Personal Blogs

Extract from TMA04

Owning Up to Blogs

During H800 to date, I completed 9 blog postings (Bamlett 2015). My first related to the course itself and to anxieties about being observed, monitored and judged. As a direct response to a design initiative it focused on an identity that was neither certain nor, at this point, developing – seeing intervention from the module design structure and personnel, and perhaps even peers, mainly as a ‘challenge’ without any particular dynamic of development that ‘learning’ requires. Hence the writer and picture-maker here takes distanced metaphoric identification with a manipulated learning ‘subject’, a rat in a Skinner box (Figure E) that is explicitly compared to the ‘experimental subjects’ of an early version of H800 reported by Conole (2013), one of the module’s earliest design authors. Bayne (2004) makes an appearance but only the negative and fearful identifications that I found there:

‘the subject of study: yourself, yourself in groups, yourself opting out of groups’. 

The term ‘subject’ is less affirmative of ‘self’ here than it is subjected and enclosed by controls. There is a hint of the narrative to follow – the sense that what controls, by overseeing and monitoring is not just course design features and other support mechanisms (that sometimes don’t look like support) but a self-regulating avatar:

‘detecting things in my own behaviours that I wasn’t all that fully aware of before’.

Looking at that now, this ghostly self-monitor is the self-regulating capacity that the course was aiming to bring into being as one of the products of ‘learning’.

There is no even development in the learning in these blogs. Later ones set myself tasks in order to explore blogging itself (a review of Taylor 2014 and Tkacz 2015, a summary of a technology used in my current teaching F2F that was new to me or tasks developed from the module activities). In retrospect, it feels to me that there is open experimentation here not only with blog but different varieties of self-display and authorial role, which occasionally do not derive from fear and anxiety but playful joy. Tone begins to variegate. In May 25^th, the focus is metacognitive: on changing ‘selves’ as product of learning that is neither playful nor fearful but merely an emergent and more rational subjectivity judging more fairly the support systems around its growth:

“this is a matter not only of personal identity – but how we should think about personal identity - … one way the self changes is in learning more appropriate ways of assessing (judging) its own judgements.”

These issues feedback from experiences in forums and interactions, including feedback from TMA02, which had explored ‘self-display’ constraints in the group and self. However, now with partners in a learning process that are beginning to be highly esteemed, the process is meta-cognitive (a way of thinking about how thinking happens). On 27 June, after a conscious decision to return to blogging, now with more positivity, the post feeds forward to the concerns of TMA04, reflects forum discussion but also situating parts of my own life-narrative in that process without a disabling sense of threat about facilitating your own observance by others – perhaps even greater comfort with, and less fear of, self-judgements.

Hence on the 3^rd July, I chose to make my own failure in a wiki task part of the learning process for myself and others. Fuelled by feed-forward to TMA05, it also opened self to later reflection BY self AND others. The last piece to date (19 July) alluded to elements of my autobiography (some of which would be recognised ONLY by those closest to me (who were not reading them) and myself) and blending within them elements of self I valued – the love of literature, language (now feeding forward to E854) and the world of co-production (which for me meant teaching I was doing elsewhere on the Social Care Act UK 2014).

I might now reify this process as ‘metacognitive autopoesis (self-making)’, were I not still hesitant about regarding the survival of the emergent product through change. However, there is a recognizable narrative here of a learner growing into ownership of a rich kind, aware that that ownership owes much to, and is still buttressed by, collaboration with others, and, particularly moderator support.

Of course, this analysis does not facilitate my full ownership of the records of that process. The OU holds personal blogs accessible to its learners on its LMS for 3 years after study ends. Of course these could be transferred to an independent blog provider but that might break the important sense of historical connection of self to other(s). Anderson (2006) shows that such narratives facilitate coming to terms with ‘owning’ one’s own process of self-owning, and its ‘persistence’ across metamorphoses:

“Persistence: The reflective posting of a blog are a digital record of the learning process. They can be an integral part of the lifelong learning accomplishment and e-portfolio of the learner. They should not disappear at the end of a course.”

 In this essay I discussed various forms in which ‘ownership’ of learning is judged relative to a number of stakeholders. One of these Stakeholders remains to be discussed in a pending EMA – the products and process of participatory and co-productive groupwork.  In looking at the tension between the claims of LMS and PLE to provide a route to ownership, the ‘autopoetic’ and ‘metacognitive’ function of one Web 2.0 tool has been analysed in relation to what it might show about how, and whether, I ‘own’ my ‘own’ learning. This is not a completed task and may not be till mortality is fulfilled.

In the rubric to the EMA task set, we are told that the segmented directive tasks historically produce good work from students but that some may find it over-specified. I'm beginning to see some of the problems here.

