Personal Blogs

If Boyer's four main scholarly functions were research, application, integration and teaching, then I would propose that those of the digital scholar are engagement, experimentation, reflection and sharing'.

Weller (2011 in Chapter 4, 20% of the way through, Kindle Location 1005. Is there a page number related to a print version? Amazon say not in a polite, informative and lengthy e-mail. What therefore is the answer to this referencing conundrum?)

Does Weller's suggestion make anyone who keeps a student blog and shares it openly like this a scholar?

Making us all digital scholars?

(I love the term as a hundred years ago in Census Returns it was used to describe anyone attending an academic institution, whether school or university).

Goals of the Scholarly Activity

• Provide students with an opportunity to employ their unique skills and talents to pursue a project of their choosing under the mentorship of an expert in the field.
• Provide mentorship and guidance for students interested in careers that integrate research, teaching, and clinical service (academic medicine).
• Foster development of analytical thinking skills, rational decision making, and attention to the scientific method.
• Enhance communication skills.
• Enhance self-directed learning.

 

Reference

Boyer, E.L. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ.

Weller, M., (2011) The Digital Scholar

'Amateurs' often create content which addresses subjects that academics may not and also in a manner which differs from traditional teaching', Weller (2011)

Water-Cycle Images offered under Creative Commons

http://quizlet.com/2634344/water-cycle-with-pictures-flash-cards/

How I see learning in Web 2.0 where everything is digitised, shared, communicated and changed. Simply write over the terms and phrases here with:

• Web 2.0
• Digital Asset
• E-tivities
• User Generated Content
• Forums
• Social Learning
• Mobile Devices
• Cloud Computing
• Computers
• Internet
• Communities of Learning
• E-Books

... and so on

 

The most a busy blogger can do when unable to blog is to jot down some notes in the hope that in a quiet moment you can return.

After a protracted absence from work I have that to catch up on, as well as an End-of-module Assignment (EMA) to deliver in 10 days times (far earlier I hope).

I need to return to:

• Presenting to Buckingham Marketers on Social Media Marketing.

I drew all I needed to share from this mind-map (to upload indue course). Most telling for me is being just as interested to engage face-to-face so I need to do this regularly. Social Media is complementary, not replacement technology.

• The following day I was a guinea-pig in the Institute of Educational Technology Labs on the next offering of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

I found the process as well as the likely outcome to be fascinating. For all you H810ers, the Chair of this module was the observer in the TV Gallery follwing my behaviours and actions. More to come.

• And then today, the first in a four part presentation that will eventually run to eight hours, on how the concept of 'personas' is used to inform web design and functionality for different user types.

What the outsider cannot appreciate is the extraordinary depth and quality of thinking that goes into what the OU does.

• And finally (the day after) a presentation from the Head of Legal at JISC on Creative Commons and OER.

Another vital lesson that in a two hour form (they could edit the video from its six hour length) ought to be part of an induction package for anyone coming into Higher Education in a content creation role. More to follow once I have H800 out of the way (end of September).

Having failed to register for the next module I'll have good time to reflect on the content of this blog and migrate most, if not all of it, over to my external blog My Mind Bursts or to a new blog focused exclusively on e-learning.

 

Best policy would to have all non-fiction, or certainly books from academic publishers, with the page number facility for citation. This or a change to citing practice. I have resorted to putting KL before a reference as in Kindle Reference so KL 2734 for example. I don't suppose this helps unless the tutor or examiner knows the exact font size, spacing and layout, but at least it shows I am trying to demonstrate the provenance of my source. They could simply do a search for the phrase within the book, if verifying the quote, fact or figure is required, but that of course requires them to own the book in Kindle form.

'If Boyer's four main scholarly functions were research, application, integration and teaching, then I would propose that those of the digital scholar are engagement, experimentation, reflection and sharing'. Weller (2011).

Reference

Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar. How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury

Blogs as thought sharing

Non-linearity

Criticalness and multivariate collision

Shaohui and Lihua (2008)

'Amateurs' often create content which addresses subjects that academics may not and also in a manner which differs from traditional teaching', Weller (2011)

Generating content as a by-product of what is done anyway: Keeping notes working up ideas Weller (2011)

Networking = crowd sourcing

Lazy web = access to experts

Reciprocity is key

The relationship between a blogger and a reader is maintained if the blogger provides interesting and regular updates.

