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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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13 E-learning theories
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Associative/ Behaviourist approaches
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Design principles
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Looking for observable behaviour
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Explicitly mentioning course outcomes
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Behavioural objectives
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Ability to test achievement of learning outcomes
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Instructional Systems Design (ISD)
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Decomposing learning into small chunks
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Routines of organised activity
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Learning hierarchies (controversial!)
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Sequencing learning materials with increasing complexity
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Giving direct feedback on learning
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Individualized learning trajectories
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Cognitive psychology (constructivism)
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Types of memory (sensory – short term – long term)
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Maximize sensations: strategic screen layout
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Research on memory, perception, reasoning, concept formation.
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Maximize sensations: well-paced information
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Learning is active
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Maximize sensations: highlighting main elements
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Learning is individual (knowledge construction)
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Relate difficulty level to cognitive level of learner: providing links to easier and more advanced resources
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Use of comparative advance organizers
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Use of conceptual models
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Importance of prior knowledge structures
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Pre-instructional & prerequisite questions
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Experimentation toward discovery of broad principles
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Promote deep processing
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Use of information maps zooming in/ out
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Cognitive Apprenticeship (Brown et al, 1989)
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Interactive environments for construction of understanding
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Metacognition (reflection, self-regulation)
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Relate to real-life (apply, analyse, synthesize)
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Learning styles (controversial!)
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Address various learning styles
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Cognitive styles
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Let students prepare a journal
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Dual coding theory
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Use both visual information and text
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Motivate learners (ARCS model)
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Use techniques to catch attention, explain relevance, build confidence and increase satisfaction
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Situated learning (constructivism)
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Personal knowledge construction
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Personal meaning to learning
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Situated learning: motivation
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Relate to real life (relevance)
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Holistic/ Systemic approaches
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Conduct research on internet
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Build confidence with learners
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Identity development
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Use of first-hand information (not filtered by instructor)
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Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger)
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Collaborative activities
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Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky)
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Fostering the growth of learning communities
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Learning as act of participation
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Legitimate (peripheral) practice, apprenticeships
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Lifelong learning
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Authentic learning and assessment tasks
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Connectivism
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Information explosion
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Digital literacies
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Learning in network environment
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Keep up-to-date in field
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Knowledge base
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Multi-channel learning
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Distributed learning
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Build diversity, openness in learning (different opinions), autonomy
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Personal Learning Environment
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self-directed learning, just-in-time |
Constructivism – Jonassen et al 1999
Social Constructions – Vygotsky 1986
Activity Theory – Engeström et al 1999
Experiational Learning – Kolb 1984
Instructional Design – Gagné et al 2004
Networked and collaborative work – McConnell 2000
Learning Design Jochems et al 2004
Primary: presenting information
Secondary: active learning and feedback
Tertiary: dialogue and new learning.
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Every bit of you contributes to your learning experience
When it comes to learning, everything matters – epecially the tips of your toes.
‘Human learning is the combination of processes throughout a lifetime whereby the whole person – body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses) – experiences social situations, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual person’s biography resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person’. Knud Illiris (2009:24)
In 1980 I worked the winter season in a Hotel in the French Alps. It was a 13 hour working day that started at 6.00am and included three hours off over lunch – 12h00 to 15h00. That’s when I went skiing – in all weather. That season, like this, had an abundance of ‘weather’ with more snow than even Val d’Isere could cope with. An avalanche took out an entire mountain restaurant … or rather burried them. They were fine and re-opened after a few weeks. Towards the end of the season I would shot up the slopes, in my M&S suit, with a plasticated boiler-suit like thing over it and skied the same run maybe 11 or 12 times before returning to the hotel and an afternoon/evening of carrying bags, digging cars out, taking trays of food, cleaning and translating French to English for the Hotel Manager. I had a Sony Walkman cassette player. I played Pink Floyd ‘The Wall’ and skied to ‘The Wall’.
33 years on, using the same skis if I want, the music on an iPhone, I manage three to five turns at a time … rest … three to five more turns … rest … three to five turns and take a suck on my Ventolin inhaler …. and so on.
And what comes to mind?
‘The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire’ Gibbon and Alexis de Tocqueville ‘L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution’ – both required reading before I started my undergraduate year of History later in 1981.
