The shape of the course of the future? #cck11

The higher education crystal ball is a bit too grubby to see very far at the moment, but online learning practitioner-commentator Stephen Downes has predicted that the future will see accreditation shrink in importance relative to reputation – the contribution you make to your community of interest or community of practice.

Accordingly, the experimental Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Connectivism and Connective Learning (CCK11) Stephen Downes (University of Manitoba) co-facilitates with George Siemens (Athabasca University) runs on the open Web as an event and an educational network of/for people interested in networked learning.

MOOCs are free, open to all, and distributed across the Web independently of any institution. As a MOOC, CCK11 is a course in that it has facilitators, material, participants and a beginning and end. However, participants are not examined, do not complete assignments, and don’t pay unless they want accreditation. They work by networking – connecting with and responding to other participants’ tweets, tags, and posts. The course is distributed in that there is no single path, and no central repository. It is authentic in that participants become part of a network of people with the same interests, networks which can be sustained beyond the course because they exist independently of the course.

More in this introductory video:

This may seem like a radical departure from the business model of most higher education institutions – but wait, from the About This Course section:

“If you would like to receive University of Manitoba certification, it will be necessary in addition to apply for admission and register for the course with the University. Here is program information, here is the program application form, and here is the course registration form.”

So as well as being a MOOC, the CCK11 course is one of six you can take towards a Certificate in Interdisciplinary Studies: Emerging Technologies for Learning (ETL) from the University of Manitoba’s Department of Continuing Education. So if you did register for a qualification, you would get to carry out your studies in a highly authentic environment which, ideally, attracted a community of motivated people with similar interests from all over the (anglophone) world.

So, the learning process is free and open for motivated, savvy learners to make of it what they can or will, but the qualification – the portable seal of approval from independent accreditors, if that’s what you need –  and presumably support to obtain it, is what the institution charges for.

I’ve signed up (which commits me to precisely nothing) and although for me this year is not a good time to do it justice, I will be joining in as best I can (for example I’ll be submitting this post) and looking at certain things in particular – those aspects I’d anticipate would make this MOOC approach distinct from established forms of higher education participation, for example, those. For example, how the filtering of information works in a massified open course without entry tariff, whether the course itself scaffolds sense-making in a distributed environment or whether you need some experience and know-how before you can join (making it more distinctively a higher learning course), and what my role is as learner on a course where – presumably – the facilitation can’t be expected to run to prioritising inclusion for those who have signed up, meaning that success may depend significantly on social-affective aspects of participation. How do you identify success? The identity of institutional higher education is changing – this course promises to help sharpen up what it is, may become, and is ceasing to be and, correspondingly, to test the limits of MOOCs.

I’m expecting interesting contrasts with the more traditional (though no less authentic) online distance learning course on the next version of Moodle, which will run for 4 weeks from February.

(For a discussion of the difference between connectivism and social constructivism as theories of learning, read Stephen Downes’ and this thought-provoking piece by Lindsay Jordan – more from me when I’ve got something sensible to say about it)

Which ICT innovations could be disruptive to current higher education?

One of the things about working in the area of e-learning is that you’re exposed to so many radical innovations that you have to be careful to keep your perspective about the difference between where they are and where we are now (while also, of course, being unendingly enthusiastic about the possibilities).

So when the JISC Observatory posed the follow question:

“We invite you to contribute to a brainstorm on the question: “Which ICT-based innovations are potentially disruptive to current models of higher education (forms of teaching, assessment, course structure, estate, research and research management, student management, etc…)?”

I wondered what the responses would be.

The survey consists of some paragraph responses, followed by some drag and drop questions which get you evaluating other (anonymous) responses. It’s interesting to see what other people thought. The deadline is December 10th 2010, so there’s plenty of time to think about it and respond.

I committed myself to two predictions. The first was to do with the open access movement and I wrote the following:

“It’s probably going to be this that focuses educational policy-makers’ minds on what makes higher learning distinct from the provision of materials and knowledge objects, and stimulates a diversification into the genuinely constructivist approaches to teaching and assessment that are already widespread in creative subjects like Design and Drama. If open access wins out over the current holding patterns of commercial providers, HEIs won’t have to provide materials for students any more – there will already be plenty out there, and in fact offering them on a plate will be denying students an opportunity because I think the HEI educator’s role (coming into sharper focus) will be much more about helping students identify good questions, turn those into objectives, work out what they need to do meet those objectives, find good supporting resources (material, human, infrastructure, etc) and put them into service. Assessment will still be about currency, accuracy, completeness etc, but much more it will be about how students can see clearly, work systematically and hunt out meaning in the glut of information.”

Of course, many educators already work like this – but in the face of opposing pressures such as forms of assessment, fees, some interpretations of the employability agenda, and some students’ expectations. Natalie Dohn (2009) writes about the consequent inertia of higher education institutions and their enduring view of learning as acquisitionist, having an “individualistic, objectivistic view of knowledge and competence” as “an individually possessed object which can be transferred between practices” as if higher learning could be boiled down to skills.

The second prediction was to do with the onlinification of the lecture. I wrote:

“There’s going to be a renewed interest in distance learning which will be mainly to do with the financial impetus to investigate new markets. The sector will begin to deeply understand the difference between technology-enabled distance learning and face-to-face learning, and the strengths and limitations of each. I think one-to-many lectures where students sit together but without interacting, will become rarer and rarer, limited to presenters who are both eminent in their area and also phenomenal live educators that way. Lecturing as we know it – where students sit silently listening to a academic at the front, without interacting together – will start to seem like a missed opportunity. I think what will happen is that students will be required to watch and listen to anything that can be transmitted in advance of the contact sessions, and it will only be carrying out these weekly tasks which enables them to fully participate in their course. Students will be required to work hard in every session, and they will be interdependent on each other. Face to face students in some disciplines will be joined by students connecting at a distance, and there will be a heightened appreciation of the role of togetherness in learning, which will begin to be educationally designed for. I worry that this will lead to segregation, by income, into face-to-face students who can pay for more opportunities to interact in person, and distance learning students who will have less interaction.”

I could have also mentioned freely available online communication and authoring tools (including multimedia editing and mashup tools) which will allow for different forms of assessment, and help to place more emphasis on process of authoring rather than just the finished product.

I ran out of steam for the next written answer questions, but then arrived at an interesting drag and drop question where you decide where to position others’ responses in relation to an epicentre of impact. Other people had mentioned open access and open data, and then there were mobile technologies and cloud computing, but the responses I positioned closest to the centre were the things whose use would prevent us from reproducing what we are already doing, or which I thought might dramatically catalyse existing social phenomena. I was bamboozled by the idea of brain enhancement. Sounds too expensive to be disruptive any time soon.

For a mixture of futurology and here-and-now see also this year’s Edge World Question Center’s annual question: how is the internet changing the way you think?

