It has given me a framework in which to reflect on privacy and access, and how I will allow my own work to be shared.

Through the process of both Visitor/Resident mapping (White, 2013) and the collaborative/individual, analogue/digital variation (Cormier, 2018) it became clear that what I’m doing for work online is done deliberately, collaboratively (for the most part) and publicly. These skills will be transferable and useful in my work as a MALAT student.

The surprising learning in these exercises was in how much time is lost in email and social media. I will be endeavoring to simplify and streamline my email queue, to have emails forwarded to two or three places, rather than have them all in different accounts.

I plan to spend my time on social media with more forethought, with a goal of posting content that’s relevant, be the entertainer, posting things that are relevant to what I’m promoting, not falling into the trap of becoming the entertained. With that in mind, I’ve developed a posting calendar that will cover my posts for the next two months. I’m also moving back towards the use of Hootsuite (Holmes, 2008) to post to multiple applications at one time.

As a MALAT student, I’m looking forward to the ongoing network building opportunities, to interact with this large, distributed public (boyd, 2011) of learners. In the spirit of this sharing and community building, I’ve elected to make the copyright attribution on my RRU blog a Creative Commons license. I am hopeful that this action will further the movement towards open resources, to open dialogue and information sharing. In this same vein, I have left my comments unmoderated.

I have mixed feelings about my current, student access to the library and other databases of copyright protected information. As someone who has earned money from publishing, I understand completely the need to make one’s work bear financial gain. As someone who aspires open access and community building within the academic arena, I’m interested in quality, open source information. At this time, I’ll endeavor to share my work openly in hopes of contributing to the free exchange of information, information exchange that won’t evaporate when my status changes from ‘student’ to ‘graduate’.

All in all, the exercises were formative and informative. The resultant shifts will be for the better and help me stay aligned with both my time management goals, and my values around open source resources and learning.

References

boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self (pp. 39–58). New York, NY: Rutledge.

Cormier, Dave (2018, March 31). Digital Practices Mapping – Into activity for digital literacies course.[Blog post]  Retrieved from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2018/03/31/digital-practices-mapping-intro-activity-for-digital-literacies-course/

Holmes, Ryan (2008). Hootsuite [Computer Software]. Retrieved from https://hootsuite.com/

White, Dave (2013). Just the Mapping. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK1Iw1XtwQ  April 24, 2019.

Going through the Visitor/Resident (White, 2013) mapping process allowed me to see how much of my work happens online.Through ongoing planning and reasonably consistent effort, I’ve built a virtual workplace for myself. Looking at the same information in the context of different tension pairs – collaborative/individual, analogue/digital (Cormier, 2018) – shifted my understanding yet again.

The main areas in which my practices would fall are in analogue/individual, digital/individual and collaborative/digital.

The analogue/individual piece is not a big surprise, really. I work as an illustrator and graphic recorder, both of which generally are done solo, even when in a room full of people.

The digital/individual piece reflects most of my digital illustration, film making, writing work, personal business blog and website, and work that I do in my practice as an instructor.

The digital/collaborative space has the most in it, as this reflects most of my work with the college, music festival and other projects that I’m involved in. The beauty of digital collaborative space being that it can be asynchronous and is not dependent on geography. Having this as a possible place to work has opened up possibilities in my practice that would never have occurred any other way. The digital realm has allowed for work with people in different areas that I may not have had the opportunity to work with otherwise (for which I’m grateful), people in many different countries and time zones.

Both exercises were valuable in that they helped me understand better where I concentrate efforts in my work world. Both helped me create a framework of how I’d like to shift that digital use over the next two years.

References

Cormier, Dave (2018, March 31). Digital Practices Mapping – Into activity for digital literacies course.[Blog post]  Retrieved from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2018/03/31/digital-practices-mapping-intro-activity-for-digital-literacies-course/

White, Dave (2013, September 13). Just the Mapping [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK1Iw1XtwQ

This week was a deep dive into understanding my own digital presence as outlined by Dave White in his video (White, 2013) to shed some light on how much of my digital persona is ‘visitor’ (lurking, not effecting public space), and how much is ‘resident’ (deliberate content creation, contribution to the internet as a whole, leaving a trace). Beyond that, the second axis of ‘personal’ and ‘institutional’ helped to articulate the reasons for choosing the digital space in which I participate.

I elected to break down that digital presence into categories based on digital publics (boyd, 2011): personal, my business, volunteer work, other projects, and my current work as an instructor. I used Leonardo (version 0.15.21) to create layers and to draw the areas of use. In retrospect, there are pieces missing (Skype, Google Hangouts, and others), but my main usages are mapped.

I was surprised to the extent that I’m performing digitally in the resident/institutional realm – this was a much deeper set of layers than anticipated. The big ‘aha’ was around my servitude to email.

I may yet make this into a gif, but the images are as follows:

References

boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self (pp. 39–58). New York, NY: Rutledge.

Henning, Tegan. (2019). Leonardo [Computer Software]. Retrieved from https://www.getleonardo.com/

White, Dave (2013). Just the Mapping. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK1Iw1XtwQ  April 24, 2019.