Posgraduate 2.0 Studies & PeterOBrien.me - October, 2015 Update

Every good day, every bad day; complex and simple at the same time - that's very me, that's PeterOBrien.me.

Considering that my last blog post was posted towards the beginning of August, I felt it was time to provide a brief update in regards to my ongoing studies or postgraduate 2.0 studies, as I have now come to call them. 

This new title for the combined online learnng via MOOCs that I have enrolled myself in, since graduating from my BA (Hons) in the summer of 2013, has come about as a result of finally getting my personal website, PeterOBrien.me, of the ground.

It is still being constructed, but it is now live.

The primary purpose of my personal website was to establish a personal brand identity under which I could bring together and unify all of my other focuses and online endeavours.

One key aim of the purpose behind PeterOBrien.me was to create a space where I could showcase my online learning achievements which is how the Postgraduate 2.0 Studies page on PeterOBrien.me came about. 

It's really strange seeing yourself objectified into a website!

I figure that Postgraduate 2.0 Studies is a good name, my studies are postgraduate and they are online.

As a result, I have shifted my focus away from Ways 2 Interface while I have been building PeterOBrien.me and organising everything that I have going on. One key implication that has now become clear as a result of this organisation is that PeterOBrien.me will unload the burden of my Postgraduate 2.0 Studies on this Ways 2 Interface blog.

As I continued to study new MOOCs (now over eighty) and add them to my portfolio, the study page on this site was getting ridiculously out of hand. It was a problem I had previously encountered on my LinkedIn profile where I would add each new MOOC to my education section and watch my profile struggle to load as a result.

Unfortunately, this is the reality of Big Data that human beings are now having to face.

"Big data is a broad term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, and information privacy." 

- Wikipedia

What to do with it all and where to put it?

However, the configuration of PeterOBrien.me has now solved this problem, as I believe the layout of the Postgraduate 2.0 Studies page is much better suited to present a vast array of information in a concise form.

It has two slideshows...

A slideshow for the courses I have enrolled myself in.

And a slideshow for the courses for which I was awarded a certificate.

Simple.

Additionally there is a link to an Excel spreadsheet that lists all of my MOOCs in chronological order together with other relevant enrolment details, if a user wishes to examine such details.

There is also a traditional list at the bottom of the page numbering all of the MOOC I have enrolled in with hyperlinks to their respective course pages. 

Therefore the Studies page on Ways 2 Interface will soon be disappearing. 

Make the most of it while it is still here.

Additionally, while I will still continue to blog about my studies on this site, the content of those posts will be focused more towards being in relation to my larger transdisciplinary research project, for which the Ways 2 Interface website was originally established.

For more general MOOC reviews, reflections, recommendations, insights, etc., the blog of PeterOBrien.me will take of these. 

As PeterOBrien.me will demonstrate, the only way in which I can organise my life and my focuses, while retaining my sanity, is by compartmentalising everything; this is why I have various different online platforms (or filling cabinets) for different purposes...

• Ways 2 Interface - transdisciplinary research
• Something to do with Film - film-centric
• Breaking Cinema - to host my podcast (not up yet)
• Forward Facing Visualographer - my visual creations
• DigitalMarketing.me - one-off blog created as part of my Digital Marketing studies
• 366 FRAMES 2012 - one-off self-contained project
• 365 FRAMES 2015 - one-off self-contained project
• EYES of a Storyteller - one-off self-contained project

... and PeterOBrien.me is the main hub (or office) that brings them all together into a unified overview.

Crucially, as the name of my personal website should indicate, they are all me, everything that I have created online is me, so I am going to insure that I keep a firm grasp on it all. 

Another key aspect of myself, or the digital extension of myself IS all of the MOOCs I have enrolled myself in, these are parts of myself as well, and, in particular, clusters of related MOOCs naturally come together to represent specific focuses of my career focus and wider interests. 

It is for this reason that if you examine PeterOBrien.me you will note that in addition to my Postgraduate 2.0 Studies page, there are additional pages devoted to specific MOOC and study focuses.

I have individual pages for...

• Entrepreneurship
• Digital Marketing
• Emerging Technologies
• Career Success
• Web Science
• Solid Science
• Big Data
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Filmmaking
• and I am probably going to add another one based around Digital Making, that may just be combined with the Filmmaking one, because the fact that I am a filmmaker kind of speaks for itself. I have not decided yet.

It is should be noted that one of my focuses is Digital Marketing and this is not accidental. 

Digital Marketing is something I wanted to get to grips with ever since graduating from my BA (Hons) and it is not accidental that I have spent the last two years exploring and defining myself in order to construct an appropriate unified brand to encapsulate it all. 

A value driven brand is essential for success in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship is the primary objective of my postgraduate 2.0 studies, everything is working for everything else, that is the point.

"Entrepreneurs are competing for resources and opportunities that enable them to tell their story and build their reputation. If you’re an entrepreneur who isn’t actively branding himself, rest assured that your competitors will waste no time in branding you, which may hurt your image, company valuation and bottom line." 

- Michael Georgiou, Entrepreneur

PeterOBrien.me is a fusion of personal and professional and my key driving impulse in making it was to produce 'an online portfolio to end all online portfolios'.