These are the games the brains plays on you. I can now of course recall Madame Raymond, the Hotel Manger, The Sofitel, Val d’Isere and Christian, the waiter who taught me to ski … and the word for dust ‘poussiere’.
And while up here 33 years later I have so far got through three books:
‘The A to Z of Learning Theory’ (2002), David Leonard; ‘Contemporary Perspectives in E-learning Research’ eds. Grainne Conole and Martin Oliver and ‘Contemporary Theories of Learning’ edited by Knud Illeris (2009) … from which I drew the above quote. The first covers some 150 learning theories – by the time you’ve finished it you may conclude that there is life and learning while death brings it to the end. As Illiris states, everything counts. The second is one of those academic compillations of papers. The title is disengenious as I could not find in ONE single paper (chapter) any attempts to give a perspective on e-learning research, rather these are papers on e-learning. Period. While the Knud Illiris edited book does the business with some great chapters from him, from Etienne Wenger and Yrjo Engestrom. So one is the K-Tel compilation from Woolworths, while the latter is ‘Now E-Learning’.
As it is still snowing I may have to download another book.
H817open Week 2 Activity 8: Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners
A data visualization of Wikipedia as part of the World Wide Web, demonstrating hyperlinks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
ACTIVITY: Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week.
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Often the messiest and most problematic of tasks prove to be the most revealing.
Thinking of a group of swimming teachers as participants in some Open Learning was a challenge as some would never have used a computer at all. I thought of another group, nursery nurses and even contemplated going on to undergraduate medical students or junior doctors so that I could imagine working with a digital literate group but then returned to the challenge of introducing those with no experience of computers at all.
Do you try to teach someone to swim butterfly when they cannot swim? Can a swimming teacher learn anything if they don’t have access to a swimming pool? This is what it felt like – clearly OER is never suitable for everyone – the learning outcomes must come first, then how to deliver these in a way that suits the participants. There’s a saying in advertising, ‘preach to the converted’ i.e. you are selling goods and services to people who want them anyway. The easiest ‘sell’ would be to create a course on digital skills for those who are just coming online and are eager to acquire the skills, rather than a group that includes those who have no digital skills and are even belligerent or disinclined to take any interest.
Coming from Learning & Development we have sometimes been expected to ‘shoehorn’ other people’s content, or the client’s old content, into the production. We decline. We will use the material to inform the production process only. There is a reason, for narrative and continuity why I still feel that creating your own bespoke content is often a better alternative, otherwise there can be discontinuity, the need for writing in caveats, or simply reversioning as participants take a negative view of the smallest of things – say US English used instead of UK English.
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Week |
Topic |
Resources |
Suitability (G/M/B) |
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INTRODUCTION to the Web and digital skills Learning on the go Mobile devices Just in time or applied resources and tools. Websites and social media Twitter, Facebook … WordPress Wikis |
M M M G |
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SEARCH Find a variety of content on MSM Website related to schedules, programmes, events, Swim21, contacts and compliance Download and open PDF files. Login and add personal details |
Searching: Making the most of being online (BBC Webwise) Searching the Internet (UK GOV) Locate Swim21, download the Code of Ethics PDF, email the Swim21 Officer to say that you agree to abide by these guidelines. |
G M |
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VIEW Select a video on swimming technique from the Breakwater Swimming Website and note tips you would use in a training or teaching session. |
M |
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PARTICIPATE Register with IoS Online Forms Navigate/Search Function Find and do a 1 hour free CPD of your choices Multiple-choice Audio/View Rate/Comment |
Register with the Institute of Swimming Do a Free Continual Professional Development (CPD) refreshed – 1 hour Working and Learning in Sports and Fitness Open Learn, The OU Track 6 How to develop reflective skills and improve leadership techniques. Part of The OU course E113 Working and learning in sport and fitness. |
G |
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5 |
CREATE Register withe blog host Create a journal entry on a session and reflect ELABORATE Find and comment on other club and personal blogs Create and load video Legalese |
Blogging, a tool used to reflect and learn Twitter Users. A Guide to the Law (BBC Webwise) |
B B G G
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REFLECTION
It was recently announced that a company had created a connector or ‘brick’ that allows those playing with either Lego bricks or Konnex to connect to two. It strikes me that OER requires some conformity in the creation of the learning resource in the first place to allow such bonds and that templates or connectors are required too. However, even if the learning resource is an idea expressed as a doodle with some text or a series of annotated diagrams from a whiteboard that are photographer and put online I believe this is far preferable to shoehorning another’s ideas into your learning design. Can you construct a new short story by lifting paragraphs from others? Can you construct original Shakespeare by mashing up lines from different monologues? Can you create a coherent painting by grabbing elements from a number of masters? This isn’t the same as the remixing musicians do, or is it? This isn’t the same as taking a cooking recipe and changing some of the ingredients – it is about the quality, truth, conviction, coherence and flow of a persuasive narrative.