I’ll post the findings here once they’re published.

~~~

Dohn, N.B., 2009. Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(3), 343-363.

How experienced are you with social networking online?

(Unless you are one of my workshop participants on 12th or 13th, you can ignore this…)
By ‘social networking online’ I mean active participation in any of the following: Facebook, Twitter, blogging, commenting, posting photographs, collaborative document editing, shared or collaborative libraries of references.

Brian Kelly: 5,000 tweets on

Brian Kelly (Community and Outreach Team Leader at UKOLN, the University of Bath) has a post on his blog reviewing his use of Twitter. In it he summarises how Twitter has contributed to funding bids, participation at a distance, promoting and amplifying his own and others’ work, peer-reviewing draft work and, perhaps most importantly, his professional grapevine.

As you can gather from the tag cloud illustration in his post, Brian Kelly is a professional online networker. As such, he is drawn to Twitter as Twitter, examines its potential purposefully, tweets and blogs about being online, and has a community of practice with similar interests. Of all the academic disciplines, you would expect people in disciplines like Brian’s to be the pioneers – and I’ve learnt a great deal from Brian so I’m glad he is. What his experience illustrates, though, is that Twitter becomes an attractive proposition for academics who have people they want to hear from, or communicate with, there. For many disciplines, Twitter is still a bit empty.

I think what that suggests in turn is that, in academic disciplines without an academic interest in online networking Twitter will have to broaden through multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary channels, or through an individual’s non-professional tweeting identity fusing with their professional identity (as can easily happen on social networks – although various studies of online networking for learning e.g. Great Expectations indicate that learning in social environments tends to be haphazard). This broadening will probably go unnoticed until it is picked up by established organs like journals or disciplinary conferences, after which I think it will probably take flight.

So (for the very small proportion of my working time I have to dedicate to such things) I continue to wonder, what would pique interest for an academic who is intrepid with technologies but whose community of practice isn’t on Twitter?

Connecting learning and making

Missed this short, thought-provoking film by David Gauntlett of theory.org, from back in January.

(I’m not sure I accept – if I understand the argument correctly – that the professionalism and specialism embodied by television, and by implication radio and film, belong in the trough of human creativity merely because they oblige ordinary people to adopt the role of an audience. Audiences are only lethargic if the programme is bad. On the other hand, good programmes foment ideas.)

Presentation on learning and Web 2.0 for the IDEA Exchange

We were invited to present at the 2009 IDEA Exchange (IDEA stands for International Debate Education Association), a Goldsmiths-hosted conference on social media.

The presentation (Goldsmiths, Learning, Teaching and Web 2.0) is on SlideShare.

eLearning 2.0 – a conference at Brunel, 6-7 July 2009

There was a huge amount of interest to see and hear at this convivial, well-organised, and generous conference. Below I (in this order)

• list some specific things (stuff I highlighted in my notes at the time)
  
• dump the typed notes I took (can’t guarantee that they are complete or accurate, although I tried) and the mostly-unasked questions which occurred to me. Perhaps this will encourage the odd reader to visit the conference web site and download the audio and/or slides from the presentations.
  
• summarise some general thoughts the conference threw up on the implications for teachers, learners and institutions, and some issues with identity management. Mostly issues and questions, but I will try to post some ideas at a later date.
  

The conference web site, incidentally, is an online community using the free service Ning; at time of writing participants are on there talking to each other and feeding back.

Specific and unrelated things

Next comes the small practical I excerpted from my notes to do or to pass on to various people where I work. The notes are below that.

• There is a discrepancy between what staff think students do with feedback (i.e. little or nothing) and what students say they do with feedback (i.e. pore over it and incorporate it into their work).
• What to call things. Students prefer the word ‘learning journal’ to blog. They also prefer ‘collaborative workspace’ or ‘project space’ or ‘research community’ rather than ‘wiki’. Not only is this a preference – using these terms reduces requests for technical support. Students were much more likely to attend ‘review sessions’ than ‘office hours’
  
• US Educational Opportunity Act 2008 requires demonstration that the student taking the distance assessment is actually the student getting the credit. Every student must be validated.
• A politely tech-skeptical artist-in-residence at the V&A Museum became a reluctant blogger (at their request), excited enormous interest in her work, and managed to get herself on the A Level syllabus and attract 600 uploads to her Global Beach (or is it ‘Wild Beach’) project.
• In early 2008 blog usage declined, but Twitter came and people began blogging again.
• Careerbuilder.com
• Look out for Andrew Middleton’s A Word in your Ear’ conference on audio feedback – how is the digital voice used to support students particularly in terms of feedback.
• Read David H Jonassen’s book Meaningful Learning With Technology
• Web conferencing – dimdim.com – free vid conferencing, you can record, and there is also the opportunity to dial in. Brought into Moodle and everything else with dimdim’s widgets. Posted everywhere to remind students that the meeting was imminent or ongoing. Can download recording and transcript from chat.
• Reminding me why we work with enthusiasts: Everett Rogers’ theory of innovation and dissemination – you work with the enthusiasts, the innovators, first because they are resilient about wrinkles and pitfalls. The early adopters can recognise a good thing once it has been refined and honed – once they have seen proof of concept.
• Paul and Elder’s (2008) work on cultivating thinking – “much of our thinking is biased, distorted, uninformed or down-right prejudiced when left to itself.“ You have to systematically cultivate your thinking.
• Sound decision-making – the Exploratree at future lab. Wow – a repository of thinking guides.
• Www.gapminder.org – “Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.”
• The Teaching and Learning Strategy at Manchester mentions inspiring both learner and teacher. Goals are for highly employable students and students who are prized in research.
• On Web 2.0, read Ullrich 2008 and revisit Franklin and Van Harmelen, 2007.
• Read Michael Eraut on informal learning.
• FlightPaths, the collaboratively-authored novel
• Andrew Middleton on choosing a digital audio recorder – Creative Zen £40. M-audio can sample noises for music. You can put it in your pockets. Costs £200.
• Go and mine John Connell’s presentation for theorists to read
  

My notes

Keynote – Good eLearning and Bad eLearning – John Connell

Blogged the question solicited responses. Pretending ‘e’ doesn’t exist – to reassure. Joe Nutt (cynic, Shakespearian) drop the ‘e’, learning not as a participle, not as a process, but as a goal. Martin Weller @ OU: drop the ‘e’ and the ‘learning’ and the question is still the same (telling good from bad); draw up an archetype.

So, back to first principles, identify an archetype.

Bad e-learning – creepy treehouse syndrome – Chris Lott’s definition, followed by Jared Stein. A mimicking, luring, but actually repressive and repulsive environment; infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups. Objections to influence of the institution. You can’t build a community, you can only grow one.

A VLE?

GLOW – SSDN – a broadband netwk to link schools in Scotland. Browser-based national intranet. Boundary-busting. At first, teachers wanted content. So they got a VLE, as a sop to pull them in. Nobody said they wanted to collaborate, but they got collaborative tools anyway, and they have proved most useful. GLOW groups; esp video conferencing.

First principles – the purpose of learning. Ivan Illich’s (‘De-Schooling Society’ and ‘Tools for Conviviality’) vision on empowering, peer, lifelong, challenging learning; learning webs (then with cassettes, now come of age). James Ralph Darling’s ‘The Education of a Civilized Man’, education which avoids the production of ‘instructed barbarians’.