Reference

Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar. How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury

Shaohui, W and Lihua, M. (2008) The application of blog in modern education

CAMELOT

'The Camelot comparison - accentuating the positives of the entrenched practice'.

ASSESSMENT

'Assessing quality in a reliable and transparent manner is a significant problem in the recognition of digital scholarship, and its intangibility and complexity are enough to make many give up and fall back on the practices they know and trust'. Weller (2011)

'The Trucker's Deal' Wiley 2009b

'A digital scholar is likely to have a distributed online identity, all of which can be seen to represent factors such as reputation, impact, influence and productivity'. Weller (2011)

BLOGGING

'Many if the characteristics which would be frowned upon in scholarly articles, such as subjectivity, humour, and personal opinion, are vital elements in developing a dialogue in blogs'. Weller (2011)

KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION

'Knowledge is acquired through research, synthesis, practice and teaching'. Boyer (1990)

'The fact that there is hype doesn't mean the overall direction isn't correct. A technology may not completely change the world in the next 18 months, but it may significantly change practice in the next decade'. Weller (2001)

Publication associated with promotion and tenure.

Shaohui and Lihua (2008)

· Blogs as thought sharing.

· Non-linearity

· Criticalness and multivariate collision

Where Academics get stuck - identity and status.

Zittrain (2008) 'generatively'

'A system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences'.

Low product OERs encourages further participation.

The implicit message in these OERs is that the consumer can become a producer - they are an invitation to participate precisely because of their low quality.

KEY

'In educational terms it may be that both (big OERs and little OERs) have a role to play within a learning context or course. Learners may want to feel the reassurance of the quality brand material for core content, but they may also want a mixture of the more social, participatory media that encourages them to contribute'. Weller (2011)

Joshua Bell playing on the underground story.

Top violinist using an instrument worth 3.5 million dollars.

Context of big OER compared to little.

Naive to think putting stuff onto YouTube will get it noticed.

REFERENCE

Boyer, E. (1990), Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, San Fancisco: Jossey-Bass.

The Digital Scholar (notes 2)

Revolution not imminent, significant trends are as far as it goes.

(More than a Model T Ford getting a lick of green paint, more akin to flight making the shift to jet propulsion?)

Something of a revolution in other sectors, from external agencies or bottom up.

Digitisation of content. Perfectly distribution.

Social networks and the easy distribution of content.

• Newspapers
• Music Industry

WPP near 20% drop in traditional advertising in papers.

Craig's list has double the traffic of the New York Times

Unbundling if newspaper advertising

Don't confuse function with form, we don't need newspapers, we need journalism. Shirky.

John Naughton

Think Ecologically

Think long term

JV Abandon voice in favour of large text, three to four words per line, like a TV autocue, the Kindle in my right hand typing with my left and skim reading rather faster.

See my scrapbook of images in Picasa Web, or put in Tumblr, or image favouring Wordpress layout.

VS industries based in ownership.

So music returns to the live concert,

Blurring of boundaries between sectors.

What Apple has over Microsoft and many others, is a passion sand vigour when it comes to design both of hardware and software.

So what's the equivalent for universities?

If they are the record company then they are redundant, let’s go for the author as artiste, even their free books to promote the live lecture?

Atoms, molecules and filters.

Google and an eBay for education?

• A community of learners
• Approved mentors
• Credits based on learning they can demonstrate

University Functions:

1. Teaching

2. Research

3. Dissemination

4. Outreach

5. Curation

· Change can be quick

· No assumptions are unassailable

· Form and function are different

· Boundaries are blurred.

· We can't wrap libraries and such like in cotton wool if their time is over.

· Global networks, unpredictable environments, rapid response.

The life experience of the university campus and college.

Resistance

Chapter 4

The Nature of Scholarship

Unsworth (2000)

Scholarly promotes:

· Discovering knowledge

· Adding layers

· Comparing

· Referencing and acknowledging

· Sampling

· Illustrating

· Representing

Palmer, Teffeau and Pirmann (2009)

• Searching (browsing)
• Collecting
• Reading
• Writing
• Collaborating

 

Boyer (1990)

Need to recruit to teach, not research.

'Knowledge is acquired through research, synthesis, practice and teaching'. Boyer (1990)

· Discovery

· Application

· Teaching

Favours humanities, lone scholars and a culture of 'possessive individualism'(Rosenzweig, 2007)

Isn't the term digital harking back to the 1990s? Should we not be talking about E-scholarship?