My greatest challenge is the nature of the intended audience, whilst ‘Swimming Teachers and Coaches’ is one way to define them, for most this is a volunteer role for an hour or so a week, for a few more a modest part-time and paid role for perhaps 6 to 8 hours and only part-time and professional for 3 or 4 – say 12-16, sometimes 22 hours a week. They are a disparate group too – from airline pilots and Doctors, to a retired postman and an assistant in Waitrose who left school with no qualifications and now understand that they have Dyslexia. One is doing an MA in Sports Science online, another gets his wife to receive and send emails – yet another her husband. This spectrum of digitally literate ‘residents’ to the ‘occasional visitor’ even the non-user – and in some cases belligerently ante-Internet means that to reach this group requires more group workshops, face to face applied ‘poolside on the job’ and hand-outs. Content online needs to be printable so that if necessary intermediaries can print off in specific fonts onto coloured paper for those with Dyslexia. Content in the post, the traditionally distance learning approach would be favoured by some.
PROBLEMS
Links no longer valid or content removed, sometimes for declared copyright issues, such as here. Not having adequate input into the bespoke construction of the content in the first place, and then the possibility that the content may be removed is a problem.
Several hours too late I gave up on the depositories. I have always found UK Gov websites very easy and clear, say for calculating and paying tax, or getting a Road Licence for the car. With the drive to have everyone on Universal Credit using the web – those in the community who are most likely also to have no or poor digital literacy skills or access, I wondered what training and support UK GOV offered. I was delighted with the ‘We Make Getting Online Easier’ website and feel that it would support those for whom using the Internet would be a struggle – how and where they get online is another matter if they don’t have an Internet connection at home, or a Smartphone. For continuity reasons I may then use this website through-out with the only venture away to look at YouTube ‘How to …’ videos relating to swimming teaching and coaching. I then checked the BBC and for UK residents found the BBC WebWise resources perfect. Start on the home page, run through the content bit by bit over the weeks.
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Is neuroscience is going to blow this allow out of the water?
KEY
Green = Activated
Amber = Engaged
Red = Blocked
What concerns me is the belief that theories of learning, which academics have identified in eduation in the last 90 years, are either key drivers or infleuncers in the design of learning. Surely these are all observations after the event. Like trying to analyse a standup comedy routine using a set of plans and parameters – ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’ comes to mind. As, I suppose would ‘Dead Poets Society’ to bring in Robin Williams again. Was the Khan Academy a product of such analysis? No? An investment banker wanted to help his nephews out with their Math so he recorded some videos. Actually, I jsut realised my wife is doing this for a friend’s daughter who is learning French – creating bespoke French language pieces for her to practice on. I can’t even think what either of them are – behaviourist or social-constructive and experiential. I’m afraid, given what the academic ‘gurus of e-learning’ keep coming up with they are probably the least intuitive or inventive because their hands and minds are tied by this kind of thing. Just my opinion.
If I want to develop a platform or school that uses e-learning I’ll go find myself a ‘Robin Williams’ kind of educator – someone has a natural flair for it, who engender a following, who most importantly delivers extraordinary results.
Looking back at school I know that what motivated me was two fold – my own long term goal and the quality of an inspired and informed teacher who had tutoring, moderating and teaching in their blood.
There’s a reason why research and teaching don’t mix. I’ve asked some academics about this and they have told me that they haven’t gone into the commercial sector, nor do they teach … ‘because they hate people’.
