Personal Blogs

Teacher Marking as an invisible Dialogic Process

Why is that many teachers (I include myself) feel that writing feedback commentary on the work of learners is an uncomfortable process, akin to scarring a delicate surface – a kind of violence done to the text? It is likely that this feeling springs moreover from early experience of the academy – maybe first or primary school. In my early youth teachers only ever used red ink for marking – a kind of process that seems to revel in the blood of its victims. Of course, you can take metaphors too far but I increasingly feel that it is necessary to begin to be sensitive to the effects of written feedback and the meanings it shares with its recipient and others. Ted Hughes it was claimed in a story often told that he felt feedback marking as the mark of a bloody wolverine paw on the surface of the exposition of meanings that, to him, mattered.

I feel this strongly in studying Systemic Functional Grammatical Analysis (SFGA) in OU course E845. One application of this analysis to which I am becoming increasingly sensitive is the discernment of the ‘appropriateness’ of learner writing to a proposed social function – whether that be writing work for assessment, a job application or a piece of prose or poetry to place before an evaluator – and perhaps all readers are that. In the version of SFGA in Coffin et. al. (2009) such tasks are legion – often in the form of exercises to help a learner become more ‘effective’, as well as ‘appropriate’, in their appropriation of a symbolic exchange common to a particular culture.

My problem with this was registered in an earlier blog. I have since returned to it as I prepare for TMA04 concentrating on application of SGBA skills and knowledge. Why do I suddenly feel vulnerable here? I don’t especially value my own writing in TMAs.

I realised that my feelings were sparked by the sense that feedback marking is often based on a presumption of what you believe EITHER the writer intended to write OR had been instructed in some culturally relevant rubric to write. Write an ‘essay’ or ‘report’ for instance! As I questioned my own marking of TMAs, I began to realise how much commentary is about the acculturation of the learner into conventions that, for me were culturally well embedded – perhaps even pieces of automatic process learning stored deep in some cerebellar area.

Is SFGA necessarily aiming to cause the eternal recreation of these genres and their assumptions – many of which – like ‘balance’ in essays – have more to do with ideology than, strictly speaking, appropriateness to form?

To answer my immediate problems in E845, I had begun to read Martin & Rose (2008: 2ff.). Here I began to read about Ben who, with his class were asked to ‘write’ without specific further instruction a piece for teacher to assess. In that period – it was 1985 in Australia and Ben was 8 – Most learner writing took the form of narrative recount. However, the pressure of that consensual agreement on genre also formed expectations in primary school teachers of what it should be ‘appropriate’ that learners at age 8 write.

This is what Ben did write (ibid:45) but what we see on that writing is the fulfilment also of an otherwise invisible dialogue already present in the learner’s text before it was handed in to teacher – feedback. There are a number of ways teacher feedback comments are differentiated from those of learners in these texts. They appear in marginal space (especially page ends), they employ cursive (joined-up) writing and are in straight lines with ‘appropriate’ punctuation.

But what do these feedback comments answer in response to Ben’s attempt to dialogue? They assume Ben’s ‘failure’ to write appropriately i) in the expected location on the visual field that is a page and ii) in the genre this teacher expects: ‘a story’. Even the multi-modal elements are presented as, as yet, inappropriate – the picture must be finished. But how does the teacher know whether, for Ben’s purposes it was not already finished? In fact Ben’s learning space is 'violated' – undermined in a multi-modally received metaphor – the sum (what it adds up to) of his pages is a negative comment.

And that comment is about the refusal of Ben (or so it is read by the teacher) to create a ‘space’ for teacher’s mind-set – the margin. This is an issue I find even more telling in TMA feedback where so much of it is placed in marginal comment – a function of Word designed to typecast the form of feedback in old channels.

Are there ways in which we might feedback to Ben without violence to his developing purposes as a writer?  I think there are. Some of that would be to mark achievements in this prose – not least in the means by which it captures human perceptions of time-bound processes. Not for instance how the new element added to the hyper-them ‘Earth started’ is taken up as the theme of the third sentence: ‘Slowly water formed’. The isolation of the ‘first man’ is perfectly complemented by that ‘unfinished’ picture – unless you already know what to look for – what is appropriate!

What if teacher feedback interpreted rather than merely described what Ben was doing? What if, it gave guidelines for development rather than for precise regulation? What if ….? 

I tail off because these are aspirations I have yet to show as a marker and I'm sure learners whose work I have marked will validate that.

