This Messy Web

I've just finished reading an article by Postill and Pink titled Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web. It's appropriate that this happened immediately following the OEOFellows retreat in Toronto this past weekend since it brings new insights into "making connections between online and locality-based realities". With social media and real-life events intertwining in what I do in open contexts, not only my course work at the university, but also in a variety of digital communities, it's important for me to step back and look at the messy interconnections and weavings of these virtual and physical interactions. This environment, for my action research project, will need to consider the dispersed and changing localities (Postill & Pink, 2012) of the study. There will be a "constant sense of becoming through practice and practical knowledge" (Postill & Pink, p 127).

The everyday routines outlined by Postill & Pink are described as catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting and archiving. This is how I, as researcher in action, will produce knowledge and create elements of this ethnographic place (Postill & Pink p. 128). Media making is part of how I will create and maintain relationships. This is evident in the blog post I wrote the morning after the retreat where I capture the essence of the event, created a remixed video in Animoto of all the tweets I had captured from the day of the retreat, and shared the Twitter connections for those who are OERFellows as well as those with eCampus Ontario who will support the group.

Postill & Pink make reference to hashtag sociality to identify and group the conversation into an organized timeline where people can 'convey, relay and discover information' (p 131). This became apparent in our quest, as OER Fellows, to have a unique hashtag with which to identify ourselves. Since OER does not fully describe what we hope to accomplish in our roles as fellows, I selected and proposed (through the blog post and video production) that #OEOFellows (an extension of the OEORangers from last spring) and #GlisteningLearningFish (from our mad lib activity) be adopted to tag and collect our Twitter conversations. This becomes an example of the hybrid sociality Postill & Pink describe, where the participants in the group gain a mediated sense of contextual fellowship (p 132) through the hashtags that share their story.

This same struggle that I describe here within the OEOFellows group is similar to that in my digital teaching spaces, other physical and virtual communities in which I engage (AKGTCanada, Voiced Radio, Virtually Connecting, CLMOOC, Creative Commons and Lakehead Faculty of Education). It's important to find ways to build the connections into meaningful storylines in social media spaces. For my courses, I use a Twitter account with @ to share tweets but also use a hashtag to collect conversational threads.

It's the messiness of the interrelatedness, interconnectedness and inter-weavings that often leave me wondering about place and space, relationships and participation. It's not just a community of practice as described by Wenger & Lave when they state that "the idea that learning ‘is a process of participation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engagement and complexity’." Nor is this hybrid sociality similar to the engagement in community within affinity spaces as described by James Paul Gee.

It's more complicated and complex - in this messy web.

References

Gee, J. P. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From the age of mythology to today's schools. In Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context (Vol. 9780521836432, pp. 214-232). Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511610554.012

Postill, J. & Pink, S. (2012). Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web. Retrieved from http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/files/2013/04/Postill-Pink-socialmedia-ethnography.pdf

Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009) ‘Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice’, the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.