Where in these theories is the person?
This relationship, the rapport that can form between tutor and student is what is lacking and it is why, in my opinion, the lifes of the Oxbridge Tutorial, that one to one, or one to two or three hour long session once a week is far, far, far from dead.
Neuroscience is going to blow this allow out of the water.
Already the shift is very much in favour of genetics and the way our unique brains are formed as we develop as a foetus. It is nature, not nuture, so frankly, we can have anything thrown at us in terms of life experience and how we learn and how we respond will remain individual. This is the perspective of my father in law whose secondary education was the being in the Polish resistance during the Second World War, his first university a prisoner of war camp. He had England or the US as choices having decided not to return to Poland. And found himself learning English in Gateshead. The story continues … so what kind of learning was occuring in the POW camp?
He bartered lessons in German for lessons in English.
Social-situated in extremis.
Not that it can be injected into a class, and even less so in online learning, but ‘fear’ doesn’t half help turn a short term memory into one that will stick. Playing Devil’s Advocate, can ‘e-learning’ only ever be ‘cotton wool’ the safest, tamest learning you will ever recieve? Try reading an essay out in a tutor group – there’s fear! Try getting up in a hall of 300 people to make your point in a debating chamber – terrying. An odd conclusion to reach at the end of this reflection on the exercise – but where is the ‘fear’?
And I mean the right kind of fear, not the threat of the cane or other such punishment, but the fear of letting you down, or your side down, or of humiliation … against the public reward if you get something right?
Pinned down in a collapsed cellar in Warsaw my father in law believed he would die. He was the only one alive. Everyone else had been flattened. By some chance he had been standing under a beam that had partially protected him. He made promises he’d keep if he lived. He was found. A smash to the head.
Does learning have more impact when there is something at stake?
Try introducing this element into an e-learning module.
The impossible hypothesis – people learn better and make decisions with firmer convictions, where their life is at stake?
Then again we turn to neuroscience and will conclude that some will, some won’t, that the response of the individual to a shared experience means that you get as many different outcomes as there are people.
Institutions think that grades divide students – that’s only the tiniest fraction of what makes each person in that class different. If the student isn’t suitably self aware to know how to play to their strengths and managed their weaknesses then the observant tutor and others who are part of the institution should be doing this on their behalf – as parents, friends and siblings might do. Even with medical intervention.
The ‘Flipped classroom’ for me is finding ways to work with the individual who happens to be in a class that is probably already sorted by age and culture, if not also social class and gender.
And therefore already inappropriate.
Maybe the classroom has had its time. A short-lived interlude in human development over the last 70,000 years.
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H817 Open MOOC Activity 4: Identifying priorities for research
English: Postage stamp depicting Martin Luther, the initiator of the Protestant Reformation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Imagine you are advising a funding organisation that wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.
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Set out the three main priorities they should address, explaining each one and providing a justification for your list. Share this in the Week 1 forum and compare with priorities of others.
In this activity you are just expected to start thinking about these issues, and to use your own experience and intuition; you are not expected to research them in depth. You will build on this work during next week, and also for the assignment.
1. Get noticed
A clarion call to those who matter to you online to take notice, take an interest, give it some thought and give it a go. Get the message right. Know why you are doing it. Express it with conviction, professionalism and enthusiasm. Seek out like-minded people.
2. Use the medium
All Martin Luther could do was nail an edict to a church door, but it started the Reformation. There too many doors, and a plethora of nails when you go online. Brief a team of web experts and web savvy to design a platform and structure that is robust and provides ‘scaffolding’ for what comes next. A river is free and open, a flood or tsunami cannot be controlled. Put in a slide and provide kicker floats and water polo balls. Gather ‘big data’. Watch everything and keep a record.
3. Be a great host
In France you’d be called an ‘animateur’ or ‘realisateur’ in North America you might be ‘the host with the most’ and in Britain ‘a jolly good chap or chappess’. To go online successfully is to transfuse the live component of the institution you represent into the World Wide Web – think of it as an organism that requires nurturing. Be there for them. Have plenty of eager, online net residents to welcome the naïve and the expert, the time starved and those with time on their hands.
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Lost in the clouds in an OLDS MOOC 2013
Fig. 1. Detail from Clouds (1812) Constable.
