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Formats and themes: towards an online conference artefact
Fig. 1 Mashup using Studio to indicate, at this stage, my choice of theme and format for the OULive conference in January 2014
Open Learning with the Open University – a modus operandi in the 21st century?
Fig.1 Posing for a scamp at the School of Communication Arts, 1987
H818 Activity 2.1
I will only publish in open access journals.
I’m not a professional academic. Should I publish then I imagine the calibre of the journal will count for something. As a professional writer (copy, scripts, speeches), with exception of blogging I am used to being paid for my words.
I will share all learning material that I create and own openly online.
From the moment I started to blog I have been part of self-help groups ‘publishing’ openly on everything from blogging to creative writing, swimming teaching and coaching, social media, the First World War and e-learning. My goal over the next year or so is to produce under a Creative Commons module a series of 30 to 1500+ micro- OERs, one minute pieces with Q&A attached, as what Chris Pegler terms ‘Lego Techno Bricks’.
I maintain an online social media identity as a core part of my professional identity.
It lacks professionalism as I don’t edit it or write to a definable audience but I have a substantial e-learning blog that largely, though not exclusively, draws on my MA ODE experiences (in fact I started on the MA ODL in 2001 and blogged on that too). I use Google+, Linkedin and Twitter haphazardly by pushing blog content to actual and potential commentators, participants and followers.
I take a pragmatic approach and release some resources openly if it’s not too much extra work.
I come from corporate communications where created content is closed to employees.
I have concerns about intellectual property and releasing my content openly.
Actual words of fiction I write is my copyright, Factual I care less about. Whilst a blog is largely like a recorded conversation, a formal paper would need to be recognised in the appropriate way.
I will share all material that I create and own openly online, as soon as I create it.
No. I cannot hope to earn a living or sustain my interests if I cannot both charge for my time and my output.
What is digital ‘academic’ scholarship? Should 19th and 20th century definitions even apply?
Martin Weller published ‘The Digital Scholar’ in 2011 on a Creative Commons Licence. You can download it for free, or purchase the book or eBook, and then do as you will with it. When I read it I share short excerpts on Twitter. I’ve blogged it from end to end and am now having fun with a simple tool for ‘mashing up’ designs called ‘Studio’. It’s a photo editing tool that allows you to add multiple layers of stuff. I rather see it as a revision tool – it makes you spend more time with the excerpts you pick out.
You cannot be so open that you become an empty vessel … you have to create stuff, get your thoughts out there in one way or another so that others can knock ’em down and make more of them. Ideas need legs. In all this ‘play’ though have I burried my head in its contents and with effort read it deeply? Do we invoke shallow learning and distraction with openness? If we each read the book and met for a tutorial is that not, educationally, a more focused and constructive form of ‘oppenness’?
In relation to scholarship shoulf the old rules, the ‘measures’ of academic prowess count? In the connected world of the 21st century ‘scholarship’ is able to emerge in unconventional ways, freed of the school-to-university conveyor belt.
REFERENCE
Weller, M (2011) The Digital scholar
Does exposure in the sense of ‘open’ learning work?
Fig. 1. what collaboration online looks like? Activity theory meets neuroscience. This could be many heads knocking together, or the internal workings inside one.
I’m getting a sense of deja vu as the rhythm of H818 reveals itself. I’m doing the Open University module H818:The Networked Practitioner. It runs until Jan 2014.
Openness comes with caveats. It is not everyone’s cup of tea.
As people we adjust our behaviour in different environments. I am not saying that we necessarily behave in the same way in an Open Studio online (a virtual studio no less) than we do or would in an open studio, as in a collective in a workshop or ‘atlier’ that is ‘exposed’ to fellow artists in the physical world, but wherever we are ‘open’, in the physical or virtual worlds, we are nonetheless prone to human interaction with all the usual undercurrents.
For all those busy exposing themselves, the easiest default position, someone – ‘one’ being the key word, has the door closed and is getting on with the job without the distraction of others. Is achievement and success of necessity a lonely, not a ‘connected’ activity? You can do the networking once you have a product to sell or a well formed opinion to share … otherwise this is nothing more than ‘chatting’ in the First World War sense of the word – idol banter to pass the time between periods of conflict.