· Build

· Create tools to build and analyse

· New intellectual products

Borgman (2007)

'The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data and information-intensive collaborative research'.

N.B. The sharing of data and data itself constitute knowledge capital, comparable with published articles

Changes in how scholars communicate, outputs and the networks they operate in.

Discovery or 'genesis research'

Datasets being more readily shared.

Data visualisation and information is beautiful.

New forms of journal publishing see the journal of Visualized Experiments. Jove.com

Academics as brand

Outreach and viral appeal ...when the right person tweets you.

Through openness of two kinds, sharing and being.

Chapter 5

TED Rapid innovation being driven by sharing. Anderson (2010)

Crowd accelerated innovation

X3

· Crowd

· Light

· Desire

Driven by observation, competition and being seen.

Research?

Using SlideShare?

n.b. Clarity & engagement

VS. Caution and hostility of the research community.

Inherent values and attitudes

Chapter 6

· Integration

· Cross-fertilisation of knowledge

· Wissenschaft

· Interdisciplinary

Publication associated with promotion and tenure.

Shaohui and Lihua (2008)

· Blogs as thought sharing.

· Non-linearity

· Criticalness and multivariate collision

(JV but only if people become alerted to it or familiar with its content)

Loic Le Meur (2005)

· Early sharing

· Input from others

· Launching collaborative projects impossible to do alone

· Gathering content continually from many sources

· Code of blogging practice? DISAGREE

· Speed LESS IMPORTANT THAN FREQUENCY, RESPONSIVENESS.

Recognition DISAGREE WHY ELSE SO MANY ANONYMOUS?

Tricks can mean that blogs get traffic and readership because of SEO actions: key words, tags, links, subscriptions, PPC.

The personal mix renders blogs interesting. MW

No, it is apposite disclosure or exposure, wit and pertinence.

E.g. John Cooke Rock and Business

REF: Shaohui, W. & Lihua, M. (2008), The Application of Blog in Modern Education'. Proceedings of CSSE 08,4:1083-1085

· Conferences

· Trending

· Retweets

To amplify, entertain, comment, visibility, validation, loyalty, friendship,

LL tail models when there is sufficient content for the tail.

Wasted time:

· Meetings

· Lectures

Or share. Blog posts

Generating content as a by-product of what is done anyway:

• Keeping notes
• Working up ideas

Chapter 9

Openness in education

A set of characteristics of the open scholar.

Sharing

· Frictionless

· Quick

· Content sharing

Higher citation impact of open articles of 36% to 172%

Networking = crowd sourcing

Lazy web = access to experts

Reciprocity is key

The relationship between a blogger and a reader is maintained if the blogger provides interesting and regular updates.

An economy of reciprocity

The more you give online that is of value to those in your network then the more 'credit' you establish.

Sarah Horrigan (2009) lists Twitter etiquette that could be ... Advice on establishing reciprocity.

· Fill in your profile

· Picture please

· Not a private club

· Participate

· Update

· Learn the importance of @ and 'd'.

· Retweet selectively

Nowak and Roche (2007)

Upstream reciprocity

A recipient of an act of kindness is more likely to help others.

Openness the sine qua non

· Sharing

· Reciprocity

GSA. Centralise LMSs:

David Wiley

Michael Wesch

Larry Lessor

Where Academics get stuck - identity and status.

Zittrain (2008) 'generatively' 'a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences'.

Low product OERs encourages further participation. The implicit message in these OERs is that the consumer can become a producer - they are an invitation to participate precisely because of their low quality.

KEY

In educational terms it may be that both (big OERs and little OERs) have a role to play within a learning context or course. Learners may want to feel the reassurance of the quality brand material for core content, but they may also want a mixture of the more social, participatory media that encourages them to contribute'.

Joshua Bell playing on the underground story.

Top violinist using an instrument worth 3.5 million dollars.

Context of big OER compared to little.

Naive to think putting stuff onto YouTube will get it noticed.

I just typed busier and if I hadn't looked down would have posted 'nudists'. How on earth did it do that?

