HelenB's e-learning blog

Design or be designed for

2012-01-11T05:25:00.000-08:00

In the new digital literacy campaign from Michael Gove's office (as reported here in the Guardian) there are a few things to celebrate but perhaps more to regret.

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.

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 'program or be programmed' 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?

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.

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 critical and creative digital literacy, which goes beyond the capacity to choose and use the latest digital product. David Buckingham calls this the capacity for critical reading and creative production. For me the key questions any digital curriculum should ask are:

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?

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 Josie Fraser's blog post on the same topic for signs of hope - at least if you live in Leicester.

Digital visitors and residents - some thoughts

2011-12-14T03:25:00.000-08:00

I took part in an online seminar on the Digital visitors and residents project at a Collaborate seminar organised by the JISC 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 Developing Digital Literacies 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.

Some of the early findings obviously replicate work that has been done in the past to problematise the digital natives 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 Learners' experiences of e-learning studies confirmed both of these).

I do have some thoughts about the metaphor itself, which I shared at the seminar. For example:
- 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?
- 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.
- 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??)
- I am assuming that the metaphor distinguishes behaviours and not individuals. i.e. we are all visitors and residents in different contexts.
- 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?

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.

So, this post is meant to open a conversation that I hope will be a productive one!

2011-11-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

I noticed this quote in a Guardian report on digital animators
"A lot of the animators here don't have a degree. It's all about your showreel.'

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?

Good things I can imagine happening as a result:
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).
Learning is potentially richer as more diverse evidence of capability is valued.
Digital literacy- e.g. identity and reputation management, networking - is to the fore.

Bad things I can imagine happening as a result:
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.
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.
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.

Thoughts on OER

2011-01-25T06:13:00.000-08:00

A summary of reflections from the interim meeting of the UK OER II programme. Warning - it's a bit long (lots to say).

Financial constraints 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?

In the short term, with threatened mergers etc, visibility and reputation enhancement 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 iTunesU 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.

Course marketisation 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.

Reward and recognition 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?

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 quality and relevance of the resources.

It is possible that more insecurity in academic employment 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.

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 'borderless university' is another way of expressing these tensions.

Defining 'open'. For JISC open = openly licensed 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.

OERs allow universities to position themselves as sites of public knowledge, 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:

- 'Best of' UK OER resources to showcase quality

- Talking heads: towards open public knowledge (students, potential students teaching staff, professionals, developers, managers talking about their OER experiences)

- Impacts: 2 sides of A4 on institutional and educational benefits and lessons learned

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.

‘OER’ as an issue 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.

Where's the critical literacy?

2010-07-13T13:44:00.001-07:00

Spotlight has a recent comment on critical media literacy 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.

However, I wonder if there is any evidence for this assertion:
'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'

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.

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.

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.

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 cameras 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.

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.
'

Thinking the future with/and/of/as technology

2010-07-08T01:54:00.001-07:00

This post is in response/dialogue with Richard Hall's post Educational Futures, Educational Technology, and Digital Social Media. I was lucky enough to be involved in the Beyond Current Horizons 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 :-)

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.

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 this, the demands of sustainability and peak oil mean that more rather than less human labour will probably be needed to keep the bare necessities coming.

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:

* Graduates are not all going to be working in the global knowledge economy and not all of them would want to anyway.

*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.

*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.

*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'.

*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.

*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.

Four questions about learners' needs and expectations

2009-11-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

Ahead 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.

What capabilities will today's learners need in 2020? (Which of these capabilities have 'digital' aspects and what do they look like?)

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?)

What experience will learners get from HE and FE that they can't get from other kinds of learning (especially informal, technology-enabled learning)?

What do learners want or expect from HE and FE that present challenges to the existing practices of institutions (especially around technology)?

why talk about texts?

2009-11-14T01:29:00.000-08:00

This was blogged in response to Robin Goodfellow's post on the Literacies in the Digital University 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. Ong, 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').

To get back to the practices, the 2007 British Library report into the information behaviour of school-age researchers 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.

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.

Design distance

2009-11-12T23:20:00.000-08:00

This is an idea that came to me during a recent meeting with Cluster C of the JISC Curriculum Design programme. 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.

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.

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.

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...

Learners' needs and expectations

2009-11-10T01:51:00.001-08:00

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: can institutions meet the challenges posed by learners' needs and expectations?).

The keynote offers a chance to respond to the government's HE review, Higher Ambitions, a key theme of which is that learners should be treated more like customers and consumers of education (Richard Hall has already blogged brilliantly about the fact that the model here is big business, not social enterprise).

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, self-actualisation, 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.

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.

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.

So while acknowledging the need to become more relevant, many people have been expressing discomfort with the customer model 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. 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.

Open everything

2009-11-03T13:48:00.000-08:00

Putting together a workshop proposal for the Open Educational Resources (10) conference in Cambridge next March, based on work I'm doing with Allison Littlejohn and Lou McGill in support of the JISC OER programme (our synthesis and evaluation wiki is here).

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!)

'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?

'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?

'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?

'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?

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 Compact for Open Access Equity, 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?

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age

2009-10-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

How 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. Rhona's blog entry has the chapter list: our thanks to all the wonderful authors involved.

Digital literacies - LiT meets TEL?

2009-10-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

Just been reading Robin Goodfellow's post about the seminar last Friday at the University of Edinburgh on Literacy in the Digital University. 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.

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.

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 http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/2874 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.

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.

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.

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.