What I believe will not work is to put a gaggle of creators in the same room and expect them to collaborate. The studios of the ‘open’ type that I am aware of are either the classic Rennaisance workshop with a master artist and apprentices at various stages of their own development, or, with a similar dynamic in operation, the ‘occupants’ of a studio, or business unit cum workshop, are exposed LESS to each other and more to external commentators and contributors. This requires some formality to it .i.e. not simply ‘the person off the street’ but an educator/moderator in their own right.
It also helps if people have parricular skills sets that when combined work together – as in a team producing a film.
Is H818:The Networked Practitioner too dependent on chance? The foibles of a small cohort of postgraduate students with little in common and complete strangers … and the complex, messy, moments ‘we’ are each in. Actions differ between those who have had the course paid for by their institution, those who are doing it out of their own pocket for career advancement which requires the degree and anyone in it ‘for the love of it’ – with full-time employment, part-time employment or retirement, and any number of other commitments that colour participation and attitudes.
Over three years of this and, by chance only, surely … six of us strangers in a subgroup jelled. More often the silence and inactivity of the majority makes ‘group work’ a myth – partnerships of two or three were more likely. The only exception I have come across in the ‘real world’ have been actors working together on an improvisation – they have been trained however to disassociate their natural behaviours. The reasons why that ‘six’ worked has been a topic I have returned to often – team dynamic, spread around the globe on different time zone, all experienced practitioners and typically on our second or third OU module … digitally literate, socially networked …
Some of us study with the OU as we cringe at the ‘exposure’ of a course that requires us to meet in the flesh – distance learning suits, to some degree, the lone worker who prefers isolation.
By way of revealing contrast I am a tutor at the School of Communication Arts – a modest though pivitol role given their format and philosophy – exposure to many hundreds of kindred spirits who have been there … a sounding board and catalyst. NOT a contributor, but more an enabler.
We’ll see. My thinking is that to be effective, collaboration or exposure needs to have structure, discipline and formality. Of course this is or should be exactly what the ‘Open Studio’ platform provides. But like a restaurant, however lovely the decor, if the place is empty no one will be eating the food.
At the Brighton Arts Festival the other evening I wonder how the 80 odd exhibtors would cope if the Cornexchange was also their workshop? In certain, vulnerable environments, the only comment should be praise. Feedback is invited from those who are trusted.
A school setting is different again, as is college … people share the same space because they have to.
Open Studio apears to try to coral the feedback that comes anyway from a connected, popular and massive sites such as WordPress, Linkedin Groups, Facebook and even Amazon. Though the exposure, if you permit it, is tempered and negotiated – Facebook is gentle amongst family and friends, Linkedin is meterd and professional in a corporate way, WordPress is homespun while Amazon, probably due to the smell of money, can be catty – and in any case, the artefact is a done deal it’s not as if, to take a current example, Max Hastings is going to rewrite his book on the First World War because some in the academic community say that it is weak historicaly and strong only on journalistic anecdote. Some of the reviews read like they were posted by a PR department, not a person. Another story, but can we smell a rat as easily in the virtual as in the physical world?
We’ll see.
Could you be the first Digital Scholar ?
Though not scholarship my clumsy mash-up above that includes a grab from Martin Weller’s book ‘The Digital Scholar’ is both encouraged and permitted under the creative commons licence under which the book was published in 2011.
In the past I grabbed and Tweeted so many chunks as I read ‘The Digital Scholar’ that Martin Weller popped into the fray to ask if I planned to Tweet the entire book – at which point I stopped. Rather like a member of an audience who keeps applauding wildly after everyone else has stopped so that the eventually the performer catches their eye.
If nothing else the words fast, cheap and out of control will stick.
They would have stuck had I gone to the authors cited above and I had read them (I will). The two acts have something in common and are perhaps the same as far as brain activity is concerned: the thought has held my attention for twenty minutes.