Martin and Rose (2008:5) point out that Ben’s parents were deeply concerned by what to the teacher may have seemed innocent atonal feedback. I think maybe this trait in assessment goes on and on and on. It will be justified by people saying: ‘But we are preparing people for the world and its expectations as they are – not what they might  be emergently ...’ However, we need to see that that act of preparation is political not pedagogic – it is an assumption about the world, time and the issue of change that we  don’t absolutely NEED to make.

Coffin, C., Donahue, J. & North, S. (2009) Exploring English Grammar: From Formal to Functional Abingdon, Routledge.

Martin, J.R & Rose, D. (2008) Genre Relations: Mapping Culture London, Equinox Publishing.

Hi

I believe, admittedly from, a possibly less than fully informed viewpoint, that there is a contradiction in  Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) that precisely hangs around the term 'function' when it is used as a criteria for evaluating success.

The role of 'evaluating success' of linguistic representations as a means of addressing 'real world problems' seems fixed in 'blame-culture’ and individualistic readings of history. I also don't believe the world would be rid of 'real- world problems' if only people balanced areas of meaning production (ideation, interpersonal and textual) more successfully. That seems to be the problem in allowing SFL a lead role in critical analysis.

The issue I have with the focus on evaluating success is probably rooted in epistemological assumptions about language (and perhaps the world in toto). Yet I can't see how we cannot be invited to do other than apply those assumptions if using SFL as sole critical tool.

I root my objection in a very old-fashioned approach to textual study: Wimsatt, W.K. & Beardsley, M.C. (1954) The Verbal Icon Lexington, University of Kentucky Press (relevant extract available from: http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/fallacy.htm.)

These philosophically-minded literary critics berated the judgements made about literary works (by the New Critics) in terms of their success in realising a specified formal function. 

If we have no 'prescriptive' notion of genre then we can only judge success against the author's 'intention' (the 'function’ they intended this communication to serve) modified by the degree of control actually exercised over the discourse - its spontaneity or otherwise. 

Now Wimsat & Beardsley (1954) called this the 'intentional fallacy'. They write (of poetry):

The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance.

If we substitute 'text' for 'poem' here, I think the argument of SFL feels to me (at least in the version asked for in TMA04) is equally implicated in the potential strength of their objection to the 'intentional fallacy'. 

Examples in Coffin et. al. (2009) often seem to me to judge function by analysing it from the text as given and then assuming from that some notion of authorial intention. 

But is intention available to us for any text? Even if the author themselves expressed 'their intention', would we believe that they were privileged to adjudge that issue alone. That would be to assert that individuals were entirely responsible for their own action (even 'speech acts') when they were not entirely spontaneous. This is not a view of the person I hold - as a central directing and controlling consciousness (only apt to not know itself when it speaks 'spontaneously). 

In fact I don't believe that the meanings of much language are really entirely in control of their authors even under conditions of optimum control. Even then the paradigm of what constitutes control will be determined, at least in part, socio-culturally.

For me this is the guiding argument for the insubstantiality of claims for seeing SFL as a 'critical' discipline.

For instance, I feel that the text we are analysing in Exercise 2  is capable of success in multiple ways – many that cannot be thought be ‘owned’ or intended by the writer (registering for instance the threshold moment in his education represented by this exercise).

All the best

Steve

Below are images of the front and back of a leaflet based on the 'Open Up' Project'. This flyer advertises a fictional MOOC at the fictional University of Coketown. it it is devised as an appendix to a report to the Academic Board of Open Innovation, Coketown University and is submitted to its director, Professor Jack McOpen. 

Steve Bamlett

Google Docs as a Multi-modal wiki

Inevitably I want to start autobiographically. When researching for my EMA on H800, I decided to look at wikis in practice. The only Higher Education example I could find was accessed via this reference:

Higginbotham, D., May-Landy, L. & Beeby, D. (2008) ‘Promoting Collaborative Learning Using Wikis’. Webcast. Available: http://ccmmtl.columbia.edu/nme2008/sessions/wikispaces_collaborative.html (Accessed 06/08/2015).

However, on re-investigating I find the video material is now only available through a web-page designed to publicise, trial and sell a bespoke wiki resource (known as Wikispaces).

Columbia (2015) ‘A University-Wide Wiki Solution’ Available from: https://www.wikispaces.com/content/private-label/case-study-columbia (Accessed 09/04/2016).

So what has changed. The original connection was to the conference proceedings following a pilot  only run on selected course by TEL technician, Dan Beeby. At that point, the pilot used open-source software (actually Google Docs) to model its wiki. Now Campus Wikispace is integrated into Columbia’s LMS but is on sale. It can trialled from that webpage (but i hate financial semi-commitments like this so I gave it a miss.

