A blog on Reading my own blogs - what have I learned?
Wednesday, 9 Sep 2015, 21:59
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Wednesday, 9 Sep 2015, 22:01
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 25th, 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 3rd 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.
A blog on Reading my own blogs - what have I learned?
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 25th, 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 3rd 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.