Other ideas have been to cut and paste chunks of the book into illegible fonts. Not as daft as it sounds as being obliged to struggle with the text requires effort and so helps the information to stick.
Time and effort … and a wee bit of fun makes the medecine go down?
The Author
His book
Something fast
Something cheap
And something out of control
Reference
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar @5% Kindle Location 299
Why we need to call it ‘connected’ learning, not ‘networked’ learning
As the education community seeks to envisage and plan for the future of learning most are too light on their fingers to consider that aspect that hasn’t changed, nor can its form or functioning be changed – the human brain. Is there a difference say between a child born into Pharoah’s Egypt several millenia ago and one born in Stoke on Trent this morning? Or a child born in the Belgium city of Liege on the 4th August 1914 and a child born in Nagasaki on the 4th August 1945. My challenge is to say examine the raw goods – what has a neuroscientist or a phsychologist got to say about the way we learn?
However and whatever sweeps us up we have an extraordinary capacity, as each new child is born and the next generation takes its place in the world, to stay true to form: our parents raise us, we learn both informally and formally, we are exposed to whatever chance provides us with – coloured by – to whom, and where, and when we are born, and how raised, and because of, or despite this, our ‘true nature’ is revealed, burried, or in other ways transmogrified.
We probably crave affection, recognition or security, we fall in and out of love, and probably mate, raise a child or two of our own, grow old as they grow up and see them on their way. In the scheme of things, on our death bed, do we reflect on what opportnities the education we were exposed to did to us or gave us? The perspective that needs to be taken is to see education holistically, especially as those parts of it that are still contained and made exclusive by books and institutions are freed up.
The latest Open University module that has my attention, H818:the networked practioner, uses a challenging approach whereby the cohort of students are to learn what ‘openness’ means through sharing and collaboration. However, already, I can see that far from being open, we have been coralled into tutor groups and the real boundaries that these create. In 1999 when I started blogging, in time, out of the hundreds I engaged with, three of us recognised eachother as likeminds and worked together on various creative writing and creative blogging projects – we found each other, we weren’t made to ‘be’ together. We stumbled upon eachother’s words and beyond liking what we read saw and came to see a common willingness to hangaround. Why this will struggle to work amongst 60 people divided into four groups is that ‘teacher’ has decided with whom we will work … not just teacher, but of course the cost, timing, platform, access and accessibility to the course content and its affordances.
There is no accounting for human nature. I can fluff up like pom-pom or prickle like a thistle; I can be as cute as a hedgehoge with its snout in the palm of your hand or fold into a ball of spikes because of a desire to be left alone. We all have these phases in various guises and can to a lesser or greater degree control them. In the vastness of the total Internet community we can be these things, whereas inside a the formal walls of an online learning module I suspect there will always be someone with some kind of stick, whether it is a tickling-stick or a club.
On reflection and baring in mind what I suggest above about the unique qualities of human nature – I like to chose the ‘gangs’ I join or to form my own. My default position is to be peripatetic. The point is, the default position of others will be as unique as they are. Across numerous modules and other collaborative activities I have seen groups wax and wane. To work the mix of people in the group generally needs to be highly diverse, with clear sets of skills to contribute and a variety of personality types too. There is good reason to build a professional team based on their skill set – take the creation of a film: not everyone can direct and produce, nor can everyone having a go at presenting or play the lead. The script can be composed collaboratively, though who did or does what, or gets credit for a line, character or scene is as complex as human nature and the sensibilities of the creative in all of us.
The nature of learning – through travel, online, face to face … and in your head
I love to travel, not just on holiday with friends and family, but alone. Maybe this happens to you too, but I always find travel, especially new trips and destinations, are a catalyst to reflection.
All I did was take the first train out of Lewes to spend the day at the University of Birmingham.
Two things come to mind that shook my brain: St. Pancras International … and, sounding like a commercial, Virgin Trains. Although the train was quiet two people came through the train to collect rubbish … as bubbly as buttons. Four times. The toilets were spotless. All in very sharp contrast to Southern Trains out of London where everything was overflowing …
St.Pancras International reminds me of the first time I stood in Gar du Nords, Paris and looked up at destinations that included Moscow. Inside and out St.Pancras says that travel is a ‘grand adventure’.
