tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19588035124383361502024-03-18T02:48:14.033-07:00HelenB's e-learning blog'it's not about rethinking some part or aspect of learning, it's about rethinking all of learning in this new technical and cultural context'HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-78424064171662164532016-06-26T23:59:00.001-07:002016-06-27T05:48:49.463-07:00Europe, post-truth, and the role of educationI had a blog post written on democracy and the common good, that tried to link the Brexit vote with e-learning and digital citizenship in a positive way. I'll post it soon. But for now, as the real meaning of what has just happened sinks in, I find myself as worried about the quality of the debate we have just had than the actual outcome.<br />
<br />
I'm assuming we can all take for granted now that the referendum was a cynical exercise in Conservative party politics. None of the key players on either wing of that party ever believed Brexit would win, so they used the British electorate as a tool in their political games. (If they'd looked a bit harder at the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/21/brexit-euroscepticism-history">history of referenda</a> they might have been more cautious about the outcome.)<br />
<br />
Their political goals were various: to do down their rivals in their own party, to drag our national debate further to the right, to direct people's anger at 8 years of austerity and wage decline towards immigrants and 'Brussels', and to disempower other parties by forcing them to play second fiddle in a broad front coalition. These goals really shouldn't matter to us now. No party that lies, cheats, manipulates and plays Russian roulette with our future to sort out its own differences should be allowed to govern again for a generation. Unfortunately that isn't how this will play out.<br />
<br />
It is difficult to blame the majority of people who voted to leave. As is clear from the number who are now regretting the outcome - at least in its details - <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-anger-bregret-leave-voters-protest-vote-thought-uk-stay-in-eu-remain-win-a7102516.html">Brexit was a protest vote</a> against a governing class that has failed to deliver. Job security, housing, public services, standards of living have all declined since the crash of 2008 and the Tory government has ensured that the most vulnerable pay for the greed and recklessness of the financial elite they largely represent.<br />
<br />
And we were lied to. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/25/leave-campaign-rows-back-key-pledges-immigration-nhs-spending">The lies are unravelling already</a>, but they were persuasive, and pervasive. Like other big lies we've been told, such as the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we can only revisit them from a world that has been re-shaped by their consequences. So it's difficult to know - and we are discouraged from asking - how differently things might have turned out. The right wing press lied, and lied, and lied, as they always have done, as they always will. But the mainstream press and media were negligent. They seemed so fascinated by the opinions falling out of people's mouths that they forgot they had a responsibility to report the truth. I don't remember a single serious analysis of what Leave would actually look like, or challenge to the motives of the main players. I don't remember any attempt to educate us about the institutions of Europe, their history and constitution, their real political powers and economic role. Other people were taking the BBC to task for this on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07glx7x">Feedback just this evening</a>.<br />
<br />
But it would be patronising to say that people who voted for Brexit had no idea what they were doing. If we are in favour of universal suffrage, and of more rather than a less participative forms of democracy - as I am - we have to give people credit for their own decisions. There are millions of disadvantaged people in other parts of the continent who continue to support the collective project that is Europe, recognising that it is imperfect and compromised, and most days of the week works in the interests of big business rather than their own. But that it's better than the alternatives. It's better than beating your nationalist breast and going it alone. You don't need a huge stake in society to want to stay with an international arrangement that has brought Eastern Europe out of communism and Southern Europe out of its infatuation with fascist dictatorships, that has looked after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_policy_of_the_European_Union#Areas_designated_as_less_developed">the most disadvantaged countries, regions</a> and people of a whole continent as a matter of principle (not of elected government whim), that established the first and best international agreements about <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=82">workers' rights</a> and <a href="http://europa.eu/pol/env/index_en.htm">the environment</a>, and that has <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/23/the-eus-part-in-70-years-of-peace-in-europe">kept the peace</a> in a fractious part of the world for 70 years.<br />
(I say this in the unhappy knowledge that the UK result is giving <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/24/european-far-right-hails-britains-brexit-vote-marine-le-pen">comfort to populist far-right organisations across Europe</a>, and that what I've just written may not be true for much longer).<br />
<br />
So what have we got wrong? Does my own sector - Higher Education - share any of the blame, or have any of the answers?<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/brexit-vote-sparks-huge-uncertainty-uk-universities">We're going to be hit harder than most</a> by the Brexit result, even though we're
one of the few sectors of the economy where the UK can realistically
still claim to be a world leader. (Financial services and the arts are the other two - and it's not looking good for them either.) We in HE are completely inter-dependent with other
EU countries for <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/international/funding/eurofunding/">research funding</a>, collaborative opportunities, and
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-36619686">bright young people wanting to t</a><span class="text_exposed_show"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-36619686">ravel and learn</a>. Today we are frightened for our jobs, for the free exchange
of ideas, about what will happen to our many colleagues from other
nations. We are, perhaps, feeling a particular fear when we see 'liberal intellectuals' held up everywhere for disparagement, even among the people who voted Remain. Immigrants are far, far ahead of intellectuals in the queue for bigotry, and we will stand up for them wherever they are threatened or made to feel unwelcome, because it's the right thing to do. But the kind of anti-rationalism, paranoia and <a href="https://twitter.com/PostRefRacism">fear of the other</a> that is walking our streets this weekend has never, historically, been kind to thinkers either.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">There are things we can be proud of. In every part of England and Wales where people have had the opportunity of higher education, the vote was to Remain. University towns (with one or two exceptions -
Sheffield?!) were solidly pro-Europe: so were <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/european-union-referendum-nine-out-of-ten-university-staff-back-remain">90% of HE staff</a> (note: not just the academics). </span><span class="text_exposed_show">More than four in five (81%) of those still <a href="http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/">in full time education voted to stay</a>. Education works. It gives us a
stake in the wider world, it makes us more likely to question the
lies, damned lies and statistics. It makes us more tolerant and open
to other cultures and ideas. But the same voting patterns show us that higher education is just one of many opportunities that the same half of society enjoys, and that the other half doesn't. That's why it would be a tragedy if the new <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/higher-education-white-paper-success-knowledge-economy">White Paper on HE</a> and the creeping privatisation agenda make it even harder for people to move across the divide, and send to the wall those universities that have taken the most local students and done the most to advance their own regional economies.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">As educators we also have to deal with the fact that millions of people turned their backs not only on the liberal values that the intelligentsia hold dear but on rational argument and informed debate as well. Why are so many people actively hostile to evidence and reasoning, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/james-obrien-lbc-eu-referendum-brexit-mark-carney_uk_576d26e7e4b0232d331dda31?kxz5b3xr">turned off by 'experts'</a> (in the main, people who have studied a subject deeply and know what they are talking about) and unable to deal with any admission of complexity, uncertainty or nuance?</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">It was manifestly untrue that leaving the EU would pop millions of pounds a week back into the British exchequer. It was incredible that right wing conservatives would use any extra public money to pay for public services like the NHS - and has indeed proved to have been a lie. It turns out not to be true that we can just slip out of the European door and start 'making our own laws' again - at least, not if we want to trade with the rest of the world. Nor is it true that the problems in our public services are caused by immigration, though it's <a href="http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/diseases/fault">a lie with a very long history</a>. It isn't even true that the European Commission is larger, less efficient and less accountable than our own civil service. And yet, rather than go on explaining and illustrating these truths, we are supposed to make way for the people who espouse the opposite because opinion, 'passion', belief, is all that counts.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">At this point I could go consider the many the post-isms we have endured and enjoyed over the last 30 years, but it is crediting academia with far too much influence to suggest that people have been turned off the truth by continental philosophy. It has more to do with poverty. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/1/2%20Areas%20of%20high%20immigration%20voted%20to%20Remain:%20areas%20of%20high%20poverty%20and%20low%20education%20voted%20to%20Leave:%20http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/eu-referendum-how-the-results-compare-to-the-uks-educated-old-an/">The voting patterns for Leave correspond very exactly to levels of poverty - and hardly at all with patterns of actual immigration</a>. Our voting system doesn't help - the fact that once every five years, a fraction of the electorate living in marginal constituencies get to decide which of two varieties of capitalism we will all live under. There was a profound nihilism in the decision to put a cross by 'leave' in defiance not just of the present establishment but of the whole rational, post-enlightenment settlement - the idea that from rational collective decisions, collective solutions will flow.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">And perhaps there is something more going on. These last few days I've started to wonder if social media isn't partly to blame. I hear Leave voters wringing their hands because they never thought their vote would actually make a difference in the real world, and I see not only decades of political cynicism draining them of self-determination, but an array of facebook polls and pop-up petitions. No wonder people struggle to take voting seriously. We have become a culture of endless, irrelevant choice and no power or capacity to make decisions. In other dark nights of the soul I remember that paranoia and unreason, of the kind shown in the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/eu-referendum-brexit-how-to-vote-own-pens-polling-station-polls-live-latest-mi5-conspiracy-fears-a7097011.html">panic over voting with pencils</a>, have always been the bedfellows of extremism.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">So if we're going to have democracy, we need democratic education. Out
leafleting and just talking to people I know, I've been shocked by how little understanding there is of the basic idea behind taxation and public spending, of democratic decision making, and of international trade. In other European countries and
America, citizenship is a compulsory part of the curriculum. In our country you can be a well-educated grown-up and not know how our own government works, let alone the institutions of Europe. Ironically, the only way to be certain of a citizenship education is to <a href="http://www.theuktest.com/life-in-the-uk-test/6">come to the UK as an immigrant</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">To come full circle back to my usual topic, surely there is a role that e-learning can play. If the advantages of higher education lead people to make good decisions, not just on their own behalf but in all of our interests, then it is in all of our interests to make it as widely available as possible. There are no short cuts to a stake in society, or the skills to think critically about evidence, as <a href="http://www.informationliteracy.org.uk/2016/06/the-eu-referendum-campaign-a-case-of-fateful-information-illiteracy/">Stephane Goldstein observes in this post about Brexit and the costs of information illiteracy</a>. But we can develop and make freely available resources for citizenship education. I am particularly thinking of the work of all my colleagues in the Open Education movement who are motivated by this every day of their working lives. We need resources that encourage people to develop their facility with digital media into a deeper engagement with political ideas and civic movements. Resources that can be shared and added to by political and community organisations of all kinds. And as people who understand the power of digital media to change minds and lives, we can use it to call to account those who have abused us. Not with opinion, not with post-truth confections, but with lies.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">A few blog posts along similar lines that have come to my attention since posting this: </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><a href="https://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/">Lorna Campbell: This time it's Different</a> (i read this after writing my own blog post, which is probably as well or I'd just have said -> this)<br /><a href="https://oerqualityproject.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/why-open-data-is-key-to-teach-democracy-and-citizenship/">Why open data is the key to democracy and citizenship</a></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span class="text_exposed_show"><a href="http://www.informationliteracy.org.uk/2016/06/the-eu-referendum-campaign-a-case-of-fateful-information-illiteracy/">Stephane Goldstein's post on Brexit and the costs of information illiteracy</a></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span class="text_exposed_show"><a href="http://blog.edtechie.net/">Positive thinking from Martin Weller</a> </span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><a href="http://francesbell.com/uncategorized/processing-our-grief-and-looking-to-the-future/"><span class="text_exposed_show">Frances Bell: Processing our grief</span></a> </span><br />
<br />HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com468tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-60455326746746033802016-03-24T17:50:00.003-07:002016-04-07T12:06:38.789-07:00What is 'Digital Wellbeing'?This is the first of a few posts on digital wellbeing. The term is
one I coined - or at least brought into the education space - while I
was working on a new <a href="https://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2015/11/10/framing-digital-capabilities-for-staff-deliverables/">Digital
Capabillities framework</a> for UK HE and FE (funded by Jisc) in
2015. Here, from the framework, is my definition.<br />
<br />
<b>To care for our 'digital wellbeing' is to:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>look after personal health,
safety, relationships and work-life balance in digital settings; </b></div>
</li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>act safely and responsibly in
digital environments; </b></div>
</li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>manage digital stress, workload
and distraction; </b></div>
</li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>use digital media to
participate in political and community actions; </b>
</div>
</li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>use personal digital data for
wellbeing benefits; </b>
</div>
</li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>act with concern for the human
and natural environment when using digital tools; </b></div>
</li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>balance digital with real-world
interactions appropriately in relationships;</b></div>
</li>
<li><b>... </b>
<br />
</li>
</ul>
There are diverse issues here, and more could be added. What links
them is an understanding that digital technology saturates our lives,
including our embodied lives. Our digital and physical identities are
constantly passing into one another through the devices we carry, the
data we shed, and the representations we capture and share. Our
bodies and brains, our knowledge of self and world, our working lives
and our personal relationships are all radically transformed in this
process. (Different subject areas have different ways of framing
these transformations, and the responsibilities of educators surely
include exploring what each knowledge / practice area adds to our
understanding of the digital revolution and outlining what kinds of
knowledgeable/capable selves can develop within that subject space.)<br />
<br />
It was challenging to insert wellbeing into a framework of
individual capabilities, especially as I don't think being well is
only or mainly an individual responsibility. The design of learning
systems, the contents of digital curricula, the distribution of digital know-how, the business models of
digital development, the globalisation of digital labour... these are
issues with profound impact on our capacity to thrive, over which no
individual has control. But I think it's useful, and
potentially radical, to suggest that digital capability includes
self-care, and that self-care requires a critical awareness of how
digital technologies act on us and sometimes against us, as well as
allowing us to pursue our personal and collective aspirations in new
ways.<br />
<br />
In using the terms 'capbility' and 'wellbeing' in a digital space I am consciously drawing on Martha Nussbaum's work on human development. Too rich to summarise here, her ideas are opened out nicely from an online review of her 2011 book <a href="https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26146-creating-capabilities-the-human-development-approach-2/">Creating Capabilities: the human development approach</a>.<br />
<br />
My own work on the <a href="https://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/students-expectations-and-experiences-of-the-digital-environment-phase-1-study/">experiences
of digital students</a> had already led me to question what it means
to <i>thrive</i> in a learning environment that is saturated with
digital technologies. Students have many concerns about the impact of
digital technology on their wellbeing, if we listen. This goes back
to my original definition of digital literacy for Jisc (2010):<br />
<div class="western">
<b><i>those capabilities that enable an individual
to thrive (live, learn and work) in a digital society.</i></b></div>
<br />
In 2015 I was also conducting interviews with a wide range of
staff, and considering the future of work both inside and outside
education. I summarised these findings in my report <a href="https://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2015/08/5.-Report.pdf">Deepening
Digital Knowhow: Building Digital Talent</a> (first two sections) and
in much more detail in <a href="http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/abstracts/beetham_symposium.htm">Employability
and the Future of Digital Work</a>, part of a symposium for the
Networked Learning Conference 2016.
