Ten months till the end of my degree

Well, it's been an awfully long time since I've  blogged here - almost two years in fact. 

I'm not going to beat myself up! I've been studying hard and working hard, I've become an auntie, and played some gigs too.

Life just keeps on coming, as always.

Also, I haven't been silent online either, keeping up with  twitter, facebook, tumblr, instagram and the rest. 

When I changed over to a new smartphone recently, I decided not to add the facebook app. 
I was a bit addicted, and the noise from the feed, coupled with my own FOMO (fear of missing out) was becoming a problem, upping my anxiety levels and keeping me up at night. Also, when the app said it would now be wanting access to my text messages, I thought, "You know, I'm a bit less keen on this app now..."

Much has been written about information overload, and on the whole, I'm quite optimistic about our potential  not only to adapt to the social web, but more importantly, to really adapt social web tools to our own purposes, to integrate them into our daily routine in healthy ways and have them serve us well, instead of us being simply overwhelmed conduits of our feeds, passive consumers, less effective humans.  The seven years since I joined have provided me with a personal case study of how a disruptive technology can affect behaviour and daily life on an individual level, in both positive and negative ways.  After the heady days of full immersion in the exciting world of Web 2.0, I've eventually surfaced with some new skills.  These include, a commitment to filtering and managing my information intake, mixing content consumption with a thoughtful response, and making time for making things which are not digital.

What have I learnt in that time?

• I will never be bored again
• I am very good at doing two things at once -  e.g. watching a film and looking up all the other films the actors have been in on iMDB; walking around on a beautiful day and stuffing around with my phone taking pictures of the beautiful day; cooking and also stuffiing around with my phone getting just the right angle of light on my dinner plate while the food goes cold; having part of a great conversation while searching for the next topic of conversation and being present to neither the conversation nor what I'm searching for - AND that doing two things at once is not really the most enjoyable use of my time and life.
• Of the people I knew at school and found again on facebook, the ones with whom I had wonderful connections in the past are pretty much the same people, except for one friend I hardly knew much at high school who has become an inspiration and a little ray of sunshine in my current life - yes I'm talking about you Megsy.
• Never get angry about the government, society, or life in general and express yourself on social media if a) it is after midnight or b) you have been drinking or c) both.
• Netiquette is an actual skill and those who think there is a divide between the Web and "real life" are a little bit deluded.
• Nobody likes having other people's social web content, e.g. what a friend said on facebook, special interest blog posts, newspaper articles, read out to them without being asked if they would enjoy having the other person's 'fascinating' content read out to them.
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
• Done is better than perfect, but you'd better have the facts.
• If you have gone five hours and don't know whether it was sunny today, you need to step back from the computer/your homework/the social web.
• Having time in your day where nothing is happening is really important.

It's really sunny outside, so I'm going out in the garden to hang out with the cat

Creating an online personal learning network (PLN)

Map of my personal learning network:

After reading Jeff Utecht’s Stages of PLN adoption, I see myself in a fairly constant dialectic between the “know it all” stage – where I “give up sleep and contact with others” in order to stay plugged in to my “networks of knowledge”, and the “perspective” stage where (usually through conscious choice), I spend time just reading a novel, or when pressed, some emergency (podcast) meditation.  This appears to grow in cycles – the incoming information steadily becomes more constant and diverse.  My ability to take it all in reaches a peak then drops off completely for a few days – the “perspective” stage takes over briefly.

I am yet to reach the “balance” stage “between learning and living” and this often affects my ability to focus.  Only in the last few months have I given up on reading back to the last tweet I read the day before – it’s just not sustainable.  Now I am more likely to scan an interesting link and ‘favourite’ it for later, or send it to my gmail to make sure I can come back to it more reliably. 

What I find is happening while I am immersed in learning and more engaged with the bigger picture at work, is that maintaining my literacy as a musician becomes more and more intermittent, and this is a real concern.  Encouraged by Norman Doidge’s The brain that changes itself, neural plasticity theory convinces me that practising a little every few days can keep those neural pathways, and hence abilities, strong.  This feeds back into the rest of my learning - regular immersive learning via my PLN is more effective than constant scanning.  

There are gaps in the way I use and organise my PLN. One concern is information siloing, where the more like-minded people with similar work, political and social interests I follow, the less likely I am to be challenged by opposing, or enlightening, viewpoints.  To counteract this, it can be valuable to follow others with a range of views on my industry, and other topics. 

The biggest area in which I can develop my PLN is in learning to more effectively organise it in ways which inform my learning in a constructive and active manner.  The key to this, it seems, is in the adoption of effective location and retention habits, such as considered tagging and bookmarking, and deciding immediately if the item is relevant to my learning objectives.  The rest is not going to go away.

Human 1.0 looks to the future (and the past)

         While reading the set text for my study subject, I find a term for which I don’t have a definition.  I go to the index to find an earlier instance of the word where it might be defined.  As I scan my eyes down each page instance of the word listed in the index, I find myself thinking that this find sweep is not very effective.  Then I remember that it is my own brain which is conducting the find.  It’s not very efficient and it’s slow.  I find the definition after about six minutes, but find myself comparing the effectiveness of my human searching of the pages of a book with the find function which I am used to using on my computer screen and coming up second best - and being frustrated by this.  Am I now entering a phase in my life where my need to existentially jack in and upgrade myself will become more and more apparent? Where my version 1.0 of myself is just incredibly out of date and incompatible with the software all around me? Am I suffering from a kind of usability envy of my own digital devices? As there was a secret gestural prehistory of mobile devices, am I now experiencing a prehistorical frustration in anticipation of my human integration with the digital? Am I yearning for cyborg status?

           Perhaps yearning is too strong a word. Will I look back on today and remember with yearning the days when simple word-processing and blogging were the extent of my content creation? Will I see this as a peaceful and uncluttered time, much as I now see the 1970’s as a golden age of being outside in the fresh air, doing one thing at a time, and not recording it or conveying my experience to someone somewhere else until I saw them later in person? Of relying on memory and of not worrying if the details were a bit fuzzy? Of using my hands to draw and write on paper? This nostalgia coupled with future yearning happens on a pinpoint axis of desire, intention and frustration.  Where I am in technological history depends upon what I want to do right now – in the sense of whether I am in the beginning, the middle or near the end of life as I have known it… and whether I judge this to be useful or frustrating.   This then colours how I see myself - am I using a technology, is the technology using me, or am I part of the technology, or am I the technology, and where do we overlap? Or am I on a continuum of use, as well as on an axis of usability? 

One thing I do know, I am running out of caffeine (and this issue probably won't change in the near future...)