I last studied ‘lecture style’ 31 years ago, yet I have signed up for one of these while I continue my learning journey online with the Open University through all the Master of Arts in Open and Distant Education (MA ODE) modules.
Learning is learning – it neither takes place online or off. It is in your head. It is what the brain is given a chance to do with it that counts.
I can now weigh up the two as I study in two very different ways in parallel.
There is of course ‘blended learning’ too that in a planned way mixes up both use of e-learning and face to face.
The key to successful use of elearning, offline or blended is the same of course – ‘planned’.
I met a fellow student on the MA in British First World War studies who, like me, has just completed a degree with the Open University (OU). He has a BA in History, while I now have the MA ODE. We immediately began to share notes on this ‘new’ experience of making our way to and now being physically present in the senior common room of a faculty on a traditional campus – Birmingham doesn’t look the way it sounds … (Forgive me Birmingham but you have a reputation, which isn’t for grand Victorian buildings and exciting architectural ‘super builds’).
The OU is of ourse ‘open’ to anyone – online learning makes formal learning possible for any of us who either need to stay in one place, or, by contrast, are always on the move. People who need significant flexibility in how they manage their time … and don’t want the cost in time and money to get to a place for a tutorial, seminar, lecture or conference. And people who ‘don’t get on with people’ – not just agrophobia … you know what I mean.
Nothing beats getting to know your fellow students than spending a day with them, during coffee and comfort breaks, at lunch, walking through the campus, in seminar rooms before a talk begins … and on the way home when you find part of your journey is shared. Online attempts to ‘get to know each other’ can be spurious exercises in sharing trivia about pets and holidays. Actually, you can get to know eachother by talking about what you are here to do – the subject matter.
Relationships formed online are akin to a long distance phone call, or letters to a stranger, even, oddly, having a chat with the postman or a builder … you let them into your house.
And your head?
Recollections of postgraduate online learning since 2010
Fig.1 Screengrab from JISC 2011 that I took part in via Twitter (see top right hand column). From my OU student blog of 14th March via a folder in my vast gallery on picasa.
Two and a half years ago I took part in JISC 2011 ‘at a distance’ – distance, cost and illness were all barriers to attending in person. I’m prompted to recall one of the afternoon conferences as Chris Pegler and Tony Hirst from the Open University were on the platform. As well as questions coming from the floor (some 200 attendees) questions also came from the online participants (some 350). A question I posed was picked out by the chair and discussed. For a dreadful moment I worried that I could be seen sitting in pyjammas and a dressing gown at the kitchen table. By March 2011 I was on my second Master of Arts in Open and Distance Education (MAODE) module. A month or so later I applied to and eventually joined the OU where I worked, living away from home, for a year. This year I graduated and have since also completed what I see as a conversion course ‘H809:Practise-based research in technology-based learning’ with a mind, belatedly in my lifetime, to undertake doctoral research. To ‘keep my hand in’ and to stay up to date I have joined a new MAODE module ‘H818:The networked practioner’. I am yet to feel fluent in the language and practice of e-learning so need this repeated immersion, modules that I did a couple of years ago are being updated and I want to prove to myself and potentially others that I can keep up the scholarly level of participation and assessment that I began to display on the last couple of modules.
The learning lessons here are simple: persistence, repetition and practice.
Ambitions to take me e-learning interests into healthcare were thwarted at my first interviews for doctoral research – I am not a doctor (medicine), nor have I conducted a clinical trial before … let alone the ambitions for my proposal that would require departmental participation and funding. Basically, I’d bitten off far too much.
With this in mind I am falling back on a subject on which I can claim some insight and expertise – the First World War. Knowing that expressing an interest, linking to a blog or unproduced TV scripts won’t open academic doors I’ve decided to take an MA in History … the subject I set out to study some decades ago before getting the collywobbles and transferring to Geography. So, alongside a 12-15 hour a week commitment to another OU module on e-learning I will, over the next two years, be spending as much time on an MA in British First World War studies with the University of Birmingham. The additional insight I will get from this is comparing abd contrasting a series of modules that rely on an intensive day every month of lectures and tutorials rather than the dense, minute by minute closely supported and networked virtual learning environment (VLE) of the Open University.