<br />
<br />
Since delivering the framework, <a href="https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/thriving-in-a-connected-age-digital-capability-and-digital-wellbeing-25-jun-2015">blogging
about it on the Jisc site</a>, and producing <a href="https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/thriving-in-a-connected-age-digital-capability-and-digital-wellbeing-25-jun-2015">this
podcast</a>, I have had a positive reaction from different sectors
and from different parts of the world. For example:<br />
<br />
1. I presented keynotes on digital wellbeing at the <a href="https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/dsdg/Events/2015/digcaps/new_programme.aspx">UCISA
Spotlight on Digital Capability</a> event and at <a href="http://programme.exordo.com/edtech2015/">EdTech15</a>
in Galway, and at a range of events since then (see my <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/">slideshare
account</a>). An <a href="http://lthechat.com/2015/06/19/lthechat-no-28-with-helen-beetham-helenbeetham-on-digital-wellbeing/">#LTHEchat
about the subject</a> resulted in this re-drawing of Maslow's
hierarchy of needs by Simon Rae (thank you Simon).
<br />
<br />
<center>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 322px;">
<colgroup><col width="322"></col>
</colgroup><tbody>
<tr>
<td width="322"><div align="CENTER">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oM0-mewEK3c/Vu_ouBhd41I/AAAAAAAAArA/CgG36K0W3f4iCUnqxHYsFA2vfPaqrE23A/s1600/Simon%2BRae%2BMaslow%2527s.jpg"><img align="BOTTOM" border="0" height="297" name="graphics1" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oM0-mewEK3c/Vu_ouBhd41I/AAAAAAAAArA/CgG36K0W3f4iCUnqxHYsFA2vfPaqrE23A/s320/Simon%2BRae%2BMaslow%2527s.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="322"><div align="CENTER">
@simonrae</div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</center>
<br />
<br />
The link with Maslow is a reminder that digitally-mediated
learning still happens between human beings with human needs for
safety, nurture and care, for a sense of belonging and for personal
attention. Other writers such as Laura Czerniewicz, Catherine Cronin
and Gardner Campbell are raising the question of what love and care
for learners might look like in digital settings.<br />
<br />
2. 'Digital identity and wellbeing' was included prominently in
the Irish National Forum's new (2015) <a href="http://www.teachingandlearning.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DigitalSkillsFrameworkHE.pdf">framework
of digital skills for HE</a>, after conversations between myself and
Jim Devine. You can see the final frameworks on pp. 35 and 36
of this report.<br />
<center>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 322px;">
<colgroup><col width="322"></col>
</colgroup><tbody>
<tr>
<td width="322"><div align="CENTER">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WzrXb0GHNxc/Vu_pUO6GjcI/AAAAAAAAArI/ZbWLCedC1ekGWzebWoKNu2A4sFb7us1cw/s1600/All%2BAboard.jpg"><img align="BOTTOM" border="0" height="226" name="graphics2" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WzrXb0GHNxc/Vu_pUO6GjcI/AAAAAAAAArI/ZbWLCedC1ekGWzebWoKNu2A4sFb7us1cw/s320/All%2BAboard.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="322"><div align="CENTER">
(c) allaboardhe.org</div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</center>
<br />
Elsewhere in the report there is a useful account of how
conceptions of digital literacy have evolved in the UK and Ireland,
with evidence of how widely used are the digital literacy development
pyramid (myself and Rhona Sharpe, 2009), the Jisc definition of
digital literacies (myself and Allison Littlejohn and Lou McGill,
2010) and the two frameworks I developed for Jisc in 2010 and 2015.<br />
<br />
3. 'Digital wellbeing' is a theme for the <a href="http://www.designsonelearning.net/call-for-papers/">2016
Designs on e-Learning conference</a> in New York City, with the call
for papers using a definition that closely follows mine in the Jisc
framework. I like the connection between 'design' and wellbeing,
because the two have often been antithetical in accounts of how
people learn. 'Learning design' has tended to treat learners as
rational users of a rational system or - worse - as components of the
system to be known through measurement and tracking. Here they are
treated as embodied, socially-connected and potentially vulnerable
human beings, whose learning involves investment and risk as well as
cognitive effort.<br />
<br />
<center>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 642px;">
<colgroup><col width="642"></col>
</colgroup><tbody>
<tr>
<td width="642"><div align="CENTER">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7GVEHrhI5Hs/Vu_qHTv7EiI/AAAAAAAAArU/qmjJkugszmwqAHXBGaYh8h53nhlcb1GdA/s1600/DoeL16%2BCfP.tiff"><img align="BOTTOM" border="0" height="148" name="graphics3" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7GVEHrhI5Hs/Vu_qHTv7EiI/AAAAAAAAArU/qmjJkugszmwqAHXBGaYh8h53nhlcb1GdA/s640/DoeL16%2BCfP.tiff" width="640" /></a></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="642"><div align="CENTER">
http://www.designsonelearning.net/call-for-papers/</div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</center>
<br />
4. I was invited to talk about the framework with <a href="http://digital-literacies.blogs.latrobe.edu.au/2015/12/18/digital-literacies-a-seminar-a-new-community/">universities
across Australia</a>, which has led to the formation of a community
of practice in digital capability development. Digital wellbeing was
the area that elicited the most interest and excitement over there.
The term 'wellbeing' resonates immediately with professional staff -
librarians, careers advisers, learning skills professionals and other
student-facing specialists - who support learners in ways that are
not directly concerned with their subject knowledge or assessments.
But teaching in its traditional sense also involves care:
acknowledgement of everything learners bring to the experience of
learning, including their motivations, challenges, and prior
experiences, and an interest in their specific paths of development.<br />
<br />
5. I was invited to contribute to a European framework on
developing <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomporg/framework">Digitally
Capable Organisations</a> which is being further developed into tools
for use in schools. I have more recently been invited to contribute
to a Commonwealth of Learning framework on <a href="http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/c-delta">Digital
Education Leadership</a> (forthcoming 2016). In both cases I think my
contribution is to stress the responsibility that educational
organisations have for the wellbeing of all staff and learners as
they rely more on digital systems and introduce more digitally-based
practices.<br />
<br />
6. I've also been approached by health education bodies to
consider developing a common framework. The wellbeing aspect of the
Jisc framework is particularly appealing to this sector.<br />
<br />
7. I've been approached to work collaboratively with specialists
in e-safety and cyberbullying, who feel that 'digital wellbeing' is a
particularly helpful term to use in post-compulsory education. Adult
learners may not see themselves as needing support to be 'safe' or
'respectful' online, despite the fact that cyberbullying is an
increasing problem in universities. But they are interested in how to
live, learn and work effectively in digital spaces - for example to
understand different norms and cultures of online expression. They
also have legitimate concerns about how living, learning and working
relationships play out differently in those spaces.<br />
<br />
One of the joys of working and publishing openly in a digital
community is to watch ideas taken up in diverse ways, taking on their
own lives and meaning different things to different people. As I've
argued elsewhere, terms such as 'digital wellbeing', 'digital
literacy' or 'digital capability', are useful only if they allow new
conversations to happen, and ultimately if they usher in new forms of
practice or critique. They belong to whoever can make use of them,
and once they are no longer useful they fall away (though if they
have had any traction, they leave changes behind them).<br />
<br />
For me the important thing is for there to be an open dialogue,
recognising that ideas have a history and provenance, and that their
contexts of production and sharing deserve some attention.<br />
<br />
Thanks for bearing with me. In further posts I'll look
at different aspects of digital wellbeing, depending on interest.<br />
<br />HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com684tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-6524397319693055862015-09-30T06:23:00.001-07:002015-10-18T14:59:30.445-07:00Occupying digital spaceThanks to the enlightened policy of <a href="https://twitter.com/openunipress">the Open University Press</a> I can make available the text of my recent chapter Occupying Digital Space, originally one half of a chapter (the other half written by the wonderful <a href="https://twitter.com/mikeneary">Mike Neary</a>) in John Lea's edited book <a href="http://www.mheducation.co.uk/9780335264162-emea-enhancing-learning-and-teaching-in-higher-education-engaging-with-the-dimensions-of-practice">Enhancing Learning and Teaching in HE</a>. If you enjoy my piece I encourage you to buy (or ask your institution to buy) the book. It includes lots of wonderful practice-based case studies and opinion pieces alongside academic points of view on pedagogy in the C21st. Plus as an academic writer I want to promote a publishing house that allows me to make my work openly available to everyone who can benefit. Here's my conclusion. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Y9KEPNS31x0nYvau5_XofNNNf5xeORNhX40XPnYwklNoaYAOTVcyzdrdRl5r4XgttMHgI8cqkmygHGWgDCeh0qnvvd42-lFA4XnvdjmbsgiChOmbskNGYEdT1q4UHVoeAunFaB7Diw2ZVXEB8lzky1Kggd0r8SIuyRMrIAqoRe_GLucJ2cji1kSTiJoPg0on" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Enhancing Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Engaging with the Dimensions of Practice" border="0" class="gallery-image visible" src="http://www.mheducation.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/80/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/t/e/temp_27406_1_5560.jpg" id="image-main" title="Enhancing Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Engaging with the Dimensions of Practice" /></a><br />
<i>Virtual space is continuous but not identical with real-world space. As educators, we are particularly interested in how meanings, feelings and identities, social actions and economic values are transacted in digital space, and as I have tried to show, these<br />transactions reproduce the inequalities, power dynamics and oppressive institutional practices of real-world space. Some aspects of virtual space disguise these continuities and make it difficult to adopt a critical stance. These include the radical separation of designers from end-users, the fact that actions are narrowly constrained but alternatives<br />are literally unthinkable within the interface, and the ‘natural’ and ‘frictionless’design ideal. All are good reasons why we should foster in our institutions, among our colleagues, and most importantly in our students, a critical approach to digital technologies<br />and their uses. How we approach this will depend on our disciplinary resources, but we should be in no doubt that it will become more difficult for students to do this with their own resources, as they become more naturalised to living in a hybrid world.</i><br />
<i><br />Just like real-world spaces, virtual spaces can be co-opted against their original designs, or can be designed differently – collaboratively with students, for example, or in ways that are radically incomplete. And while real-world spaces can only be redesigned after much investment and long processes of consultation, in which radical ideas can easily be lost, virtual spaces are agile and reconfigurable. Personal learning environments, cloud services, community solutions and peer-to-peer networks are already deeply connected into the institutional infrastructure, introducing potential fault-lines and spaces of alternative play. Alongside virtual environments that reproduce<br />an instrumental and managerial idea of the university, we can set alternative virtual spaces such as Coventry’s Disruptive Media Lab or the Ragged University project and its various affiliates, online and physically located. Against the virtual pantechnicon we can imagine the hybrid university as a network of loosely affiliated spaces, some allowing for safe exploration and identity work (‘walled gardens’), but with doors always opening onto other institutions and cultures, onto different ways of<br />knowing, and onto an open landscape of knowledge in public use.</i><br />
<br />
Read <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/occupying-virtual-space">my chapter in full here.</a><br />
<br />
<!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mheducation.co.uk%2Fmedia%2Fcatalog%2Fproduct%2Fcache%2F80%2Fimage%2F9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95%2Ft%2Fe%2Ftemp_27406_1_5560.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*" with "https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Y9KEPNS31x0nYvau5_XofNNNf5xeORNhX40XPnYwklNoaYAOTVcyzdrdRl5r4XgttMHgI8cqkmygHGWgDCeh0qnvvd42-lFA4XnvdjmbsgiChOmbskNGYEdT1q4UHVoeAunFaB7Diw2ZVXEB8lzky1Kggd0r8SIuyRMrIAqoRe_GLucJ2cji1kSTiJoPg0on" -->HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com127tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-65826081561277201842015-09-17T07:13:00.002-07:002015-09-17T07:13:33.685-07:00Conference reflections: digital work and political futures<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This was meant to be my reflections on last week's ALT conference: <a href="https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2015/">Shaping the Future of Learning Together</a>, but like many people I know I've been distracted by the outcome of another conference, the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/sep/12/labour-announces-leadership-election-result-with-corbyn-tipped-to-win-politics-live">Labour Party Special Conference</a> to announce the winner of its leadership contest. My twitter stream has been a double-stranded flow of excitement about digital and political futures, with not much exchange between them. Some friends have even suggested that it would be good for me - and my twitter followers - if I kept my political views running in a separate channel to my work on digital literacies and digital education.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">But it's hard not to notice how many people in the world of e-learning are dipping into the Corbyn stream. Hard not to be excited - if you care about education - that we have a Leader of the Opposition who wants to reintroduce student grants, who promises to reverse this Government's savage cuts to FE and adult/skills, and who views education as a '<a href="http://labourlist.org/2015/07/education-is-a-collective-good-its-time-for-a-national-education-service/">collective good</a>' that demands investment and safeguarding through a lifelong 'national education service'. Whether or not Jeremy Corbyn can deliver on these promises, debates that we thought were dead and buried are coming back to life in front of our eyes.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And the unexpectedness of Corbyn's win, the loss of any certainty about how electors will respond to continued austerity at home and war/misery/emigration overseas, the questioning of apparently unshakeable economic verities by serious economists as well as climate change and anti-capitalist protestors - these should make us all very nervous of current 'futures thinking', or at least the kind that talks up the 'digital economy' as though we know exactly what that means. It might mean the dog-eat-dog of neo-liberal entrepreneurialism, or the 'sharing economy' that would have us monetise every skill we gain, every interest we entertain, and all the space in our homes and cars we aren't actually using to breathe in. It might look like the <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12038/full">mechanical turk</a> writ large, with human brain space rented out to projects determined by the demands of data. Or it might look like old-fashioned collectivism with the emphasis on digital participation and decision making. It might look like a lot of paid and unpaid work in caring for others, with the help of personal data services, the digital world a beautiful collaborative playground where we spend much of the leisure time we have on our hands. It might look like a world of infinitely permeable borders, or one of constant surveillance and control, or most likely both at once. We know it will be digital, or 'post-digital' if you must, but beyond that there's still everything to play for.