The reasons given for initially using Google Docs was that the latter was, for reasons not clear to my very very low-level appreciation of coding repertoires, that the Moodle facilities were not very adaptable to editing multi-media material, whilst Google docs is.

In the OU on H800 we found out the LMS wiki was intolerant to major editing of tabular graphics and other graphics. Hence group members opted out of  wiki use, except as as a text only or list-based resource. Yet, I never explored Google Doc myself. I now have, starting at: https://www.google.com/docs/about/ .  

In fact I wrote this in Google Doc. I have inserted above a screenprint of the ‘sharing’ facility, which allowed me to enter emails of persons I wanted to be able to edit the document (or have other means of access I could choose), whether or not they were registered with Google or Google Doc. I could edit the screen print - or someone else I allowed so to do - could - cropping, enlarging, choosing wrapping etc. They could not be so edited in this version on the OU Moodle blog.

The same is true of tables and more conventional images. This immediately enlarges the functionality of this document as a wiki - the only drawback being that although the free facilities (including storage on the Google ‘My Drive’ (presumably ‘cloud’ based)) are good, they may with continued use seem very limited.

This seems an OLD technology to recommend as a change but even in H817 it would transform our use of the most accessible tool for fostering participatory and collaborative learning. As I write this, I am reading Greengard (S. [2014] The Internet of Things Mass, Cambs, MIT Press) and overawed by the technologies in that I could be showing off about - delusively in my case). But that would not be where I am act in the game of driving change in my teaching and learning. 

So my recommendation is to H817 administrators - give us Google Doc (or Wikispaces) so that we can really explore the affordances of wikis for networking and group projects based on ‘making’ collaborative objects. We can only learn, for instance better skills with different media with that kind of flexibility.

At the moment, I steer clear of video or animation (fear of the new) and have only a feeling of beginner’s capability with basic text-image multi-modality. But I can learn from those ‘infographic’ experts out there amongst my fellow learners. That's one use of openness. 

Let’s do it. Goodness knows what even simple technological access will do to our respective pedagogies - open them up?.

Consider your reaction to the video.

• Were you convinced by rhizomatic learning as an approach?

I came across the metaphor in H800 and was enthralled. Here was a natural phenomenon whose order and organization were apparently chaotic and worked counter-intuitively, the very opposite of the metaphors preferred by rationalists.

However, unlike the connectivist idea, it did not work by associationist and behavioural contingency nor by the mathematics involved in the differential weighting of links between nodes. It was complex BUT it was conceivable as more than the accidental framework for the recognition of patterns with only an epiphenomenal ontology. It was chaotic BUT capable of creative generation and growth in unexpected directions (out from its nodes) that had sense in the larger scheme of time. They grew and allowed growth: provided they were alive.

Connectionism (and connectivism) were never more than an abstract model, conceivable (if at all) in complex but under-performing computer models of brain activation. As a committed cognitivist, I was delighted. Nodes were living sources of change and revision but not in themselves unmeaningful.

Courmier’s use of the metaphor imbues it with meaning: an intentional stance, after Dennett, he presents it as an organism with intrinsic motivation, being in itself cognitive:

They grow and spread via experimentation. So they’ll try out this way… and trying to figure out whether it can find a place to grow …’

The ‘intentional metaphors’ may be just convenient expressions like the extension of cognitive relations into the language of Daniel Dennett, but Stephen Downes, a dogmatic connectivist, tells us – in reading we are given – that we should in pure Churchland fashion, be suspicious of those, even in Daniel Dennett.

Courmier’s thinking plant intends to live and intends to grow and it is this which makes it a good metaphor of learning, just as full of distrust of foundational beliefs as connectivism but committed that the uncertainties this throws up are not grounds for believing that mental events and objects have no phenomenal existence.

The main point is not to get a model that explains the constant process of change (as connectivism does) but one that sees in aa way of imagining that our task in teaching and learning is not to change people and there it ends but to ensure the change in them enables them to be part of the ‘changeability’ necessary for living in times of rapid change.

• Could you imagine implementing rhizomatic learning?

Not personally. As a metaphor, it allows us to conceptualise the value of steps in the dark based on evidence we know to be uncertain at some level, however good. It allows room for learning as an idea of continual transformation. However, to try and reproduce a ‘rhizome’ as the structure even of a virtual learning place is to miss the point. A rhizome’s structure is always emergent, never then a ‘blueprint’ for design. Indeed as a metaphor it only keeps reminding us that the design of learning is provisional and hedged with uncertainty, prey to events that are not yet evidenced enough to be in the ‘evidence-base’. DS106 is not structured like a rhizome, it grows only when you respond to its object with intention to learn and grow and apply.