Meanwhile, as in March 2011, I am recovering from a stinking cold. Not totally incapacitated – I have read several books, nodding off between chapters and so plagued by dreams about the causes of war in 1914. Power politics and corporate takeovers where the soldier is the worker while the owners, investment bankers and hedge fund managers risk all for their own gain.
What is WebScience?
WebScience is the scientific study i.e. the identity of problems, the formulation of hypotheses and their in depth scrutiny and analysis, written up and published for sharing, discussion and further debate. This should mean publishing findings with the broadest possible variety of audiences in mind not just to the academic community, from whom further research should be expected, building on the work already done, but to other audiences who through the Web or serendipity, would find the work either appealing, appalling or inspiring.
To help with ‘meaning making’ (Conole, 2011) the metaphor I use to describe the Web is to compare it to the earth’s water cycle where the ocean is awash with digital content, and akin to Web 1.0 influenced by currents and tides, then evaporating into the atmosphere where it forms clouds is shared and transformed (Web 2.0) only to fall as precipitation and return to the ocean.
How much the Web conforms or differs from this pattern helps my analysis and comprehension of what is taking place.
Fig. 1 How we learn behaviourism (Vygotsky) to third generation activity theory (Engeström ) and the World Wide Web. (Doodle by J Vernon, 2013)
A more organic metaphor that places the Web in one context that interests me the workplace is that used by Yrjo Engeström (2008), in which a transmogrification of the model of an Activity System (Fig. 2) becomes like the ‘fingers’ of a funghi. The web after all is alive and growing. Here, an Activity System should be seen not as a static entity, but rather a living and growing thing. KnorrCetina (2003) talks of ‘flow architecture’ and if neither of these concepts ring true for you in then Zerubavel (1997) talks of ‘a mindscape’ while Cussins (1992) talks of ‘cognitive trails’.
Such patterns help describe, explain and predict what is happening in the Web, indeed a third metaphor, building on the ideas of Vannevar Bush from the 1940s, would be to think of the Web as a brain and to draw on lessons being learnt from neuroscience on how complex systems form connections and clusters. In turn, the brain would be an additional important area of study in relation to assistive technologies in relation to chronic illness and memory loss such as with. Alzheimers or Parkinsons.
In relation to WebSciences at the University of Southampton (SOTON) my interest in the iPhD begins with the lofty desire to ‘make a difference’ and to do so drawing on a combination of interests, professional experience, training and study.
It is from a career identifying problems, devising a synopsis, writing treatments, then scripts where amongst a plethora of industry and government an interest in health has developed. This can be pinpointed further to an interest in what role the Web can play in medicine, to inform and support health workers and patients, in particular patients with chronic illnesses such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons, asthma, diabetes and epilepsy.
Focusing even further to one illness and a particular group I have been considering what role e-learning might play to improve adherence to drugs.
I have produced training videos for pharmaceutical companies on the use of preventer inhalers.
My interest with e-learning is to use an inexpensive and readily accessed platform such as Qstream (Kerfoot & Baker, 2012) to deliver appropriate content, including video, through mobile and other devices in order to improve adherence to medication. A literature research has not shown the use of video in this way but there a number of studies where text messaging has been used to improve weight loss (Haapala, 2009), smoking cessation (Rodgers, 2005; Bramley, 2005) and diabetes management (Benhamou, 2007; Cho, 2009; Franklin et al, 2006; Hanauer, 2009; Rami, 2006) which suggests that e-learning initiatives to patients could change behaviours (Cochrane, 1992; Rand, 1994), while emails to multiple-choice questions are used to support medical students. (Kerfoot, 2008, 2009, 2009b, 2010).
A research question I would like to consider is:
‘Can the health of moderate persistent asthmatics aged 14-25 be improved through an e-learning programme that uses targeted emails linked to tailored short videos online (under 90 seconds) in order to achieve adherence to taking their prescribed asthma preventer inhalers to 80% or more?
