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‘Smartness’ online is the product of teamwork
Dreams
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| From 2BlogI |
I rarely write about these, though feel obliged when they are so telling. I had another double bill of movie like dreams. I won’t bore you with the detail but I challenge any of these new ‘memory’ apps to account for them. What is my head up to? It’s very probably because I am, after six or seven years of not having done so, thinking about storytelling: character, plot and narrative arcs. Where’s that in a mini series such as ‘The Borgias’. Some of these series, however often there is a murder or sex act after a while become as interesting as standing at a bus stop and starting to recognise the same faces every day.
Nabakov said something about ‘loving a memory to make it real’.
Can an App love something as abstract as a memory? It strikes me that memories can never be digitised, that as the construct, at that moment, of a chemical process, that they will be forever analogue. Can you digitise a chemical process?
Memory is not a photograph, or recording, not even something you have written down, rather a memory is what your brain at that moment chooses to construct for you drawing upon sources in various, and differing corners and recesses of your brain. It takes very little to alter this mix. Nothing you recall can ever be the way you remember it before, far from being frozen in time, as a digital form would do, it erupts like gas from a swamp.
In my early teens I had one of those ‘Five Year Diaries’ that offer four or five lines per day. After five years you have what you did on that day for five years. It took a long while for me to move on from these. What I did was try to write something about that day that would provide recall of some kind. I don’t need the video of the day. Or an assortment of photographs. All it takes is a phrase, a place, person or event. Something you ate or saw on TV. Oh dear. I just saw that I thought my new girlfriend’s breath was bad. She read this by chance a few years later. Together for five years we finally left each other in tatters a decade later. I can see where we were standing. Her Dad had come to pick her up. Neither of us could drive. She was 16, I was nearly 18. Do I need a gadget to replace my mind’s eye?
Towards an assessment of my teaching
I often share a post I am writing as I do so. In this case having identified the story to tell : running a workshop to solve a ‘messy’ business problem I am pulling together or creating supporting images, in the above case a grab and mashup from Martin Weller’s book ‘The Digital Scholar’ – my goal is to be recognised as one. In a forum post as an Open University ‘Master of arts in Open and Distance Education’ (I graduated in early 2013) I suggested this could be achieved in four years – John Seely Brown thinks that eLearning speeds things up, while Weller reckons on ten years.
Blogging as an acdemic and scholarly acitivty
What’s going on in there? How do bloggers react, respond and coalesce?
Anjewierden, A. (2006) Understanding Weblog Communities Through Digital Traces: A Framework, a Tool and an Example.
My own interest was sparked by an article in the Washington Post on Ellen Levy who had spent 1998 keeping a journal and putting it online.
Druckerman, P (1999) Ellen Levy Has Got The Write Project For the Internet Age — It’s a Year of Scribbling Down Almost Everything; Ah, Yes, It Was a Raisin Bagel
This ‘user generated content’ has value to its author and the community that reads it. This is a key outcome of open, collaborative and connected learning, where the blogger is a ‘produser’.
Efimova, Lilia (2008) Bloggers and ‘produsers’
Having blogged consistently since this period it is interesting to understand that as it encroached upon student and academic practice, as it was impinging on journalism, that it was considered disruptive.
Fiedler, S. (2004) Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal Webpublishing and Weblogs, Part I
While my passion felt like a niche practice it has been of value to see blogging recognised.
Kaiser, S. (2007) Weblog-technology as a trigger to elicit passion for knowledge
Why MAODE students blog (Kerewella et al, 2009) depends on their perceptions of, and for:
- an audience
- community
- the utility of and need for comments
- presentational style of the blog content
- overarching factors related to the technological context
- the pedagogical context of the course
Kerawalla, L, Minocha, S, Kirkup, G, & Conole, G (2009) An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education
Knowing the practice to be of value personally as part of a number of specialist groups made research on blogs as wikis, Sauer (2005) or as e-portfolios of interest.
Sauer, Igor M. (2005) “ Blogs” and“ Wikis” Are Valuable Software Tools for Communication Within Research Groups
As Smolkin (2007) points out it is about creating or finding and then sharing your niche – in this case the niche being personal stories of participants, witnesses and combatants in the First World War.
Smolkin, Rachel (2007) Finding a Niche. (cover story)
This is a key outcome of open, collaborative and connected learning, where the blogger is a ‘produser’. Efimova (2008) It has taken over a decade, but blogging is now considered to be a valid, scholarly activity. Weller (2012).
Weller, Martin (2012) The virtues of blogging as scholarly activity
Bishop, D. (2013) ‘Blogging as post-publication peer review: reasonable or unfair?’ LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog. 21 March.
Available at:http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/
impactofsocialsciences/ 2013/ 04/ 15/ blogging-as-post-publication-peer-review-reasonable-or-unfair/
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.
eBooks vs. Textbooks
Ones to watch:
- Amazon
- Pearson
- Academic publishers
- Writers
- Educators
- University Faculties
- Schools
- Research in and of faculties.