• How might rhizomatic learning differ from current approaches?

In many ways, I cannot see it as offering ‘a’ radical alternative. Instead, it gives credence to the use of multiple design methodologies in pedagogy. It only stops you from changing these methodologies into hardened certainties, from which no one must stray. It tells you that the shape of authority is and never will be ‘top-down’ only and maybe does not need to be top-down at all. It allows us to see the ‘teacher’ not as a ‘necessary presence’ (for whatever function) but as an instantiation of functions in learning itself: like, for instance modelling, feedback generation, design and reflection-in-action. When we see that, we can’t see one teacher (or indeed any other role in a learning system) as ‘sole’ authority

• What issues would arise in implementing rhizomatic learning?

As Courmier, makes plain, ‘dealing with uncertainty’. Once we embrace this idea, we may remember that any learning that is sustained is learning that negotiates ‘uncertainty’, even finding that ‘uncertainty’ in itself and moving on from it.

So there it is FOR NOW!

Steve

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

King Lear Act 3, scene 4, 28–36

Weller traces the metaphor of scarcity to classical economics in his paper, (A pedagogy of abundance), but the metaphor has, of course a longer history than that and one that ties it down to issues of social justice – so brilliantly comprehended by King Lear in his madness outside in a storm and experiencing ‘scarcity’ for the first time.

Of course it was always going to be the case that capitalism in its advent and after justified the obvious inequality between capital and labour by pretending that ‘scarcity’ was a metaphor of the human condition – in the socio-economic ‘myth’ of Robinson Crusoe for instance, although there were others (Marx called them ‘Robinsonades’).

I’m not saying this just to quibble with Weller but to emphasise that education and scarcity was usually a relation experienced first by the poor ‘houseless wretches’, and to emphasise that the internet accidentally and alone does not remedy poverty by the provision of abundance.

We still have to look at the quality of what is distributed in any network and to whom. The metaphor I prefer here is Lear’s one of superfluity – things that flow on and above any need or wish that might be ever felt, other than in a system of regulated desire that has become its own self-justification, the market. The market in modern society depends on the production of wishes and their commodification as things and it is the market (described as ‘free’ and ‘open’ by its lovers but actually nothing of the sort) that has been the mechanism of unequal distributions of ‘abundance’ and ‘scarcity’ with respect to material matters.

That doesn’t mean that we are not in a new pedagogic situation. One of superfluity. That something is superfluous to our needs and wishes does not mean that it is valueless but only that its value is limited to those who learn to value it – and that can go for ‘One Direction’ memorabilia as much as for ‘King Lear’. But it does mean that, faced with a ‘superflux’ of choices, we need skills to help us to come to know what we value, including what we might value given adequate comprehension, and how to select from the superflux what meets the criteria of personal value (it need be no more than that) we have allowed ourselves to develop.

So in a new pedagogy, we have:

1. Excess of potential learning objects of undifferentiated value as they cascade down to us;

2. No universal or absolute authorised or agreed prescribed criteria of value of ‘what is best for us’ (we used to – people called ‘Shakespeare ‘eternal’ and all kinds of other absolutes, Matthew Arnold thought culture 'the best that has been thought');

3. A recipient population of learners whose needs and wishes, it has never been in the interests of an unequal society to develop.

What we need is what Paolo Freire called, ‘a pedagogy of the oppressed’, a means by which people develop both the quality of the cognitions that frame wishes and with it an ability to discriminate between things which will meet developing needs and a need for development, rather than merely supporting them in the stagnant status quo.

So, teachers need simultaneously:

1. To offer access to the superflux of abundant resources;

2. Help people to understand their needs by developing their cognition and metacognition (thoughts and ways of evaluating their thoughts).

Learners can only cope with ‘abundance’ in stages:

1. Exposure to the  ‘superflux’, including the ability to be overwhelmed and know why they are overwhelmed;

2. Ability to organise and sort the material via cognition;

3. Ability to evaluate the material once it has been processed;

4. Ability to know that they have made a  ‘selection’ but it is not the only one they could have made or might make as they learn more, ‘metacognition’

I suppose I labour all this to attack what I believe to be the real enemy, which is the ‘philosophy’ of associationism (a modern re-vamp of behaviourism) and recognised in computer and brain sciences by the term ‘connectionism’. The guru of this view in philosophy is Paul Churchland and its Churchland who fed to Siemens and Downes the framework of connectivism.