The appropriateness and relevance to me of such an approach to research is to start with a clearly define problem and place it in a context where scrutiny can occur. In relation to the Web
increasingly the opportunity exists to use and gather ‘big data’, in this instance therefore to have at one level the belief that the globally, all those being treated for asthma form the data set.
Indeed, patients defined as anyone with a chronic illness who should be regularly and consistently taking preventative drugs for a chronic illness would embrace diabetics, those with epilepsy, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers. It is this bigger cohort, and the the role the Web can play to improve the prognosis of those with chronic illnesses that may be the focus of my interest for doctoral research.
It is vital to understand how people learn insights gained studying for a Masters in Open and Distance Education can in part be summarised in Fig. 6 as from each learning theory comes an appropriate research methodology. How therefore are patients with a chronic illness becoming informed about their condition and why in many cases are they failing to act upon it?
Fig. 2 Learning Theories drawn from multiple sources (Authors given). J Vernon (2013)
REFERENCE
Benhamou PY, Melki V, Boizel R, et al. Oneyear efficacy and safety of web-based follow up using cellular phone in type 1 diabetic patients under insulin pump therapy: the PumpNet Study.
Diabetes Metab. 2007;33(3):220–226.
Bramley D, Riddell T, Whittaker R, et al. (2005) Smoking cessation using mobile phone text messaging is as effective in Maori as non-Maori. N Z Med J. 2005;118(1216):U1494.
Cho JH, Lee HC, Lim DJ, et al. Mobile communication using a mobile phone with a glucometer for glucose control in type 2 patients with diabetes: as effective as an internet-based glucose monitoring system. J Telemed Telecare. 2009;15(2):77–82.
Cochrane, G.M. (1992) Therapeutic compliance in asthma; its magnitude and implications. Eur Respir J 1992;5:122458/
Conole, G (2011) Designing for learning in a digital world. Last accessed 30 May 2013 http://www.slideshare.net/grainne/conolekeynoteicdesept28
Cussins, A. (1992). Content, embodiment and objectivity: The theory of cognitive trails. Mind,
101, 651–688.
Engeström.Y (2008) From Teams to Knots: Activity theoretical studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work. Learning in doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives.
Cambridge University Press. Series Editor Emeritus. John Seely Brown.
Franklin, V, Waller, A, Pagliari, C, & Greene, S (2006), ‘A randomized controlled trial of Sweet Talk, a textmessaging system to support young people with diabetes’, Diabetic Medicine, 23, 12, pp. 13321338, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 16th March 2013
Hanauer DA, Wentzell K, Laffel N, et al. Computerized automated reminder diabetes system
(CARDS): email and SMS cell phone text messaging reminders to support diabetes management. Diabetes Technol Ther. 2009;11(2):99–106.
Haapala I, Barengo NC, Biggs S, et al. (2009) Weight loss by mobile phone: a 1y ear effectiveness study. Public Health Nutr. 2009;12(12):2382–2391.
Kerfoot BP, Armstrong EG, O’Sullivan PN. (2008) Interactive spaced education to teach the physical examination: a randomized controlled trial. J Gen Intern Med 2008;23:973–978. Kerfoot BP. (2009a) Learning benefits of online spaced education persist for 2 years. J Urol 2009;181:2671–2673.
Kerfoot BP, Kearney MC, Connelly D, Ritchey ML. (2009b) Interactive spaced education to assess and improve knowledge of clinical practice guidelines: a randomized controlled trial. Ann
Surg 2009;249:744–749.
Kerfoot BP, Lawler EV, Sokolovskaya G, et al. (2010) Durable improvements in prostate cancer screening from online spaced education a randomized controlled trial. Am J Prev Med 2010;39:472– 478.
