Personal Blogs

Last day of week 4: an intensely busy week at work and I also pulled a back muscle. Even so I managed to engage in my studies most days, although not usually first thing in the morning as originally planned. Still, I am on here now!

I recently changed my weekly schedule and moved cleaning the kitchen to Sunday afternoon/evening instead of Monday morning. This was partly because I had a new kitchen installed a few months ago, and found I was spending two hours lovingly polishing my dual fuel Belling oven instead of half an hour quickly flicking a cloth at a surface then diving into my emails. (One cupboard was particularly easy to clean in the old kitchen as the door had fallen off so you didn't need to do it at all.) This made me pressured and anxious on Mondays, whereas doing cleaning on Sunday, I can take my time and wake up on Monday to a sparkling clean kitchen; this feels like a fresh start to my week. (In the past I have kept cleaning to weekdays because I wanted to mark out the weekend as family/leisure time.)

This means I have a clearer timetable for study time so I hope moving forward to be able to do my morning stints.

The other thing which has kept me engaged so far is the group work on H817. I disengaged from group work on earlier modules partly because I fell behind, and this made it difficult to have conversations in the chat threads or weekly forums; also because there was incidental racism in some of the materials and therefore comments by other students. I wanted to study online education, not battle with racism but obviously with my expertise in the field, I became interested in tackling this problem. Rather than do this by arguing with my fellow students, or having long discussions with sympathetic white allies among my fellow students, I withdrew from student group work and raised the matter within the university, with some success (in the end).

As part of H817 is a groupwork project, I knew I would have to engage with fellow students. From early on I suggested we set up a WhatsApp group. There are some other people from the Open University in my group, and I have always been keen to develop better networks across the MAODE programme with fellow OU staff. The WhatsApp group does help, as the messages pop up on it with fellow students saying they have been on and done something to our groupwork exercise, and then I am tempted to nip in, have a look and do a bit more work myself. This reinforces the impression I had from moderating WhatsApp groups for my own students: it isn't a space where intellectual debate takes place (although there was one early interesting discussion on the WhatsApp chat). It does encourage students to go into the official forums, wikis and other resources in the OU module website and engage. (Four out of the six people in my group are on the WhatsApp.)

I'm struck by how much can be achieved in a step by step, little by little way. Several people popping in and spending 10/15 minutes each contributing to a written exercise builds the piece up well. Sometimes it's been hard to hold back and leave gaps for the others to fill, but I hope I've been good about that .

First reflective activity in H880.

(It's reflexive really )

‘How has my understanding of technology-enhanced learning changed during Week 1?’

Hmmm , I think I prob had a fairly advanced understanding already.

Begin by making ‘What happened’ notes, using the following questions to help you.

What did you do this week that had a bearing on your understanding of TEL? Include any salient feelings, thoughts, events or features.

• Watched the Nelson video. He was both optimistic and wanting to rein in over-enthusiasm about the potential of technology.
  

Did your understanding of TEL change or deepen, or did your week’s study reinforce your previous ideas?

• Reinforce
  

Now make ‘So what?’ notes, using these questions to help you.

•     Which were the important moments that changed, deepened or reinforced your understanding?
  • Chatting with fellow students
•     Why did they have this effect?
  • Made me think through my ideas and theirs. Their ideas helped inform and writing mine out helped clarify my thinking.
•     What made them so important?
  • Well, they weren't that important
    

Finally, make ‘What next?’ notes, using this question to help you.

    How will your understanding of TEL influence your practice or your studies?

I shall write up my account of teaching referencing

When I first joined Facebook, I was at a loss how to operate on it. Two great drivers towards complete openness on there were:

1. The philosophy behind Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg designed the platform to connect people up who might not normally meet, by getting them to share all their information so algorithms could hook them up to similar people.
   
2. The period of time I spent living in London in lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer (lgbtq) communities. We spent hours debating 'coming out' - the political need to do so in order to show we even existed, the risks of doing so - particularly for those of us in the black and minority ethnic communities.
   