I’ve shared my frustrations with Cloudworks from the start of the OLDS MOOC 2013 … and had some experience a year ago so entered the cloud with a sense of dread.
I stuck at it and found some odd ways in.
What mattered was the contact with people I got to know – as they gave up it became inevitable that I would do so too, not least because I had more pressing matters. H809 a postgraduate module, partially produced by the same team as it comes from the Open University stable, but a very different beast.
More like getting on a bus with four to five stops a week.
A weekend for an assignment every five weeks and a longer sojourn to produce a short dissertation at the end. Four tutors groups each with less than sixteen people in each.
I liken my Cloudworks experience to Fresher’s Fair … every day of the week.
Every time I came in I wondered around getting interested in what other people were doing, sometimes landing their by mistake. So a Fresher’s Fair with some 12 entry doors on several floors with the people behind each stall mostly changing too. Your brain gets tired of the overload, the lack of landscape and in this sense ‘Cloudscape’ is the right term, for the wrong reasons.
I took some pictures of a Constable painting ‘Study of Clouds’ in the Ashmolean Museum when I was in Oxford on Friday.
What was I doing in Oxford. Hankering after ‘the real thing’ – a chance to meet and talk with some people in the flesh, this at an talk on Virtual Worlds in Japanese at the Centre of Social and Cultural Anthropology hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute.
After a while, all this online stuff has you eager to meet likeminds in person.
Which I guess why conferences will flourish, not die out, and then from pure e-learning vs. traditional learning the blended form might become the long term, preferred pattern. The best of all worlds, with landscapes, water courses, digital oceans and shifting clouds.
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Could blogging be seen as a scholarly activity?
This are me thoughts from reading:
An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging for digital scholarship
Heap & Minocha (2012),
Fig.1. Digital Scholarship with a nod to Martin Weller‘s book of the same name. (Created in 2011)
By stripping back the paper what do I learn from this paper:
- about blogging and digital scholarship
- about devising the research question(s) and method of research.
This quote from Axcel Bruns is wrong in relation to blogging.
‘Were originally more popular amongst journalism and business context’ Bruns (2007)
In fact, from my experience from 1999 onwards, journalists were highly dismissive and didn’t cotton on to blogging as a valid way to share their opinions for several years. The exception being financial journalism where breaking views on markets were fed, blog like, to subscribers,
Fig.2. An excerpt from my own early blog.
I was reading blogs in 1998, did some Dreamweaver training and if I’d got my head around FTP uploads I may have been up an away in 98 rather than 99 when I heard of Diaryland and joined the platform soon after it started.
Fig.3. An excerpt from a blog created by Claire Z Warnes in 1998
Over the next 4 to 5 years I saw a massive growth and influx of what by modern terms would have been described as journals, creative writing, fantasy, role play and social networking.
Fig.4. How I saw blogging in 1999/2000
I question why bloggers are defined by the institution they are at – the blog is more personal, like the noticeboard at someone’s desk in the bedroom or study, or a diary or journal they carry about with them, whether electronic or paper.
Fig. 5. We should stop seeing blogging in isolation – forms of ‘keeping a journa’, for whatever purposes, is as old a writing itself.
Little is ever mention of a history of keeping diaries, a writer’s journal or other kind of daily record for reflection or in scholarly circles to record the iterative process of a learning journey or a piece of research. John Evelyn was a diarist. Was he scholarly? What about Pepy’s he was keeping an historic record? For whom did Lady Anne Clifford keep a diary if not for an historic, even a legal record, of her rights to her father’s estates? (Lady Anne Clifford kept at a diary late 1500s into the 17th century).
Was Virginia Woolf using herself as the subject of an internal discussion?
What did Anais Nin learn and share about her writing as well as her personal journey, a journey that was shared with Henry Miller and that a couple of decades was taken by the filmmaker Francois Truffaut. As someone who had kept a diary since he was thirteen and had been typing it up and putting on disc for nearly a decade, the move to the web was a natural one.
- for personal reflection (e.g. Xie, Fengfeng, and Sharma 2008)
- collaborative working (e.g. McLoughlin and Lee 2008)
- developing writing skills (e.g. Warschauer 2010)
- flexible usage of blogs to suit the individual blogger’s needs, such as
- a space for reflection, to seek peer support, or both (e.g. Kerawalla et al. 2008).