The killer is that this piece, given its specification, is actually quite short. Given that Part A and B both require 2 technologies, you have say 1250 words to describe for Part A the 'main uses' of each and evaluate them against these uses. That is a big ask and some selectivity is going to be required and concision.

My immediate concern is that larger issues are hard to 'fit in', though they seem important. For instance, I've been pondering how to think of evaluating strengths and weaknesses of its 'uses'. How do I distinguish between creative and innovative affordances of a technology and the technology itself? Which am I evaluating? Strengths and weaknesses really seem to belong to the interaction between the technology, its application within a teaching and learning design and serendipitous factors that might emerge as it is used - not to the technology per se.

I don't think I can explore that in 1,250 words and there will have to be some very some SMART thinking about how to frame this issue which addresses the issues economically without reducing the task to a functional list. The answer might lie in being clear about what is meant by your 'experience' of the technology - how has that experience opened up strong uses in teaching and learning design that can be made of the particular technology. What were its deficits? Are they intrinsic deficits or ones that can be changed by a) improvements in the teaching and learning designs or b) in the potential evolution of the technology for change in its own nature. Thus, at a certain historical moment - a weakness of some Wiki applications is the integration of features like charts and graphics but, although this problem persists in the OU wiki it doesn't in other versions of the wiki that are discussed in the literature.

Even then vast areas for potential exploration grow. HOW do you learn to be selective here - to specify the project even more than it is already. I'm struggling with this!

My past is a bit mixed academically but now I'm retired I have reverted to an old-fashioned expository style, trying to enjoy describing things again, especially things that were before outside my experience. I'm used to writing myself into a topic - getting immersed into it but that has dangers here of getting lost in its newness to you and the joy of discovery of what, to other people, are already probably quite standard ideas.

Below is how I started on wikis. I quite enjoyed it but it isn't addressing the issues. To exorcise it, I'm including this false start in my blog  as a self-warning: SELECT, SPECIFY, BE DIRECT and therefore concise. Learn how to 'park' certain questions for later reflection.

MY FALSE START.

"WHAT are Wikis?

A backward-looking discipline like etymology seems a poor place to begin definition of 'emergent' phenomena like software learning applications, but in this case it is necessary. Whilst few still attempt to use the false etymology of wiki as an acronym ('what-I-know-is'), it can still be found in Gomes and Sousa (2013:627), probably as a result of confusion of the prototypical format of wiki software with the encyclopaedic ambitions ofWikipedia. As the latter flourished, it began to retrospectively validate the 'bacronym'. However, although semantic connections to the aggregation of personal knowledge in wiki work, and are of some interest to teaching and learning: they are also pedagogically misleading.

The term was adopted by Howard Cunningham for his new WikiWikiWeb after he learned about the fast shuttle service (Fig A.) serving the airport at Hawaiia: in Hawaiian, it means 'quick', and when 'doubled', 'very quick' (Oxford 2015). Hence the associations are with perceived pace of time and connection not with personal knowledge aggregation per se. It is this act of attaining personal association within a larger group, without the constraints usually posed by the time taken to bring about human interactions at a distance that should, and will, occupy us more in what follows. Linking people up very quickly from the moment of serendipitous contact with output from one by another is the essence of asynchronous media (where time as constraint is not a significant factor in cementing the link)."

So bye-bye bus and languorous exploration. Time to relearn how this might be done!

Hi

Below is the original text. However, the experiment was based on ignorance of the affordances of the OU Wiki. In fact I thought this the only way to test them. To see failure in its full glory, connect to the wiki trial:

PS. On the 4th July and in order to get a personal outcome (usable for teaching in October), I edited the Wiki page to add an alternative format - for my own learning ONLY. I've also attached Word file for table version.

https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=553042&group=127745&page=Wiki%20Exercise%20Trial

I'm leaving the text below as it was (bar correcting any typos / spelling errors found) out of interest for me. I might even reflect on all this in EMA.

A WIKI Exercise.

Learning Outcomes:

The learner will:

Demonstrate the ability to choose or write a number of statements that predict features of the role of a teacher in 2030.

Express a measure of their confidence in that statement.

Justify in one brief sentence their level of expressed confidence.

Elaborate on the statements in one brief sentences.

Collaboratively work to a choice of the 5 statements in which the group as a whole have most confidence.

Evaluate the learning, if any, involved in this exercise.

Suggest changes to improve the exercise or create an alternative exercise.

The Task

Stage 1

Learners have been instructed to establish a group view of what the teacher's role will predominantly involve in 15 years.

They will produce facilitate a wiki to collect statements that express statements about the key features of a teacher's role in 2030, together with an expression of their confidence about their prediction, an explanation of that confidence and any additional elaboration of the points.

In order to facilitate brief expression, the statements must be able to be written (such that they can be read) on a template that restricts the space for expression.