By the time Facebook came along I was the mother of a young child. I was wary of sharing pictures of my young daughter with the whole world - including potential paedophiles . I wasn't surely I wanted the entire world to know about the whole of my life.

Facebook was not a flat playground on which we could connect without consideration for normal social issues.

• I have relatives who have not spoken with each other for some years; I had to think about the consequences if I was a 'friend' of both when my posts about the other one might pop up on their timelines.
  
• Sometimes students would ask to be 'friends' on Facebook, but I felt this could be an inappropriate blurring of boundaries. I like to let myself go on FB and chat freely in a way I would not do in a tutorial
  
• I was doing some (fiction) writing, which I wanted to publicise widely. Doing this on my personal Facebook account felt like I was pushing it at people, using my friendships.
  
• We live in a neo-liberal capitalist economy, and the States - where Facebook is based, is even more neo-liberal than the UK. I found adverts popping up in my sidebar which had clearly been designed for me based on my postings. On one occasion I posted a picture of two old ladies on a demonstration holding a sign saying 'F*ck the police' and within minutes an ad had popped up saying 'single police officers in your area, click now'

My daughter grew up during the era we were grappling with internet safety for children. I was very lucky as I was doing research on bullying at this time, so had access to a mass of expert opinion (some of which I was writing). I had friends who were social workers, barristers and IT experts, who told me that Instagram was marginally safer than Snapchat because on Snapchat photos disappear in seconds, so people think they are safe to bully on there. I think schools and the police responded incredibly quickly, getting together to circulate robust advice to children and parents. (The best advice I had was someone who wrote on a blog that making an iPad child-friendly is impossible - it is a device designed for adults, it's like giving your kid the keys to the car and hoping they will be OK out there. You can only keep them safe online by constant vigilance.)

Now in her young teens, my daughter is more internet-savvy than I am so I learn a lot by observing her online habits.

She splits up her social media accounts. She has Snapchat and Instagram to connect with schoolmates and her cousins. (She is not friends with me on those but she is friends with adult women friends of mine she admires, who will tell me quicker than she can delete the posts if anything is going on.) Recently she opened a Facebook account for the purpose of connecting up with older relatives and friends; she is friends with me on Facebook. (Very annoying, as I have had to moderate my Facebook posting in consequence Although it does mean I can post cute pictures of the cats for her to check out while she is at school 😻😻)

As part of starting my MAODE studies, I have had a think about my own social media networks.

We have a lot of Associate Lecturer specific forums. These can get crowded with threads, and some of the bigger ones have a poor reputation for negative posting. I do find the module Tutor Forums useful, as a means to chat about what is happening on the module and raise issues with the Module Teams. One module Tutor Forum is less useful, maybe because it is for a much smaller teaching team.

I go on the university Yammer site and I find this a more enjoyable and versatile means to share my thinking about teaching and work issues than going on large generic tutor forums. Not many people go on Yammer and this has made it a more positive space to post in. (Plus, I know senior managers read the posts, even if they don't post much.)

I have sometimes spent long periods 'off my facebook', but recently I have got a clearer idea about how I want to use it and have gone back to it. I found a lot of political material circulates. If I were meeting friends in the pub, we would often avoid these topics - since some of my friends and I have very different ideas about Brexit, immigration and other topics of the day. However on Facebook, I can see their posts and they can see mine - so we are able to engage in dialogue and gain better insights from each other. I post political material publicly, and I post personal and family issues with my 'friends'. (Have to be a bit careful to always remember to use the right privacy button.)

I have started a Twitter account, and I mean to keep that for posting about digital technologies and e-learning. Although I couldn't resist recently posting the picture of two cakes I took to a face-to-face tutorial I guess that is about 'distance learning' in a way since we have the face-to-face tutorials quite rarely, being a Distance Education institution.

