Grand tour

I'm off on my travels again later today, this time on a grand tour taking in the length of Europe. After a brief visit into the University of Plymouth, to shake hands with my Vice Chancellor and collect my Teaching Fellowship award, it's a quick dash off to Bristol Airport to catch my afternoon flight to the land of the midnight sun. Yes, Helsinki (via Brussels) is my next port of call where I will be working for a few days at the invitation of the Finnish Research Academy. I will be working in a team of Education experts from Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Greece, to evaluate a number of recent large scale research proposals. I hope I can get some sleep during Finland's white nights.

On Sunday it's down to Frankfurt and a meeting with my old friend Sigi Jakob-Kuhn (follow her as @Networking_Lady on Twitter) in Wienheim, before moving onwards the next day to Heidelberg to attend the International Networking Conference and chair some of their sessions on e-learning. I will meet up with several old friends there too, including my colleagues from the Atlantis Project, Udo Bleimann, Tillmann Swinke, Ingo Stengel, and of course the University of Plymouth's very own Steven Furnell.

It's all change again on Wednesday 7th July when I fly from Frankfurt down to Barcelona to participate in another exciting event - the Personal Learning Environment Conference. A whole host of well known activists, (reading like a Who's Who PLE researcher list) will be speaking at this event including Graham Attwell, Alec Couros, Ismael Pena-Lopez, Dirk Stieglitz, Paulo Simoes, Ricardo Torres Kompen, Palitha Edirisingha, Cristina Costa, Wolfgang Rheinhart, Carmen Holotescu, Gabriela Grosseck, Sebastian Fiedler, Dave White, Jose Mota, Chahira Nouira, Su White, Manish Malik.... I could go on, but you can read the impressive list of speakers for yourself at the link below. There will be some alternative sessions including a speed-cafe style presentation set. We have been told we need to make our own personalised badges too, in keeping with the PLE flavour of the event. You should see my full colour @timbuckteeth badge - it's a corker!

The full programme for the @PLE_BCN event is here at this link. It's going to be a very busy, tiring but enjoyable 10 days for me on my grand tour.

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Grand tour by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Digital tribes

Today I presented a keynote speech at the Engaging the Digital Generation Conference which was held at the Hendon campus of Middlesex University (Pictured: Steve Chilton, conference organiser and me enjoying a cup of tea before the conference starts). A video recording was made of the keynote which can be viewed here. It was great to meet up with the other two keynote speakers, Tara Brabazon (University of Brighton) and William Wong (Middlesex University) and spend a little time talking to them both. It was also nice to meet so many great folk from the staff at Middlesex too, and speak to a few of them about their ideas for e-learning. The hashtag for the event was #altcmu - search for all the tweets on Twitter. Below is the abstract for the conference and below that is the full slide set.

Digital Tribes and the Social Web: How Web 2.0 will Transform Learning in Higher Education

The Social Web is transforming the way students interact with others, and is challenging traditional pedagogies, values and practices. An analysis of students’ uses of social networking tools (e.g. Facebook, Myspace) and video/photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr) reveals the emergence of collective digital literacies. These include filtering content, new textual and visual literacies, managing multiple digital identities, representing self in cyberspace and engaging in new modes of interaction. In this presentation I will argue that identification through digitally mediated tools has become the new cultural capital – the set of invisible bonds that ties a community together. It is this ‘social glue’ – such mutual understandings and exchanges that occur on a daily basis within social media – that build the digital communities, and create new learning spaces, nurturing the habitus of a new ‘digital tribe’.

Emile Durkheim suggested that it is easier for tribal members to project their feelings of awe toward a totem than toward something that is as complex as the tribe itself. For digital tribes, their totem – the traditional rallying point for all tribal activity – is patently the Social Web. The digital spaces found within the Web are in themselves objects of intense interest and become meeting places for the tribe, but they also act as transmitters of units of cultural knowledge – memes. Max Weber once remarked that culture should be construed as a ‘web of significance’ spun by the individuals who constitute the culture. Significantly, the increasing role the World Wide Web plays in the shaping of modern tribal culture causes Weber’s notion to resonate. In this presentation I will argue that digital technologies and electronic networks provide fertile environments for the transmission of memes and that new literacies are needed to receive, interpret and comprehend them.

Such new literary practices of communication rely heavily on shared spaces, shared symbolism and the viral nature of the social web. I will explore how the new digital literacies impact upon teaching and learning in higher education, and discuss the implications of a growing gulf between traditional teaching and the expectations of the new tribe – the digital generation. I will pose the questions: What will be the new roles of academics in a world where the boundaries between novice and expert are blurring? and what new digital literacies will scholars need to harness the full potential of the social web?

