There is a course that just began at the the University of Edinburgh on “E-learning and Digital Cultures“. It is a very interesting course that requires all students to create and maintain a Lifestream.
Here’s a snippet from the outline of the course content
The course will be organised in three blocks. Learning activities throughout will focus on maintenance of an online ‘commonplace book’ using lifestreaming technology (see assessment), on group blogging, asynchronous discussion, twitter tutorials and text chat. You will develop one online visual artefact (block 1) and one ethnographic ‘story’ using an online application of your choice (block 2), in addition to the final assignment.
A PDF of the course guide can be found here.
(Click to visit the site)
There is a dedicated website for the course that provides information on course assignments and other interesting posts such as this one on “Lifestream: Curation or Chaos“? From the home page of the blog you see a list of all the course participants with links to each of their Lifestreams. The sidebar of the site also provides recent tweets about the course which are identified by a custom hashtag.
I really enjoyed poking around the site, looking at the articles as well as the Lifestreams created by the students. It appears that each of them were provided with their own instance of WordPress where they could choose their own theme and utilized the WordPress Lifestream plugin to create their Lifestreams.
(sample of some of the student Lifestreams)
A while back I wrote about a course at IUPUI which also utilized Lifestreaming but not quite to the degree of this course at Edinburgh. It’s both exciting and interesting to see how Lifestreaming is making its way into the curricular of colleges internationally. I’m sure this trend will continue and expand even further in the future.
hi Mark – thanks for your review of our course! We're using WordPress MU and the iBegin lifestream plugin (http://www.ibegin.com/labs/wp-lifestream/). Our main concern was to have a lifestream setup that we could host ourselves, since the lifestream is being assessed.
The course is experimental in the context of our MSc in E-learning programme (http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/), mainly because it's the first time we've run a course primarily in public, and so far we (the tutors) are having an excellent time. My feeling is that the lifestream is giving students a way to personalise their experience of the course and to track their own interests in very productive and interesting ways.
This looks like a great project. how did you find the students responded to it?
As a student on the digital cultures course I have to say that I love the route this course is taking. It is almost making us part of the history of digital culture as we appear to be one of the first groups to undertake learning in quite such a free and open manner. I have to say that I adore lifestreaming and will probably continue using it beyond the lifetime of this course. It makes it so easy to keep all resources in one place beyond the ability of Delicious or similar packages. As a learner I get meaning from many places and lifestreaming collates them all together in a manageable container!