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So perhaps I am working and thinking in a space where digital and political futures are intertwined. At the moment I'd call this space '<i><b>the changing world of work</b></i>', and mean by that both the lived experience of working inside UK HE and FE, and the 'world of work' as reified in current education policy - as the entire rationale and telos of our students' learning, the 'real' against which our intellectual and pedagogical labour must finally be reckoned.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This year I have mainly been working on a project called <a href="http://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2015/03/29/framing-digital-capabilities-for-staff/">Framing the Digital Capabilities of Staff in UK HE and FE.</a> The project was funded by Jisc who will be publishing my report and other deliverables shortly. I've already used this work to inform a revised <a href="http://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2015/06/11/revisiting-digital-capability-for-2015/">Digital Capabilities Framework</a> which I hope will be useful to people working in this space. What I have to say here is in no way endorsed by Jisc and it arises from only a small area of my work for them - my review of the changing nature of work inside and outside the academy. I was lucky enough to talk with more than 60 professionals in HE and FE about their work and the role digital technology plays in it, and their thoughts have certainly informed my own. But the interviews ranged widely and none of the people I spoke to would necessarily draw the same conclusions that I do. With that important disclaimer, here are my thoughts on...</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>The changing world of work</b></span> </h3>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img class="irc_mi" src="https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/workshop-campaign.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 84px;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some people I know, looking as if they are working (CC Jisc 2014)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="western" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Many excellent researchers have studied work inside academic organisations: I have been particularly influenced by Lynne Gornall and her co-editors of <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/academic-working-lives-9781441185341/"><i>Academic Working Lives</i></a> (2014). Go read it if you want to know more. (This and all my other references can be found <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QmBZMMU0c7la4eJZF6t1pPcMW4tuMdTV4kHlE2eB45A/edit#">online here</a> along with key stats, facts and quotes). According to this and other sources, academic and professional work is becoming:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
</span>
<br />
<ul>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">less secure – rise of short-term contracts,
constant restructuring, funding constraints;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">shorter term</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> – defined by
short/medium term initiatives, often organised in flexible project teams
(e.g. task and finish); </span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">more goal-driven – KPIs, personal
performance management, citation index, REF, NSS, teaching quality
measures, service level agreements;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">uncertainly located – open offices,
hot desking, working from home, working across multiple campuses,
working online;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">more self-directed – rise of
self-employment, consultancy, project-based working and
enterpreneurship; also the individual's responsibility to constantly improve (the self as project);</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">multiple/hybrid – people doing more than
one job (split contracts), roles crossing professions or specialisms;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">technology-based – core processes carried
out within institutional IT systems, some aspects entirely
automated, rise in roles with IT-related responsibilities e.g. in
learning technology, organisational data (NB this list is my summary of multiple sources).</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Of course not all of these changes can be associated directly with the impact of digital technologies in education. They have arisen in a political context of constrained finances, increased competition for students and commodification of the student experience, an interest in the quantification of outcomes, and the favouring of managerial over collegial modes of governance. However, digital technologies have played a role both instrumentally - enabling governments and organisations to carry through some of these agendas - and also contextually, for example supporting the development of cheaper alternatives against which the 'value' of traditional courses is now to be measured.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Employability and the 'world of work' also penetrate every aspect of the student experience via part-time work, work
placements, internships, sponsorships, and co-curricular activities
reframed as tokens of employability. Employment is widely seen as making sense and ascribing value to the whole
experience of education. And this wider world of work is also changing in comparable ways. It is becoming:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
</span>
<br />
<ul>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">less secure, with multiple job and career
changes and the rise of casual, part-time, informal and
self-employment;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">more entrepreneurial, via the 'gig' or
'sharing' economy (uber, AMT, clickworker, workfusion, mechanical
turk) on the one hand, and on the other the rise of project-based working
teams and internal marketisation (intrapreneurship) within relatively
secure forms of employment;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">fragmented in terms of attention, tasks,
work-time and work-space, working teams;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">multiple and hybrid, with simultaneous
contracts/roles/projects/commitments in work and the monetisation of
previously private pursuits, hobbies, personal time and space;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">uncertainly located through disclocation from
the traditional workplace and a rise in home working;</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">automated and/or at risk from automation,
with up to 36% UK jobs likely to be lost in next 20 years; cognitive work is being done by a smaller number of people working
collaboratively with IT and data systems.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Key career assets are now a person's immediately relevant
capabilities, rather than (say) length of service, and these must be
constantly updated, especially where digital technologies are
concerned. </span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So digital capabilities are essential to
finding and retaining work and to managing multiple work roles. </span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This is equally true of staff as it is of the
students who are being supported to enhance their employability.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Many people, perhaps especially women, find the flexibility of digital work a liberation. This has certainly been my own experience as a long-time single mother. I've also been lucky enough to work with many educators who are inspired by digital opportunities for learning and have shared that inspiration with their students. Across disciplines, digital technology is both an exciting new subject of scholarship and a whole new toolbox for discovery, exploration and the communication of ideas. But a</span>spects
of digital academic work cause frustration
and stress. Staff worry about keeping 'up to date' (the self as project again), about growing demands on their time and attention, about information overload and the loss of boundaries between work and home. People who went into teaching because they preferred face-to-face contact with students to life in the archive or laboratory find they spend most of their time sitting at a screen.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students too worry about the loss of face-to-face contact time, but perhaps more acutely about their own working futures. For a majority of graduates, the 'digital economy' has not meant high-value 'knowledge' work but white-collar labour in call centres and data departments,
insecure self-employment, or piecemeal work in a hybrid (human/computer) service economy. Most graduates are exercising their entrepreneurialism to find, retain and stitch together opportunities to earn, rather than leading digital start-ups. Dougald Hine has spoken powerfully about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNZ3jW0SrpI&feature=youtu.be">the new graduate 'precariat'</a>, who have 'done everything right' but are still struggling to find meaningful work. And whatever their work, it is likely to take place in a largely digital setting, which brings its own stresses - cyberbullying, information overload, repetitive strain and other health risks, loss of face-to-face relationships - as well as new opportunities and new networks of support.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This precariat, and the young people on the brink of entering it, are significant among the people who have elected Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party. (If his detractors are to be believed, the rest are 'intellectuals', which puts education professionals squarely in the frame as well.)</span></div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
</span><b><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Our relationship with 'work' as educators</span></span></span></b><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Students Hold Up a Sign that Says "Free Education."" class=" wp-image-18287 " height="330" src="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/04_Giroux_FIG1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Students Hold Up a Sign that Says "Free Education."" width="410" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CC Michael Fleshman: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/neoliberalisms-war-against-the-radical-imagination</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">At this point I want to suggest that we have a responsibility, as educators, to involve ourselves in what it means to work in a digital age. This is true both of our own work and the work for which we are preparing our students. So far from being removed from the pressures acting on the wider economy, educators are in some ways in the vanguard (or firing line). Our work is quintessentially 'knowledge' work. Our workplaces are among the most hybrid (real/virtual) in the world, as I have argued recently in Lea's <a href="http://www.mheducation.co.uk/9780335264162-emea-enhancing-learning-and-teaching-in-higher-education-engaging-with-the-dimensions-of-practice">Enhancing Learning and Teaching in HE</a>. Rightly or wrongly, a 'passion' for our subject has long been held up as the defining quality of a lecturer, which makes us in some ways the archetype of the 'passionate' amateur who is C21st capitalism's <a href="http://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/center-for-the-edge/artikelen/connect-passion-with-profession.html">fantasy worker</a>. Unless we understand ourselves as particular kinds of worker - and producer - in the C21st economy, we risk being disempowered in relation to our own working lives, and failing to theorise and organise on our own behalf, let alone on behalf of others who are caught up in the same nexus of forces.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">As far as our students are concerned, the employability agenda has for too long been handed down into the curriculum as a given, rather than opened up within the curriculum as a set of questions about what it means to be productive in a C21st society: what value particular subject areas bring to the defining challenges of our times, what it means to live (and work) well, and how work might best be organised. As
well as enabling students to cope with their immediate economic
realities, it is also our place to develop critical people
who can question the technologies and technology-based roles they are
offered, and find new solutions to the conundrum of how to work and live in a digital society. </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There has been important work around the idea of students-as-producers of knowledge, for example at the <a href="http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/blog/">University of Lincoln</a> and behind the NUS' <a href="http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/nusdigital/document/documents/16659/bf343f09e6fdd4c5a4f7392d0433f2d7/A%20Manifesto%20for%20Partnership.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJKEA56ZWKFU6MHNQ&Expires=1442338498&Signature=XRS8kfLN%2F0MJdkPXmvqirda21%2FE%3D">Manifesto for Partnership</a>. As educators we can support that work through our teaching and curriculum practices. But we can also support it by putting our own working lives under a critical lens. Over the last decade the 'students as consumers' narrative has reframed our work as service provision to learning consumers and - more importantly - to their future employers through students as agents of productivity. Research has been obsessively quantified for its impact on measurable outcomes, ideally transferable into monetary terms. The fetish for quantity has obscured some of the qualities that really matter in educational work, such as the quality of relationships in a community of knowledge and understanding, or the quality of the relationship between teachers and students. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <a href="https://youtu.be/3BORMZ8UoUE" target="_blank">Jonathan Worth’s keynote</a> at Alt-C returned us to that relationship. He spoke about the vulnerability of learners, the trust they place in us, and the attention we must pay constantly to the workings of power in teaching/learning as in other close human engagements (photographer/subject, seer/seen, designer/user). He also alerted us to the changes of meaning and the altered nuances of power when these relationships are mediated online. Hidden in his talk I felt were some deep questions about the nature of professional work - photography, teaching, design - when technology equips and then exhorts people to 'do it themselves'. Whether taking selfies or taking part in self-directed learning, we are dispensing with a whole class of relationships with more capable others, or defining them as a supplement - a premium service - instead of a critical term in what was once a relational activity. To 'work' as an educator increasingly means to facilitate learners' engagements with various systems within which their identities, their knowledge and their capabilities are distributed, and not to engage with them in a relationship of concern for who they are becoming.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Laura's keynote,</span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <a href="https://youtu.be/WEglB5b_msk" target="_blank">Inequality in Higher Education</a>, offered us a wide-ranging interrogation of learning technology through the lens of social justice. She showed us how the question of what kind of society we want to live in is continually posed and (partially) answered by the work we do as educators. To give an example with which Laura and I have both been involved, we can ask how our work as open educators impacts on the distribution of educational opportunity. When we ask that question we quickly realise that open is not enough - that the wealth of new opportunities to learn are being taken up overwhelmingly by people who are already well resourced and well motivated. Where there is systemic inequality only systemic redress - organised investment in those who have been disadvantaged - can change the balance. Laura reminds us that while our day-to-day work rightly focuses on helping individuals to meet their aspirations, in the long view we are also helping to build a world in which everyone can thrive. She reminds us that education is care, and that care costs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Whether our work as educators moves in the direction of social justice and human wellbeing is not something we can fully determine as individuals. Our actions are constrained by political and economic - and nowadays by associated technical - systems. But those contexts change, sometimes in extraordinary ways. The Corbyn train arrives, unannounced. Endlessly-announced transformations fail to arrive (see <a href="http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/i-watch-the-ripples-change-their-size-but-never-leave-the-stream-altc-2015/">David Kernohan's brilliant recent post</a> on the e-learning hype industry) or when they do arrive fail to take anyone where they want to go. There is nothing inevitable about how work will be organised ten or twenty years from now - that is for political action to determine. In how our work as educators is valued, the victory of quantity over quality is not pre-determined either. There is always hope. It's all to play for.