- Initiatives to give eReaders preloaded with course books to students.
- Proactive use of eReaders by learners, say junior doctors.
- Research in schools. Related research on mobile learning.
- Drivers include cost savings.
The purchase of books and their distribution is expensive compared to digital versions that are easily uploaded and include a multitude of affordances:
- highlighting,
- book marking,
- annotating,
- sharing,
- searching …
Whilst digital versions of millions of books, journals and papers increase access and scope of reading, developers are producing new interactive, multimedia formats even blending eBooks into the learning process with assessment and student analysis through quizzes and games.
A student can find rapidly from vast sources the material they need to see, though distraction is an issue. They can fast track through ‘reading’, branch out or study something else in parallel.
Has this been cornered by Martin Weller?
The Institute of Educational
Technology at the OU is a leader.
Ones to watch:
- Paul Anderson
- Graine Conole
- Tim O’Reilly
- Eileen Scanlon
- John Seely Brown
- George Siemens
- Clay Shirky
- Rhona Sharpe
- Lave
- Wenger
- M Wesch
- Victor
- Mayer-Schonberg
- Adam Greenfield
- Brian Kelly
- Stephen Heppel
Ones to follow:
- Martin Weller
- Helen Beetham
- Rhona Sharpe
- Allison Littlejohn
- Chris Pegler
- Sara De Frietas
Open Access: Guardian Higher Education Network
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
Digital Scholarship
I’ll reflect on and absorb the H818 academic stuff in due course – somewhere in the reading a couple of authors were mentioned so while the pressure is low I’ve been reading Lawrence Lessig ‘Remix’ and re-reading, possibly for the third time, Martin Weller’s ‘The Digital Scholar’.
Open Learning is with us.
Whilst more people globally will get a slice of the tertiary education pizza, there will still be those that who are stuck on the edge with the crust while the ‘privileged’ few get the real substance. This applies between ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds, but also locally in an education catchment area – when it comes to the democratization of education through e-learning some are more equal than others through having the kit, access, inclination, support and opportunity.
Speaking with a school friend I’d not spoken to since we were 10 or 11 we got onto those OU broadcasts in the middle of the night, and then the BBC ‘Trade Test Transmissions’ – how else could we possibly know anything about how the stain glass windows were made for Liverpool Cathedral on how animals were rescued during the flooding of the Zambezi? Repetition, rich content and a dearth of anything else to watch. In sharp contrast ‘open’ today, and TV too means everything and anything. How can anything stand out? Because the search engines offer it, because of branding and association, through word of mouth through your social and other networks i.e. as a consequence of the nature of your ‘connectedness’.
The nature of relationships in a connected world
Fig. 1. A mashup with a screengrab from Martin Weller’s book ‘The Digital Scholar’.
This uses an App called Studio from which I may have been expected or to which I am supposed to provide a link. As I screen grab then crop from the App so that I can ‘publish’ the way like now what?
The nature of relationships in a connected world do matter while the difference between face to face and online may be tangential. Whilst I feel I make new acquaintances online, of more interest is how I have been able to pick up very old friendships – even reconnecting with a Frenchman with whom I went on an exchange visit in 1978!
I wonder about the 150 connections given as a figure that can be maintained – this depends very much on the person and their role. Even when I collected people for the joy of it as an undergraduate I doubt I could muster more than 70 I felt I knew something about and could care for, whilst my father in law, a well respected, influential and even loved university tutor has, in his eighties several hundred contacts – former students on whom he had an impact as an educator. So, the person and their role will have more to do with this ‘connectedness’, which comes with a price, My father in law saw/sees himself as an educator who put significantly more time than his contemporaries into the students rather than research.
I’d like therefore to see ‘digital scholarship’ associated with educators not simply for what they publish – collaboratively or otherwise, but by the ‘quality’ and ‘validity’ of the students they mentor, supervise, inspire and motivate – made all the more possible because of the extraordinary tools we now have at our fingertips.
Reference
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar. @4% or Kindle Location 199
Would you know a digital scholar if you met one? Are we there yet?
Martin Weller, in ‘The Digital Scholar’ looks forward to the time when there will be such people – a decade hence. I suggested, in a review of his book in Amazon, that ’10 months’ was more likely given the pace of change, to which he replied that academia was rather slow to change. That was 18 months ago.
Are there any ‘digital scholars’ out there?
How do we spot them? Is there a field guide for such things?
I can think of a few candidates I have come across, people learning entirely online for a myriad of reasons and developing scholarly skills without, or only rarely, using a library, attending a tutorial or lecture, or sitting an exam. But can they ever be considered ‘scholarly’ without such things? They’ll need to collaborate with colleagues and conduct research.
On verra.
Mind Bursts 