It’s all just behaviourism or ‘associationism’, they say in the end. We know nothing except by the virtue of contingent and accidental associations. What we know forms patterns to which we give names but they are patterns that change in the chaos of complex interconnectivity. Knowledge and skill are just examples of 'pattern recognition'.

We therefore don’t need a ‘pedagogy of abundance’ but a pedagogy of emergent criteria that allow us to make choices and selections in a newly emerging world. In the latest ERSC general national report (for 2015), it is reported that the main mechanism differentiating access to university by class is the poorer choices of school subjects working class children make. I don’t see that connection as accidental, even though I do not see it as planned. It is a reflection of inequalities running throughout a society where social justice has a low cognitive priority. Let’s go back and construct or re-construct – not be slave to the accidents of association.

• Compare either DS106 or Rhizomatic Learning with offerings from Udacity, FutureLearn or Coursera.

• Write a blog post comparing the courses with regards to technology, pedagogy & general approach and philosophy

BLOG

This is a first pass at an assignment that requires another go at a later date. I am so new to MOOCs that I found myself having to gather confidence to enter them at all and, I have to admit, still feel a bit flummoxed by them. But I’m learning. So far I am at the ‘toe in the water’ stage. I want to return to this in a few weeks.

What I’ve done 

1. Joined DS106 and Rhizo 14 I think – the fact I’m not sure is because it seems too easy and I don’t seem to be able to get the sites to recognise me again, which suggests I never really joined in the first place. They look interesting. At the moment, I’m interested in assessment so I have a go at a middling difficulty assignment from DS106. You can do this without joining. Here is my attempt – you place it in your own blog with a link.

2. I signed up with Coursera – so far so good, Coursera recognises me. I selected a course on poetry writing (you can see from the above that I need it) I attach materials from the introduction that tell you about it. To complete registration for spring, I need to pay £32 but I might even do that, if I want certification. The leader, Douglas Kearney at California, seems good.

This comparison then is based on the ‘toe in the water’. 

• Technology

DS106 is ‘joined’ by you attaching a pre-existing blog, or one made in bespoke fashion for the course, to the website. I found you can use the OU one with ‘/feed’ after it but somehow I can’t re-find my original registration, so my attempt at a written assignment is just attached to their trial page on the ‘Open’ course. In this sense it seems genuinely to follow connectionist principles, linking not just to learners, who connect with each other but also connecting together all the technology used in each members Personal Learning Environment [PLE] (or at least the digital elements of it). This seems good but I need more time to reflect although the description and figures in Stacey 2013 already helped me.

Coursera is full of gateways and portals but they are much easier to navigate – the hardest part being the bit when you realise that probably you want credit for doing this – if only to recognise and remember that fact. So I have some counting up my pension to do before I go further.  

• Pedagogy 

In the Kearney course, (A sharpened Vision: A Poetry Workshop) methodologies are conventional but well tried: ‘talk to camera’, private reading, asynchronous group discussion in selected weeks and a planned curriculum focused on specifics – the nature of poetic lines.

The blend of web-page information and video is seamless and very professional. But it is rather a digital mediation of things I already knew about: charismatic teaching, rigorous pedagogy and academic challenge towards the front. 

The curriculum planning, delivery and assessment are all prescribed (see Appendix 1) and very coherent and respectable within the academic discipline they represent. General learning outcomes – in terms of assessment objects to be completed – are all there but the assessment criteria to achieve the required grades (80% on quizzes, 75% on score for poem by peer assessment) aren't clear. The vagueness of the assessment criteria for these grades isn’t what I’m used to and could have different meanings for different people. The question remains: does that matter? Must assessment be about 'making a grade'?

DS106 is harder to work out. Look, for instance, at the trial assignment I did (see ‘What I’ve done’ (1) above: ‘my attempt’ hyperlink). What is this testing? The stress on emergent outcomes may explain this. What emerges will emerge (if anything) from interactions and progressions – possible future connections of self to a new agency in self and to as yet unknown others with, as yet, unknown things to say. I’m puzzled, excited, a bit frightened but definitely up for it as yet. 

• General approach and philosophy 

The Coursera offering stresses things near to my heart: the role of tutor and peer challenge to increased quality of performance in small knowable things – writing a better line of poetry, for instance. But it stresses that coproduction involves caring too: ‘…. the same level of care needs to be experienced in this workshop.’ Kearney says the latter in the video meaning that BOTH

1.  care for others: this is not done by empty praise but challenging them to meet a yet unseen (by them) potential in themselves. And;
2. to care for and take responsibility for poetry and its value: a notion that there are hierarchically established values that distinguish poems from each other in terms of their absolute worth. 

