I did correctly represent the times I had available in which to attend the Artifact presentation. And yet, we ended up with the presentation taking place on Friday afternoon anyway! This was an excellent, excellent way for everything to turn out for me, as it gave me a little bit of extra time to get everything ready(ish) for the presentation.
Originally, I planned to have a “proper” presentation, by which I mean a Powerpoint with slides and bullet points and everything else… but in all honesty, it just wasn’t happening. Rather than trying to make it “official” and business-like, I chose to simply tell a story–I know the community I was building for, I know the background, I have a relatively good understanding of the people involved and the various conditions influencing the course of events… telling the story and demonstrating the Artifact I created just felt more natural and more honest to the material.
And I think the presentation itself went relatively well. I talked too much and ran into the time I had planned to allow for questions, but at least I did manage to finish under 20 minutes and had a few minutes for questions at all. I classify that as a success, overall.
This was the working setup of TediCross, using two test bots, a test group on Telegram, and a test server on Discord. I also showed my configuration file during the presentation, but I won’t replicate it here–it’s largely default, and I don’t really need to share bot tokens and channel IDs with the wider Internet!
These ended up being my notes for the presentation. Yeah… far, far from a Powerpoint presentation, I just wrote down my reminder points and spoke from the heart, as it were.
The other Artifact presentations were also interesting. Chi presented a website offering e-portfolios, and Damian presented a vibe-coded social networking website for gardeners. I even made a post about “salting the earth” on Damian’s site while he was presenting, just to see how it worked. (I wanted so badly to suggest a little badging system to designate longevity of membership… everything from “bud” to “new leaf” to “shoot”, etc… but mostly so that the system administrator could be designated “root.” I didn’t want it to be all about me cracking jokes, though.)
And so I’m now at the end of COMP650: Social Computing. As I sit and reflect back on the entire term… while it’s a relatively small sample space so far, I feel like I’ve done the most learning in this course. It’s not the sheer amount of reading (though that has been very high!), but the reading has been… less targeted, if that makes sense? Like, COMP695 has also had a substantial amount of reading, but it’s been very tightly focused on extracting bits and pieces of techniques and methods from the readings. In contrast, the readings here have been much wider and not targeted on specific points. Rather, they’ve been based on entire topics. That means that what I’ve read, I’ve read out of pure interest, which means a lot more time spent and detail ingested from the readings that I have done.
The course isn’t what I thought it would be originally, or even on the second glance. It’s weird to think about it, but it wasn’t even on my short list for potential electives originally. Even once I identified this as “Actually, this should be one of my primary goals, if I get the chance,” it turns out I didn’t understand the course at all. We definitely examined some of the topics I had in mind, but… in a very, very different way than I had thought. It wasn’t “Here’s the points that you should learn,” but “Here’s the field… here’s some things to ponder, maybe… otherwise, go nuts!”
Honestly, I still like Brightspace as a system (about as much as I liked Moodle), but I do recognize that it’s… mismatched, is probably a good way to put it, against the content and format of this course. Whatever else it might be, Brightspace is not any sort of social networking platform, and the format for this course really kind of seems to work best with a relatively tight set of social interactions. If everybody is reporting on their thoughts and reflections, and everybody else can absorb that and emanate their own thoughts and reflections in return… a bit like a nuclear reaction, you need all of those thoughts emitted in an environment where they will collide with other course participants in order to spark new reactions. If everybody goes off to their own corner, then even if they reflect in private, you won’t get the same critical reaction.
The Landing might be much more optimized for this. I think you could replicate it to an extent, even without necessarily using the Landing, but… you need that relatively cohesive, tight environment in order to sustain the (social) reaction. Rather than every participant setting up their own kind of learning diary in a location and format of their choice, selecting a platform and instructing people to use it to create their learning diary would offer the advantage of being able to ensure all the participants are working in (relatively) close (social) proximity to each other. If the platform offers an easy “friends list” (or the Landing’s circles, I think?), so much the better for ensuring everybody has fast access to everybody else’s output. That would, essentially, produce more optimal conditions to sustain an increased reaction rate. But Brightspace alone is simply not going to be able to produce the conditions needed for this.
I won’t be taking two courses concurrently again if I can help it at all. I didn’t want to be taking two concurrently, but that’s how it worked out with the course offerings. And that, combined with still working full-time, made it exceedingly difficult to juggle both course loads and get my posts made on time. That didn’t help things at all, I’m sure. But, if I look on the bright(ish?) side, I can also take that as confirmation that I definitely cannot sustain that in future.
And now… to compile the portfolio and map the learning objectives. (I was rather pleased to be able to link back to the previous unit where I had remarked on creating a map, because that’s really exactly what we’re doing here… creating a map for marking the prodigious amounts of output I have verbosely blathered on to create.)
This has been a most rewarding segment of my journey. I look forward to unlocking still more in the future.
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