Archive for March, 2011
All kinds of social media and networked culture theory – Journal Club – 25/03/2011
Mar 28th
After recently joining the LiSC Friday afternoon research group and eating all the cake for the past few weeks I was invited to give a talk in relation to my PhD project and give some theoretical/critical insight into the development of online social networking practices and related networked socio-economic trends. I guess this contributed some degree of an interdisciplinary flavour, since I come from a cultural studies/media studies background. My PhD is focussed on how forms of subjectivity (embodied in connecting, producing, performing, playing, communicating, tagging, uploading, ‘poking’, and ‘liking’ in the social media platform Facebook) may be being governed, conditioned, structured, captured and modulated through the technological architecture of such sites, representing a critique of wider developments to highly mediated, networked cultures in the context of global capitalism. I have been collaborating with members of LiSC to develop an application to collect data from Facebook users for my study, which is how I came to be involved in the research group.
I began my talk by discussing some of the recent work on online social media, and it was interesting to see a number of apparent crossovers here. I gave a brief discussion about the historical development of capitalism then attempted to map out three key areas which I feel are important for critically understanding networked technology and practices: Identity, Power and Labour. I delved into a broad range of critical theory and philosophy, in particular Gilles Deleuze’s work on ‘control societies’, the ‘dividual’ self, ‘de-territorialisation’ and ‘assemblages’, as well issues of ‘affective/immaterial labour’ and ‘networked ontology’ (which really warranted more time to explain in fine detail but hopefully the group found the overview of these concepts in someway interesting and/or useful). These core issues make up the body of my literature review and provide the historical, cultural and critical background from which my study will emerge; as this process is far from complete, my talk painted a vague picture of the theoretical environment in this area, perhaps opening avenues for future research.
I think I will reward everyone for sitting through that session with some assortment of cake and nibbles for next week…
Electro-Magnates – Public Energy API and Project Progress
Mar 20th
It has been quite a while since we posted an update on our Electro-Magnates project so here goes! The project is progressing along nicely and has reached another ‘technical’ milestone. Using Windows Communication Foundation, we have built a Restful API that exposes the University of Lincoln’s near-real-time energy consumption data in either XML or JSON formats. Exposing the energy data using open formats is one of the project’s core deliverables and follows the ethic that only good can come of data transparency. Having the data ‘online and out there’ allows the potential for tapping into the creativity of developers, designers and anybody who knows a little bit of basic programming. The API has granularity at the building level (for now) and energy data consumed (KWh) at half-hour intervals.
Although the API is built and ready for consumption, it will be released at an appropriate time in the project’s timeline in the near future. And there’s more! By building our own API we have the benefit of designing it to meet the needs of the project and that of any requested features, we also understand the benefits of an ‘internet of things’ service in the ‘cloud’. To this end we are about halfway through the development of automatically syncing the energy data to Pachube, described by themselves as ‘a data brokerage platform for the internet of things’. With Lincoln’s energy data also on Pachube developers will have access to Pachube’s feature-rich API for consuming the data, its community and its growing set of ‘ready-to-go’ applications (desktop and online widgets) built by the community. Readiness with Pachube is just a few weeks away; again the availability of the Pachube energy feeds to the public will be released in the near future.
In other Electro-Magnates work we are collaborating with Oxford University to run three ‘energy themed’ workshops across Lincoln, Oxford and De Montfort universities. The Lincoln workshop is planned for May 17th, other dates to follow. The workshops are primarily part of Oxford’s JiSC funded project into the effectiveness of innovative energy usage ‘info-graphics’ to change consumption behaviours. The JiSC project complements the ‘energy visualisation’ work component of Electro-Magnates hence a collaborative effort with the workshops, with findings shared with each project.
More progress updates on Electro-Magnates will be posted over the coming months! In the meantime you can follow the project’s Twitter feed and Facebook group.
 |
Online social tools for Higher Education – Journal Club 4.3.2011
Mar 7th
John Murray came along to our session on Friday to discuss some ongoing research that he is conducting on developing social tools for Higher Education. We probably shouldn’t give away the specifics of what he’s doing just now, but there were some points that came up that are relevant to all applications that aim to improve student participation and engagement using online social tools.
One issue that we kept coming back to was that of anonymity – whether or not contributions from students to any social network-based education tool should be done under their own name, or anonymised. I am by no means an expert on the role of anonymity in contributions to online communities, but there has been a great deal written in this area. See this blog for example, and this Journal Article.
Another issue that came up was that we need to carefully consider the incentives that students have to participate in non-compulsory facets of the Higher Education experience. In this respect, we discussed this very interesting work (and this) which uses game-based feedback to inspire student motivation and engagement.
We’re looking forward to seeing how this project develops as it touches on some issues that are of real importance to some of the other work we are doing at LiSC.
Interestingly, last weeks graphical feedback seems to have prompted a huge upsurge in cake buying. We had a total of 5 cakes at the meeting – of which we ate only one. If anyone can suggest a nice solution for organising our ad-hoc cake buying it would be much appreciated.