Finally I am going to have to figure out WhatsApp, as my fellow MAODE students are starting a WhatsApp support group. This will mean learning how to operate my phone as a Smartphone, whereas up til now I have got away with saying 'hahaha, my phone is smarter than I am' and being able to peacefully knit on the bus instead of having to engage in my teaching/studies while travelling

This part of the module materials brought up the memory of a time when research projects I was doing had small elements of SNA - Social Network Analysis. (See the International Network for Social Network Analysis for more on this.) Dating from before Facebook was even thought of , SNA involved making computer maps of people's connections. I expect the ones we drew up would look very clunky next to the visualisations linked to in this part of the module. 

I also thought vaguely about social capital. Although this is more widely known in the Robert Putnam version, I prefer Bourdieu's more nuanced version. (I think I better write a separate blogpost about this, as I will need it for my own students )

At first I felt a bit stuck about the exercise. I do have a Twitter account but it's so old that I don't want to go back to it. I had decided to open a new one when the module starts officially - that seems like a good moment to begin tweeting.

I thought about exploring my Facebook connections, as Tony Hirst does. This could be interesting, since my Facebook contacts are a pretty diverse bunch. I have some far left buddies - one or two of whom I became friends with on Facebook and have never had a connection with outside of the virtual circle. I have some centrist right buddies whom I met in other contexts, and whom I politely try to bring back from the Dark Side (ie Brexit and their self-contradictory posts about immigration). I have an American friend who, after the election of Trump, went from posting pictures of her kids' tea parties to suddenly posting a lot of material about race politics and feminism, and a Catalan friend - you can imagine what he is posting just now. Some of my friends are from the queer communities, and post sexually exploratory art. Others are mums I know from school, they post pictures of nights out with their friends. Some of my cousins post art-y photos and others post photos of their dogs and one posts art-y photos of her dog. 

• Did the visualisation reveal anything surprising?

• Could you think of ways you might use a visualisation like this in your presentation?

• What else would it need to do to add benefit?

• Did you have any concerns about what could be found about the networks of others using these tools?

Issues of privacy have been much more prominent in my research than issues of openness. The argument that all data are sensitive and should be treated equally (as mentioned in The Open University 2017) has met with polite scorn from me.

Much of my research was with, firstly black gay communities in Britain, and then in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer Muslim community.

I interviewed people whose families were extraordinarily rational in their acceptance of lesbian and gay children, who considered that once they had argued their case out, the principles of their faith were such that they should peacefully allow their children to live life as they saw fit. I met one lesbian woman who had been denied access to her university mosque on the grounds of her sexuality. An Imam was brought in to discuss the situation with her. He  said to her fellow students that they had put their case to her, she had listened and had decided how she would live her life and she should be allowed to practise her faith in the mosque in peace now.

I also met people who had left home and moved to the other side of the country, cutting themselves off from family and friends in order to live with a loved partner. I met people whose family members had brutally assaulted and hospitalised them. I met people who were in fear of being kidnapped and forcibly married.

The circles I moved in while conducting this research were necessarily small. I knew there were other academics in them. Even when writing up the case study material for deposit in obscure academic repositories, I took great pains to anonymise it so that participants' rights to privacy could be fully respected.

At the same time, in the queer communities, the rhetoric was about coming out, showing the world: "We're here, we're queer - and we're not going shopping!" That was a slogan used by the activist lesbian, gay and bisexual people who would do same sex kiss-in's at shopping centres in the States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We also shouted it on Gay Pride marches in Britain, although I remember one Winter Pride a small committed band of us were marching and diligently shouting on our way to the Winter Pride fair in what was then called ULU (the University of London students' Union). Someone said: "Hang on a minute, we're going to the Winter Pride fair and when I get there I intend to look at all the stalls, especially the leather goods [I will save your blushes here by not describing those in detail! ]." Someone-else said: "Yeah, so do I!" We decided to chant: "We're here, we're queer and we ARE going shopping."