First principles – intelligence. Gilbert Harcrow. Intelligence as literacy, imagination, creativity.

First principles – conviviality. Illich’s notion of autonomous and creative intercourse; individ freedom realised in personal interdependence. The transformation of learning to education – having your learning planned by others – paralyses ability to endow world with personal meaning.

First principles – pedagogy. Jerome Bruner’s necessity of being self-consciously cultural, ideological and political. Freire’s desire for a critical focus.

Pundits’ principles. George Siemens. Diversity of opinions. The capacity to know more in more critical than what is currently known (learning as a process or a skill, or ability). Nurturing (aha! Is this a role for a teacher?). Polsani’s displacement of learning outside the institution and onto the network; education as preparedness for change.

The non-neutrality of technological instruments. Educ and tech has often been about maintaining status quo, render people passive, rather than to affirm transformation.

Web 2.0 is a shifting context. Individual production, epic amounts of data; crowd power ; complex participation; network effects; openness (Paul Anderson’s JISC report what is Web 2.0)

Great segmented oval – present to workshop participants blank.

Jay Cross’ learnscape. New network values. Unlearning of secrecy, control, role clarity, specialisation, hoarding, walling off. Speed.

Stuart Brown video. Serious criminals missed play in their early lives. Derek Robertson’s Scottish Centre for Games and Learning – Consolarium. Nintendogs as a great motivator for learning arithmetic – young kids who should be counted up to 20 understanding hundreds of thousands.

Institutional v. networked learning. Students are the biggest competition to institutions; doing it for themselves. “This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority”. A gradual, reluctant decline.

My questions

This is post-colonial, broadly. The teacher has disappeared. But this is a very empowering presentation for anybody in a learning role. It also has ambitions for society.

He missed out the cognitive psychology – how easy is it for us to learn to unlearn? What about Susan Greenfield’s worries?

Why the resistance and suspicion?

How would he have changed the paradigm of his keynote speech today.

Being illiterate in any medium leaves one at the mercy of those who control it (Joe Nutt?)

Questions –

Q – access to inforamtion was limited today there is no need to go to the library for information teacher no longer the fount of all knowledge. The job of a teacher should be harder today than it was back then. (Didn’t answer the question – clearly there is a difference between the rhetoric and the reality – he attributes this to the conservative impulses of our institutions and the slowness of change).

Q – the cynic’s problem with learning as process rather than goals – false dichotomy. There is no end to knowledge; you need a sense of where you are going. Process of maturation, depends on prior knowledge, judgement.

Q – desire to learn: how can this be developed?

Q – isn’t there something very different we can do now with the tools we have which requires new pedagogies. We must no drop the ‘e’ or we will drop the challenge. JC: it can be a form of cowardice (I’d love to see the response of academics in my institution to a comment like that).

Q – how can training prepare people for surprises and pitfalls?

Verity Aitkin (Keele) – blogging

Need for a faculty provision to become more visible

The blog grew and the bloggers emerged after early writers block; humsslearningspace.blogger

A blog is like a house, because it can home an entire provision; ability to brand. It sits outside the VLE.

Feedback – Google analytics account. Felt it important to take it out of Google search. Student feedback has been positive.

New features eg Digital Study Tool of the Month.

Questions

Q – did the institutions have concerns about security, PR etc?

My questions

Comments?

What are the stats like?

How much time do you spend? Do you confer with colleagues? Is it acknowledged as part of your working day?

How have you surfaced it?

Did anybody from e.g. IT Services query the use of blogger?

How did they manage the folksonomy of blogging together?

What was positive about the positive feedback?

Making assessment count – integrating Web 2.0 to support student assessment and reflection

Not Gunter Saunders, Uni of Westminster

JISC project with origins in bio-sciences Year 1 level 4.

Easy to get lost in gadgetry. Need to return to first principles.

The degree is compartmentalised. The ideal is that all tutors know what each other is doing and can integrate. Silo behaviour.

What holds a degree together? Motivation to learn. Supportive staff. Feedback, supposed to hold degree together, but actually equally compartmentalised. Personal tutoring.

Personal tutoring depends on reflection on assessment and feedback.

Discrepancies between what staff think students do with feedback and what students say they do with feedback.

E-reflect project – JISC.

Theory: Feedback to strategy to action to reflection.

Model: tripartite subject, operational and strategic model of feedback. Submit work. Complete a v simple questionnaire (Google). When students get their subject-specific grade they are asked to write a short reflective blog post, for their personal tutor. No extra effort for staff, but a record of feedback and reflection.

Students prefer the word ‘learning journal’ to blog.

Mobile technologies.

Q – examples of strategies for learning

Personal tutor now has a record of student performance.

Q – is it mandatory?

Stick and carrot thing. Pilot achieved 50% response rate.

Q – have the exam marks improved? e.g. FASST project which measured changes in performance. Being able to plot performance in relation to engagement.

My questions

Anticipate any barriers to rolling it out into say the humanities and arts?

Blended approach is where technology is most valued.

How will knowing yourself help you to choose a good course or a good institution when institutions are trying to get as many enrolments as possible?

Isn’t part of learning learning to fit in with the styles, personalities and intelligences of others?

Keep it simple – Milena Bobeva, Bournemouth

Towards i-learning and we-learning.

Including audio-feedback and podcasting.

Blogging – depended on carrots – optional blogging didn’t work.

Howard Gardner’s dominant intelligences. Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles. Myers’ Briggs Personality Tests

Hole in the wall project demonstrated that motivation is a powerful factor in un-taught learning.

Savin Baden’s framework of 3 learning stances: personal; pedagogical; interactional.

E-learning stakeholders

Again, replace wiki with ‘project space or research community or project portfolio and blog with reflective diary or project diary – then requests for support go down drastically.

Politics around facebook and the institutional VLE.

Q How much do your undergrads exhibiting the Gen Y characteristics. A: they’re always connected – MB spent 12 hours with them in the labs.

Q re Gen Y and employment. The answer acquiesces to a very technologically-driven future.

Q – maybe a museum should be more like a website.

My questions

May have switched off, but not sure how Milena used the Web 2.0 tools.

Why not Google for university resources?

If students are leaving blogging late, then is it feasible to ask for drafts. Just like asking for drafts helps prevent last-minute panic plagiarism

MB puts her finger on it at the end. How do we move from I learning to We Learning? Well, particularly if you are caught up in your own learning styles, own intelligences, own personality. This is the old question about valuing and nurturing individuals within learning or practice communities. It is also a question of valuing and revisioning the concept of accommodation in highly individualistic times.

Afshin Mansour (Brunel) on impact of blogs on student learning

Project as part of PG Cert.

15 Operations Managements Pgs.

Examining effectiveness of blog as additional contact hour in place of face-to-face seminars.

AM’s blogs as more of a notebook.

Learning styles – AM chose Fleming’s 2001 VARK model. Classifies visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinaesthetic learners

One hour slot a week for AM to interact with students (i.e. Not anytime, but the opportunity for instant feedback from everybody). Interesting notion of blogging at the same time and commenting in a given time slot.

Then he interviewed and conducted a VARK questionnaire.

First blogs were poorly received but activity and commenting grew.

The more participants, the greater the perceived advantage of participating.