None of this is stressed in DS106, not, at least, at the Portal. Again the stress is on the emergent and an emergent that must depend on some unknowable contingencies. Maybe I will see. 

Appendix:  

https://www.coursera.org/learn/poetry-workshop/supplement/aqNSz/syllabus

Read one of the following:

•Mackness and Bell (2014), Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade.

•Stacey (2013), The pedagogy of MOOCs.

It was useful for me to Stacey (2013) because it gave a historical overview very briefly that I found invaluable and one which helps define Activity 14 a little better. It certainly helped me to develop my knowledge of the innovations around assessment in higher education (HE) and to help me contemplate why the resistance to significant change in education invariably focuses around assessment, something I sense as strongly in H817 as elsewhere, which sets up innovative ideas for assessment and then undermines them by over-regulation (sourced probably externally to the course team). The menu of assessment types, varied in modality of presentation and attached credit in DS106 seems really interesting and full of potential for building in genuine motivated group work and a balance of personalisation, which you will struggle to find in any extant campus course, or indeed, as yet, the OU.

The drift of the argument in Stacey appears to be that MOOCs are not ‘open’ by nature but can be designed to be more or less open (or indeed relatively closed, ‘enclosing students in a closed environment that is locked down and DRM’ed in a proprietary way’).

So very useful piece this, although the over plus of closure in the repetitive metaphors of the bit I quoted shows it to lack the elegance of Mackness & Bell (2015), which is an eye-opener in so many ways.

This paper has the capability to change where I am on H817 because suddenly and unashamedly it forefronts the values implicit in the practice of online education and (p. 33 citing Noddings 1984) ‘the nurturance of the ethical ideal’. That’s an ugly phrase (Nodding’s not theirs) but a beautiful idea – which I haven’t heard since the 1960s – 70s.

I think I like it because it does not doubt the fact, implicit in Stacey but less sensitively registered, that the tussle between demands for closure and demands for openness in education (and assessment in particular_ is a struggle between the desire to stabilise and embed standard against the fact that all genuinely new learning is inevitably disruptive and destabilising (p. 30).

One thing that comes across very strongly is that learning is productive of strong emotion. The paper locates it in the differential reactions to the ‘rhizome’ metaphor from Deleuze – that fungal substructure of haphazard connectivity: ‘weeds’, ‘dirt’, ‘sh***’ ‘thug’, ‘damn’. The reaction is not unlike Hamlet’s to the new destabilisations in the state of Denmark, his family and his mother’s bed: ‘things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.’

This means that innovation is problematic unless posed in an ethical context. They even claim it must be a ‘caring’ context (p. 33). As they point out, innovation by teachers or educationally innovative institutions inevitably puts the student in the position of the ‘subject’ of a socio-psychological experiment, something I sensed in the very first blog I ever wrote )for H800), where just like respondents in this article (p. 33) I saw myself as one of Skinner’s lab rats.

In many ways the only change now as I face TMA03 – imposed group work- is I now see myself as one of the packs of rats sometimes tested post Skinner. No doubt much of this is my own over-neurotic fear, but Mackness and Bell put their fingers on the need to explore ‘the ethical implications of experimenting on learners’ (p. 31).

And the truth is that such experiments yield ambivalent results that show again that the positive and negative, light and dark are balanced across the ‘sampled’ populations and even within each participant, at different points of the continuum between those poles.

Good critical writing like this does not plump for easy answers – unlike Stacey who feels, and I have some sympathy, that we need sometimes to ‘leap in the dark’ if we are not to stay locked in the prevailing present with all its staleness and inequity. Mackness and Bell have really help me to see that that the agenda of Kear et. al: (2010) for a primary ‘social presence’ on the web or a community is located in this very unease about change (p. 29). However, that is a too simple solution, and not one that is in my view, pedagogically sound (it just feels safer and warmer to the ideological imagination). Ethical systems however are not simple minded – unless ground down to over-rigid structures of command or prettified (in that very social class-bound way) into ‘netiquette’ – they force us to base principles of what it means to communicate: and that means, at least in part, to challenge each other. We need to look again, without flinching, at what Rogers work on ‘encounter groups’ show us about how mutuality works in complex ways.

All the best

Steve

H817 Activity 12, Block 2: MOOCS and everyday life in a Northern Cluster

The reading here was useful and interesting and I found myself engaging in terms of what happens in teaching and learning clusters I know. I reflected back to on a recent conference on ‘team teaching’ in the Open University where, although I do not know if there was resolution, I took part in a debate on the value of ‘social presence’ (Kear et. al. 2010) as a means of guiding work in a-synchronic cluster forums and synchronic tutorial conferences.