</span>HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-39110753393190128962014-11-12T08:12:00.003-08:002014-11-13T01:53:21.627-08:00Post-digital provocations #4: 'in recovery from' the digital<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm feeling lucky today. Just as i was preparing to write this final provocation and wondering 'what kind of recovery can I possibly offer?' a wonderful pdf landed in my intray. This report from the National Union of Students is called '<i>Radical Interventions in Teaching and Learning: How the partnership agenda can help create radical and inclusive learning spaces</i>'. Alongside quotes from Paolo Freire and Nelson Mandela, it argues that:</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">a focus on students as consumers undermines the learning/teaching relationship, the ethos of collaborative knowledge-building and the capacity of learners to develop as human beings;</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">our current system of quality assurance in HE - driven by marketisation, standardisation, and human resource management - is measuring the wrong things and does not value radical, inclusive (or indeed any truly transformative) approaches to learning;</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">innovative technologies have a role to play but<i> 'it is not the technology in itself that is transforming education and society; it is, rather, the creative ways in which people are using technology to educate and drive change'</i></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'We are moving towards a more open access environment, where access to research and teaching is more egalitarian, but also more open to abuse by market forces... the potential benefits of open and mobile access to learning resources could be marred by the profiteering of private providers or by the unfair exploitation of academic labour.'</i> </span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You see how I just gave up summarising and started quoting. I am hoping to find out where this report is hosted so I can put in the link and you can read it in its entirety for yourself. I promise you, it will be time well spent.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile, how does this tie in with what I originally planned to say today (<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/in-recovery">my slides are <span style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a>)? </span></span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xVDJygbE5qQ/VGR8AhGF05I/AAAAAAAAAWM/GqUDJpaZhR8/s1600/4585933619_3be2e78fef_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xVDJygbE5qQ/VGR8AhGF05I/AAAAAAAAAWM/GqUDJpaZhR8/s400/4585933619_3be2e78fef_z.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CC Perry McKenna: https://www.flickr.com/photos/63567936@N00/4585933619/</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">main message w<span style="font-family: inherit;">as (and is) this:</span></span> i</span></span>f 'post-digital' means attending to agendas other than technology in education, that is surely what we need to be. There are much more important and - frankly - interesting things for developers to commit ourselves to. The NUS report highlights one of them: post-compulsory education has lost the democratising aspirations it had - however weakly theorised they may have been - as recently as ten years ago. We must ask how our institutions redress rather than entrenching inequalities of opportunity and outcome. 'Inclusivity' is the term used in the NUS report. Inclusivity (and again I'm quoting because I can't put it any better) '<i>not only means that teaching and learning takes account of students’ diverse backgrounds, but that we should be embracing this diversity by valuing and utilising the many different capabilities, expectations, aspirations and prior knowledge that students bring to their course</i>'. Now digital technology can play a role here. Some kinds of disadvantage can be positively addressed in digitally rich spaces, such as sensory and accessibility problems, and problems of confidence in speaking out face to face. Providing of course there are appropriate resources, and the educational will and know-how to use technologies in this way. But other kinds of disadvantage are likely to be exacerbated, such as access to educational capital. Put simply, better-off learners come to college with better digital devices and better home-based experiences of using them for learning. So we can't afford to be blind to the role of technology, but technology is not the end-point of our development work: inclusivity is.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking beyond the crisis in education itself, we should be developing people who can tackle our most pressing human, economic and environmental problems, and who believe these to be their concern. As I argued in my first set of slides ('in the wake'), digital technologies are relevant to many of these probems. And as with inequalities of opportunity, we need to understand the contribution that digital technologies make to amplifying or dampening the crises around us. But as developers we need to move on from asking 'are there digital technologies in the curriculum?' to asking: does the curriculum foster an awareness of sustainability? of fairness and justice? of global citizenship? </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And then: what role do digital technologies play in this? We need to move on from delivering 'digital literacy' as a set of competences and ask how are students are becoming critical (and creative and empowered) in relation to practices of knowledge, and in relation to the tools </span></span>they are offered to accomplish that.</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TARjI9Y8fro/VGR8ehW2NbI/AAAAAAAAAWU/RABVJDsCEz8/s1600/In%2Brecovery.004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TARjI9Y8fro/VGR8ehW2NbI/AAAAAAAAAWU/RABVJDsCEz8/s400/In%2Brecovery.004.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-family: inherit;">So <span style="font-family: inherit;">if we <span style="font-family: inherit;">better</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> understand <span style="font-family: inherit;">the ways in which</span> digital technologies change the context for learning and develo<span style="font-family: inherit;">pment, how can we (do we need to<span style="font-family: inherit;">) get over</span></span></span></span> our obsession with the digital as an agenda for change? That is the <span style="font-family: inherit;">last of the three</span> questions I will ask delegates to discuss with me on Friday<span style="font-family: inherit;"> and that I have <span style="font-family: inherit;">tried to open up in these posts:</span></span></span></span><br />
<ol>
<li><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What real changes have digital technologies brought about in e<span style="font-family: inherit;">ducational practice?</span></span></span></span></span></span></b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> (<span style="font-family: inherit;">'<a href="http://design-4-learning.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/post-digital-provocations-2-in-wake-of.html">in the wake</a>')</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></b></li>
<li><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How do those accord with our values as educational developers? </span></span></span></span></span></span></b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">('<a href="http://design-4-learning.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/post-digital-provocations-3-in-response.html">in response</a>')</span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(If we need to), how do</span> we move on from 'digita<span style="font-family: inherit;">l' as a positive agenda for educational change? </span></span></b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">('<a href="http://design-4-learning.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/post-digital-provocations-4-in-recovery.html">in recovery</a>')</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span> </span></span>Tune in to <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://t.co/BUqiJzHpv9">C</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://t.co/BUqiJzHpv9">ollaborate</a> at 0930 to fo<span style="font-family: inherit;">llow live, or catch up with the outcomes here.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<div class="page" title="Page 16">
<div class="layoutArea">
<div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span></span>HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-1078230560770339212014-11-11T13:36:00.000-08:002014-11-12T02:14:30.012-08:00Post-digital provocations #3: 'in response to' the digitalIn the previous two posts I talked about the digital 'mode of knowledge production' and the kinds of change it has brought about in educational relationships and practice. I argued that changes to the contexts of learning affect learners' relationships to their institutions and to each other and to us as educators. That changes in theory and method in academic practice, and in the content of curricula and in what is expected of graduates, are all influencing how we come to know things and to value what we know. I summarised these changes as generally making knowledge more fluid, and situations of learning more <b>porous</b> or 'leaky'. And I considered how traces of learning and development are easier to make and more <b>persistent</b>, both in the kind of records that learners make themselves and in the data trails that organisations (educational and commercial) make of them. A recent <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/lecturer-calls-for-clarity-in-use-of-learning-analytics/2016776.article">Times Higher article</a>, for example, shows that academics and students alike are waking up to the implications of learner analytics for the relationships between students and institutions.<br />
<br />
There are changes that I think time has shown to be less profound. The interactivity of digital media would for me be one, or the different terms used for independent learning when digital technologies are involved, though these have at various moments in the digital 'wave' seemed essential to its forward momentum. In <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/in-the-wake">my slides</a> I also cautioned against substituting developments in digital technologies for political engagement with issues of equality and power, in the belief that entities such as 'the internet' or practices such as 'open sharing' necessarily entail more equal access to learning opportunity or more democratic institutions.<br />
<br />
In this post I want to consider our response to digital transformations, and to do that in two moods, though I don't see them as distinct. One is an intellectual response or critique, and the other is a felt response to the experience of living/teaching/learning in a world saturated with digital technologies. I wasn't originally planning to bring the second kind of response so fully into view, but a recent <a href="http://hackeducation.com/2014/09/03/monsters-altc2014/">keynote by Audrey Watters</a> at the ALT conference, followed by a <a href="http://theory.cribchronicles.com/">seminar with Bonnie Stewart</a> as part of the #scholar14 MOOC, have convinced me that it is necessary. That is, we must acknowledge our own feelings including fear, vulnerability, boredom and compulsion in relation to digital technology if we are to support students and staff in the same space. We must practice rigorous critique of the technologies we are offered to use, but also speak from our consciences and hearts, especially when we experience digital spaces being colonised by values that are antithetical to educational (and human) development.<br />
<br />
My second set of <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/in-the-wake">slides is now available on slideshare</a>. In the following slide I am wondering aloud what it feels like to think/act/be in online spaces that are simultaneously private and public, that are porous in ways we might not feel we have consented to. There is no one response, and one of the points I am making is that this feels very different depending on whether you are a man or a woman, from the global north or south, digitally and/or educationally empowered or not, and in other very personal ways. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lOG8Jmyy_K4/VGKdluo6zVI/AAAAAAAAAVs/307w0TzEyy4/s1600/what%2Bdoes%2Bit%2Bfeel%2Blike%3F.005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lOG8Jmyy_K4/VGKdluo6zVI/AAAAAAAAAVs/307w0TzEyy4/s400/what%2Bdoes%2Bit%2Bfeel%2Blike%3F.005.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
For each of these there are negative feelings associated with either end of the axis. There is of course a middle ground where
we are thoughtful, balanced, in control of our relationship with technology. Where I might feel (for
example) neither fearful of interacting online, nor liable to behave
disrespectfully to others. However, increasingly I seem to be able to experience both negative ends of the spectrum at the same time. In writing this keynote, for example, I am working obsessively on my slides, using Keynote and Google advanced image search, and cycling between them like my daughter's hamster on its little mouse wheel. I've just noticed that it's after midnight and I probably haven't got up from the laptop in three hours. At the same time I feel ungrounded and dispersed through the various media I am using and through the different sources I have open. I am slightly in despair at the impossible task of keeping up with all the exciting people who are blogging in this area (see my blogs to watch on the right). I also feel some guilt that I am dipping into various online discussions in order to snatch at what is useful to me immediately, rather than making my own stance visible or committing to participate over time.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z566V1KLsx4/VGKoPqzL_5I/AAAAAAAAAV8/wmCAB_z1Pi0/s1600/global%2Bnorth.009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z566V1KLsx4/VGKoPqzL_5I/AAAAAAAAAV8/wmCAB_z1Pi0/s400/global%2Bnorth.009.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I have hardly made myself vulnerable through this confession and I feel lucky that I participate online as regularly as I do without (yet) meeting with any significant abuse or trolling. But I see that many many women do experience this, from below the line responses to female columnists such as <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/hadleyfreeman">Hadley Freeman in the Guardian</a>, to the reaction Audrey Watter received when she posted that '<a href="http://www.hackeducation.com/2014/10/17/hack-education-weekly-news-10-17-2014/">Gamergate is an EdTech issue'</a> on Hack Education. And in similar vein I understand that participating online, especially in academic spaces, feels very different if you are not English, not from the global North, not from an elite institution such as most UK universities (in a global context) are, not from a particular educational culture, not physically able, not digitally able, not a 'proper' student, (not a 'proper' academic)... <a href="http://blog.mahabali.me/blog/">Maha Bali's blog</a> is an upbeat but sobering read on many of these issues.<br />
<br />
