My Flight Path

Current Coordinates

The only experience I have with multimedia is on the side of consumption rather than production. I don’t post very often, and if you checked my accounts, you wouldn’t see much. The only exception was when a few years ago I competed in Rainbow Six Siege and streamed the game for a period of time. This required me to consider various aspects that I didn’t have words for back then, such as what kept people watching, when it was appropriate to talk as opposed to focusing on the game, and how the platform itself influenced what I could say and when to say it. This didn’t involve content creation in the way the course most likely intends, but it did deal with maintaining an audience’s attention in a live online environment, and for that reason I believe it provides me with a suitable starting point even though it’s an uncommon one.

Mapping the Route

The aspect of the objective that appeals to me most is explaining personalised learning and the way it connects with learning theory. What particularly interests me is the way that algorithms react to what you already believe; if you agree with a certain idea or simply keep looking at it, the feed then begins to show you a more extreme version of that same viewpoint. I have noticed that this affects the way people interact with one another, since each person has already been reinforced in their beliefs before entering a conversation. I would like to go beyond the simple explanation that ‘the algorithm radicalizes people’ and instead understand the actual learning theory and design choices that lie beneath it.

I’m just as interested in the way people can take part in a network without fully contributing to it. For example, the repost feature on Instagram and TikTok allows you to share something without having to post it yourself; this can be described as participation without full ownership. This relates to the aim of using social media to build a personal learning network, and it is a real question for me and not just a hypothetical one since it’s similar to the way I actually use these platforms.

I would now like to gain a proper understanding of data ownership and licensing; although I have come across terms such as Creative Commons and Public Domain I still can’t explain the differences between them or the reason why they are important, and it seems to me that I should be able to do so before creating or sharing resources online.

Potential Turbulence

The aspect of this course that worries me most is the part relating to community contributions. The weekly blog posts, commenting on three of my classmates’ posts, and remaining visible in a public learning network are almost the reverse of the way I usually behave online. Although I am at ease when taking part in a limited context such as streaming a game, sustained public reflection is something new to me.

My intention is to run the blog in such a way that I myself would be interested in reading it rather than presenting a show, and to begin with genuine questions rather than aiming to appear impressive. I prefer to publish a short and honest piece most weeks rather than one that has been polished and is therefore empty. I also plan to start by commenting, since it is easier to respond to other people’s ideas than it is to produce your own from scratch, and use that as a basis for eventually writing more comprehensive posts of my own.