A similar phrase, 'the film dissertation to end all film dissertations', worked in producing my award-winning undergraduate theoretical dissertation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle (the progenitor for Ways 2 Interface), so I do not see why it will not work for producing a personal website that utilises the entirety of my professional portfolio and personal life experiences as a combined visual-centric portfolio of my values, my character, my strengths, my skills, myself.

If you do not know what you are, then how will you know what to do with yourself?

With the design of PeterOBrien.me, the idea is that you click on what appeals to you and within that page there will be details and links to other relevant and related components of my overall portfolio.

Or you can just have the brief visual-centric storyboard overview of my overall portfolio on PeterOBrien.me's main page.

Every good day, every bad day; complex and simple at the same time - that's very me, that's PeterOBrien.me.

However, going back to my Postgraduate 2.0 Studies and as they are now organised and collected on PeterOBrien.me, I am no longer going to be providing periodic progress updates or MOOC by MOOC reflections on Ways 2 Interface.

There are two reasons for this...

1. I do not need to provide periodic progress updates because the MOOCs as arranged and detailed on PeterOBrien.me speak for themselves. If I do provide a periodic update I will do it on the blog of PeterOBrien.me and I will only do it on Ways 2 Interface if that progress update is immediately applicable to the research concerns of this platform.
2. It is becoming impossible to provide periodic updates and reflections on each MOOC because I study so many! I rarely find the time to provide updates or to author reflections; unless, of course, those reflections are required exercises of the MOOC I am studying, such as is currently the case with the DigitalMarketing.me blog I had to create for my Digital and Social Media Marketing MOOC. I do not underestimate the power of reflection and of getting your head in order by objectifying it, but I also always respect the concept of time and realise that I only have so much of it! However, I have now started to produce video reflections and reviews of my MOOCs as evidenced within my 365 FRAMES 2015 project, which is a quick, easy and spontaneous way of generating reflection material. As a result of this, I will continue to produce these videos instead of lengthy, time-consuming written reflections, such as I am doing now!

However, I will provide one final and very brief MOOC progress report right now.

I am currently enrolled in...

Priority:

• Digital and Social Media Marketing - as part of the iversity Marketing Toolkit
• Logical and Critical Thinking
• Understanding Video Games

Secondary

• The Importance of Money in Business
• What is a Mind?

Tertiary

• Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance
• Introduction to Big Data - as part of the Coursera Big Data Specialization
• Quantitative Methods - as part of the Coursera Solid Science Specialization
• Marketing in a Digital World - as part of the Coursera Digital Marketing Specialization
• Fundamentals of Neuroscience, Part 1: Electrical Properties of the Neuron
• The Mind is Flat: The Shocking Shallowness of Human Psychology

Finally, I will very shortly be reconfiguring the Ways 2 Interface website to be bring it into line with the changes I have cited in this blog post and some additional ones I have not detailed.

In particular specific changes concerned with the transdisciplinary research of Ways 2 Interface and how that will play into the content of Breaking Cinema, the podcast I have been developing.

But more on this later...

The web is not an exact science - Web Science - week 1 reflection #FLwebsci #MOOC

Web Science is inherently transdisciplinary as it is employs many analytical techniques and knowledge bases from other subjects, such as economics, law, psychology, sociology, computer science, etc., hence why I am drawn so much to this subject. The aim is for Web Science to operate very much outside of the box in order to consider the thing we have come to call the web - a thing that keeps growing, that keeps changing and that is anything but an exact science!

Back in February I started the Web Science MOOC as presented by the University of Southampton on FutureLearn, but I struggled to find a way into sticking with the essential focus of its topic. 

What is Web Science?

The main problem was that I lacked a technological foundational understanding in how the web actually works on a software and hardware basis. Therefore, after completing the first-and-a-half weeks, I decided that I would come back to the MOOC at a later date, once I possessed a better foundational understanding.

One of the great things about many MOOC platforms is that they let you retain access to the course materials long after the course has completed.

However, now that I have dabbled a little with coding and have (nearly) finished the Internet History, Technology and Security MOOC, I now possess a basic understanding of the operational processes behind the internet. 

Additionally, while I was undertaking the Internet History, etc. MOOC and also its kindred Introduction to Cyber Security MOOC, I noticed that my attention kept shifting back to this Web Science MOOC.

As I was coming to understand the workings of the internet, I noticed that I started to look at my daily usage of the internet in a very different way: a very analytical manner not too dissimilar to the perspective the Web Science MOOC had started to nurture in me...

Web Science - an introduction to a bold new academic discipline.

Web Science is inherently transdisciplinary as it is employs many analytical techniques and knowledge bases from other subjects, such as economics, law, psychology, sociology, computer science, etc., hence why I am drawn so much to this subject. The aim is for Web Science to operate very much outside of the box in order to consider the thing we have come to call the web - a thing that keeps growing, that keeps changing and that is anything but an exact science!

The tangled pre-history of the web.

Week 1 of the MOOC provides a brief pre-history and and recent history of the web and this is something that Internet History, etc. has gone into vastly more detail and is accordingly vastly more enlightening. 