Those who braved the risk and volunteered to be interviewed for the research project I was involved in with lgb Muslim people did so (even though they feared it was a cover for a brainwashing programme), in order to show the world that it is possible to be Muslim and same-sex oriented, to save others the isolation that they themselves experienced.

My job as the academic was to mediate between their absolute and vital (in the full sense of that word) need for privacy, and our wish to tell it as it was, to tell their stories so that others would know they are not alone in a pitiless faith - and to contribute safely to the stock of openly available knowledge about the world, to science.

Some of the people I spoke with had thought long and hard - had agonised, had gone through the principles of Islam and could argue with scholarly authority that there was nothing wrong or inconsistent with being a lesbian, gay or bisexual Muslim. (Queer may be another matter - see Pilgrim, 2012.) However, they felt a strict obligation to keep their sexuality private for their families' sakes. People frequently said they could not come out themselves, because it would ruin the marriage chances of brothers and sisters, and even their cousins.

References

The Open University, 2017. '2.4 Online privacy and identity', H818 Unit 2 Openness and privacy [online]. Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1097703&section=4 (accessed 29/09/2017).

Pilgrim, A.N. 2012. “Sexuality Politics in Islam” in Farrar, M., Robinson, S., Valli, Y. and Wetherly P. (eds) 2012 Islam in the West, Palgrave Mcmillan. 

My ignorance about internet matters made it difficult for me to be sure how to identify a search term in the Wordle we were offered, but I guess you take the words and add 'open' to any of them.

For my first word, I picked 'open science'. I snuck off to the first link in DuckDuckGo that popped up: the open resource I am always telling my own students not to use , Wikipedia.

(The reason I say it's not a good idea for students to use Wikipedia is that it presents summaries of complicated material. If you have got an academic background in that material, you can tell what it is they are referring to but if you are coming to this fresh, you can be misled by the summary. Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed like journal articles are, so the information may not be reliable - here we see one problem with open access material. In my own case, I am looking for some other links to follow up which I hope I will be able to recognise as authoritative, rather than for an accurate summary of 'open science' - although that would be nice too.)

Gosh, there are clearly a lot more 'open' terms I can go off and explore underneath the term 'open science'

_{(Developed by Andreas E. Neuhold. and made available under CC)}

It's not clear who are the main spokesperson(s) for this initiative, as it seems to be very widespread. However a paper by Pontika et al (2015) mentions a European Union funded project (FOSTER) which is looking to develop training and a taxonomy of open science (presumably just in Europe - and not including us Brits any more ). There is also The Open Knowledge Foundation.

Open Science is happening all around, but there are some quite different opinions about when it started.

On the one hand, Wikipedia (2017) says Open Science developed in the seventeenth century. Earlier scientists (eg Gallileo) had been obliged to circulate their thinking in code. The founding of the Royal Society in England and the Académie des Sciences in France allowed for government funding of scientific projects, and of academic journals in which scientists could openly write about our work.

On the other hand, Pontika et al (2015) say: "OS is a relatively new and complex concept and its adoption will require a shift in the researchers' behaviour regarding the conduction of research and information sharing and will demand the adoption of new practices." We are seeing a shift in practices for writing about academic work - one so great that we might even call it a paradigm shift in the strict Kuhnian sense of that term (as discussed in Smith 1998). However Open Science is clearly not that new a concept; having been developing since the Enlightenment on the principles of rationality and humanism which Enlightenment thinking is based in (again see Smith 1998). What has changed is the medium through which Open Science can be disseminated - it has gone from paper to internet.

It's interesting that this mere shift in medium is viewed as an opportunity to be even more open. Primarily it seems to me that this is about money (and social class). It's expensive to train up in the sciences, become a member of a (Royal) Society and get copies of the journal sent to you, it costs comparatively little to make material available online for anyone in the world to read. (Although not nothing.)