So, as Bonnie Stewart has argued, we need to <i>take care of each other</i> in digital spaces, recognising that they engender vulnerabilities as well as opportunities. How much truer that is when the others are our students. In my final provocation tomorrow I will ask how we might recover from digital fall-out, and help our students to recover too, in ways that make us all more resilient. HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-25321769292427345142014-11-10T05:28:00.004-08:002014-11-11T16:38:19.472-08:00Post-digital provocations #2: 'in the wake of' the digitalIn this post I introduce the first of three sets of slides that would have been the backdrop to my keynote, had I been doing a standard keynote at the <a href="http://www.seda.ac.uk/index.php?p=14_2&e=450&x=1">SEDA conference</a>. However, as this is a flipped format I am making the lecture material available in advance, so that we can use the live session for discussion. The first topic I have called '<b><i>in the wake of</i></b>' the digital, exploring the idea of 'post' to mean 'after' but 'not yet done with'.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MaGVT8WZ0ms/VGCy-NaGrxI/AAAAAAAAAVM/F86msiWXEnk/s1600/wake2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MaGVT8WZ0ms/VGCy-NaGrxI/AAAAAAAAAVM/F86msiWXEnk/s1600/wake2.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_r3"><a class="_ZR irc_hol" data-ved="0CAYQjB0" href="http://charlie-trumpet.deviantart.com/art/Boat-Wake-149905932"><span class="irc_ho" dir="ltr">cc charlie-trumpet.deviantart.com</span></a></span><span class="_r3 irc_msc"><a class="_ZR irc_msl" data-ved="0CAgQhxw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wake+boat&as_st=y&hl=en&tbs=simg:CAQSWQnmwMsD4XCobRpFCxCwjKcIGjwKOggCEhTII8Mk0yTXGvwPtiT-D5sa3COzGhogO-z11IZtazQYP5eDOm9l9slptixww1zTTtArDvwphpUMIWhNGR0Du2ad&tbm=isch"><span class="irc_idim"></span></a></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You will find my <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/in-the-wake">slides on slideshare</a> and my <a href="http://youtu.be/-Gnr8gdIxnw">slides with audio on youtube</a>. In these slides I look at some specific features of networked digital technologies from the perspective of their development up until 2014. I review the impact of these new means of production on academic practice, thinking in terms of educational <i>content</i>, <i>context</i>, <i>theory</i> and <i>method</i>. Finally I conclude that - while there are specific affordances of digital media for learning and communicating ideas, and specific opportunities presented by digital data at scale - the most significant overall impact for educators is to make learning settings and events more porous (leaky). <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7_32gaEcX_c/VGC1-AOSp6I/AAAAAAAAAVY/9Ts-Vzisf38/s1600/water-424807_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7_32gaEcX_c/VGC1-AOSp6I/AAAAAAAAAVY/9Ts-Vzisf38/s1600/water-424807_1280.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pixabay.com/en/users/TobiasD-206193/">CC0 public domain license: http://pixabay.com/en/users/TobiasD-206193/</a></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In my next post and slide set I continue the water theme and look at what that feels like - for learners and for educators - and how we develop a critical response to these changes.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com409tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-69750604477350469002014-11-06T08:20:00.000-08:002014-11-10T01:51:46.981-08:00'Post-digital' provocation #1: mode of production<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xtxKfekbsEI/VFuVBwNlm5I/AAAAAAAAAT0/hyqlADaY3gI/s1600/Willetts%2BTHES.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>I've been asked to provide a 'flipped keynote' for the SEDA conference 2014, which this year is called 'Academic Development in a Post-Digital Age'. You can find the abstract for my keynote and more about the conference <a href="http://www.seda.ac.uk/index.php?p=14_2&e=450">here</a>.<br />
As homework for the live keynote - and for interest if you have arrived here and don't plan to be at the live session at all - I will be posting three short slide sets with audio and notes. These will follow the three ideas I outline in my abstract: that we can understand 'post' to mean <b>in the wake of</b> the digital event, whatever that is/has been, <b>in response to</b> the digital, and/or <b>in recovery from</b> it. <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jPdUnPyuIIU/VFua3q7PeyI/AAAAAAAAAUE/-R9psaFU578/s1600/wake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jPdUnPyuIIU/VFua3q7PeyI/AAAAAAAAAUE/-R9psaFU578/s1600/wake.jpg" height="259" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Malene Thyssen, <a class="external free" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
By way of an introduction, today I want to examine my own
assumption that the 'digital' (as in 'the Digital Age') is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_production">mode
of production</a>. Economic theorists have coined the term '<a href="http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/54297/datasheet_310981.pdf">cognitive
capitalism</a>' to distinguish today's economic relations from (say)
mercantile or industrial capitalism, when - respectively - trade and
conquest, and advances in industrial technologies, were the drivers
of profit. Today, they argue, in a globalised economy and at an
advanced stage of technologisation, innovation and information
technologies are key. The same ideas may be more familiar as the
'<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy">knowledge
economy</a>', though I would question the optimism with which this
term has generally been used (see for example this <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/podcasts/the-future-of-education-are-we-having-the-right-conversation-11-nov-2010">interview
with Keri Facer</a> from 2010).
Whether or not we accept these overarching accounts of our C21st
economy - which after all still has to produce real means of
subsistence and shelter and good health as well as good ideas - still
it seems to me beyond argument that digital technology is changing
modes of academic and intellectual production. Research, sharing and
disseminating ideas, putting ideas to use, teaching and developing
new thinkers and innovators - none of the core functions of academic
labour has failed to be radically changed.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xtxKfekbsEI/VFuVBwNlm5I/AAAAAAAAAT0/hyqlADaY3gI/s1600/Willetts%2BTHES.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xtxKfekbsEI/VFuVBwNlm5I/AAAAAAAAAT0/hyqlADaY3gI/s1600/Willetts%2BTHES.tiff" height="270" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
These changes in the mode of academic production are accompanied
by many social and organisational changes. I have <a href="http://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_129_Ed%20Devs%2013.2%20v3%20%28FINAL%29.pdf">argued
before</a> that digital technologies have been complicit in various
political agendas for higher education and therefore in the present
crisis of legitimacy that we face. Without digital systems,
politicians might aspire to (but surely could not deliver) the degree
of academic surveillance, rational planning, the obsession with
metrics, or the casual assumption that our best measure of success is
how well we provide 'skills for a knowledge economy'. (David Kernohan has <a href="http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/graduate-employability-and-the-new-economic-order/">blogged persuasively</a> about this recently). Without their
ease with just-in-time, just-for-me digital information, I wonder
whether students would have been as quickly persuaded that higher
education is essentially another customer service? These are the
outcomes of policies, not technologies, but changes to the mode of
production makes new kinds of policy possible. (New kinds of radical
thought and action are also of course <a href="http://newint.org/books/reference/world-development/case-studies/social-networking-in-the-arab-spring/">more
possible</a>, though I have deliberately chosen an article about the
use of social media that is equivocal in its conclusions.)
</div>
<br />
I suppose what I am confessing to here is that I am a materialist.
I'm still not sure exactly what that means in relation to a mode of
production that is manifestly <i>immaterial</i> in most of its
actions and effects. But I think it's to do with avoiding both
idealism (thoughts and ideas exist independently of the medium in
which they are expressed) and technological determinism (access to
the internet will overturn educational disadvantage). It's attending
to the specific technologies of this revolution, and the specific new
educational arrangements and relationships that they are bringing
about.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
If we are 'post-digital' that cannot mean that the digital mode of
production is over and done with, any more than industrial technologies
are over and done with. We continue to depend on fossil fuels and mass
production, even if they are deployed largely in distant lands, and we
continue to increase our reliance on digital networks and devices in
everyday life. Perhaps, though, we are at the end of the beginning of
the information age, equivalent to the point in the industrial
revolution (about 1860?) when technologies that were no longer
alarmingly new were adopted at scale (railways, electrification,
production lines). Perhaps the first extraordinary digital wave has
rolled over us and as we surface and catch breath we can see that this
turbulence is the new reality - it is still rolling us forwards - and we
have to find some other way of characterising what is new.</div>
<br />
There
will be more about academic development specifically in what follows,
so please don't be put off by the theoretical flavour of this
provocation. I'm just confessing my biases before I start. I welcome
comments, contributions, tweets and emails, which I will incorporate
into what follows. In particular I'd like to ask you: what do you
understand the 'digital' in the 'digital age' to be?<br />
#SEDApostdigital.<br />
Key influencers - though in no way responsible for my views - include <a href="http://www.manuelcastells.info/en/">Manuel Castells</a>, <a href="http://www.richard-hall.org/">Richard Hall</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/Czernie">Laura Czerniewicz</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">.</a> Since first posting I've had my attention drawn to a recent <a href="http://ibrarspace.net/tag/sociomateriality/">SRHE conference</a> on 'The Digital and the Material' - this twitter stream by Ibrar Bhatt references work by Martin Oliver, Donna Lanclos and Lesley Gourlay (among others) and considers how virtual technologies constraint/structure behaviours in the material world. HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-35201920942423968982013-04-23T04:48:00.000-07:002013-04-23T04:48:41.889-07:00OcTEL task on 'readiness' to learn online.<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">As I'm leading a <a href="http://octel.alt.ac.uk/octel-week-2-webinar/">webinar</a> on the subject of 'learners' this week i thought it was time to engage with some of the content and comments in the ongoing <a href="http://octel.alt.ac.uk/">OcTEL MOOC</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Week two's activities start with reviewing <a href="http://octel.alt.ac.uk/course-materials/understanding-learners-needs/">four questionnaires</a> designed to find out whether learners are 'ready to learn online'.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Once I'd got over the 'online' learning bit - I had thought this was a general TEL course with the focus on blended rather than purely online learning - I decided to complete these questionnaires in as unready a way as possible. The Penn State feedback directed me to some general study skills resources. However, these were not at all suited to online students or even students with basic digital habits - for example the mindmapping tutorial only covered the use of pen and paper to create mindmaps. The San Diego questionnaire seemed very joky - in fact if I was unsure about using a computer I would find it frankly insulting - and the Illinois one though more serious had obviously not been piloted on any real students. In both cases the feedback only reinforced my deficits:<br /><i>'Not only do you need to feel
comfortable reading course content online, but you must feel comfortable
with the technology used to deliver the information'. </i> </span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">'</span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">you must be extremely self-disciplined, somewhat
technologically savvy, and communicate through writing without ever
meeting your instructor or peers face to face'</span></span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Need to? Must? How do I get better at these things?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The University of Houston questionnaire was the most useful in that it actually identified different kinds of aptitude that might support online learning and was reasonably serious in its approach, though the questions were extremely repetitive and again I wondered about piloting. Again i was directed to general advice about 'improving' my skills before attempting to learn online. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">While masquerading as self-help, all four of these questionnaires read to me like disclaimers designed to protect the relevant universities from irate students who may not have learned successfully online. They were not research-based diagnostic tools, and nor were they supportive signposts to relevant resources for prospective students.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I'd refer people interested in this kind of questionnaire to the one we created at Exeter ('<a href="http://bit.ly/learnerquiz">what kind of digital learner are you?</a>') which produces customised feedback with clear pointers to how students can build on what they already do. Bath have built a similar questionnaire, using our code but with categories mapped to Doug Belshaw's model of digital literacy. Neither are exactly research-based instruments, though in the case of Exeter it was based on interviews with real students. But both are intended to help staff and students appreciate the different skills and resources they bring to study, and explore how they can build on them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span> HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-22233249294569973902012-04-14T13:50:00.004-07:002012-04-14T14:12:05.510-07:00'Learning technology' - an outmoded term?In an email conversation with <a href="http://lawrie.jiscinvolve.org/wp/">Lawrie Phipps</a> and David Baume from <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies/seda.aspx">SEDA's Digital Literacy project</a>, we were looking at the term 'learning technology'.<br /><br />I suggested that the term comes from a time when <span style="font-style: italic;">institutional</span> LTA systems were being developed and implemented for the first time. Important because one of the great powers of digital technology is interoperability, and making information easily shared among all the people and processes involved in learning. But since the emergence of VLEs, I think different strengths of digital technology have come to the fore, especially portability and ubiquity. Networks, tools and services that <span style="font-style: italic;">happen to be useful for learning</span> have become much more available, disappearing at one end into disciplinary practices (GIS are hardly 'learning technologies' but 'technologies of geographical practice'), and at the other end into learners' personal and social habits (blogs, wikis, social networks, digital media…). So it has become less useful to talk about 'learning technologies', which implies that the learning is in the system, and more important to talk about specifically educational practices (LTA and research/scholarship) in a digital environment - an environment in which activity is always already infused with digital information and communication options, and in which this fundamentally changes the meaning of the activity.<br /><br />I do think that in all this we must give ourselves the means to describe the material, social, cultural effects of the <span style="font-style: italic;">digital</span> as distinct from other human technologies such as print, writing, picture-making etc. In part just because these effects are becoming harder and harder to see - particularly for younger students who have been surrounded by them from birth and have them, so to speak, pressed up against their eyes. As educators and developers we need to open up spaces in which it is possible to critique these effects, to reflect on how they act in our own lives/learning, and to adopt critical stances towards the ways they act on us collectively - I mean specifically, materially, historically etc and not imagining digital technologies to have some magical powers that other technologies do not. This space can't be opened if we adopt the position that 'it's all just technology' or 'the kids don't see the difference so it doesn't exist'.<br /><br />As a further complication of terms, I've grown quite keen on the word 'educational' for all its baggage. Teaching/educating others is a different set of activities to learning, or at least a radically different 'set towards' those activities (a 'set towards' the learning of the other person). All animals learn but only social animals teach, and I dislike the over-valuing of informal learning if what that means is the basic human aspiration to help others to learn is side-lined. There are enough people gunning for the teaching profession. And again in the interests of making visible, learning/teaching that takes place in institutions/settings specifically designed for those activities is different from learning/teaching that takes place in other settings. That's not to say new relationships should not be developed between formal educational settings and other places of learning, and in fact digital technology is critical in mediating those new relationships. But if we lose sight of what is different and special about times/places of formal learning it becomes very difficult to bring those relationships into being, or indeed to pursue the aim of equal access to those special times and places which has been the driving force behind educational thinking for much of the last two centuries.