Barriers – time, typing, language, technical hitches.

Mild aural learning prefence (radar diagram) for students who participated in sessions. They wanted to interact a lot. (?) But no patterns among the rest. He induced the hypothesis that the strong presence of kinaesthetic element in the non-participants compared to the weak in the participants suggested that the participants hoped to learn what they needed to learn from blogs.

My questions

Another contradiction emerging in the day. To what extent should institutions – as places which encourage unlearning, and learning how to change – be accommodating of individual learning approaches? Isn’t this quite conservative?

Were there any media in the blogs?

How much activity took place outside the hour?

Yair Levy – effectiveness 2.0 or security breach 2.0

User satisfaction measures don’t measure what is valuable for the learner.

Satisfaction post-experience does not equal effectiveness.

Efficiency trying to do things with less v. effectiveness trying to do things right.

Missing a theoretical piece called ‘value’ – level of importances users attribute to a given aspect of the experience, or to the ‘system’. (This is, unsurprisingly, a very systems-oriented event.

Effectiveness as a multiplication of value * satisfaction.

Quadrant – what if there’s high satisfaction but low value? Useful to see what is unimportant AND unsatisfactory – then an institution can stop investing in it. You learn a lot about where you can improve.

Learners’ Value Index of Satisfaction.

Moving onto Learning 2.0.

Security worries with Facebook and other Web 2.0.

US Educational Opportunity Act 2008 requires demonstration that the student taking the distance assessment is actually the student getting the credit. Every student must be validated.

Http://CeLSR.nova.edu Centre for e-Learning Security Research.

Some other US institutions are doing biometric validation for all assessments.

Lastly, we are comparing e-learning to an existing benchmark – trad learning, where any student can take an exam, and we don’t place such high demands on accuracy and efficiency.

Q – but don’t you know your student?

Not really – one time somebody’s cousin took the exam. The video is one-way.

Q – what about the valuing of the social interaction aspect?

Q – what about difference in perception of value?

My questions

What about time?

What about controversial areas – differences in perceived importance.

How did he arrive at the curves?

How does one frame a question about value?

Trevor Barker Group Working in 3D worlds

Second Life campus of >500 students. £500k investment from university.

Usability issues; different disadvantages.

More help students received to perform tasks, the less they remembered things about the world. More usability equals more constraints.

Set up a project, threw everything at setting up a course in second life, for computing students. Even so, it took a lot of students.

Attendance in Second Life isn’t great.

Built something in Second Life allowing the tutor to analyse the attention, action and interaction of the virtual students.

Names in Second Life are a problem.

Student evaluation: nobody liked the virtual lectures – preferred Trevor in real life. Also hard on the lecturer. Group meetings were well received cf phone or Skype, but f2f preferred. Some were still using it socially after the course.

Tutor evaluation – robustness; usability; question marks about pedagogical benefit (some evidence of benefit in small group work); training necessary; freedom.

Second Life is not accessible.

Natalie Ticheler (London Met) Using a VLE for Blended Learning

Open Language Programme; Japanese students; how are they using a VLE and what do they think?

Divided cohort by sex. Low uptake. Higher uptake of flashcards.

Simon Tindall – Desire To Learn – VLE replacement, complement or shouldn’t be used at all?

VLE supplier’s thoughts on the Web 2.0 turn.

A scale from No Web 2.0 to Only Web 2.0 (i.e. No VLE).

Security, data protection of record of achievement, respect, longevity.

With which tools should a VLE choose to integrate? This is the same question as an institution has.

My questions

Open ID?

Gail Durbin V&A – Web 2 as task not technology

A politely tech-skeptical artist-in-residence reluctant blogger managed to get herself on the A Level syllabus and attract 600 uploads to her Global Beach (or is it ‘Wild Beach’) project (Drupal).

You have to phrase the instructions carefully.

People want to be part of the site.

V&A’s knitting collection, with work and patterns. Using technorati they found out who was using the patterns.

Invited people to submit non-garment knitting.

Anxiety about “dumbing down” and poor quality at the museum.

Another project on body art with the arrival of 1500 to be photographed by photographers who are more used to static art. Tattoo is a very common search term.

Christine Keeler’s chair, and visitors sitting in the replica.

Extending the museum experience.

1960s fashion show.

Sometimes set projects on Flickr.

1 million objects online in Sep when the collections information system goes live.

Twitter.com/gail_durbin. g.durbin@vam.ac.uk

Reynol Junco – Translating social media research into academically relevant practicies

rey.junco@gmail.com

will post references and slides.

Student use stats; adoption by faculty; digital divide; positive fx; academically-relevant usage of technology based on research (there isn’t much)

Student tech uses

Pew phone survey

Students use things more than people in other generations. Focus on Twitter and Facebook.

When you categorise, you miss a lot – there is more diversity within groups – but:

Silent generation -1925-42 – events wars, New Deal, Depression

Baby boomers – 43-60 – competitive, individualistic. Reagan recession, Vietnam, Watergate

Gen X – 61 – 81 – latchkey kids, working parents – skeptical, nihilistic – grunge

Millenials, Gen Y 2000-now– special, sheltered, confident, optimistic – Oklohoma and 9/11, and Obama election

Same Pew patterns of social networking use in general and Twitter specifically.

Typically older generations are not as likely to take up newer technologies.

Nielsen March 09 report

Global reach of social networking sites is bigger than email.

Facebook audience becoming older since 2007.

Digital divide

Not all students are fantastic with technology.

Reynol’s reseearch.

Less likely to own mob phone: African American poorer men. More likely to talk on cell phones: African American men and Latino/Hispanic men. African American wealthier men spent more time texting.

Multitasking (IM and study at same time) and women and Latinos more likely to report that multitasking had a negative effect on academic work.

Facebook penetration on college campuses – 99% of U of Michigan students in 2008. Twitter’s change is over 1200% in a year, although use is relatively low.

Blogs and microblogs

In early 2008 blog usage declined, but Twitter came and people began blogging again.

Blog use in classroom.

Engagement and retention: Aston’s (?) work on student engagement – the more involved, the more successful. What are the variables? National Survey of Student Engagement (quasi commercial survey) in and outside class. Research on Facebook and student engagement. Higher Ed Research Institution (2007) and Heiberger (2008) correlation studies, survey based, looking at undifferentiated Fb use, high and low users. High users were more engaged on campus on some engagement variables – eg connections to the institution, friends, extracurricular organisations.

Attitudes – social networking is private, but low awareness of privacy statements.

Somebody called people stupid for not creating a second profile. It’s not stupid, it’s unaware and trusting, and normal.

Careerbuilder.com (2008)

22% of hiring managers used social netowrking websites to search. 33% reported finding information to disqualify an employee.

Research-based strategies.

Pre-enrolment orientation efforts; learning about faculties and staff. Values of the institution. Connections with graduates. Mazer, Murphy and Simonds (2007) research on Facebook – yes students do like to learn about a professor’s personality. But will faculty spy on them?

Facebook apps

Courses 2.0 – students can connect to course you post without having to be your friend. You can post assignments, a book, syllabus, schedule, in advance. You can share notes, connect with other students.

Twitter and student engagement

Good for connecting outliers to the campus. No research on the effects of Twitter but Reynol is going to start experimental research in the autumn to see if Twitter has an effect on grades.

My questions

Addiction to social networking?

Does this kind of engagement translate to academic success, or has the soft skills agenda eclipsed this.