Kerfoot, BP., Baker, H., (2012) An Online SpacedEducation Game for Global Continuing Medical Education: A Randomized Trial. Annals of Surgery Volume 256, Number 1, July 2012. pp.12271232 http://www.annalsofsurgery.com
Kerfoot, BP., Baker, H., Pangaro, L., Agarwal, K., Taffet,G., Mechaber, A.J., Armstrong, E.G. (2012) An Online Spaced Education Game to Teach and Assess Medical Students: A Multi-national Prospective Trial. Technology and Learning. Academic Medicine, Vol. 87, No. 10 / October 2012 pp. 1443 -1449
KnorrCetina, K. (2003). From pipes to scopes: The flow architecture of financial markets. Distinktion, 7, 7–23.
Rand, C.S., Wise, R.A. (1994) Measuring adherence to asthma medication regimens. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 1994; 149:6976
Rami B, Popow C, Horn W, et al. (2006) Telemedical support to improve glycemic control in adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Eur J Pediatr. 2006;165(10):701–705.
Rodgers A, Corbett T, Bramley D, et al. Do u smoke after txt? Results of a randomised trial of smoking cessation using mobile phone text messaging. Tob Control. 2005;14(4):255–261.
Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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31 Years Ago – Oxford 1982 on video
Fig.1. The author/auteur with his Sony Betamax out. My study, Staircase 11, Balliol College, Trinity Term 1982
31 years ago I was an undergraduate at Oxford University.
In my second year, eager to develop my interest in TV production I managed to get myself a Sony Betamax Camera. It was semi-portable – a backpack and cable. I’ve had the 20 tapes digitized. The pleasure for me and for those featured will be to see themselves and their friends in a way that will have quite escaped them. You are faced with the spatial disjointedness of seeing and hearing yourself as others presumably saw you and the temporal disjointedness of seeing a 19 or 20 year old from the perspective of a fifty-something. There’s some 17 hours of content. I got through it at x18 in a few hours yesterday afternoon.
Fig.2. Rehearsing in the Oxford University Drama Society (OUDS) production of Taming of the Shrew. I played Baptista.
These are the obvious observations:
- How young we looked. Look at the fashion (hair, clothes) and the cars.
- Did I really look like and talk like that?
- Even an idiot could see that I couldn’t grow a beard, so why did I try!
- Why did I buy that shirt?
The more nuanced thoughts and realisations are:
Fig.3. The Oxford Lightweights Crew, Henley. My purpose had been to video them in training.
How amazing it is that watching a blurry clip of a team of rowers an image no bigger than a pea tells me quite quickly that I know one of these people, a few moments more and I have their name. The ability of the human brain to identify faces is remarkable. (The above is far closer and clearer than the silhouette tat initially gave me the location, purpose and person).
There are events I covered, even moments where I appear, that I simply cannot recollect at all.
Being behind the camera can do this … you’re cut-off from the moment slightly in any case as you should be tending to the camera (on a tripod), lighting and sound. There’s a good deal that I didn’t cover – the camera often went out with others.
Then I see a person, and it does ‘come flooding back’ – this personal emotional tie to a person or event is vital.
Just a few seconds of a person and I feel warmth and longing for a lost love. I know the name, when we met and the times we spent together. But what unintended hurt might I cause even these decades later? Or others who had no inkling of my interest? Or is this just part of being who and what we are at that age? And we have, of course, move on … so far beyond that the past really is a different country. And we are not those people who populated it.
Getting myself back into the head of a 20 year old feels like a kind of lobotomy – it had might as well empty my head of everything that has happened since. The perspective makes you realise just how naive and inexperienced you are even at that age.
There are inevitable technical issues:
- The tapes, stored for three decades, are damaged.
- The lighting, anything in doors or when it was dreary, is atrocious.
- The sound, through the directional mic on the camera is pretty dreadful too.
Fig. 4. In conversation somewhere, with someone – but I don’t know with whom, and can’t even tell what was on our minds.
What next?
Just a screen grab shared with a handful of the participants has produced glee. It is a reminder of how friendships are formed, a bond and trust that slips into place between strangers after they’ve got to know each other and then spend more time together doing things and making fond memories. This is its value if nothing else. None of the video will go online. I’m even reluctant at this stage to store content online and offer a password to people. I know that it is too easy for content to ‘leak’ which at this stage I feel is too unfair to those concerned. I’ll start just by sharing the moments with them.