I appreciate that some reading this will have gone through months of being unwell or their condition is long term. I am simply using ideas taught to me during H808 a year ago to reflect on what I have been through: 15 days of a ghastliness that has included a day in hospital and three clinic visits. In hospital I counted the seconds and did so for nearly five hours. At home I crave fresh air but repeatedly ended up back in bed. As the last week or so shows I would read, comment and write - though until today my head has felt decidedly befuddled. So I did some digital housekeeping, all my mind could manage, mostly shuffling pictures, screen grabs and such around in Picasa Web, even referencing them properly. And I slept a great deal. I read Martin Weller's new book but know, and will see this from notes, that a second reading will have me picking out different things and adding different notes. We humans are unstable at the best of times, gender, age and background doesn't start to define who we are and how our state of mind, openness to learning, levels of self-esteem, can influence how we will 'perform' one week to the next. Consistency, for me at least, is a futile, even a stultifying quest.

Having followed Dion Hinchcliffe for a couple of years I'd now happily shadow him. A combination of sonud thinking, a business background (IT), a polished and dense writer with authority who tops it all off with one-stop graphics like this.

Martin Weller (2011)

INTRODUCTION

Introduced to the power of blogging by John Naughton

(Worth following in the Guardian. Surely a demonstration of how academics blur the line between academic and journalistic writing styles successfully, just as Weller intimates that students will have to learn to differentiate between social networking writing styles and the academic style of an assignment, paper or thesis?)

· Explain things in depth

· Give all sides to the argument

· Why academics can't do the elevator pitch

The Digital Scholar was written through a blog to explore the advent of new technologies.

Wrote his last book on VLEs in 2004.

(By coincidence I am using it to prop up the iPad)

• Online databases
• Searching
• Bookmarks from Delicious
• Google Reader
• cited posts from blogs, but not only text, also video.

Blogging for around five years

Also keeps a scrapbook like blog in Tumblr.

(I’ve used Flickr, and Tumblr, even Kodak Gallery in its time. Now I put everything into Picasa Web. The 250 grabs, charts and images are open to share. Dion Hinchcliffe offers his social media diagrams free as separate assets in Flickr River).

• A way to offer drafts to ask for feedback
• Sharing resources
• Working in an intellectually vibrant environment
• Google alerts providing updates on key words
• Keeping abreast of the field
• Declining attendance of conferences

‘With special thanks to’

By sharing content online I believe I may finally find my own way to publication.

Many of these services did not exist or were in their infancy in 2004.

Blogs in particular

A book

There significant changes:

1) The quantity of information available - all digital compared

2) 3000 on Twitter, 2000 subscribe to his blog

Appeals

Distributed, global resource to contemporary issues, puss of new technologies,

contributions by video and audio

3) The richness and range of contributions to include blogs, comments and

debate, video and conferences.

 

A shift I attitude to the legitimacy of these contributions.

 

Both a physical object and complementary material.

Grainne Conole using cloudworks.

Another posting a weekly video to encourage debate.

 

Concept of scholarship

 

Suffiently broad term, not only teaching and research,

not just engaged in research and employed by universities.

 

In a digital

Someone who employs digital and open technologies in a particular field.

Bloggers link to each other, democratic and easy to set up.

Epitomy of the kind

of technlogy that results in innovation.

Read or unread, daily or months,

specialist or generalist.

 

How do we recognise talent?

Should people separate out that academic and informal lives?

· Quantity

· Role of social networks

· Range of resources

 

Transformation of practice

All scholars are digital if they use a word processor and PowerPoint. But this

is 'business as usual'.

 

1) Digital

All digital files and shared by the same method.

 

2) Networked, nor longer isolated.

Easy distribution VS restriction of

scholarship to libraries, conferences, lectures and seminars. Once digitised the

barriers come down.

Dunbar. Friends 150. Reinforce with interaction. Online with a wide group of

peers.

 

3) Openness

Tim O'Reilly 2004 the architecture of participation.

Finely worked material of the journal, compared to seeing where things will lead

by sharing.

 

Digital, Networked, Open.

E.g collaboration between two people (Frank & Sally)

 

The value of a person's individual network for distribution.

The collaboration of two academics sharing their outputs they go along ... Just

a shift?

Collective impact changes everything.

 

Fast, cheap and out of control.

Brian Lamb. 1970 documentary. intersection of

all three is significant to education.

Fast to write and set up, no need for central services.

Cheap tools that have a premium, no need to turn to a budget holder.

Out of control. Outside normal institutional controls.

Money/payment and the need to persist with a certain system.

Student record systems need to be robust.