Identity management is hugely important.

Maureen Kendal, London Met, Feed forward, feedback, going global (podcasting and second life)

The aim of Maureen’s course is to acquaint students with technical and complex vocabulary.

Podcasting for feedback. Making assessment formative i.e. Feeding forward; staff able to capture video files with capture software, compress and upload for students. Timely, in-depth, private. Simple, no editing – or no time to edit, post-production – needs to be timely.

The question is how to make these unedited sessions work.

Two tutors and four students, captured, discussing the needs.

London Met pod generator. Considerations included firewalls (security and privacy) and integration with the VLE (here, Blackboard) e.g. Vanderbilt and iTunes U.

Hidden costs: equipment – is mobile phone video good enough? (Maybe)

RADSE framework is used for the teaching of design and development. Creative, technical, business and production issues (CTBP).

Findings (findings from what – I must have missed it):

• screen caputre is best with other forms of feedback
• humour, wit and spontaneity is valued
• logic, reasoning and imaginative thinking comes through

Business strategy

Weighing up iTunes U with institutional software. Fears about enabling an unstable capitalist system, but London Met probably will use it – it is free and there are good protections.

Student engagement

Critique of podcast education. Are they disposable or dispensable?

Maureen has developed a scaffolding model.

Andrew Middleton (Sheffield Hallam) educational podcasting, a learner-centred, collaborative opportunity

Snr Lecturer in Creative Development – teaches disruptive technology in Journalism; interested in using digital audio. Book: Creative Voices. Organising ‘A Word in your Ear’ conference on audio feedback – how is the digital voice used to support students particularly in terms of feedback.

Yes, emphatically, we should drop the ‘e’. The ‘e’ is useful to an extent but our focus is how we can innovate with new and emerging tech,

McLuhan and Fiore 67, when faced with a totally new sit we tend to always attach ourselves to the flavor of the most recent past.

What can we usefully do now that we couldn’t before.

Jonassen et al 03. intentional, authentic, collaborative: effective tech-enhanced apps. i.e. Meaningful.

Historically, audio has been very much about transmission. A-learning (audio learning) is more active than passive. Some comparisons between Web 2.0 and a-learning 2.0.

We don’t need hi-tech and expert intervention. Welcome and celebrate the lo-fi with a simple red button. Rich user experience – meaningful, diverse, social and wide-reaching.

Read the Jonassen book.

With his large cohort of 230 broadcast journalism students, they made conversational summaries, captured seminar discussion groups, expert voices, feedback, cognitive challenges.

Activity – we each asked the person on our left a question from a sheet, passing round the m-audio microtrack recordings.

Distance learning – MyChingo, embedded in the VLE. VoiceThread too.

My Questions

Reckon I missed something, but if the aims of the course was just vocabulary, couldn’t assessment and feedback have been automated?

You couldn’t use iTunes U for individual feedback (could you)? Can you fine grain the access settings to an individual level like that?

Podcasts do not “offer a superficial understanding”. Like lectures they demand that you listen with questions. Unlike lectures, they give their audience time to develop these questions.

Begona Perez Mira Sychronous and asynchronous tools for online course delivery (business stats course, Louisiana state)

Video lectures – 3 parts

Recorded teacher in the classroom – real classrooms

Get her slides and annotated on tablet.

So, audio, slides and video, integrated with Camtasia studio recorder.

If you have good technical people, Moodle is highly customisable.

Aplia for external homework – pool of assignments, ungraded or graded,

Web conferencing – dimdim.com – free vid conferencing, you can record, and there is also the opportunity to dial in. Brought into Moodle and everything else with dimdim’s widgets. Posted everywhere to remind students that the meeting was imminent or ongoing. Can download recording and transcript from chat.

Called ‘office hours’ ‘review sessions’ and students were much more likely to attend.

Instructors used audio+video, remote students used just audio feed. (ie one-way audio).

Louisiana offered multiple ways of learning – a wide range for them to select from. Begona was not very interested in who was using the video, who the audio.

Lessons learnt: get a smart-phone – you can be available for your distance learning students anywhere.

My Questions

Begona is fortunate her institution did not oblige her to produce stats that the video was valued by students. I asked this – turns out the students used to be campused based, and the institution is delighted that Begona has managed to cut costs – no electricity used on campus. The only cost is Begona’s salary.

Is it sustainable? (I am not sure it is).

What happens if the start-up company providing the free service fails? Begona is confident that there will be a replacement. This is interesting, and in some ways true to the principle that it is not the technology that matters, but the teacher’s commitment to the process

Heather Serdar – University of East London – audio podcasting as a supplement to lectures

Heather teaches a double credit core module, the UG dissertation module.

Rationale – non-trad students. Expectations of students. Students don’t like to read.

My Questions

Tangential, but shouldn’t an institution with students who object to reading, foster that kind of literacy? Reading is so important for avoid disempowerment and exclusion.

Roger Boston, Houston, M-Learning

They give away iPhone 3G but the students didn’t know in advance. They were extremely happy, and they received them during the session and got to know each other well through exploring them.

Then the next generation iPod Touch.

Chancellors innovation grant.

Smart phones – no point thinking of them as disruptive presence. Harness them.

Asked students to gather anecdotal data of feasibility of building the smartphones into institutional provision.

Pilot picked up a further $100k for extension. Roger had to provide server and delivery platform. His team had a lot of technical work for converting media, doing password protection schemes.

They ended up preloading devices.

They have created a platform which accommodates over 100 different phones. Software figures out the device and automatically resizes the pages, panels etc.

My Questions

What about contextualised annotation? You still need pencil and paper because data entry in iPod Touch is so poor. Doesn’t this interfere with students interacting with their materials? Roger says you can type 40 wpm. I guess you still have a laptop? And this is mostly about learning objective facts in the physical and biological sciences.

Keynote – Marylin Leask, Education Faculty @ Brunel – Knowledge Management for the public sector

Staff expected to demonstrate that they were managing the knowledge of the organisation.

So, tools are needed and created. Cochrane. Best Evidence Medical Education. Map of Medicine subscription service – funnels doctors to the level of information they need via a flow chart approach.

Web 2 environments are not secure. It would not be appropriate for professionals to contribute to a local government site (why?)

Local government – 700+ services: streetlights, roadkill, refuse, community cohesion, care, gypsy and traveller issues. They all have communities.

14% staff turnover (retention issue = knowledge retention issue). Sharing and repurposing saves time by avoiding wheel reinvention.

CoPs – as well as the obvious they wanted to address recruitment and retention. People-finding. Boundary-busting connections. New and cheap forms of consultation.

The CoP web 2 site communities.idea.gov.uk – you can’t just barge in. It would be “like going into somebody’s house without knocking” (c.f. John Connell’s vision of transparency). Communities have gatekeepers. But they are immensely useful to researchers, and any of us can apply to go in. Policy and Performance community are open to all.

Everett Rogers’ theory of innovation and dissemination – you work with the enthusiasts, the innovators, first because they are resilient about wrinkles and pitfalls. The early adopters can recognise a good thing once it has been refined and honed – once they have seen proof of concept.

Some people don’t like sharing. We are not all the same.

Linking tools with staff jobs and priorities. Behaviours. Concerns.

Second presenter – Roberta

Roberta tells of brutal cuts in her institution. Faculty were asked to teach a class with no pay.

