Reflecting on my work in the Open Design Studio, and on online v offline thinking
Four weeks into our Open Design Studio (ODS) activity on the OU's H817 course, and I've just turned a corner with regard to feeling comfortable with the technology we're using. I've struggled with the ODS layout and our Google+ community, both of which I've found rather confusing to navigate or post to. The main gripe, however, has been Google Hangouts, where my participation has been hindered (I think) by my rather inferior broadband connection. As our the third team member joined our conversation, I suddenly lost audio, and that was effectively the end of the meeting for me.
In the event, Catherine and Mariana carried on with at Hangout that was publicly broadcast. In the event, they played host to some unwelcome interlopers. Mariana posted some interesting thoughts afterward on how this had made her feel. One of the things she brought up was the the idea of different strategies for 'online life' (David White, 2011), and 2 contrasting web users: residents and visitors. Visitors tend to go online to find resources, take them offline, and do their thinking there. In contrast, residents do their thinking online through online-social tools.
I have been doing my thinking for this block 'offline' to date. Now by and large any online thinking has been hindered by my unfamiliarity with the technology and getting to grips with this workspace. Incidentally, I've not been anywhere near our Google+ site since the weekend, and I think that's helped me focus on this site, and the tasks more.
In a way, because of the similiarities of this work to offline projects I deal with in my day job, I think I've subconsciously reverted to offline thinking. I feel I had begun to move some of my thinking online in the previous blocks, evidenced by my enthusiasm for blogging, which has been conspicuously (to me anyway) undernourished since the start of this block. Ultimately, I think this whole block has produced feelings of dissonance, compared to the previous blocks, which are rooted in this tension of online v offline thinking.
Reading Mariana's post has given me some comfort about this. Fine - for this task I need to bend the tools to work for me. What's worked this week is shutting the door on the Google+ community, and focusing mainly on offline thinking. That's given me a sense of accomplishment, and from this I hope to re-engage with Google+ at a later date - though because of the shortness of this block, I don't have much time left!