I read blogs and corresponded with writers who were using the format to try out chapters of fantasy novels, to share poetry, to test webdesigns even to meet and indulge in intimate chat, role play and even cybersex. (Early blogs were the forerunners of a lot to come).
Whilst some of this activity isn’t within the parameters of ‘scholarly’ practice, certainly from a creative writing point of view self-publishing was.
From personal experience there were those exploring their personality, who were lonely, depressed or bi-polar. Most studies in English speaking countries … yet it was presumably going on elsewhere. And where does someone who is using writing in English in a blog to learn English stand in terms of being a student and a scholar?
Defining scholarship in the digital age
Boyer (1990) developed a conceptual framework which defines ‘‘scholarship’’ as a combination of teaching and research activities. In particular, he suggests four dimensions to define scholarship: discovery, integration, application and teaching.
Fig.6. Another excerpt from a blog for young writers created by Claire Z Warnes in 1998 when she was 17 herself. (I think she went off to study Computer Sciences)
The earliest bloggers played a teaching role, for example Claire Z Warnes set up a series of web pages to encourage and support young writers in 1998. She was teaching, they were exploring through reading, writing and sharing just as if they were meeting face to face in a classroom.
Boyer’s dimensions constitute an appropriate starting point for researching digital scholarship (Weller 2011).
Pearce et al. (2010) elaborated on Boyer’s (1990) model to theorise a form of digital/open scholarship, arguing that it is:
- more than just using information and communication technologies to research,
- teach and collaborate,
- embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society.
Which is exactly what Claire Z Warnes (1998) was doing, indeed, as some remaining posts that can be viewed show, it was as if she were becoming the Dean of one of the first online creative writing classes.
In relation to the research here’s the problem that needs to be addressed:
There is a lack of empirical evidence on how the openness and sharing manifested in blogging can influence academia, research and scholarship. (Minocha, p. 178. 2012)
Discussion
‘We have found that blogs seem to occupy an intermediate space among established writing forms such as peer-reviewed academic papers, newspaper articles, diaries, blurring the private public and formal informal divide ‘. (Heap and Minocha 2011).
There is a growing awareness of blogging as a writing or communicative genre in academia and research and as a new form of scholarship (e.g. Halavais 2007).
- to ensure validity of work through established forms of publishing,
- to integrate blogs so that research findings reach more readers
- to enable sharing information without time lags involved in formal publications.
The next steps in our research (according to the authors of this paper) are to validate the effectiveness of the framework (they developed) as a thinking tool about digital scholarship, and for guiding the practice of blogging in academia and research.
REFERENCE
Heap, Tania and Minocha, Shailey (2012). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging for digital scholarship. Research in Learning Technology, 20(Supp.), pp. 176–188. (Accessed 28th February 2013 http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/19195 )
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar
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The Educational Impact of Weekly E-Mailed Fast Facts and Concepts
In this study, the authors assessed the educational impact of weekly Fast Facts and Concepts (FFAC) e-mails on residents’ knowledge of palliative care topics, self-reported preparedness in palliative care skills, and satisfaction with palliative care education.
The more papers I read, like learning a foreign language, the thinner the blur between mystery and comprehension in terms of judging a paper and its contents. My goal is to be able to conduct such research and write such papers. I understandably feel that a first degree in medicine and a second masters degree in education is required at this level. At best I might be able to take on psychology or neuroscience. My preference and hope would be to become part of a team of experts.
Purpose: Educational interventions such as electives, didactics, and Web-based teaching have been shown to improve residents’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills. However, integrating curricular innovations into residency training is difficult due to limited time, faculty, and cost.
What – A clear problem:
Integrating palliative care into residency training can be limited by the number of trained faculty, financial constraints, and the difficulty of adding educational content with limited resident duty hours. (Claxton et al. p. 475 2011)
Who – Participants
Beginning internal medicine interns
Why – Time- and cost-efficient strategies for creating knowledge transfer are increasingly important. Academic detailing, an educational practice based on behavioral theory, uses concise materials to highlight and repeat essential messages. Soumerai (1990)
How – We designed this study to assess the educational impact of weekly e-mailed FFAC on
internal medicine interns in three domains: knowledge of palliative care topics, satisfaction with palliative care education, and self-reported preparedness in palliative care skills.
