Yesterday, me and LeRoy Hill ran the first of our sessions on social media at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. We had an interesting mix of PhD students and Early Career Researchers attending from a range of Schools across the University who were very supportive and enthusiastic about using social media in their studies and research. We did run over schedule, particularly as we wanted to engage with the audience and encourage group discussion, though we would like to have had even more time for this. The general feedback from attendees was that they would appreciate more interaction and would be happy for longer sessions if necessary. It was always going to be a struggle fitting everything into three short sessions and we will keep this in mind should we be running these again in the future.

Meanwhile, much of the planning for the second session has been done though we have over two weeks for fine tuning. We are intending to cover blogging, Twitter, content sharing sites and social bookmarking, as well as aggregation and syndication systems. It’s going to be tough to fit so much in if we hope to integrate further opportunities for discussion and interaction!

We also launched the online resource which supports the sessions. This was a key component in our initial proposal particularly as the limited time of the sessions was always going to restrict opportunities to demonstrate specific tools. In addition to the annotated links to key social media we have included a useful selection of tutorials, guides and articles with an emphasis on academic practice. This resource will remain active after the duration of the sessions, and we are hoping it will – along with the sessions – provide a basis for further development in this area.

Making future predictions is great fun, especially in a New Year. So when I was challenged by Virginia Yonkers to predict a new decade, I couldn’t resist. If I get anywhere near with even one of these I’ll be amazed…

Image: Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1958

Early next year, I’m running a short series of sessions with my colleague LeRoy Hill on social media for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers based at Jubilee Campus. The Jubilee Graduate Centre is hosting the sessions and providing facilities and refreshments. Centre Manager Tracy Sisson is enthusiastic about the project and has been very helpful in organising everything.

We’ve just started publicising the three sessions and hopefully we can get enough interest to fill the 20 places we are allowing for each one. We want the sessions to be informal and quite interactive, and it would be nice to get a mix of attendees from the Schools of Education, Computer Science and Business – could provide an interesting range of perspectives.

We are busy designing the sessions and compiling a complimentary online resource with links to tools, tutorials, and and other useful references – lots to do each side of Christmas.

All sessions take place in B14 from 12 noon to 1.30pm on the following days:

Session One: Monday 18 January 2009
Introductory session providing an overview of social media and a discussion of their underlying concepts, values and technologies.

Session Two: Friday 5 February 2009
A focus on blogging and microblogging, the sharing of resources such as texts, presentations, images and video, and forms of tagging and aggregation.

Session Three: Wednesday 17 February 2009
A focus on social networking, bookmarking and collaboration through social networking sites, wikis, and other participatory tools.

Anyone wishing to attend should contact Tracy at jubilee-graduate-centre@nottingham.ac.uk

Arguably one of the best British television comedies of all time, Porridge is a prison sitcom originally broadcast on BBC between 1974 and 1977. Watching re-runs of the show recently, it struck me that whilst the central character Norman Stanley Fletcher (Ronnie Barker) – an old hand at prison – provides most of the laughs, the main narrative arc is actually provided by the learning trajectory of new offender Lennie Godber (Richard Beckinsale).

The value of these two characters as a comedic double act is largely derived from the development and maturation of their master-apprentice relationship; most acutely observed in an early, classic episode A Night In, in which the two first share a cell together.

Lave and Wenger (1991) situate learning within specific social and physical environments. Learning is seen as a process of socialisation into a community of practice that is at first legitimately peripheral but increases gradually in engagement and complexity. The negotiation of meaning and process of identity formation are essentially informal; unaligned with – though not entirely independent of – institutional structures.

Over the course of two series we see Godber – young, vulnerable and initially naive of prison ways – learn the ropes; an education not so much formed by formal prison rules and routines, but by learning how to bend the system, and put one over the ’screws’ (prison officers) – largely under the mentorship of Fletcher. We see him increasingly adopt the prison slang (carefully moderated for the original seventies primetime TV audience), conform to unofficial social hierarchies, and learn the importance of prison ‘currency’; toothpaste, liquorice allsorts and in particular, snout (tobacco).

Superbly penned by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, it’s one of the best portrayals of peripheral participatory learning we have in popular culture – and still very funny.

Reference

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This coming Monday, I’m presenting a symposium with Odessa Dariel (and on behalf of Claire Mann), at the SRHE Postgraduate and Newer Researchers Conference at Celtic Manor, Newport.

The presentations will address our ongoing work as student interns with the Visual Learning Lab (VLL). Student interns have played an integral role in VLL activities since June 2008, promoting visual learning across the University of Nottingham, providing support for both staff and students in new learning technologies and related pedagogies. Our role was recognised as offering a unique position with which to undertake research that promotes the development of the ‘student voice.’

We recently conducted a series of focus groups in a number of Schools across the University asking undergraduate students about their learning experiences. In the last few weeks we have started delivering the key findings to teaching staff in participating Schools through interactive workshops based around a video we produced. We are looking to extend this to PGCHE and MA (Ed.) students in the New Year.

We have adopted a Participation Action Research (PAR) model as a broad methodology for the project, with progressive ‘action-refection’ cycles enabling ongoing communication and collaboration between researchers, students and tutors.