<br /><br />So I think we are talking about <span style="font-style: italic;">educational practice in a digital society</span>. Not as neat as learning technology, but for me it puts the emphasis of the current political/social/educational project in the right places. Defending formal education. Defending the right to formal education. Placing it in its proper social context. Understanding that the social context has been changed beyond recognition by the ubiquitous use of digital forms of information and communication, and that this would change the whole meaning of educational practice even if those social changes had not in many cases originated in the educational sphere.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-47035705878182117422012-03-25T13:10:00.004-07:002012-03-25T14:36:47.213-07:00e-learning futures: live writing for 'Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age'Tomorrow I'm meeting with some old friends/collaborators (and a few new) to collaboratively write a final chapter for the second edition of <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415408745/">Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age</a>. I'm slightly nervous about the collaborative writing aspect - coordinating people across several timezones and a larger number of theoretical perspectives to produce a coherent text in a few hours will not be easy. But I'm excited to be focusing on 'the future of e-learning', with all its risk of egg-on-face.<br /><br />Topics I hope will be included in our final piece:<br /><br />- the <a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/03/23/open-vs-closed-what-kind-of-internet-do-we-want/">open vs closed internet</a>, and specifically how that impacts on the opportunities for <a href="https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/51668352/OpenPractices">open educational practices</a> to evolve and spread<br />- <a href="http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/38511966/digital%20literacy">digital literacy</a>, and specifically how we develop <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpages.gseis.ucla.edu%2Ffaculty%2Fkellner%2Fessays%2Ftechnoliteracy.pdf&ei=EH5vT_X8I6j80QWWjfmNAg&usg=AFQjCNF9bzJa5xTX50YvnHG4fbFAZAue1w">critically techno-literate</a> individuals with an awareness of how digital systems design our world and actions in it, as well as offering themselves for use<br />- <a href="http://wlv.academia.edu/JohnTraxler/Papers/115824/Design_for_Mobile_and_Wireless_Technologies">mobile technologies</a> and specifically the convergence of real and virtual space through ubiquitous connectivity and the use of geolocational data<br /><br />I'm hoping to gather more ideas from the twitterverse and also on a live googledoc that you can access <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lla6RiXgCshUh2ZpZH7SB47kPNkPJb9U5GFZWGUBuv8/edit">here</a>.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com64tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-81746882743416111522012-03-01T13:01:00.002-08:002012-03-01T13:18:16.932-08:00Guardian 'Digital Literacies in HE' live chatIt's always great to be on a panel with <a href="http://fraser.typepad.com/">Josie Fraser</a> and <a href="http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/">David White</a>, not to mention the other excellent bloggers whose fingers will be racing over the pages of the Guardian's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/feb/28/developing-digital-literacy">live web chat</a> tomorrow. I'll post more when the dust has settled, but just to say that I'm hoping debate will cover:<br />- what it means to be critical in a digital age<br />- open scholarship and the identity of the public intellectual in a digital age<br />- the intersection of academic and digital practice - and the cutting edges of both<br />I'm also hoping for opportunities to mention the excellent work being done by projects in the JISC digital literacies programme, particularly of course Exeter's <a href="http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/cascade/">Cascade project</a> which I'm lucky enough to be project managing, jointly with Liz Dunne, but also projects at <a href="http://technologyenhancedlearning.net/seedpod/">Plymouth</a> and <a href="http://www2.gre.ac.uk/research/centres/ecentre/projects/dl-in-transition">Greenwich</a> where I have been more peripherally involved. Very different examples of whole-institution approaches but all concerned with the lifelong, lifewide impact that digital literacies will have in the near future.<br /><br />Over our cascade coffee mugs this morning we were debating why <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">raspberry pi </a>should be on the menu for all school children. Not because everyone needs to be excited by coding or want to develop apps for a living, but because everyone needs to know how the tools and environments we live by are designed for us, and design our world for us. Just as everyone needs to know how to add up to survive in a monetised economy, or in our visual culture needs to know how images of women are manipulated, or how documentary films are edited and framed. Yes the curriculum is already crowded, but the part that is given over to ICT should not be dedicated to learning the programmes that will make students productive workers in the five years after they leave school.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-57826029320756964652012-01-11T05:25:00.000-08:002012-01-11T06:03:03.552-08:00Design or be designed forIn the new digital literacy campaign from Michael Gove's office (as reported <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2012/jan/11/digital-literacy-campaign-michael-gove-speech-and-live-q-amp-a?INTCMP=SRCH">here in the Guardian</a>) there are a few things to celebrate but perhaps more to regret.<br /><br />1. Yes, at the classroom level we should focus on teachers' digital capabilities - as an integral aspect of their professionalism - rather than on specific hardware. But it's the government's job to ensure schools have the ICT infrastructure that allows teachers and learners to develop, experiment, and be creative. Higher level capabilities are built on the foundation of basic functional access. In place of the previous Government's investment in ICT infrastructure for schools - whatever we might have thought of how this was targeted - there is just a nod to Google and Microsoft to move into the gap.<br /><br />2. Yes, computer science is a scholarly, rigorous, exciting and intellectually demanding field of study, and computer scientists will shape all our futures. Courses which focus on the use of basic Office applications should not be confused with computer science. Coding, creating apps, design, understanding formal logic, working with user needs and HCI are all IMO critical skills for the coming decade. As Douglas Rushkoff argues in his book of the same title, we must all learn to '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BXjRaoTPlPE#%21">program or be programmed</a>' by others with better access to digital capital. But how do we make these courses attractive to students again when they have been so thoroughly devalued, not to say trashed as a 'soft option' by the rightwing press?<br /><br />3. Yes, digital literacy - like reading, writing and the use of number - has life-wide, curriculum wide implications and should not be coralled into a specialist subject area. But where are the teachers with the time - where are the rewards for investing the time? - in substantially rethinking their subject area and teaching practice? Which is what this approach, taken seriously, requires.<br /><br />Young people in our society, on the whole, can use a diversity of digital devices for entertainment and social networking. The role of schools and the education sector beyond school should be to develop a <span style="font-weight: bold;">critical</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">creative</span> digital literacy, which goes beyond the capacity to choose and use the latest digital product. <a href="http://lboro.academia.edu/DavidBuckingham/">David Buckingham</a> calls this the capacity for critical reading and creative production. For me the key questions any digital curriculum should ask are:<br /><br />How are applications, interfaces and environments designed? What are the affordances and implications of those design decisions? Can we use technology 'against' the purposes for which it was designed? How do we recognise the purposes - subtle and unsubtle - for which technology offers itself as the means? How can we use digital networks and infrastructure to further our own collective and individual aims? How are we being threatened, pacified and controlled by technology (and what can we do about it)? How do messages in digital media work on us as audience, and how can we construct our own messages persuasively?<br /><br />These are questions that the digital media does not exist to ask - only formal education can encourage young people to ask them. We will not find a curriculum of this kind emanating from Gove's offices, but we might find elements of it elsewhere. Read <a href="http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2012/01/compueter-science-is-not-digital-literacy.html">Josie Fraser's blog post </a>on the same topic for signs of hope - at least if you live in Leicester.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-19009729676216714892011-12-14T03:25:00.000-08:002011-12-14T07:27:28.441-08:00Digital visitors and residents - some thoughtsI took part in an online seminar on the <a href="http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/">Digital visitors and residents project</a> at a <a href="http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr">Collaborate seminar organised by the JISC</a> last week. I think this is a useful metaphor to have in play, and the findings of the project which look extremely valuable in extending our understanding of what motivates students to engage in the digital environment. There are obvious links with the JISC <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies/">Developing Digital Literacies</a> programme: by helping explain what strategies students are using, the project can help us understand what educators might do to validate or further develop those strategies, or introduce others that might give students greater repertoire and fluency.<br /><br />Some of the early findings obviously replicate work that has been done in the past to <a href="http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/file/40474930/Digital%20natives.doc">problematise the digital natives</a> narrative, to demonstrate that personal/social skills with technology are not highly transferable to learning, and to recognise that students have many strategies for using technology to support their studies which do not necessarily coincide with what institutions see as 'good' study skills (the <a href="https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/JISCle2/About">Learners' experiences of e-learning</a> studies confirmed both of these).<br /><br />I do have some thoughts about the metaphor itself, which I shared at the seminar. For example:<br />- Is the place vs tool metaphor one that the project is using, or one they are finding that participants use in thinking about the online space?<br />- How far is the metaphor a design artefact of the environment and how far is it a property of the individual's stance towards the environment? For example, 'windows' are intuitively spatial. Drop down menus are intuitively tool-like. Most software interfaces combine both to give different messages to the user about how to behave.<br />- We know that people's behaviour in online environments is very strongly influenced by those environments - arguably more than any innate factors including age, confidence with technology etc. At least, it is a question that can be researched: to what extent is behaviour in online environments an aspect of relatively stable aspects of the person and to what extent it is environmentally determined? This might vary depending on the environment in question (and even on the person??)<br />- I am assuming that the metaphor distinguishes behaviours and not individuals. i.e. we are all visitors and residents in different contexts.<br />- As described in the seminar, the visitors-residents continuum seems to combine a range of behavioural and perceptual aspect: the metaphors we use when we engage with technology; whether we are behaving as individual or social participants/learners; whether we are behaving as consumers, collaborators or producers of content etc. There is an empirical question here: to what extent are these different factors linked? Is this a question the project is trying to answer?<br /><br />One of the dimensions along which visitors and residents were said to differ is whether their behaviour is 'instrumental' or 'networked'. For me, the web 2.0 era is essentially one in which to be networked IS to be instrumental. Asking a question of my twitter followers is me being instrumental. In exercising my agency I recognise the value of collaboration.<br /><br />So, this post is meant to open a conversation that I hope will be a productive one!HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-23157188583899278412011-11-04T07:37:00.000-07:002011-11-04T07:41:31.876-07:00I noticed this quote in a Guardian <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/nov/04/modern-warfare-3-biggest-game%5C">report on digital animators</a><br />"A lot of the animators here don't have a degree. It's all about your showreel.'<br /><br />Obviously the creative digital industry is ahead of others in relying on digital evidence of employability rather than traditional qualifications. But could we see other industries moving in this direction?<br /><br />Good things I can imagine happening as a result:<br />Assessment becomes focused around authentic evidence of the learning process and learners' achievements. In fact there is no real distinction between 'assessment' and 'learning' - it's all potentially available as evidence - providing that evidence is transferable to other contexts (i.e. potential employers/clients can access and assess it).<br />Learning is potentially richer as more diverse evidence of capability is valued.<br />Digital literacy- e.g. identity and reputation management, networking - is to the fore.<br /><br />Bad things I can imagine happening as a result:<br />Education that leads directly to demonstrable, vocational/professional skills are at a premium. It becomes very difficult to fund - or justify public funds for - other forms of learning and education.<br />The emphasis is on outcomes that have maximum perceived value to potential employers. these may not be the outcomes that give the most satisfying learning experience or the best chance of a fulfilling life in the longer term.<br />The idea of the 'university' begins to come apart at the seams - e.g. the idea of the common pursuit of knowledge - which leads to cross-funding of some subjects by more 'marketable' others - and the idea that academic values have some relevance, purchase, importance in public life, beyond the value of immediate employability.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-16386339141559607352011-01-25T06:13:00.000-08:002011-01-25T06:20:06.364-08:00Thoughts on OERA summary of reflections from the interim meeting of the<a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer"> UK OER II</a> programme. Warning - it's a bit long (lots to say).<style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }</style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Financial constraints </b>mean institutions are less willing to invest in learning and teaching innovation. However, once the political paroxysms are over, the new funding regime might mean that learning and teaching agendas such as OER will have a new relevance. In non-elite institutions it will be necessary to demonstrate that the university experience is worth the money., and that it is distinctively different from the experience at comparable universities. What benefit models might be convincing in this climate, especially in terms of differentiation around the student experience?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">In the short term, with threatened mergers etc, <b>visibility and reputation enhancement</b> may become the key drivers of OER release. OERs project the institution's values to the world, and web 2.0 hosted content e.g. on<a href="http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/"> iTunesU</a> is an important marketing tool. However, there are a lot of institutions where the only OERs that are visible to the outside world are informational or marketing in focus. Is this sustainable in learning and teaching terms? Focus on learning and teaching production is very different from focus on institutional reputation and there may be polarisation of these two agendas in the coming months and years.