Michael Wolfindale's EDC lifestream
Education and Digital Cultures 2020 lifestream-blog
We’ve had three great evenings of live tweeting ds106radio. The point of this was to analyze, together, how sounds can paint pictures and drive stories. My favorite thing about this exercise is that the idea for it came from a class a few years ago. The students suggested it, and it was brilliant. This week, we’ve been listening to ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene. We heard episodes 3, 4 and 6 so far.
Reflecting on Karen Barad’s (2003; 2007) agential realism and onto-epistemology, where the “thing” is entangled with the way in which “we” research it, I have found myself questioning how I might research my micro-ethnography and how/whether I should participate (as a ‘lurker‘ or otherwise). How might different kinds of participation affect ‘community’ and the ethical issues surrounding the study?
In my role as ‘open participant‘, having ‘access’ to read/listen/participate in, and feed into, the same activities/assignments as those studying the course through a degree, the binaries between ‘open’/’closed’, ‘insider’/’outsider’, ‘included’/’excluded’ appear blurred and problematic. Is access alone enough to be ‘included’?
Listening to Tim Ingold’s assertion that ‘we don’t make studies of people, we study with them and learn from them’, this week I submitted a radio bumper into the ‘ds106 flow’ alongside the work of students/open participants, with the potential of receiving “airtime” on ds106radio. Is this an example of the kind of entanglement Barad refers to?
Inspired by an article on live field notes, I wrote some field notes of my own, and began focusing my micro-ethnography on ds106radio and the interactions surrounding it…
Great turnout for #ds106radio this evening. I enjoyed the insights and interactions everyone brought to the experience. #ds106
— paul bond (@phb256) February 14, 2020
What makes ‘community’ endure in a connectivist-informed course such as ds106, often beyond the end date (“#4life“)?
Think of all things hyped for education since 2010 that have done the Gartner slide from peak to trough, then witness how https://t.co/zpROCpo5Om is still going strong #ds106 #4life
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 13, 2019
How might we define/understand/document ‘community‘? What role might ds106radio, and sound in general, play?
Radio has been, is and for sure will remain a fundamental medium for the transmission of information. It is also widely accepted that radio stations have a fundamental role in society in terms of the potential for the provision of education, particularly adult education. Although many tend to put radio stations under one umbrella, a number of communities successfully benefit from radio stations which operate within the community and are explicitly targeted at that same community. These are referred to as Community Radio Stations. My interest to choose community radio as a topic for this article stems from my involvement in radio broadcasting for the past 15 years. I started my career in a community radio and although I now produce programmes at a national radio station, I still do occasional programmes in a number of community radio stations. Community radio broadcasting in Malta has continued to develop and is now a common aspect within the local broadcasting spectrum. An important aspect of community radios in Malta is that all those involved mostly contribute on a voluntary basis.
Whilst considering certain limitations, I firmly believe in the potential that radio broadcasting has for adult education. In this regard this article is aimed at discussing the educational potential of community radios as sites of adult education. I will also be presenting a case study from a community radio located in Cospicua, Malta. In view that this is an online article, I attempted to be as concise as possible, at the expense of portraying a ‘superficial’ approach to the subject.