 

The good enough revolution. Wired (2009)

E.g. Flip video ... Cheap, fast and everywhere.

Dinky, lower power technology that is just good enough.

VS. Dystopian and Utopian points of view.

VS. Technological determination - humans controlled by the kit, rather than the

kit controlling the people.

 

Unpredictable

 

Taking something and using it in a way never imagined

E.g. Flickr started as a game that used photo sharing.

Social construction of technology

Complex process of co-construction

Adoption of new technology is changing scholarship. Boyer 1990

1) Context

2) Evidence

3) Other industry changes in music and newspapers

4) Boyer 1990 scholarship discovery, integration, practice, application,

teaching

*

*

*

*

9) How digital scholarship may change teaching

10) Analogy of networked weather - you can't help but be touched by it.

Digital

Networked

Open

New publishing and conferencing

13) adoption

14) anxieties

Education

1

2

3) Irrelevant

 

Not peripheral, or an issue to resolve, but rather changes to society ... As

John Seely Brown.

VS. Suggestions that our students have changed and cites Marc Prensky.

 

Separating myths from the hype.

What are the solid foundations.

A truism regarding exposure to computers. Prensky 5,000 books, 10,000 digital,

20,000 TV US

75% of 9-19 have access to a computer at home UK

72% South Africa

To get information

To research say on personal health

Oblinger and oblinger

Livingstone

 

Net Gen disappointed

Gen X against pointless interaction in class and kind of connection online.

Cannot correlate truancy to educational irrelevance.

net Gens more likely to be disappointed by how tech is used.

Net gens differentiate between writing to socialise compared to writing for

school.

Those who like writing and have an aptitude are more likely to blog so no point

in getting those with poor writing skills to blog.

 

A good deal of variance.

 

Brown 2009.

 

Teens poor performance, low patience, poor

reading and poor research skills.

 

· Express themselves in personal language

· Just print off

· Visiting a narrow range of sites

· Don't question its reliability

· 21% blogs

 

The net Gen literature sees difference where none exists.

 

• Older gens did homework in front of TV
• Did a previous gen have an ambiguous view.
• Similar angst amongst students in 1908, 1960s and now. Unable to show causality.
• Differences between net gen students and general public. Differences are not
• significant.
• General decline in literature reading.

Bennett et al (2008) not net Gen difference.

 

18-22 students outnumbered by mature students in the US.

 

Google, Dec 2009.

87 billion of 131 billion searches.

55.6 million in 2007 to Wikipedia

Facebook, 500m, 130 friends, once a day

YouTube, in June 2008, content 91 viewers in 2008

 

Significant activity online across a range of society.

 

Future liberation of topics.

 

Griffiths (2008) graffiti artists share and behave in a way that educationalists

would design into a programme of learning, and so it is with many other topics,

on or off the curriculum, formal or informal, from knitting to physics.

Learn as the key motivational desire.

 

Physics 100,000

FLOSS communities

Demonstrates many of the characteristics:

Mentoring

Communities of practice

Learning by doing

Self directed learning

 

Communities can form that would have previously been unable to do so due to

geographical and other barriers.

 

Openness in education - shift driven by technology.

Make academic papers open.

 

Broader trend and philosophy of the Internet.

 

Web 2.0

Top 10

Public or semi-public sharing of personal information

MIT Open 2002

1 million visitors

132 million tertiary students worldwide in 2004

OU 3 million within 2 years and helped recruit students to courses 7,000.

Slideshare

More traffic than MIT

Several hundred years to create the lecture Based models

Using third party content in their lectures.

 

How do universities remain relevant to society?

Apple to iTunes

Guardian to Podcasts

Stephen Downes 10,000 hits per day (video)

Boundaries between sectors less clear-cut

Some perfect storm ... Convenient for some to see. The Net Gen literature is

exaggerated, overblown, HE is not about to face a tectonic shift.

Firm evidence of benefits and that it is necessary.

 

Critical mass

 

Ubiquity

Invisibility

Brown

2007 those using social networks in the minority, now in the majority.

Give students relevant skills.

Asses which of these technologies will be significant.

 

Why do Students choose a university?

Not because of the technology used.

Core suitability

Academic reputation

Jobs

Teaching qualities

 

Non-academic reasons:

Proximity to homes

Scholarships

Non academic services

Cost of living in the uni area

Job prospects (while studying)