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Course marketisation </b>may be a link between the two. If every course has an OER profile in order to give students positive choices about their learning, then both strategies come into play. At present none of the institutions represented in the strand have a policy of tasters/trailers for all courses, but there is a move towards this view. They give potential students a view of the kind of experience they can expect, they raise the profile of the module, and they can be particularly powerful if they showcase work by students themselves.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Reward and recognition</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> for teaching and learning are key. So is it about embedding OER into formal processes e.g. quality, course approval, or raising the visibility and status of individuals involved in OER, or embedding into high level policies (teaching and learning, marketing, content management, to name just a few)... or all of these? What works best?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">How students are engaging with OERs may be a different issue from how staff are: embedding into the student experience of learning is not the same set of strategies to embedding into the curriculum. So while staff recognition and reward is probably key, student motivation is much more about </span><b>quality and relevance of the resources</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It is possible that more <b>insecurity in academic employment</b> might actually make OER release more attractive as a way of enhancing personal reputation and profile. Weaker affiliation with an institution → 'public' scholarship as a career path. Academic blogs, rich media papers, open research data, pre-publication versions, and personal content legacies are all becoming part of the apparatus of scholarship and professionalism in academia. OERs are part of the picture of borderless institutions on the one hand, and public scholars on the other.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We can expect more conflicts between academic ways of managing knowledge and the opportunities presented by world-wide web – OERs, iTunesU and marketing depts are places where some of these conflicts are being played out. The '<a href="http://www.obhe.ac.uk/home"><b>borderless university</b></a>' is another way of expressing these tensions.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Defining 'open'.</b> For JISC open = <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">openly licensed </a>to support repurposing and reuse. But some other aspects of openness are at odds with one another – there is not a single dimension along which institutions can be measured. For example, open sharing in communities tends to involve some minimal gatekeeping e.g. log-in and personal identifier, to support the virtuous circle of release and re-use, and enrichment of content. Open resources 'in the wild' are available without gatekeeping but lack the history and community ownership that allow for sustained reuse. Resources may be made highly accessible to students in all contexts by including pedagogic support, but this makes them less accessible to teachers who want to repurpose them in different pedagogic contexts.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">OERs allow universities to position themselves as sites of <b>public knowledge</b>, in an age of near-universal access. But what does that look like in practice? Outcomes of the UK OER programme which would be nice to see:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- 'Best of' UK OER resources to showcase quality</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- Talking heads: towards open public knowledge (students, potential students teaching staff, professionals, developers, managers talking about their OER experiences)</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- Impacts: 2 sides of A4 on institutional and educational benefits and lessons learned</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Apparently there is no funding available for dissemination, so the evaluation and synthesis team needs to think about how outcomes from the projects and from our own work can be designed to meet some of these criteria without 'extra work' disseminating them in new forms.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">‘<b>OER’ as an issue </b>might become less visible in the coming months, because on the one hand it is just part of the developing digital landscape, and on the other hand it is just a new mode of content sharing, which has always been an aspect of the academic community. OERs can be differentiated from other content (open licence, cost free, accessible design...?) but for most users these are of limited visibility and interest – it's just content. UK OER is a particular moment in the evolution of both digital content and open practices in education, but the evolution will continue.</p>HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-73237515089544423442010-07-13T13:44:00.001-07:002010-07-13T14:42:39.012-07:00Where's the critical literacy?Spotlight has a recent comment on <a href="http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/you_say_we_need_a_revolution_the_new_digital_literacy_consensus/">critical media literacy</a> which I like because it emphasises the need for education in critical reading - of all kinds - as well as functional access to information. I would link this with the observation in my last post that in educating people to use technology we mustn't fail also to help them understand and critically appraise the ends for which technologies are offered as the means.<br /><br />However, I wonder if there is any evidence for this assertion:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">'integrating digital media into the classroom will not only improve digital literacy but is the key to improving traditional literacy as well, especially reading skills'</span><br /><br />I can see that this might be the case from the perspective of multiple literacy practices. i.e. if one is literate in several modes - in text, visual images, moving images, etc - one might have a better chance of grasping each mode as only a partial and particular representation of 'the truth'. Better perhaps: each mode becomes a resource which one uses, rather than a way of being occupied by the messages of another.<br /><br />Also I can see that different individuals might find it natural to creatively produce, and critically read, in different media, and that there might then be opportunities to transfer those capabilities. More opportunities to grasp the nature of media per se - of audience, production, genre, rhetoric, stance etc - can only be better.<br /><br />Both these presuppose that 'criticality' is not a generic attitude towards media in general - or not originally so - but a set of practices acquired in relation to media in particular over repeated exposure and reflection. That's a reasonably plausible assumption and could be tested empirically.<br /><br />But... I am very sceptical of the reason actually given in the posting: 'These [digital] media teach students to master the production of knowledge, not just the consumption of knowledge'. Wha??? First, media teach nothing. Photographs don't teach photography, though arguably <span style="font-style: italic;">cameras</span> can teach some elements of photography to people with existing skills in 'reading' the designs technology has on its users. On the whole, though, learning to take good photographs requires extensive practice, ideally in the company of skilled others, if not direct instruction. Photographs themselves, as Sontag among others has argued, occupy the viewer: they command belief rather than critical reading or creative reproduction.<br /><br />But second, why should digital technologies have a special capability to 'teach' production of knowledge? If media can teach, books can teach us to write. If tools can teach, pencils can teach us to draw. It's this kind of sloppy thinking about the 'digital' which undermines good thinking and research into the difference that digital technologies make to our world and our understanding of it.<br />'HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-48288812434306199972010-07-08T01:54:00.001-07:002010-07-08T03:02:08.081-07:00Thinking the future with/and/of/as technologyThis post is in response/dialogue with Richard Hall's post <a href="http://www.learnex.dmu.ac.uk/2010/07/educational-futures-educational-technology-and-digital-social-media/">Educational Futures, Educational Technology, and Digital Social Media</a>. I was lucky enough to be involved in the <a href="http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/">Beyond Current Horizons</a> work that he refers to and it was one of the best experiences I've had of working in e-learning. It was a space in which expertise and human values really came together. Thanks to Keri, Richard S, and others at FutureLab :-)<br /><br />In challenging the imaginary future which so much e-learning rhetoric assumes, we were not only challenging a positivist view of technology but also challenging some political and economic assumptions, particularly the 'digital economy' rhetoric of New Labour at that time. Rather than UK graduates riding high on a global knowledge revolution, the BCH economists drew our attention to the stronger possibility that high value knowledge work would be outsourced to emergent economies where labour costs remain relatively low but higher education and skills training are rapidly catching up with and even overtaking our own. Globalisation means it really doesn't matter where your expertise is located, and as/if the value of a Western university degree falls, UK graduates can't assume their place in the global digital economy will be at the top. More likely will be a restratification of the UK middle class, with lots of middle-level management and administrative jobs involving digital knowledge work, while the innovating and decision-making is confined to a small globally-mobile elite. As these middle-level jobs are likely to be on a piecemeal, results-driven basis, one impact of global digital technology may be that white-collar work becomes less well paid, less rewarding, and less secure.<br /><br />Another issue we have all stubbed our toes against since BCH reported is that the 'real' economy is... real. People with i-phones still need to be fed, sheltered, taken care of, and while in times of relative affluence it may be nice to imagine us all working somewhere like <a href="http://www.reactorr.com/blog/index.php/2009/08/google-land/">this</a>, the demands of sustainability and peak oil mean that more rather than less human labour will probably be needed to keep the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o">bare necessities</a> coming.<br /><br />I'm not really qualified to comment on the role of technology in saving us from disaster - many others are doing this brilliantly well. But in my world I think having values-led discussions about technology in education means constantly undermining the rhetoric. So, against the rhetoric, I'd want to say:<br /><br />* Graduates are not all going to be working in the global knowledge economy and not all of them would want to anyway.<br /><br />*Social media spaces are fabulous ways of extending our social life in time and space, potentially breaking down boundaries. They are also fabulous ways of reinforcing prejudice, bullying, lying, breaking reputations. They are amplifiers of our social existence, not another social existence, and they demand a new thoughtfulness about how we relate to one another, including in relationships of learning.<br /><br />*Technologies are tools designed by human beings for use by other human beings, which is a relationship of power. It is essential to develop a critical awareness of the designs that tools have on us as users. An education in technology use must be augmented by an education in critiquing the ends for which technology offers itself as the means.<br /><br />*Knowledge, like money, can circulate, play, enhance reputations, generate celebrity, transform itself. This is its exchange value i.e. how far people are prepared to give it their attention and credence. Knowledge, like money, acquires use value when it is applied to solve pressing human problems. Which don't only include STEM discipline problems but for example how we relate to one another, organise our societies and communities, learn to be happy with less. Our education should be focusing on the use values of knowledge, IMO, and 'the wisdom to know the difference'.<br /><br />*Technology is an amazing sign of our human genius and a tool for enhancing it, including our genius for learning and for developing others. It has no genius of its own. Technology neither teaches nor learns.<br /><br />*When we value system-readable, standardised, generic, instant, context-independent knowledge over human-knowable, situational, local, tacit, long-grown and particular knowledge we risk forgetting much that we need to save us.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-33264566493671438892009-11-19T14:05:00.000-08:002009-11-19T14:11:17.736-08:00Four questions about learners' needs and expectationsAhead of my keynote with Rhona at the JISC e-learning conference, here are four questions I think are relevant to addressing learners' needs and expectations - and thinking about why needs and expectations might not be the same.<br /> <br />What capabilities will today's learners need in 2020? (Which of these capabilities have 'digital' aspects and what do they look like?)<br /><br />What do learners arriving at HE and FE need to make the best of their learning experience? (What do they need if they are to make the best use of technologies to support their learning?)<br /><br />What experience will learners get from HE and FE that they can't get from other kinds of learning (especially informal, technology-enabled learning)?<br /><br />What do learners want or expect from HE and FE that present challenges to the existing practices of institutions (especially around technology)?HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-23114734720403775402009-11-14T01:29:00.000-08:002009-11-14T01:30:12.414-08:00why talk about texts?This was blogged in response to Robin Goodfellow's post on the <a href="http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/">Literacies in the Digital University</a> site and I hope can also be read there. I agree with Andy that new technologies bring forward new ways of expressing academic ideas – and maybe we need to use terms like critical, reflexive, evidence-based, rhetorical etc to describe what is valued about academic ideas, and/or acknowledge that traditions of how ideas are valued and validated can change as in the oral-to-written PhD. I think it will be in discipline and micro-discipline communities that new practices emerge, become visible, and come to be valued, i.e. become part of a social practice and historical tradition. I do also agree with Robin, though, that use of the term 'affordance' is not always helpful – again my personal preference would be to focus on knowledge practice. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong">Ong</a>, I think, talks about writing as both a technology and a practice. In this vein, 'text' is also a slippery term - it is used to mean both specifically written or printed communications (communications using a particular technology), and communication of many kinds viewed through a particular analytical lens (hence 'multimedia text').<br /><br />To get back to the practices, the 2007 British Library <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/downloads/GG%20BL%20Learning%20Report.pdf">report into the information behaviour of school-age researchers</a> has this on p.46: 'About 40% of UK schools found content in the learning directory by using a Search engine image search... Further about half of US (47%) and EU universities (47%) accessed the learning directory using a Search engine image search.' This is not young people in their personal, social practice but engaged in formal learning contexts. And actually if you have some idea what you are looking for, selecting from images (even images of text) can be faster and more accurate.<br /><br />There is absolutely no doubt that academic practices are changing - in fact text and what we can do with it is probably changing faster than other modes are being adopted - for me the question is how we reframe in the new knowledge media landscape what is valuable about academic modes of communication.