Methods
This randomized, controlled study of an educational intervention included components of informed consent, pretest, intervention, and posttest.
Fast Facts and Concepts
FFAC are 1-page, practical, peer-reviewed, evidence-based summaries of key palliative care topics first developed by Eric Warm, M.D., at the University of Cincinnati Internal Medicine Residency Program in 2000.6
Intervention
One e-mail containing two FFAC was delivered weekly for 32 weeks to interns in the intervention group.
Pre-test
All participants completed a pretest that assessed knowledge of palliative care topics, self-rated preparedness to perform palliative care skills, and satisfaction with palliative care education.
Method: Internal medicine interns at the University of Pittsburgh and Medical College of Wisconsin were randomized to control and intervention groups in July 2009. Pretests and post-tests assessed medical knowledge through 24 multiple choice questions, preparedness on 14 skills via a 4-point Likert scale and satisfaction based on ranking of education quality.
The intervention group received 32 weekly e-mails.
Control Group
No e-mails were sent to the control group.
Post-test
Respondents completed a post-test 1 to 8 weeks after the
intervention
Educational equipoise
All study participants were informed of the content and the online availability of FFAC during recruitment. At the conclusion of the study, both control and intervention groups were given a booklet that contained all the e-mailed FFAC.
Statistical analysis
Descriptive statistics and t tests were used to compare the demographic data between the control and intervention groups. Medical knowledge, preparedness, and satisfaction were compared pretest and post-test within groups by Wilcoxon tests and between groups via Mann-Whitney U tests. The data did not meet assumptions for multivariate analysis due to the small sample size. Only univariate analysis was performed.
Although traditional academic detailing techniques include educational outreach visits and distribution of printed graphic materials, e-learning techniques such as e-mail delivery of educational content, listservs and Web-based tutorials can also be considered rooted in this behavioral theory given their focus on repeated, concise content.
Pain assessment and management, breaking bad news, communicating about care goals, and providing appropriate medical care for a dying patient are necessary skills for surgery, family medicine, pediatric, obstetrics and gynaecology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, emergency medicine, neurology, radiation oncology, anesthesiologist, and psychiatry residents.
Studies that focus on e-mail education interventions have shown that weekly e-mails change the behavior of e-mail recipients, improve learner retention of educational content and that retention improvements increase with the duration over which e-mails were received. (Kerfoot et al. 2007 ) (Matzie et al. 2009)
Results: The study group included 82 interns with a pretest response rate of 100% and post-test response rate of 70%. The intervention group showed greater improvement in knowledge than the control (18% increase compared to 8% in the control group, p = 0.005).
Preparedness in symptom management skills (converting between opioids, differentiating types of pain, treating nausea) improved in the intervention group more than the control group ( p = 0.04, 0.01, and 0.02, respectively).
There were no differences in preparedness in communication skills or satisfaction between the control and intervention groups.
Conclusions: E-mailed FFAC are an educational intervention that increases intern medical knowledge and self-reported preparedness in symptom management skills but not preparedness in communication skills or satisfaction with palliative care education.
REFERENCE
Claxton, R, Marks, S, Buranosky, R, Rosielle, D, & Arnold, R 2011, ‘The Educational Impact of Weekly E-Mailed Fast Facts and Concepts’, Journal Of Palliative Medicine, 14, 4, pp. 475-481, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 25 February 2013.
Matzie KA, Price Kerfoot B, Hafler JP, Breen EM: (2009) Spaced education improved the feedback that surgical residents given to medical students: A randomized trial. Am J Surg 2009;197:252–257.
Price Kerfoot B, DeWolf WC, Masser BA, Church PA, Federman DD: (2007) Spaced educational improves the retention of clinical knowledge by medical students: A randomized controlled trial. Med Educ 2007;41:23–31.
Soumerai SB, Avorn J: (1990) Principles of educational outreach (‘academic detailing’) to improve clinical decision making. JAMA 1990;263:549–556.
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