Looking back at the last 7 weeks of my journey into Research in Emerging technologies study at University of Salford, MSc Digital Media: Video, Audio and Social Technologies degree, it has been quite involving than I thought. This is a 2 part module consisting of Research Methods and Social Technologies with equal weighting. The Research Methods’ half involves an assessment of a mini research project. Sharon George and I are doing a Quantitative Research into the future of Stereoscopic 3D Film making. The aim is to gather information from responses through a survey questionnaire found here using statistics and be able to conclude whether Stereoscopic 3D is the future of Film making or not. The other, Social Technologies’ half aims to develop my online presence and network know-how. I am expected to participate in the online sphere through participatory media production alongside the academic study of digital culture and practices. I will then put my network know-how into practice through the exploration of ‘spreadable media’ basically using Henry Jenkins‘ theory by creating media artefacts, monitor, measure and analyse their spread through, my wordpress blog, twitter, or any other social media.
As I have said earlier on, this is so involving and requires a lot of reading literature in my area of study including books, journals, blog post to mention a few. Although I was kind of expecting this, the level at which I have to do it is slightly different. I have discovered that I aught to have a critical awareness of relevant depth and breadth of knowledge in a professional capacity and a good level of communication. I was uncomfortable about blogging when I started the module. I had to blog because it is part of my assignment and I am being assessed on it, but as I posted blog after blog, I feel I am becoming more expressive. I may still be quite conservative in the way I discuss issues because of fear of risking mistakes but I see an improvement each time I blog. Before I started this module, I had quite a number of social sites signed up. The main purpose was to communicate socially with friends and family and also browse for any interesting news. Some of these sites have been redundant and my main communication tool online was through emailing. I think this is because of the fear of risks of making mistakes(as mentioned above) on public domains leading to embarrassment and perhaps being ridiculed by friends and by communicating through email has more or less avoided a lot of online presence thereby reducing the risks. Also I was uncomfortable about exposing my identity online due to the talk that ‘Internet is full of Danger’ such as identity theft or stoking. Although this may be true, the same danger may well be the same offline.
I have had a gradual integration into social media, by participating more, I have seen an increase in my presence on already signed up sites and have recently signed up for more. Through lectures by my tutor Helen Keegan and talks from guest speakers, I have managed to learn more social medial sites that have a great importance to my line of study as well as in building my professional online identity. Although creating a blog was part of my course work, I strongly feel that this has brought out the other side of me that has been hidden through communicating and interaction. Cristina Costa gave my class a talk on a number of issues, what particularly drew my attention was the ‘open access learning’ whereby some academic, journals, theses or even monographs are available to the public free of charge. I imagine the joys of stumbling upon a piece of information that is very relevant to my research without having to pay for it and would like to share the same feeling with the next person. In that light, I have managed to gradually built on my diigo and bitly bookmarks. anyone in my line of study may just find one of my bookmarks useful to their research. Another speaker Hugh Garry, presented an in depth lecture on spreadable media and I have managed to reflect on that here.
These seven weeks have been quite challenging, there has been some trial and error posts, a lot of reading and research into blogging or tweeting for slightly different purposes other than just social interaction with friends and family. Coming from an ‘always someone else’s duty to produce such work’ I feel I have done reasonably well, however I have to keep blogging regularly and tweeting more to maintain the following that I have managed to build and possibly increase it. A weakness that I have found out is, I may be blog-posting weekly but I am not engaging well by commenting or reblogging on other blogs. This interaction may just help traffic to my blog. On twitter I may be a bit passive too but I am picking up. I have been following quite a few people as well as @SirNige who is a moderator of #263chat, every tuesday at UCT +2 hours the #263chat have a chat topic each week and I have been quite active there. I have been discovered by followers and have discovered mine through this chat-room and a few re-tweets that I have done.
Zororo Mubaya 