The apparent drivers and motivators for Open Science becoming viewed as even more open are the internet. However a serious barrier here is our capitalist economic system of governance. It's necessary to tinker around and provide government funding to support the people doing research, and the person who uploads the findings online for everybody else to access. This is vulnerable to political change like Brexit - who now is going to fund the open dissemination of British science?

In terms of products and progress, there seems to be a lot of research on how we could do open research. Some blogs and some material is being made publicly available. In my own field, Education, a massive database (whose name escapes me at the moment!) of information on British children has been made freely available in the last few years, and the 'owners' of it are strongly encouraging education researchers to come and use it rather than spend money collecting their own data. Researchers appear reluctant, it seems that using primary data has more kudos than using data someone-else has collected, starting from scratch is more exciting. 

Another open resource is information from the Office for National Statistics, made publicly available in raw form and also in summary bulletins which offer a brief analysis.

How these might connect now, or in the future, with learning and teaching activity? My immediate thought is that I ought to dig out the reference to that database and suggest to my Education students that they could go to it and make use of it. Particularly in postgraduate studies, it allows us to give students access to 'real' data and teach them to handle this messy stuff in the raw. Making this particular data so openly available might also allow someone to provide an illuminating analysis of it which would support better education. (That would be better than the English government just introducing education policy on the basis of a good idea that occurred to them while eating breakfast! I'm not sure if government ministers have time for breakfast unless they are having a breakfast meeting, which would explain a lot. Research shows that the most important factor in children being able to concentrate and work well in school, is whether they had something to eat before they got there.)

References

Pontika, N.; Knoth, P.; Cancellieri, M.; Pearce, S., 2015. "Fostering Open Science to Research using a Taxonomy and an eLearning Portal". Available at: https://docs.google.com/uc?authuser=0&id=0ByewXV9UyaMtVnFVd3FWNklBNTA&export=download, Accessed 28/09/2017

Smith, M.J., 1998. Social Science in Question. London: Sage Publications.

Wikipedia (2017) Open Science [Online], 7 September 2017. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science (Accessed 28/9/2017).

This is a quick skim through some articles I read over the summer, mainly by economists, in which I explore three assumptions I think people make about computerised (digital) technology.

Computers are cheaper

Computers are sometimes cheaper.

Tim Harford (2017) says “new technologies have polarised the labour market, with more demand for both the high-end skills and the low-end ones, and a hollowing out in the middle.” We can use automation to “unbundle” tasks: give automatic repetitive work to computers, and have humans complete the high-end intellectual puzzle-solving parts or the low-end part that uses fingers and thumbs.

An example of this at the Open University is electronic marking. I award marks for two or three parts of a student assignment, the computerised marksheet automatically adds them up and will even warn me if I mistakenly entered an extra zero and gave more marks than are available. (Sorry, students!  I tried.)

Computers can mark multiple choice assignments, but not read and assess essays. It might be possible to create a computerised marking scheme which would weigh up whether a student has effectively answered the question, should they get some marks for using the right material – providing an implicit answer rather than an explicit one, have they done the referencing (appropriately for this level of study), did they use good paragraph-writing skills, do they need to be referred to module advice on writing introductions and conclusions – but it would be very expensive.

It’s much cheaper to employ me to mark essays than to invent a software to do so, especially as I will adapt year on year to assess the answers to new assignment questions whereas the computer would have to be re-programmed every time to do this. (By a human who must make sure they get the programming exactly right – a computer will not spot human error in marking guidance as I sometimes do.)

Harford says, “the most influential technologies are often humble and cheap”. The Gutenberg Press revolutionised our lives, but it would not have had any impact if someone had not also invented paper.

We should be cautious about expensive complicated technology. To be taken up and widely used, technology should be easily affordable and it should fit in with the trend of social and cultural development. Technology should enhance human activity, humans should not have to try to adapt to technology.

References

Harford, Tim (2017) “What we get wrong about technology” FT Weekend Magazine July 8/9 2017, pp.12-18.