The view expressed was that ‘social presence’ was a first step. However, my own prejudice (not even yet a hypothesis) is that ‘social presence’ as an immediate goal (or even ‘first step to other goals) may be intrinsically misguided. This is not to deny that ‘social presence’ is not required in our work but that without linking at a very early stage to cognitive and metacognitive presence, it must divert and even support negative outcomes.

There is anecdotal expert witness to the view that the virtue of MOOCs is in fact defined by their contribution to a debate on innovation in higher education ‘moving forward’ (Weller et. al. 2016, Liyanagunawardena et. al. 2013). Part of this evidence seems to suggest that MOOCs must work from ‘where people are or are capable of being, engaging in exploiting and developing those psychosocial ‘subject positions’.  Thus Stansbury (2016) reports that Australian data reveals that issues of online identity often dictated preference for optimum learning spaces online – those alien to ‘social media’ distrusting its effect on the integrity of their professional identity, whilst those who were not (the majority) felt that LMS provision needed to learn from social media.

What helped me to begin to think how different media might learn from each other was stunning research by Comer et. al (2014) on the use of writing in MOOCs for two different disciplines: English Composition and Chemistry. The evidence suggests that, far from ‘social presence’ being the necessary prompt to optimised participatory learning it was the development, through modelling, peer and teacher feedback on the effectiveness of discursive skills like ‘argument’. They suggest that this effect was greater when learners were prompted to understand the metacognitive value of such feedback to each other.

Although uneven there were specific ‘learning gains’ experienced through both giving and receiving feedback. However it was only, it was inferred, when learners were prompted by teachers that ‘giving peer feedback’ was  functional to everyone’s participatory learning that giving feedback yielded learning gains. There was on average c. 45%  report across both groups recording specific learning gains in ‘understanding' following peer feedback.

This suggests that the fear of a challenging environment that the ‘social presence’ movement has fostered has been to the possible detriment of learning. My practice is always to gear social interaction to high expectations: in Carol Dweck’s sense praise the ‘effort’ not the immediate achievement.  It also suggests that it is not counter-productive to shift attention away from the exchange of content to how best it is communicated in the written postings. It also suggests that people in higher education rise to the cognitive challenges in content and expression best if their role in the teaching and learning process is validated, suggesting that teacher presence lies more in modelling topic initiation and feedback and feeding back on these in concert with learners than in inculcating ‘teacher presence’. This is, after all, the lesson of Laurillard.

I see hints of this in my everyday teaching and learning. In the next presentation I will urge team experimentation with this model.

All the best, Steve

Activity 10: Sustainability

•Read Wiley (2007), On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education.

• 1.Was the sustainability model for each initiative apparent?

• 2.Did Wiley’s models cover all approaches or did you think a different model was operating for one or more of them?

•You can share these reflections in either the forum or in your blog.

BLOG

First of all, I wondered if the same ‘working definition of ‘sustainability’ genuinely applies to the instances we are asked to look at as that in Wiley (2007). The date is significant. Are definitions of ‘sustainability’ sustainable over time or do they change: do they have to change.  I consider the answer to that is – yes!

I found Wiley’s definition (p. 5f.)  could fit the one I used in my role-play as QUiPS, since it focused not so much on the sustainability of the archive content but on its end products: ‘learning’  or ‘use of learning’. For QUiPS, sustainability must be about dissemination continually of updated ideas.

When we look at Weller’s exercise examples – mainly on pages updated in 2016, only one had a recognizable likeness to Wiley's models and that, because it is a model originated in 2006, and possibly a declining brand (for good or ill) – although I think its demise would be ill.

However, like all time-based issues, socio-cultural agenda change. Wiley in 2007 did not consider the role of learner involvement in rewriting materials (see my blog above). I’ve added it to make a point that none of these agencies consider it an agenda item, which may have something to do with their corporate – and increasingly (Open to Future Learn) character. The world here is a globalized or ‘glocalized’ one, not quite captured by Wiley. One that is straining towards grobalization (for the terms see (Ritzer 2007[1]).

None, other than Open Learn are comfortable in Wiley’s categories.

Scenario

Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week.

Below are the finds. I have not attempted to search meticulously because this is an exercise to introduce me to the repositories. It has worked. I am more interested than I thought I would be.