Paul and Elder’s (2008) work on cultivating thinking – “much of our thinking is biased, distorted, uninformed or down-right prejudiced when left to itself.“ You have to systematically cultivate your thinking.

Third presenter, the bloke.

Web 2.0 coined in 99 by Darcy DiNucci. Tim Berners Lee called it jargon.

The jargon omits that everything is speeding up exponentially, and that there is mitotic splitting up and reconstitution. Autopoiesis – self-creation – joining and leaving groups until a fit is found. Synergistic components – whole bigger than sum of parts.

Across the board needs: ubiquitous support i.e. With a social component.

Sound decision-making – the exploratree at future lab. He uses it with his undergrads.

VUCA world – volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous.

Simple tools for tame problems – well-defined, classifiable, stable, you know when the solution is reached, a right or wrong solution

Wicked problem. Not the above. Non-linear.

Www.gapminder.org

My Questions

This is one for Matt.

Rare and welcome values-based second presentation despite the slightly bizarre Elluminate setup with slides operated from the US. Then a connection was formed, but the bloke was basically blind and deaf to us. He did very well. The pace was good, but almost no examples; just disembodied theory.

Susan Brown – perceptions of Web 2.0 among academics at the university of Mcr

U of Mcr is good on research but poor on satisfaction with the learning process.

The Teaching and Learning Strategy at Manchester mentions inspiring both learner and teacher. Goals are for highly employable students and students who are prized in research.

The strategy implies a big role for Web 2.0. But nobody uses the Confluence embedded in Blackboard (we have similar issues with Confluence).

Research study to explore perceptions of the potential of Web 2 among staff.

Questionnaire to identify familiarity and extent of use of web 2 across faculties. In retrospect it might have been better to use Web 2 tools themselves to canvas opinion, but then again, it wasn’t clear whether staff would or could engage this way.

There is individual use, but little discussion. Most of the intiatives relate to Blackboard.

No real sense among academics that students are or will or should influence the way they work.

Interviews of those with negative and positive perceptions of web 2

Read Ullrich 2008 on Web 2 and revisit Franklin and Van Harmelen, 2007.

Susan’s research – interview responses often boiled down to Not Appropriate and No Added Value. e.g. No connection made between apprehension of facts as unegotiable objective facts and then what one does with the facts, the creative thinking, the cognitive breakthroughs, the possibilities, the understanding. Where there is an idea of learning as “one answer” then it was sometimes difficult to see the point of discursive, participative environments of Web 2.

Users of Web 2 in research eg the ‘splat technology’ of wikis did not necessarily take these practices to their students.

The positive attitudes to Web 2 were consonant with a view of learning as active student engagement. Inquiry as kernel to what they are doing.

Different ideas of student agency beyond simple posting stuff to fora. What about creating playlists or aggregating feeds.

Questions – Juncol – resistance to the democratisation of knowledge e.g. Wikipedia. Trad encyclopaedias have somebody who is motivated to write it for money. Wikipedia has authors who are motivated for intrinsic reasons. Susan: critical literacies.

My questions

Whose space is being colonised by whom? If we’re going to divide institutional roles up this way then maybe it is also legitimate to ask questions about academic spaces being colonised by student values?

If Web 2 necessitates profound changes, how can we dump the ‘e’, or be unselfconscious about the ‘e’.

Get Susan’s slides and notes.

Bruce Nightingale, Nottingham Trent. Trainee teacher professional voice and identity: social networks in initial teacher training

QTA standards – attributes, kg and understanding, skills. Trainees tend to interpret standards in the context of their school placement. Will your skillset transfer to inner-city Manchester?

Bruce wanted to back off from being thought of as the authority voice. More like the host of a party.

Schools are like a walled garden preventing students from doing the things they do online outside schools. At home it’s like the wild west “anything can happen”, “threat perceptions”. Want to make it “a little bit more of a tamed society”.

The research of Rebecca Einon and others at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Going into class can be emotional, and student teachers often want to comment on their experiences.

He moved from Elgg (read benve(e)rt’s blog) to Ning for sustaining his peer community of practice.

Martin Rich, Cass Business School Blending Web 1 and Web 2

The fictitious town of Millcaster – some attributes. A brewery. Large number of dysfunctional charities. It exists to help develop the people who work in the voluntary and community sector.

Education through dialogue, through stories, through fiction (if your case studies are fictional you can work in the different things you want to illustrate).

e.g. “A laptop goes missing. What systems should be in place and how can you avoid allocating blame?” “Low-level bullying – is a manager being unnecessarily aggressive in attempting to motivate her team?”

3 year project with funding from the Big Lottery Fund.

Website developed by Centre for Charity Effectiveness (at CASS) and Text Matters – a full time team.

Michael Eraut (Sussex?) – work on informal learning.

KnowHowNonProfit

Web 1 – professionallyauthored instructional material. Comments boxes (classified as Web 1 because no new knowledge is being created. They aid building a critical mass.

Web 2 – site functioning as a sharing and creating community.

Content Management System – wanted something they could rapidly prototype in, adapt and experiment with. So, open source – but not to save money. Chose PLONE, but concerns about scalability. Went for agile development. Important to put constraints on reactive changes which can drive out more measured developments or distract from the main purpose.

Stages of involvement in the system: browser to informal learner to activist.

Influences included FlightPaths the novel and The Archers which was originally conceived as an educational service for farmers.

An element of fun can be very valuable.

It was very hard to get these people involved in communities of practice; working together.

My questions

Comments boxes as Web 1? Very surprised. I bookmark comments threads in their own right. The response to this question when I asked it made perfect sense: there wasn’t enough controversy in the comments; they were very assertive (he referred to Action Statement theory? Searle?) and didn’t pick up sufficiently on each other’s contribution to create anything new. It was not really dialogue. Susan Brown commented that it was the difference between “Web 1 and Web 2 discourse”.

General thoughts

Academic teachers have been very concerned that technology can and will replace them. There will certainly be battles about protecting contact time, already whittled away to almost nothing in some disciplines. However, this conference would reassure academics on that count.

Everything I heard over the two days of the conference implies the professionalisation of academic teachers, rather than their extinction. Over the course of the conference I had academic teachers in mind, and what the future was likely to look like for them. Here are some of the academic teaching skills and attributes (and I ignore skills with technology here, because I think these are the most straightforward to acquire) implied by the presentations. They can roughly be summarised as Vygotsky and Bruner’s notion of ‘scaffolding’:

• Excellent subject knowledge, as a requirement to excellent, incisive facilitation. This includes factual knowledge, awareness of and sensitivity to areas of controversy. If visions for learning go beyond student-centred to student-led, tutors will need to identify and highlight gaps, inaccuracies and misapprehensions leading to false premises and errors of reasoning.
• Speed and depth of processing (is that a computing metaphor I catch myself using?) to integrate student submissions and student contributions into an overall impression of a student e.g. Forum posts, twitter contributions – this is a requirement of individualising the feedback to each students. It is also a constraint – how many minutes per student in an academic’s day?