Some statements will be provided in a 'Model Doc'. The 'Model Doc' will also contain a template for new contributions of statements originating from the learner or their reading. The completed template can be copied into the 'Data Collection Wiki'. See 'Model Doc' (attached).

This task will be available for one week only before Stage 2.

Stage 2

If possible from the data achieved in the Data Collection Wiki the 5 statements in which the mean confidence of the group is highest (where H = 99, M = 66 & L = 33) will be selected into one master document (perhaps another wiki OR a Word document).

If selection is not automatically possible the team will participate to agree a mode of selection of the 5 statements representing the group's most confident predictions.

Technology-focused changes in pedagogy: the 'affordances' and potential meanings in the term, 'mobile learning'?

Sharples et. al (2005) say that 'mobile learning' is not just about the hardware devices we possess and the software we access through them but about a re-definition of learning. They do this by employing a very wide definition of 'mobility'. For them learner mobility covers the learner's journeys through both space and time but also between different learning projects and topics. In short 'mobile learning' is learning that is not fixed and static in localised space but multiform and distributed across wide expanses of:

• Time;

• Geographical Distance;

• Roles in our life in a specific time phase;

• Roles in our life over the whole lifespan including life transitions (becoming a parent and so on);

• Subjects we study;

• Use of technologies and 'non-technological' learning;

• And, the projects in which we access learning formally and informally.

If that is so, learning is not only about 'where' we learn but what we learn and how 'what we learn' is defined. Academic subjects tend to have some specific 'standard' forms based on the 'rules' of the academic discipline. Yet how were such rules and boundaries constructed?

I think Kukulska-Hulme (2012) helps us here by looking at how mobile learning can and does impact on learning a language. We are used to thinking of language study as located in rules governing certain sub-domains, the rules of grammar guiding language syntax for instance. This is only the rule however in areas of study which are not guided by academic linguists. Teaching outside linguistics has been hooked on rules for punctuation, for instance that are often claimed to be commonly misused in academic essays. In any school or college in English-speaking regions there will be at most times a conversation about 'students' not using apostrophes correctly.

But how stable are such rules. It was only in the eighteenth century that rules for punctuation began to be rigidly codified and considered as part of a set of principles through which English language use ought to be organised. This does not mean that it was then or now actually organised like that. The periodic sentence was the invention of an elite - concerned to see language as a hierarchical ordering principle like that they associated with good governance in other realms.

Although this grossly oversimplifies. I think that one way in which this was done was to organise learning around language on canonical examples and rule books and eventually in static organisations called universities. In universities the standards of 'grammar' could be located again as a principle to organise others. There is a reason for the name of 'grammar' schools, which were so essential to state education in the twentieth century.

What Kukulska-Hulme shows us is that mobile learning not only defines where we study language and for what purposes - as we drive our taxi around Athens for instance - but what we learn, which is now defined by shifting and highly flexible variants, defined not by 'standard' rules but local applications. What passes as 'correct' in such circumstances will be very adaptable indeed to the places, times, roles and so on through which we pass. What seems to be suggested is that what defined 'language' in the past - standard rules and lexical categories - will be without function when they are no longer defined by a single static curriculum. And what are academic disciplines but boundaries put around knowledge that are policed and maintained by people recognised (and 'qualified') as experts. This is a wonderful sentence:

"..., language learning can escape the traditional constraints of place and time that partly determine existing curricula, which focus largely on what can be achieved and tested at home or in the classroom” (Kukulska-Hulme 2012:10).

For practical tips on MALL see:

 http://blog.divii.org/what-is-mall-or-mobile-assisted-language-learning/

References:

Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2012) ':anguage learning defined by time and place: A framework for next generation designs' in Díaz-Vera, J.E. (ed.) Left to My own devices: Learner Autonomy and Mobile Assisted Language learning: Innovation and Leadership in English Language Teaching, 6. Bingley, Emerald Publishing, pp. 1 - 13.

Sharples, M., Taylor, J., Vavoula, G. (2005) 'Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning' - Accessed via link in Study Materials.

Then share your views in the forum, and/or make notes in your blog, about the following issues:

What do you think is the likely impact of this technology on the students’ perceptions of the quality of their modules, their approaches to studying and their academic performance?

The technology I am going to refer to is the use of a Ladibug device. This slim piece of hardware looks like a desk lamp with a large plastic ladybird as its head. It is operated through companion software and is therefore connected to the PC and any existing OHP. In Bishop Auckland HE Centre this is a ceiling set OHP.

The Ladibug once activated projects an image of any document placed below it at great and very clear magnification. It appears to self-focus (certainly I did nothing to achieve a clear image).