Tim Berners-Lee is where the 'web' begins, he is not where the 'internet' begins.

I believe this lack of in-depth consideration of the various phases of the webs history is where I felt really let down and unclear about when I first undertook the MOOC back in February. 

However, I can not really blame the course as it is called 'web science', not 'internet science' and, therefore, is not concerned with the web's precursor before Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 (also the year I was born). Obviously you will need to possess some historical background context for this subject, but for a short course offering, such as this MOOC, you can only expect it to cover so much.

Ultimately, the aim of this short course MOOC is to supply you with the basic tools in order to encourage you to proactively think much more analytically about the web, how it is changing the world and what role you have to play in this new technology. 

One of the best ways in which the MOOC achieves this in week 1 is in its consideration of technological determinism and in questioning its position that technology is shaped by society in social construction.

Does technology shape society or does society shape technology?

The argument for and against technological determinism was something that was heavily touched upon in the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC I undertook previously. While the concept of technological determinism was introduced to me I did not really grapple with its larger implications.

E-Learning and Digital Cultures was not a MOOC with which I really thoroughly stuck.

Additionally, technological determinism is not something that was really dealt with in my Film and Screen Studies BA (Hons) either, as technological determinism is something that is more integral in Media Communications concerns. 

However, while it was never the primary agenda, technological determinism can be seen to have a part to play in my theoretical dissertation Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle; essentially that the new technologies of cinema were arising out of a consumer demand for bigger film experience immersion. 

Therefore, my view is very much in favour of social construction, not technological determinism, and this is the same view that the Web Science MOOC adopts.

Why is a discipline such as Web Science is so integral?

"There are some bits of technological determinism that work. Certainly, the kind of technology in the Web, its openness, its democratic features, those things shape how the Web is. But there are other things which are very much part how we, as human actors and agents and societies, take that technology and do all sorts of different things with it, things that Tim Berners-Lee couldn't even have imagined, so Facebook or Twitter, for example" 

- Catherine Pope, Web Science educator.

Technology does not just change us, it is much more about us influencing technology - the web is a major and direct example of this. 

Social shaping vs. technological determinism - which do you support?

On the whole, social shaping has become the dominant view and the web in particular is a primary example of how society shapes new technologies to fit the needs of society:

"The state of the market, or better, of society is the crucial factor in enabling the development and diffusion of any communications technology or in hindering it. That is as true of the computer chip and the Internet as it was of the telegraph and the telephone. Thus, innovations are the creatures of society in a general sense." 

- Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing, 1996:3.

This is why the further development of a discipline like Web Science is so strongly advocated and needed. 

Certainly, in terms of Film and Media disciplines, this is what I was getting at in Ways of Being: 

"In short, there is too much indifference in Film Studies.The discipline is too focused on cave-like thinking and film theory of the past; a pantheon of knowledge that is becoming continuously outdated and finding itself at odds with new advancements and diversifications, such as the digital re-birth and large format hypercinema. Film scholars have always sought to understand the spectator’s and spectacle’s mutual pursuit of enlightenment; while they have uncovered aspects of it, there still does not exist a single unifying explanation of the profound processes of that relationship" 

- Ways of Being, 2013:105.

However, while my focus may have been towards Film and Media disciplines, by not considering the networking-and-interactions of these technologies and processes is insane and this is very much the incentive behind creating Ways 2 Interface.

Some notes I made while planning out Ways 2 Interface.

I have created Ways 2 Interface as a web blog precisely because it is considering the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle in film and media as connected globally in the thing we have called the web - it is analysing the the very thing of which it is a part. 

"Everything that has been presented throughout this paper is representative of the shift in thinking that is slowly taking place alongside the digitalisation of cinema and needs to continue to take place! In moving away from the cave, we have stopped viewing spectacle content on a screen, and we now experience and interact with it via an interface. If there is a great deal of neurobiological participation happening on the spectator’s part, then perhaps this offers a more accurate way to talk about the process by which the spectator interfaces with any type of film spectacle. While this section can not hope to provide many answers to the questions it has raised, one obvious conclusion should be apparent - all these diverging means of experiencing the world will continue to have huge implications on our ways of being in the world"

- Ways of Being, 2013:151.

Ultimately, the web has adopted cinema into its paradigm and this is the reason for why I am so fascinated by the web - it's a direct and vastly intricate expression of the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle like we have never seen before!

Certainly, Web Science will be huge help and an additional component of this transdisciplinary consideration I have taken up.

Is the web guaranteed to exists indefinitely? 

I am currently undertaking quite a few MOOCs (as always) and while I do plan to finally work my through and finish the Web Science MOOC, it may not be any time soon, I will be engaging with the MOOC materials whenever I can make the time for them.

However, I do not think that making time will be a problem as it is clear that the knowledge this MOOC will nurture in me will have a clear and primary role to play in my further studies and research interests.

The web a.k.a. unlimited potential. We have barely scratched the surface. 

The web is for everyone and for everything, but it is not an exact science, it is something that we have to keep working at in regards to how we further develop it and how we continue to analyse it.

That's Web Science.