• Excellent knowledge of individual learner needs – how to support a student’s progress from their current performance to achieve the improvements they need to be to succeed or, ideally, surpass themselves. The University of Westminster presentation on its £200k project to individualise feedback to students was the most specific in addressing this.
• A repertoire of teaching approaches beyond the didactic, in larger and smaller group settings. Ability to facilitate students’ identification of their own learning needs, and the discovery of the best questions, problems or tasks to stimulate learning.
• Excellent communication skills. Articulacy, succinctness, diplomacy, tact, sensitivity, faciliation, encouragement. And, wherever there is a presentation, performance skills.
• Quick-wittedness and judgement – new forms of student involvement implies contingent teaching and the ability of the tutor to depart from his or her planned script. Inexperienced tutors will require excellent support.
• Lastly, and not a scaffolding thing – time. If academic teachers are supposed to be formatively assessing progress in different ways – mostly, in this conference, by looking at students’ work online – then tutors need to critically evaluate new amounts of resources students are working with and creating. How will this be possible, given the current time/£ constraints?

• An openness to endemic change while maintaining a sense of identity (their own, their discipline’s) and integrity (values).

In reality, I know a lot of people with these skills and attributes.

At the same time, I found it difficult to balance the pragmatism and the vision in this conference. It is important not to treat a conference as if it were a message, but often I felt there was an over-accommodation of market forces and assumed student characteristics, at the expense (pun intended, I guess) of considering what academic institutions are for – what is the difference between businesses with degree awarding powers and universities? What is the difference between a student and a customer? A university student, and a learner? What is the difference – apart from the degree awarding powers and other forms of accreditation – between what universities do and open courseware initiatives? These considerations were largely absent from the presentations I went to. Totally absent was any consideration about what it means, in times of realisation about the role of consumerism in the environmental, waste and energy crises on the one hand and concerns about consumerism impinging on learning on the other, when we use Web 2.0 tools which are almost exclusively funded by advertising (I went to a presentation by Ed Mayo last night).

The devolution of costs from the institution to students at a US university, by making a formerly face-to-face or blended course into a distance course, was particularly dispiriting – notwithstanding the obvious commitment and resourcefulness of the tutor involved. I found it pretty grim that cash-strapped institutions should suddenly overcome their reservations and not only permit but encourage the uptake of free software from Web 2.0 start-up companies which could become the next casualty of the financial crisis, and devolving responsibility for “the show must go on” onto individual academic course convenors.

If the aim of the university is to be a force for good in society (the critical pedagogies of Freire and – more polemical – Giroux) it was difficult to see this coming out of these mostly pragmatic presentations. John Connell, interspersing a host of Marxist theorists with examples of practice with technologies in the here and now, was one exception. How well the examples live up to the theory is a question for the audience to ask. Another exception was the third speaker of last keynote, a disembodied, nameless academic from the states (interestingly rendered spontaneously blind and deaf to us by the technology and obliged to rely on the assistance of his colleague in the room; accessibility and exclusion insights elude me although I bet there are some).

I have no criticisms about putting forward a vision in the absence of a roadmap but the gap between rhetoric and reality seemed to widen, if anything. And, given the uncontested vision of participation, the irony of sitting there in a large group facing the front, listening to a single speaker standing in front of their visuals, was hard to ignore.

I was also worried about accommodation of students, as if they were customers. There is nothing an academic or an institution can sell a student except perhaps juice and gym membership. Andrew Middleton reminded me about BECTA’s and DEMOS’s work raising big questions about learning styles and learning approaches as valid constructs on which to base pedagogical decisions. I like the University of Leicester’s message: Nobody Said It Was Going To Be Easy. Isn’t one important ‘soft skill’ / life skills agenda the ability of students with – of course – different learning approaches, styles, different personalities to, in turn, cope with different constraints not to mention intellectual discomfort? I also found it hard to fit in what I was hearing about learning styles with other factors such as peer learning (are learners supposed to accommodate each others’ learning styles?), teaching (what about the teacher’s individual style – do we also respect this or do they forfeit it as employees rather than customers?).

This is not to espouse neglect or gratuitous placement of obstacles to learning, but isn’t it a responsibility which lies somewhere within an HE institution to challenge a student? Don’t students agree – isn’t this why they come? At the moment (and I write this as somebody who is supposed to be some kind of herald or envoy of change) it seems as if it’s only tutors who we talk about wreaking change upon – it’s almost as if the students are a force of nature.

Lastly, my heart rolled over at the conversation about online social networking, which was consonant with everything else I’ve been hearing on the subject. I blog and I read an immense amount of ‘user-generated content’ – ideas, entire online arguments, artworks – but must I Facebook under my actual name to be a viable bet for my next employer?  Do we have to wear our lives on our sleeves online, or risk seeming one-dimensional? Is there any room for individuals to be friendly, civil, responsible, cooperative, without demonstrating it in a social network? Can we keep ourselves to ourselves if we want to, or will we discover that we have excluded ourselves because the rules have changed? Disturbed by the idea that I might have to come out behind all my social software aliases, and perform some career-oriented identities. This is not my idea of authentic. I don’t want to use my friends and colleagues as my foil. And what about the personal and professional parts of my digital identity – should I give in to the forces which are pushing them into each other? It reminds me of a commission by the Soviet constructivist artist Rodchenko, a worker’s recreation centre. You could busy yourself in a vast variety of pursuits as long as you weren’t doing them alone. On that slightly melodramatic note I will stop.

Thanks again to Chris Evans and Ray Hackey at Brunel for provoking all these thoughts.

PS My word the vegan food was good. The best I have ever been served at a conference – I nearly wept. Little cocktail sausages impaled between an olive and a sun-dried tomatoes. Home-made mushroom pate in the sandwiches. So many flavours. Things can get very bad for vegans, and my morale tends to dip after lunch at conferences. But Executive Catering kept me buoyant.

Online erotics and university teaching

Parker, J (2009) Academics’ virtual identities. Teaching in Higher Education;14(2):221-224(4).

This short discussion paper moves from the mesmeric force of Socrates, which led to his persecution and eventual execution as an intellectual paedophile, through the svengali-like power-play of some academic teaching, touching on F.R. Leavis and Mamet’s Oleanna. It ends with the dissolution – in the form of the Web 2.0 eroticisation of the academic’s offer of teaching – of this master-disciple model of pupilage in academia:

“… there are two Facebook groups in my friend’s name. One, with 40 worldwide members, declares him to be the greatest historian of the modern era. The other speculates about his sexual proclivities and predilections and contains rival claims about why the student poster is more likely to make it with him than the previous respondent. This doesn’t seem a big deal – the discourse, specifics and tone is that of teenage girls throughout Web 2.0 – as if talking to girlfriends, they speculate and appropriate the sex object whether he is a Hollywood or television star (brought within range or fantasy range at least, to any reader of the London Lite and its ilk). A boy seen and fancied in a club or bar or . . . a lecturer.

