Hi everyone,

Hopefully you have all now received some individual mid-point lifestream feedback, sent to your student email. Overall, your lifestreams are looking great, and I’m really impressed with the quality of your work, and the effort you have been putting in to finding and displaying such interesting resources. I see your lifestreams as very much part of the EDC course content, and I’m certainly engaged and learning a lot from what I’m seeing. It is also great to see commenting going on across the lifestreams, and I think this is a really valuable part of the course experience.

I wanted to summarise some general comments here, from things that I’m seeing across the lifestreams:

Firstly, do try to keep the end-of-week summaries directed towards reflecting on your lifestream activity from the previous week. In other words, specifying what you included and why. Crudely, this might be something along the lines of, ‘I bookmarked [this website] because it seemed to provide a good definition of MOOC communities’. Of course, if you have lots of feeds items coming in, you wouldn’t need to specify each one, however, you should try to summarise your additions, or chose some key examples. You may also want to reflect more generally on your experiences around the course, and this is welcome, however try to use that in a way that frames and explains your lifestream activity explicitly. Remember that you can always write an additional blog post for wider reflections.

Secondly, do think about how you are presenting your lifestream for assessment – this will be particularly important as we head into the final stages of the task. The best lifestreams in this respect are those that make use of the categories, tags, and menus within WordPress, to provide not only easy ways of navigating your work, but also a useful visual representation of the range of feeds and topics you are engaging with. Labelling key posts consistently, such as the end-of-week summaries, is also part of this. As I am sure you are finding in week 6, your lifestreams are now substantive pieces of work, and individual items can easily be missed. My advice would be to make it easy for me, as your marker, to find the things that are going to get you marks. Slap me in the face with them. If you’ve got ten different kinds of feeds (Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Pocket, etc.) use the categories or tags so that I can see this easily on your front page sidebar. If you have specific posts where you reference the literature (e.g. your summaries), put these in a menu so I can find them easily, or create tags for the authors you cite. Organising your work well has multiple benefits. If I can see things clearly, I can give your work the mark it deserves. If you can see things clearly, you can better sum up your weekly activity, and get a sense of which feeds you could perhaps make more or less use of. If you can navigate your whole lifestream easily, it will hopefully help remind you of key areas of interest, from which you can develop your final assignment.

Thirdly, and finally, lifestreams will have busy and less-busy periods. Don’t be too concerned about this, but do keep up your end-of-week summaries, as a way of explaining this dynamic.

Hope that helps for now!