- How much do we need or want to remember?
- Doesn’t the brain, for those of us who are and remain physically and mentally well, do a perfectly adequate job of forgetting?
- Is it not better to see the past through the prism of narrative, anecdotes and recollections. To feel, either good or bad about people and moments rather than getting this ‘in your face’ absolute?
- Twice I spotted people who were lovers.
- Twice I spotted people I ‘fancied’.
Is it not healthier and correct to reinforce my marriage of twenty years with memories of equal strength of her and our children?
Wherein a wedding and some holiday video footage may have served a purpose. On graduation I never, or very rarely, have ‘gathered’ amateur footage like this. Perhaps understandably I want to work with a team of professional broadcasters and filmmakers.
There are fictionalised stories I want to tell about this age group.
This content is an invaluable record and reminder of all that we are at that age. It is also noticeable, even in the streets of Oxford on May Morning, how the student population dominate, while of course cast and audiences of students productions are for the most part students too. For a period, or for some weeks, you live away from your family, without a family – most people around you are your age and possibly, its weakness in the 1980s, amongst those from a white caucasian middle class background. This too would reflect the bias of whoever was behind the camera, and the events covered.
Fig.5. Oxford Theatre Group (OTG) rehearsals for the Oxford Review. I have several hours of footage of setting up, the hall and rehearsals for three out of the five productions: Titus Alone, Edward II and the Review.
Best of all, and the fullest record, is the Oxford Theatre Group on the Edinburgh Fringe in August and early September 1982. As well as our edited highlights from this, behind the scenes, rehearsals and productions, there are several hours of ‘rushes’. There is also coverage of an Eight’s Week (College Rowing Event), the Oxford & Cambridge Ski Trip to Wengen, one May Morning (May 1st, 1982 I presume) and Lightweights and Woman’s Eights at Henley … and some ‘Student News’ from a single edition of ‘Oxford Television News’. I didn’t need three tapes of rushes for an English Language School for Japanese Students.
In a world where such images are so easily gathered are we even more inclined to bin or wipe them?
Do most young people live in a world of image overload where the recording and broadcast of content is instantaneous so little thought needs to be given to what is recorded, how it is stored, how it is shared and who sees it? In thirty years time will my children be able to look at content the way I can?
At my mother’s funeral my God Father presented me with a couple of DVDs containing digitized 16mm footage of my mothers age 17 from the late 1940s. Would this have lasted sixty years on tape? In sixty years time will people want to or need to see clips of themselves in their youth? Isn’t it too easy, even expected to dip back and forth through your timeline?
Fig. 6 I know the people in the line and the person who recorded the footage – rain damage put the camera out of action for several months, perhaps worth it for several minutes of frivolity during May Day celebrations, May 1st 1983 (or 82?)
How will people change if they cannot forget and are not allowed to forget?
I’m sure we’ll become more accepting of the human condition – that politicians who ‘had a life’ may be preferred over those who did not? That we will be accepting of a good deal more of what we do and how we were and how we change, that we have different personas in different settings and at different times.
Fig. 7 My study – second year, a study with separate bedroom. In College. The key to this era, should I wish to explore it, is the diary on the shelf in the background. Whilst the video record is selective and patchy, the daily journal is complete.
What though the value of keeping a diary? I understand the academic value of reflection, but a record of what you did, what you read and maybe who you saw and most especially what you thought back then? Digitised, a process I started patchily two decades ago, others insights – some best left in the past. Devices that capture your day, sensecams and wearable devices … how much more are these a record if the data they provide can be analysed for you or does a memory need and deserve the filter and effort of being recorded as you experienced and felt it?
Several edits into the above I realise I have failed to sate the obvious – after a part-time Masters Degree in Distance and E-Learning (MAODE) I am now applying to undertake doctoral research. The youth of these images didn’t have postgraduate study on his mind largely because he didn’t understand who he was – deeply curious about people and learning. If an education is wasted on youth, then I’d say this is even more the case with postgraduate study.
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Mind Bursts 