But . . . teachers all go into the teaching situations projecting an identity: professional, enthusiastic, caustic, evangelical or whatever. We do not ‘simply’ transmit disciplinary material; we project to and enthuse the next generation; we accept the role of disciplinary representative and trainer/coach/tutor to those who will move into other work and those who we hope to follow in our footsteps. (Some questionnaire-based research projects report that the single most important factor in ‘excellent’ teaching is enthusiasm and charisma.) So, what’s new?

Answer: Web 2.0. As academics, we control our public image via our websites, Research Assessment returns and dustjacket biographies. In previous times, if we were talked about in the student union, pub or campus coffee bar, we were frankly validated. But, RateMyProfessors – which in addition to ‘easiness’, ‘helpfulness’, ‘clarity’ and ‘rater interest’ offers a chilli ‘hot’ symbol – and Facebook offer another identity, promulgated between current but also to future students. (There are now Facebook groups for those expecting to go to university or college the following year: by the time ‘Freshers Week’ comes they will have been in communication and forming a group dynamic for anything up to nine months . . . ) We now have an uncontrolled, de-regulated, continuously commented on and modulated virtual identity.

Does it matter? Perhaps we should be flattered that we are the target of paparazzi-type attention? Students have always gossiped and speculated about their teachers, perhaps in an attempt to reverse the power politics of the teaching situation. Pity those who do not have an adulatory Facebook group started for them by their students . . . .

Yes, it does matter. Every teaching situation is at base an offering of the self, of one’s passions, vitality, engagement with and formation by the discipline’s epistemology and sometimes, importantly, ontology. If nothing vital is on offer, then the students should surely, rather, stay at home and read authoritative public academic documents. Teaching is an offer, and that that offer can publicly and popularly be interpreted as sexual is deeply problematic.”

Mira & Sonja in Oxford

We are at Oxford yesterday & today (excuse the time machine grammar), attending “Shock of the Old” yesterday and “Beyond Walls” today.

We will both report on it in more extended postings, in the meantime, you can “follow” it on twitter, if you are so inclined:

Today’s event, andyesterday‘s. Today is all about podcasting!

How I tag

First of all, what are tags (which some people call ‘labels’, others ‘keywords’)? Here’s an example from the 2007 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project:

“Tagging is the process of creating labels for online content. The mechanics are simple on most tag-centered websites and there is an Appendix to this report that links to some sites that cover more fully the mechanics of tagging. After creating an account on a site like flickr.com you can upload your photos to the site and then apply labels to the pictures that make sense to you – for instance, labeling a photo of a sunset as “sunset.” Once the labels are applied, anyone using Flickr’s search bar who types in “sunset” can find yours among the other pictures that are similarly named. You can also search the site using keywords and when you find photos posted by others that you like enough to want to retrieve later, you can apply your own tags to them. That might mean that you call someone else’s picture “sunset” even though he originally labeled it “clouds.”

Then, from any internet-connected computer you go back to the search box on flickr.com and type in the labels you created and find all the material you have tagged – both yours and the material from others that you have labeled your own way. Thus, typing in “sunset” will yield search results that take you to the pictures you tagged that way.

Not only can tags be personally useful to people who want easier ways to retrieve information that appealed to them, but tags also have a social dimension. Your tags on flickr are added to the millions of other labels on the site and that allows flickr to organize information better for other searchers who use those keywords – making this a classic example of bottom-up building of categories instead of top-down imposition of categories.

Your tags also allow flickr to highlight the most popular listings. These “tag clouds” illustrate the material that was tagged by others and tag sites usually showcase the most popular tags by increasing the font size and boldness of the type as flickr does here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/”

Among many other places, I tag my photos in Flickr, my bookmarks in Diigo and del.icio.us, and stuff I author in WordPress (here) among many other places. I soon realised that despite tagging thousands of pages in Diigo, I still couldn’t go to Diigo and easily find what I needed when I needed it.

This made me realise that my tagging could improve.

Next, here are some tagging considerations – my own – which have emerged from long experience of tagging web resources for personal and professional use.

What are my aims in tagging?

• Sometimes I’m keeping a record of a phenomenon over time
• Sometimes I’m collecting examples of something
• Sometimes I’m collecting ephemera which I won’t need after a certain date
• I always want to find resources again – I need my tags to be sensitive and specific
• Sometimes I want to share my tags, or build a repository of resources with somebody – then I want my tags to be meaningful to more than just me. I want them to be intuitive. In learning technology parlance, this is a collabulary rather than a folksonomy.
• Sometimes I want to generate a quick list of resources (e.g. a reading list) and circulate that.

What I no longer do:

• I never use tags like ‘e-learning’ any more. My entire job is to do with e-learning – that term is not going to help me find anything. Being general, it applies to too much to be useful. It’s a millstone – I have to waste time to use it consistently, but it doesn’t help me narrow down a search. Ditto tags like ‘racism’, ‘work’ or ‘news’ don’t work for people who are researching racism, work or news. They aren’t particular enough.
• I no longer worry that I have ‘too many’ tags, because it started to seem like worrying that I had too many thoughts.

What I do:

• I always tag with the year in which the given resource was created. If the topic is highly time sensitive, I may also tag with the month. This means that I can narrow down my search if I can vaguely remember the date. It also fulfils a historical function – it allows me to follow different phenomena over time.
• I try to tag consistently. I know that if I go searching by tag 6 months down the line, I will hope to myself that my search results are complete.
• I’ve begun to tag with media type, or document type. Again, this helps me narrow down my search to stuff like guidance, briefing, report, video, audio, satire, opinion, cartoon and so on – and any combination of these.
• For opinion pieces I use names in my tags – I tag with the author’s name, or (if it seems important) the names of the people mentioned.
• When tagging, I go with my first associations – assuming that they are the strongest ones.
• I try to anticipate in advance how I might go about finding a given resource in the future – what would it help me with, and what search terms might I use?
• If the web-thing in question has triggered a powerful reaction in me, that’s likely to be memorable. So I might tag with a word like ‘disgusting’ or ‘ludicrous’.
• I sometimes incorporate analysis – tags like ‘utopian’ or ‘libertarian paternalism’
• If I want to generate lists, I will tag with everything I’d usually tag with, but also a tag for that particular list. For example, our new web site (which is currently under development by the Web Team) will link to groups of our del.icio.us bookmarks, rather than hard-coding lists of links which we’d have to keep updated by making repeated requests to the Web Team.
• I have tags to denote web things I most value – one of mine is ‘key argument’, which I use to tag blog posts which have a particularly illuminating conversation in the comments.
• I periodically review my tags (and I have hundreds) to see if I can merge any, or if I’ve duplicated any concepts using different terms.

Basically, my tags are principally for me and/or colleagues. Realising that I cannot confidently anticipate my 6-months-later me, I try to anticipate my future needs and tag so that I can find my stuff again long after I’ve forgotten why I tagged it in the first place, and so that other people can find things too.

We’d really like to hear how you are tagging, and what you have learnt about tagging from experience.