Digital Tribes and the Social Web

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Related posts:
The tribal web
En masse, online
Digital tribal identity
Virtual clans
Middlesex University Annual Learning and Teaching Conference Blog
Personal Learning and various literacies (Jan Moreland Blog)

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Digital tribes by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Up Pompey (again)

I attended an excellent conference today at the University of Portsmouth, and it was the second time in as many months I have spoken there. There were 28 workshops and seminars in addition to my keynote speech. Just over 100 people attended from 3 of the faculties at the university, and there were several lively sessions to take part in. Martin Weller from the OU came in live via a webcast to talk about the intriguing topic of 'Academic output as collateral damage'. Also there from the OU was Tony Hirst, and it was a pleasure to meet him face to face for the first time, and talk about issues ranging from Google to assessment. His presentation was fittingly entitled: 'Making the most of Google'.

I also attended a session presented by Emma Duke Williams and her colleagues called 'Twispering in class' which explored the history, usefulness and application of Twitter as a tool for communication and reflection in formal learning contexts. Stewart Milton from Blue Orange Consulting gave an excellent, wideranging session on how to reach students through social media, which also covered the use of mobile handheld technologies. Both sessions drew quite a crowd, and provokes some good discussion. Manish Malik's session on 'Exam revision using Examopedia Wiki and Google Talk' was also well received, and prompted some quick fire questions from all those present.

I had the honour of kicking off the event with a 45 minute keynote that I entitled: 'Lifelong learning in a digital age: Inspiration and innovation through social media', in which I covered a lot of ground from disruptive technologies, through personal learning environments to the use of mobile phones in education, all of which seemed to be well received. All of the sessions were recorded through Camtasia and should be available for viewing soon on the conference website. Here is the link to my own keynote presentation on Camtasia with full audio. The slideset accompanying my keynote speech is below. Thanks to all those who organised such a great event, and also to all those who took part.

Lifelong learning in a digital age

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Up Pompey (again) by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Giving it all away

How much do you freely share on the Web? If you are a user of any Web 2.0 tools, it's likely that you give away your stuff for free, and in doing so, you make a digital footprint for yourself. My digital footprint grows each time I post new content, whether it's on this blog, one of my Flickr accounts, or YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Slideshare. The killer apps for me though, have to be Delicious and Twitter - both give me the ability to make my content highly visible to anyone who might be interested.

Look, as altruistic as it may seem to give away all your content, ideas, lecture notes, videos, slides and even articles and books, for those who actually opt to do so, there are also excellent rewards. Give your content away, and you don't lose it - but you do get some great benefits. I have given away a lot of my content on the web - see for example my Slideshare collection of slideshows and published articles. My reward for doing this is multi-faceted. Not only do I get the pleasure of having thousands of interested people from all over the world viewing my slides, they may also favourite them, comment on them, or give me valuable constructive feedback which can I learn from. Some also embed my slideshows into their own websites and blogs, which disseminates my ideas even further afield. I couldn't pay for that kind of distribution. And as if that isn't enough reward, I sometimes get some really nice invitations to speak at events, or participate in really interesting projects, as a direct result of some content I have created on the web. Web 2.0 tools have that affordance - they make your content very visible to people who are interested.

Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: 'Good artists borrow, great artists steal'. So OK, 'steal' is an emotive word, which we probably don't want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be 'derivative' - and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here's my point: I don't mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don't make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have - some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I'm an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.

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Giving it all away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Words and images

I had the pleasure yesterday afternoon to sit in a seminar presented by Gunther Kress. Known for his work not only in the theorisation of English language teaching, but also his study of communication through new media, Kress is an intriguing character. At 70 years old, he is still very sprightly and energetic, and is a prolific writer. He is author of a number of books including the Routledge volume Literacy in the New Media Age. He is also a self-confessed Marxist and his beliefs emerged strongly through several passages in his talk.

Professor Gunther Kress started his presentation by showing his audience some combinations of text and images, and made the point that new literacies are emerging as a result of the merging of modalities of communication. He showed that Japanese characters can express more than Western text, and that as a result, reduced text which is integrated into larger area images features in Japanese text books. He counselled that because children spend a lot of their time playing computer games that are influenced by Japanese culture, perhaps we ought to start paying closer attention to the potential effects of this kind of cultural influence on thinking. The spectre of Prensky's digital natives and immigrants theory emerged at one point, as teachers discussed the implications of media on children's learning. My view is that even though Marc Prensky has retracted some of his assertions (due largely to a distinct lack of evidence to support them) there is still a widespread belief among teachers that digital natives exist, and that they are restricted to younger generations. We discussed this with Professor Kress, whose view seemed to me to be a reworking of the Braverman Thesis on technological deskilling. Harry Braverman (another Marxist theorist) believed that technology was imposed upon the workers by the owners of the means of production so that in effect, a widespread deskilling would occur. Technology made workers redundant and saved the owners capital which they would then invest in more technology.