We hope to replicate the video workshop in the final part of our symposium, and as such the conference will itself constitute a further strand of our own reflective practice.

I’ve had it with EndNote. I’ve transferred all my references to Zotero and plan to use it as my main bibliographic organiser. Zotero operates on the Firefox browser and seems light and versatile in comparison, particularly in referencing Web-based content – I was never convinced with EndNote Web. Developed at George Mason University, Zotero seems to be gaining recognition and support across the academic world, and successfully survived a threatened lawsuit with Thomson Scientific. I never got the hang of Endnote’s Cite-While-You-Write, but apparently, Zotero has a similar feature which I need to try out as, at present, I am creating my references manually.

There is something instinctive about Etienne Wenger’s concept of learning as a landscape and life as a trajectory, particularly from a student’s perspective. Similar notions are explored in Cussins’ (1992) cognitive trails, where movements of information create traces or trails which are both cognitive (in the mind) and material (in the world), thereby creating both a mental landscape and a material infrastructure. Indeed, geographical metaphor is common in educational discourse. Becher and Trowler (2001; 58) suggest:

“It seems natural enough to think of knowledge and its properties and relationships in terms of landscapes, and to saturate epistemological discussion with spatial metaphors: fields and frontiers; pioneering, exploration, false trails, charts and landmarks.”

Yrjö Engeström (in press) describes the learning landscape “as a terrain of activity to be dwelled in and explored.” The type of exploration is defined by the learning movement, which Engeström (2007) describes as “dominant patterns and directions of physical, discursive and cognitive motion in historically different organizational frameworks.” Engeström refers to movement from periphery to centre – similar to Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of Legitimate Peripheral Participation – as ‘craft,’ whilst ‘mass production’ is defined by linear movement (typified by project management structures). He describes new forms of movement associated with Web-based social and peer production as pulsation and swarming:

“The dwellers create trails and the intersecting trails gradually lead to an increased capability to move in the zone effectively, independently of the particular location or destination of the subjects. However, the zone is never an empty space to begin with. It has preexisting dominant trails and boundaries made by others, often with heavy histories and power invested in them. More than that, the existing trails, landmarks and boundaries are inherently contradictory, possessing both exchange value and use value, being both controlled by proprietary interests and opening up possibilities of common good. When new dwellers enter the zone, they both adapt to the dominant trails and struggle to break away from them.”

(Engeström, in press).

Breaking away from pre-existing trails to create new ones requires expansive agency, which partly extends Engeström’s (1987) conceptual framework of expansive learning.

References

Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories (2nd Ed.) Buckingham: Open University Press.

Cussins, A. (1992). Content, embodiment and objectivity: The theory of cognitive trails. Mind, 101, 651-688.

Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.

Engeström, Y. (2007). From communities of practice to mycorrhizae. In J. Hughes, N. Jewson & L. Unwin (Eds.), Communities of practice: Critical perspectives. London: Routledge.

Engeström, Y. (in press). The Future of Activity Theory: A Rough Draft. In Sannino, A., Daniels, H. et al. Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SmartMobs describes a report from the China Digital Times on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up by KulturProjekte to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using the twitter hashtag #FOTW, Chinese ‘netizens’ have bombarded the site with calls to end State censorship of the Web.

Which I wonder (should the latter happen) would have the greater historical significance; the fall of the Beriln Wall or that of the Great Firewall of China?

I picked up on another interesting comment by Dave White during the webinar discussed in my previous post. He suggests academic reputation, status or kudos is not automatically transferable to social media environments, but has to be ‘re-earned’ through new modes of participatory engagement. If this is the case, why is it some academics (e.g., Etienne Wenger) have accrued hundreds of followers in twitter despite little or no output. This is almost akin to sitting at the feet of a prophet waiting for him to speak – not much re-earning necessary here.

Academic hierarchies (either perceived or real) are culturally and historically stratified and persistent. I suggest social media has the ability to ’skew’ rather than nullify this stratification. True, the cultural heritage and technological infrastructure of social media lends itself to a more open and accessible academic discourse than that provided by traditional platforms, and enables greater movement and interaction between academic strata, but only up to a point.

In an entertaining webinar, Dave White of the Department for Continued Learning at Oxford University, enjoys a beer while he presents findings from Isthmus, a JISC-funded project. He describes how Marc Presky’s outmoded pre-Web 2.0 concept of digital natives and immigrants became largely interpreted in generational terms, and offers an updated concept for the social web; suggesting learners engaging in social media fall into two distinct groups – visitors and residents.

• Residents see the web as a space, in which they develop a visible social presence, creating digital profiles as a form of personal branding.
• Visitors may use the web in sophisticated ways but remain largely invisible. They see web as a toolbox to dip into and use without leaving a digital footprint.

In reality, these two groups exist on a continuum, which White subsequently maps onto a professional-private axis.

Motivation to use social media is not related to competences, age, or experience, but is rather influenced by learning ecologies. Visitors, it would seem, are goal-orientated; viewing learning as content delivery, and valuing the role of the expert. Residents see learning as a social activity, in which identity propagation plays a key role.

White suggests we are entering a postdigital era – in which tools are becoming culturally normalised – and argues the tools and applications themselves can be seen as either residential or visitor orientated.

A video based on White’s ALT-C 2009 presentation is also available.