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-46568928203745322462009-11-12T23:20:00.000-08:002009-11-12T23:30:39.138-08:00Design distance<span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;font-size:85%;" >This is an idea that came to me during a recent meeting with Cluster C of the<a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/curriculumdesign.aspx"> JISC Curriculum Design programme</a>. I have been reviewing their baseline reports and we were discussing both how design/teaching 'roles' may be changing, and how design for learning takes place at several interrelated levels of the curriculum. I came up with the term 'design distance' to describe the distance that design decisions are being taken from the real learning and teaching process. Learners and teachers responding to the situation as it arises are very close, while those engaged in planning programmes with a 3-4 year lead-in time and no expectation of actually teaching them are very distant.<br /><br />Technology – and learning design in fact – has tended to be used to increase the distance, or at least deal with an increased distance, e.g. through asynchronous, anytime learning, through segregating design from delivery as a separate instructional role, etc. But there are a few indications from the CD programme that it could be used to telescope the distance in various ways, e.g. using course tools such as Mahara to represent a curriculum to students and to the course validation committee, or using visualisations in a LD system to help designers step into the shoes of learners, or other means of supporting dialogue with learners about their learning, before they are actually engaged in it.</span></span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;font-size:85%;" >Dimensions of design distance would have to include time, space and role. 'Good' design acknowledges the distance, leaving unspecified those issues that are better determined at closer range. i.e. leaving room for teacher and learner improvisation. Learning design approaches can help by representing what needs to be decided at what level, to retain design effectiveness and efficiency, while leaving other decisions open (guided in various ways?) to those closer to the point of learning. Distance from the learner brings in the issue of how the designers involve and respect those who inherit their design decisions.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;font-size:85%;" >It feels like a useful idea - better than 'learner-centred' which has become almost meaningless, and anyway implies that designers are doing well if they *think* what they do is relevant to learners... It can be both subjective and (reasonably) objective as a description of design practice. But I'm wondering if there are any pragmatic implications? Curricula need to be designed at the lowest possible distance from learning if they are to be maximally relevant and responsive. There may problems with too great a separation of roles - design teams who are not invested and implicated in the actual delivery process – as for example the OU has begun to recognise by involving associate tutors in the design process. Engaging stakeholders in design is one way to reduce design distance, and creating flexible designs to be 'completed' closer to the point of learning is another. Must think further about this...<br /></span></span></p>HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-81458741493338949752009-11-10T01:51:00.001-08:002009-11-10T02:28:47.602-08:00Learners' needs and expectations<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Working on a keynote for the JISC Online Conference I've been reflecting on the assumption that learners' needs and expectations are closely related (theme one, question: </span><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/11/elpconference09.aspx">can institutions meet the challenges posed by learners' needs and expectations?</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">). </span><br /></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0.56cm;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The keynote offers a chance to respond to the government's HE review, <a href="http://www.bis.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/publications/Higher-Ambitions.pdf">Higher Ambitions</a>, a key theme of which is that learners should be treated more like customers and consumers of education (<a href="http://www.learnex.dmu.ac.uk/?p=1847">Richard Hall has already blogged</a> brilliantly about the fact that the model here is big business, not social enterprise).<br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.56cm;font-family:georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><span lang="en-GB">A consumer model sees learners' needs and expectations as one and the same thing. Find out what learners want – or what employers want from learners, but that's another story – and deliver it. But learning isn't like that. Learning in the higher sense, understood as self-reflection, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_actualization">self-actualisation</a>, self-transformation etc means that an individual's needs may be met by challenging her expectations, and that both needs and expectations change if deep learning is taking place. Yes we need to respond to learners' long-term goals and short-term plans, which is what bring them to education in the first place, but we are failing if we let them define the limit of learners' ambitions.<br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.56cm;font-family:georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><span lang="en-GB">We're also, actually, limiting society's ambitions. There was once a Thatcherite ambition to transform our economy into a financial services economy, because there were short-term gains to be made by liberalising the financial markets ahead of our European competitors. It looks a bit short-sighted today. What Universities are for in the C21st has to have a longer and more critical perspective, more collective ambition, than what governments think they are for on today's policy agenda.<br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.56cm;font-family:georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><span lang="en-GB">There seems to be a consensus that formal post-school education has been too driven by the 'supply side'. (This is an argument that just doesn't make sense to 'selecting' universities, btw - they have been offering much the same for decades, or centuries, and are still turning 'customers' away - but still...). Let's agree that HE needs to make its offering more relevant to the C21st. If we accept at face value Mandelson's definition of the role of HE as 'competition plus civilisation', it's clear that everybody has a stake in defining what universities 'need' to offer, and in ensuring that they go on to meet our collective 'expectations', since what is at stake is on what terms we compete, and how we imagine our civilisation. Neither next year's undergraduates, nor this year's major graduate employers, can be allowed to define something so important on their own, though they may be the stakeholders with the sharpest stakes.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.56cm;font-family:georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><span lang="en-GB">So while acknowledging the need to become more relevant, many people have been expressing discomfort with the customer model</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of defining relevance. What do we have to offer instead? First I think we have to widen the debate from what individual learners need and expect. Particularly in a downturn, individual needs are never going to be a good indicator of the wider social good - just in time, just for me is no basis on which to define a civilisation. But second, I think we need to express individual needs and expectations in a developmental way. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Learners need to feel secure – to have aspects of their expectation satisfied – only so that they can be challenged and changed, so that they can encounter new ways of thinking and practising and being in the world. Learning isn't something added on to us, let alone something we can purchase – learning is transformation. The wider debate must be about what kinds of transformation are worth devoting our professional lives to support.<br /></span></p>HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-6777095876071658912009-11-03T13:48:00.000-08:002009-11-05T02:22:01.267-08:00Open everything<span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >Putting together a workshop proposal for the </span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer10/">Open Educational Resources (10)</a></span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" > conference in Cambridge next March, based on work I'm doing with Allison Littlejohn and Lou McGill in support of the </span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer">JISC OER programme</a></span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" > (our </span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/">synthesis and evaluation</a></span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" > wiki is here). </span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >I've ended up thinking about the different ways that I've heard 'open' being used around content specifically (leaving aside open source and 'open technology' at this point), and about which I think we need to know more (scare quotes alert!)<br /></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" >'Openness' as a feature of communities/organisations: What features of educational communities and institutions could be described as 'open', or precursors to full participation in 'open content' sharing?<br /></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">'</span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: georgia;font-size:100%;" >Openness' as a feature of content: What features of content allow it to be fully shared and reused in other contexts? Are these features enhancing of or inimical to specific pedagogical values (e.g. those which are strongly situated or context-based)? What are the implications for quality processes?</span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" >'Openness' as a value in education: What impact is 'open pedagogy' having, above and beyond issues of content, and how should we understand and promote this idea? </span> </p> <p style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" >'Openness' as a feature of certain technology-based services (typically public/third-party): Are web 2.0 solutions to content hosting over-riding the demand for deposit of content in 'open' repositories?</span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;">Since first writing this post I've also been reflecting on the links - not nearly strong enough yet IMO - between open content and open access to research materials. In the US a new <a href="http://www.oacompact.org/">Compact for Open Access Equity</a>, signed by 5 leading HEIs, commits them in effect to supporting open access publishing by their own staff, on both economic and scholarly grounds. What would leadership of this kind look like in relation to educational (T&L) content?<br /></p>HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-11616068638945844612009-10-23T14:07:00.000-07:002009-10-23T14:22:48.411-07:00Rethinking Learning for a Digital AgeHow Routledge do love these hubristic titles (not the editors' choice, I should mention). It has been a busy last two weeks, and Rhona has worked heroically to get the manuscript off on time. More modestly than the title suggests, we're hoping people will be interested in a new collection with more of a focus on learners' experiences and less on the design and pedagogy. <a href="http://rhonasharpe.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/rethinking-learning-for-a-digital-age/">Rhona's blog entry</a> has the chapter list: our thanks to all the wonderful authors involved.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1958803512438336150.post-37579094286905425352009-10-23T12:51:00.000-07:002009-10-23T23:34:29.614-07:00Digital literacies - LiT meets TEL?Just been reading <a href="http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/">Robin Goodfellow's post</a> about the seminar last Friday at the University of Edinburgh on <a href="http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/2009/09/seminar-1-programme.html">Literacy in the Digital University</a>. He makes some good points about the clash of the 'literacies in learning' and the 'technologies in learning' frameworks, and I'm always in favour of surfacing these tensions. We spend far too much time in e-learning trying to pretend it doesn't matter whether we're hardened instrumentalists or dyed in the wool social theorists, and it won't do.<br /><br />However, I'm not sure ANY of the presentations I heard at the event, with the possible exception of (some bits of) Chris Jones' summing up (blog it Chris!), fitted the charge that we 'simply utilised the term 'literacies' as a descriptor for different kinds of technical practices'. Personally I avoided the term 'literacy' as much as possible in that company, recognising that it has already been comprehensively theorised and to some extent therefore claimed by academics working in a very particular domain. I prefer to talk about knowledge practices, i.e the expression of some presumed personal capacities, preferences and habits in particular situations (I'm interested in the practices and situations, I'm not at all sure how one goes about accessing or even very usefully defining the personal capacities otherwise). By knowledge practice I do not at all mean 'signing up to follow someone's tweets' as a single action in a particular technology-enabled space, but I probably do mean the bundle of actions I perform using twitter and the meanings they have for me, and for others involved.<br /><br />One problem may be that just as the literacy people are making certain assumptions about 'their' frameworks being widely shared, we too are making certain assumptions about 'our' technology being widely used. For example, putting a twitterstream live behind a speaker is for me so 'normal' that I didn't even stop to think that there might be sensibilities to consider. For any given f2f event of that kind I expect there to be an accompanying 'event' taking place on twitter (not a 'representation' of the 'real' event but another, parallel event). This 'other' is not even necessarily less interesting or engaging than the first (see <a href="http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/2874">http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/2874</a> on the great keynote/harshtag debate - and twestivals, tweetmeets and flashmobs are examples of an originary twitter event breaking out into the 'real'). And bringing the two events into closer proximity through projection has evolved (I now realise) as a means of dealing with several social issues, e.g. exclusion (people not tweeting can at least take part vicariously in that event), respect (tweeting cannot take place behind anyone's back), interaction (questions can be taken from 'the floor' on a much broader basis), equality (people lacking the confidence to speak in public can tweet in public) etc etc.<br /><br />I should mention that as a fairly regular presenter using Elluminate and twitter streams I don't find it difficult to speak, monitor a room, and monitor a stream of text at the same time. That is clearly something I have learned to do, but I don't think it's nearly as interesting as what the participants are doing - that is what changes the meaning of the situation. It also, for me, changes the meaning for *everybody* in the room, including those not tweeting.<br /><br />I was frustrated in Edinburgh (for reasons not at all the fault of the University or our lovely hosts) that I couldn't get online to twitter, and so could not involve the many people outside of the physical situation who I knew were interested in it. In fact, to confess my own technology predelictions, I didn't feel properly 'there' as a result. Had I been tweeting I would not have been failing to engage properly in 'the real': on the contrary, I find tweeting an event for others at least as reflective as writing notes, with the added advantage of bringing other people's reactions and ideas into the live event.<br /><br />Before we have appropriated a technology to a personal and social practice, the technology itself seems to be the point (this is Robin's perspective). To the outsider, whether by choice or exclusion, the technology IS the practice. I guess writing and print demanded exactly the same focus on the technologies at one time - those bastards have PENS. To the insider, the technology is only visible when it becomes a problem (can't get online). The social practices that Robin found objectionable did need surfacing and exploring and negotiating, but to suggest that they were 'simply' technical practices, and that the technical was hijacking the social, is an equally one-sided perspective.HelenBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839221731738952532noreply@blogger.com3