This allows an A4 page completed by a student or student group to be projected for the purpose of a group or individual presentation. Of course tutors can with this share textual or graphic documents or put up a stimulus for an exercise.

It is promoted by the college as an alternative to the use of flip-chart paper and pens for group presentations.

The advantage of this device is that it is an easily learnable device that can put students in control of elements of a teaching plan, reporting back from private study or sharing a stimulus with their work group or whole class. Images can be captured and later distributed either electronically or printed.

When I used it for group work I was disappointed. An A4 sheet is insufficiently communal and groups tended to atomise rather than cohere around it as I have seen happen with flip-chart paper and pen. I think in future I would ask students to prepare a segment of the whole page based on a master-plan which the group would re-assemble (making group changes) at the end. My fear is that group work in F2F events may lose coherence.

What do you think is the likely impact of this technology on the teachers’ perceptions of their teaching context and their approaches to teaching?

It might increase the use of shared stimulus (text or graphic) without recourse to a photocopier and emphasise the need for literature search. However Ladibug does capture images, so complex stimuli can be given out at the ends of class or sent to an email distribution list. Think of the cost savings on printing, colleges!

Teachers may see the Ladibug as like the conch in Lord of Flies since who holds it has the 'floor' and this may cause more democratic (or less autocratic) teaching practices to emerge!

Do you think this technology embodies particular assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning in higher education? 

In this case no, since its use rather than its nature will determine the nature of T & L. As with any other technology, it is a slave rather than a master of 'learning design!'

If so, what are these assumptions? Are they likely to promote more positive perceptions, more desirable approaches to studying and better performance on the part of the students?

Given my (convenient) view on the question above, there is less to say here. I do think learning design the prior thing, so much so that its role is iterative - review of LD leads to redesign and so on, ad infinitum.

So having less to say than I thought, I'd like to share a resource (from St. Clair, R. (2015) Creating Courses for Adults: Design for Learning San Francisco, Jossey-Bass p. 150) - my book at bed-time.

An informal comparative review of Taylor, A. (2014) The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age London, Fourth Estate & Tkacz, N. (2015) Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

“Openness is a philosophy that can easily rationalize its own failure, chalking people’s inability to participate up to choice… “(Taylor 2014:139)

It is open season, so to speak, on ‘openness’. Both of these important, and very differently orientated, books stress that whether something is described as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ (whether it be a society – as in Popper’s anti-Marxist philosophy – or any other system) is far less important than other features of its political structure and organisation.

Openness in late twentieth-century thought has stood for freedom, radicalism but above all for meritocracy – the notion that in ‘free’ exchanges (whether in a market economy or an internet forum) the best will rise to the top by a process that appears entirely spontaneous and unplanned. Not so, say both writers: Taylor from the perspective of the philosophic and documentary artist and Tkacz from that of an analytic media academic.

Tkacz’s post-modern analysis is careful and astute and argues from close involvement with the most ‘open’ system of all, Wikipedia. Taylor (2014:221) exempts Wikipedia from her strictures about the limits of openness, which makes Tkacz’s (2015;65) argument all the more urgent since he argues, that ‘Wikipedia is defined through the systematic exclusion of certain kinds of knowledge.’ However, based in very urgent cultural struggle it is Taylor that throws out more light, even if of a very diffuse kind. Whilst Tkacz’s argument is controlled and ‘academic’ in its generic conventions, Taylor throws out tough-minded apercus’ of considerable brilliance that ring in the mind and which speak to the H800 experience better than anything I have read:

“Strategically constructing an identity requires a kind of feigned authenticity” (OUCH! – that hurts!) “that involves continual management and monitoring of audience feedback. Self-censorship is inevitable; one must be ‘liked’ above all … It puts a premium on quickness and sensation, on the emotions of anger and awe proven to trigger virality. If slow-moving and sometimes solitary work was always at a disadvantage, now it is even more so.” (Taylor 2014:208)

Hence, she claims that art and certain constructions based in patience and passive experience are its victims. Hence that brilliant pun! ‘Virality’ is a criteria of noisy, timely and crowded success that just nearly sounds like ‘virility’. Taylor’s is a highly sophisticated and gendered argument but it works like art more than it does the philosophers she so admires (and about whom she made very ‘edgy’ documentaries: Zizeck! and Examined Life). Tkacz, with its careful discriminations about conceptions of knowledge and truth in relation to ‘point of view’ and ‘exit’, is another thing, but it has its moments that might sound like Taylor:

“To be ‘well-behaved’ is to produce statements that stick to the topic at hand and the rules in play. Well-behaved statements are ones that ‘find consensus’ and ‘avoid edit-wars.’ (Tkacz 2015:101)

Above all what both point out is that certain aspects of the world as we have known it are at risk and that we allow them to pass without comment at peril to the quality of our lives together.