BLOG PROPER FOLLOWS TABLE

An Introduction to Digital Skills:

1. Target: New staff, new providers, those looking for a refresher.
2. Level: Introductory
3. Leaning Outcomes:

• To be able to use asynchronous and synchronous fora flexibly.
• To understand that playing enhances the awareness of the affordances
• To understand the strengths and weaknesses of automate / algorithmic systems. To test that using the Teacher Bot device.
• To further develop wiki use in multimodal ways to enhance care and support planning.
• To be able to apply the QUiPS’ mission statements on collaboration and co-production to the use of multimodal fora and wikis.
• To make a support plan for a fictional ‘circle of support’ surrounding Dora, a you women with multiple needs and expressed wants established in a collaborative interdisciplinary assessment involving user, carers, professional disciplines and staff. This will be specified.

The table shows however that the deeper the repository queried (Merlot as an instance) the longer the URL and the greater possibility of corruption of this URL through transmission. We had intended to simplify this before going to report but were unable to do so. Yet again tolerance is needed here. We have given the full URL for box 2 & 4  below.

The immediate gain for us was that, using these repositories, we were able to link our interests in innovative and open resources with innovate and open pedagogies and culture. We were able to find a more or less straight path to collaboration. However, the most difficult concept in this course is the one learners often believe they know already but do not – collaboration.

Address 2:

https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=426249&hitlist=hasCollections%3Dfalse%26amp%3Bkeywords%3Dsynchronous%26amp%3BhasEtextReviews%3Dfalse%26amp%3BisContentBuilder%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterOtherOpen%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasAssignments%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasAwards%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfromAdvancedSearch%3Dtrue%26amp%3BfilterSubjectsOpen%3Dtrue%26amp%3BhasRatings%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterTypesOpen%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterMobileOpen%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasComments%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasCourses%3Dfalse%26amp%3BisLeadershipLibrary%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterPartnerAffiliationsOpen%3Dtrue%26amp%3BhasSercActivitySheets%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasEditorReviews%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasPeerReviews%3Dfalse%26amp%3Bsort.property%3Drelevance%26amp%3B

Address 4:

https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=531089&hitlist=hasCollections%3Dfalse%26amp%3Bkeywords%3Dwiki%26amp%3BhasEtextReviews%3Dfalse%26amp%3BisContentBuilder%3Dfalse%26amp%3BexactPhraseKeyWords%3Dtrue%26amp%3BfilterOtherOpen%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasAssignments%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasAwards%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfromAdvancedSearch%3Dtrue%26amp%3Bcategory%3D516814%26amp%3BfilterSubjectsOpen%3Dtrue%26amp%3BhasRatings%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterTypesOpen%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterMobileOpen%3Dfalse%26amp%3BisLeadershipLibrary%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasComments%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasCourses%3Dfalse%26amp%3BfilterPartnerAffiliationsOpen%3Dtrue%26amp%3BhasSercActivitySheets%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasEditorReviews%3Dfalse%26amp%3BhasPeerReviews%3Dfalse%26amp%3BallKeyWords%3Dfalse%26amp%3Bsort.property%3Drelevance%26amp%3B

The aim of both Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practice (OEP) is their integration into a culture of openness. Yet, the latter still only exists as an aspiration. I want to use my blog – and the illustrating photograph to draw out 3 hints from JISC 2013 and OER Evidence 2013-2014 to pick out factors which may contribute to this.

1. OER and OEP may imply each other but, as yet are very different. For instance in OER ‘pedagogic’ material is sometimes seen as an add-on, while to OEP is the central and organising factor in transforming closed cultures. The latter depends on softening boundaries between persons (like teachers and learners) and institutions (private, public, third sector),  OER, in contrast tends, on its own to raise issues of individual ownership and therefore a push to unique ‘brands’ vying for prominence ((JISC 2013 4f.).

2. Cultures seek cultural goals – flattened hierarchies, the common facilitation of personal development and unforeseen learning affordances. Meanwhile resource-centred thinking tends to be conservative, fitting new brands to old needs rather than generating emergent, otherwise untried connections between people and things (ibid 7).

3. This problem appears to emerge even in personnel during the adoption of innovations in OER. Whilst the tendency of OEP is to sharing, co-producing and co-facilitating, individuals often seize on a resource (if that is all they see it as) as a means of polishing a personal expertise (ibid. 9). The latter route can lead to the formation of elites and ‘expert’ neo-languages that exclude rather than include aspirants.

There are no easy solutions. To change we have to know and understand our own vulnerabilities and resistances (sometimes the same thing). One of the saddest ideas in the JISC report was that whilst open to OER that might enable my own progression, educational staff are resistant to OEP because it does not ‘fit’ with their ‘current work practices’. The answer is then access to reflective openness to change. Easier said than done. But in the end is this not what learning is about.