Another punch-up is brewing at this year's ALT-C Conference, which kicks off tomorrow at the University of Nottingham. Last year, several of us had a dust up on the future of institutional VLEs, and apparently we caused a bit of a stir. This year, I'm on another debate panel, this time with John Traxler, Frances Bell, Karl Royle, Mark Childs and Andy Black, to discuss ethical interventions in Web 2.0. Will this be about the ethics of Web 2.0 use, or the ethics of researching the use of Web 2.0, or about using Web 2.0 tools to research, or about .... er, well, you'll just have to come along and find out... The title of the symposium/debate, which is scheduled for Wednesday 8th, at 09.00 in the main auditorium, is New Bottles, Old Wine? You can check out this and all the other conference sessions, venues, times and also who will be attending each by going to the conference Crowdvine site. There is also a link for you to participate with the live events online, if you can't get to the conference this year. We are expecting 550 delegates, according to the latest bulletin from ALT. Here's a sneak preview:
Frances Bell will identify private/public as complex reflexive student practice in personal and education use of social media, e.g. Youtube (Lange, 2007) and explore the role of the educator in students’ ethical development.
Andy Black will expose the issues relating to the transnational use of technologies approaches where users will have access to very different levels of technology and even if technology used is the same or similar the way it is deployed is culturally different. The concept is that these differences will decline or morph over time to become transnational & transcultural, resulting in usage that is woven into a global cultural thread.
Mark Childs will raise some of the ethical issues that influence creating learning activities in immersive virtual worlds and offer viewpoints to be debated on the potential responses to students' unease concerning the experience, cultures and perceptions of virtual worlds, the appropriate balance between authenticity and pseudonymity in virtual worlds and the responsibilities of teachers with respect to protecting those within virtual worlds from the impact of our teaching within them.
Karl Royle will argue that the ethical considerations of gaming are inherently bounded and regulated by the inherent rules of 'the game' and that as such are disposed to self regulation, and are about trying to do good or at least minimise harm in achieving a win state.
John Traxler will argue that the universal experience of mobility and connectedness in our societies is leading to transient, ephemeral and overlapping communities each with its own ethics; there are no longer grand narratives of ethics, only partial and local expressions of values and preferences. It's new wine, new bottles, new drinkers.
Steve Wheeler will take a cognitive stance to the issue of ethics in emerging digital environment research. He will hold that users interact and represent themselves in different ways depending on environment and context, switching between identities. Steve will argue that new technologies and tools present new affordances and expectations, and therefore require new approaches.
Do you have the bottle for a debate? You're welcome to join us, f2f or online.
Got the bottle? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