Kress took a similar stance with new media. He asserted that there is a social defragmentation happening as a result of social networking and online gaming, and that social skills are drastically declining. For me, this is a dangerous assumption. My observations are that younger users of digital media tend to communicate just as well through them as they would in face to face environments - they just adapt their social skills across different media and in effect, they become adept at communicating in multiple contexts. Kress also argued that the instant nature of social media (by this I assume he meant the synchronous nature of some tools) precludes young people from reflecting on what is learnt. Again, I contend that this is not necessarily the case, as they find new ways of reflecting through time away from the keyboard/handset, and not all social media are synchronous in nature.

Kress does have a point though when he claims that education institutions tend to adapt their processes to technology, and that this is a key reason why many schools lag behind. Social pace, he argued, does not proceed at the pace of technology, so there is always a gap within which people become marginalised and disenfranchised. His assertion that younger students desire real-time, mobile and multi-tasking activities instead of 'fine grained focus and accuracy' may also be wrong, but I believe he is correct in claiming that younger people engage more in processes (the how to) than in content (the what). This has echoes of connectivism theory, where who you know and the connections you make are more important than learning 'content'.

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Words and images by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Show and TEL

I spent some time at the University of Plymouth's Technology Enhanced Learning Showcase today, which featured the best of a number of in-house led initiatives in e-learning. The event was the third Plymouth has held and was well attended by many academic and support staff. I went to a couple of sessions on podcasting and digital identity, which were short demonstrations of what lessons have been learnt so far during research and teaching fellowship activities. The digital identity session for example, covered not only how we represent ourselves in virtual environments, but also discussed acceptable use of personal content, protection of personal data and issues of privacy. We also talked about 'netiquette' - acceptable behaviour in online environments, and how people use Facebook and other social networking tools appropriately and innapropriately, and the implications.

These were by no means the only sessions on offer. There were also rolling presentations throughout the day on personal response systems (voting), computer aided assessment, plagiarism detection, Open Educational Resources, iTunesU, online submission systems, digital repositories, e-portfolios, learning through mobile devices, learning and communicating at a distance, and our own in-house development we call UpMedia. There is so much going on down here in Plymouth, it's difficult to keep up with it all, but try we must.

For a complete overview of all the learning technology and technology enhanced learning initiatives here in Plymouth, visit the TEL website. It's full of information, and also houses all of the learning technologists' blogs. You can also visit the MyBrand site for more on digital identity

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Show and TEL by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Scaffolding or no scaffolding?

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my hats has 'Editor' written all on it. I'm co-editor of the Routledge journal Interactive Learning Environments, which this year went to 4 issues a year and in 2011 will extend its reach to 5 issues a year. We have a large amount of submissions each year and are kept very busy as a team managing, reviewing and editing the journal. This means that only the best papers are published, and periodically I give readers a glimpse of some of them. Here's the abstract of a stand-out paper from the current issue, written by Connie Siew Ling Ng, Wing Sum Cheung and Khe Foon Hew, from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It is thought provoking at a number of levels, not least because it takes a position on scaffolding using web tools, and challenges us to think about learning through Problem Based Learning in a new way:

Solving ill-structured problems in asynchronous online discussions: built-in scaffolds vs. no scaffolds

Solving ill-structured problems is regarded as an important learning outcome in education as it allows learners to apply theories learnt into real practice. An asynchronous online discussion, with extended time for reflection, is an appropriate learning environment to engage learners in solving ill-structured problems. However, scaffolds may be needed to support learners in the online discussions. This study explores the effect of online scaffolds in supporting a group of graduate students' ill-structured problem-solving processes in asynchronous online discussions. The results of this study showed that the use of the online scaffolds did not lead to a significant difference in the number of ill-structured problem-solving processes. Further analysis revealed that wrong selection of message labels and under-usage of sentence openers affected the results of this study. Improvements for online scaffolds include having more precise message labels and sentence openers based on a Socratic questioning approach.

Reference: Ng, C., Cheung, W. S. and Hew, K. F. (2010) Solving ill-structured problems in asynchronous online discussions: Built-in scaffolds vs. no scaffolds. Interactive Learning Environments, 18 (2), 115-134.

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Scaffolding or no scaffolding? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.