"Emma" - Le Trèfle Maxi Feuille (2013), added by Le Trèfle. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMOLg-2SFw, (accessed 26/09/2017).

OK, so I set aside good time on this sunny morning to focus on searching for material I could reflect on about the topic I will probably write up for my assignments: the use of online forums in teaching. (I did this partly by working late last night, writing forum posts to welcome my own new group of students - who suddenly popped up on my homepage when I wasn't yet expecting them )

I actually have a little set of academic papers on forum use which I have collected slowly over the last two years as I attempted to develop my work on this topic -  while also teaching three modules, looking to develop my portfolio of teaching, bringing up my daughter, feeding my cats and occasionally getting to go out with my friends. (I think I still have some friends! They are mostly parents or OU Associate Lecturers too, so they understand why I don't get out that often, blinking in the social sunlight.)

However, using my already existing list would be cheating so I set slowly to exploring the sites listed: the Association of Learning Technologists (that sounds good - maybe I could go to one of their conferences at a later date?), Youtube, Slideshare, Prezi and Animoto.

I am hampered in my search by the fact that the word 'forum' is frequently used in phrases like 'we will discuss this in our forum'. I try phrases like 'teaching in online forums'. I find very little, although one Youtube slideshow does say that the topic is under-researched (good news for me if so! that would mean this is a good area to continue developing work).

I don't manage to do a search on Animoto, as it looks like you have to sign up to the site to do this. I am deeply suspicious of signing up to things online, and have an email Junk Box full of messages from beautiful Russian and Japanese women begging me to marry them (and undertake other less salubrious activities) to explain why. (I am half-Japanese myself, and I don't need another beautiful Japanese woman around; I know how expensive we are.)

Another issue for me is that I hate videos. I find it impossible to concentrate in audio clips, videos and other aural/visual learning media. I am an exceptionally text-oriented person, who used to try and carry on reading at night as a child, by lying next to the door holding a book to the sliver of light from the crack under the door. When I have to view/hear video and audio material on the modules I teach, so I can teach about them, I have to do something else at the same time in order to concentrate: the ironing, or knitting. I readily provide, use and recommend sympathetic materials for my students, who are often not textual learners, but I personally switch off within 10 seconds of a video or audio clip. This makes it hard to even figure out whether the clip has got anything relevant in it. I have managed to learn a little Welsh from two and three minute videos only by listening to them while I make my daughter's packed lunch in the morning. ("Bore da! Mae'n braf heddiw yng Cymru." )

I do manage to find three things before starting to bite my memory sticks with boredom. One is a Youtube video by a Prof. Bonk. His name stuck in my mind from other reading on the module (for some reason ), so I figure his will be a good video to view - although his delivery style makes me feel like going to do washing up and ironing immediately. I will get my knitting, I have just got to quite a difficult bit so I will have to make sure I concentrate on Prof. Bonk and not finishing off the picot hem to the thumb of my mitten.

In activity 1.3, we are asked to read and comment on a paper about Open Scholarship, also variously referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER). In particular, the authors suggest four assumptions about open scholarship. (My notes are in the text boxes.)

While I would agree with Veletsianos and Kimmons that there is an assumption that open scholarship can seamlessly support a more democratic education, I might go further than them in my critique of the extent this is possible. It might be illuminating to look at publications about open scholarship in terms of how many women, people from ethnic minority communities and people from less developed countries, in particular, actually are involved in this field of scholarship.

Too often, there are sets of outcomes which are publicly circulated while an invisible set of outcomes are far more influential in academia. For example, when interviewing for lectureships, candidates may be asked about teaching and management skills and qualifications, but it is the list of research publications which is the real means to an appointment.

Generally in digital scholarship and teaching, it seems to me that there is a lack of acknowledgement of human social input. Time spent engaging with students or with colleagues on forums is often not realistically quantified; if it were, the actual cost of engaging in digital scholarship would have to be counted as much higher.