A week on from attending the excellent Digital Researcher event run by Vitae and the British Library, it’s been interesting to see how some attendees have followed up with their online activity; developing networks and continuing discussions, partly driven by Tristram Hooley and Alan Cann, two of the presenters at the event. The #dr10 hashtag key has been evident on Twitter, FriendFeed and a number of blogs.

Open online course models, such as George Siemens’ and Stephen Downes’ Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08 and CCK09) may partly rely on traditional ‘bounded’ online platforms (such as a Moodle site), but actively encourage participants to use their own existing social media (blogs, wikis and social bookmarking sites etc.) for personal reflection, social engagement and content management, as well as creating new groups and platforms for further discussion and debate. The use of a unifying hashtag seems at present, the most effective way of aggregating this type of distributed activity.

But how effective is this in sustaining interest and participation? By adopting and encouraging an open, distributed model like this, it is necessary to accept that the resulting activities can be unpredictable, exciting, imperfect, messy or just plain non-eventful.

Attendees at events like Digital Researcher can be extremely varied in their awareness, knowledge and competences of the technologies being introduced, and in their motivations to use them (like it or not, some Doctoral students DO attend training courses merely to tick off another skill-set for their annual reviews). The excitement and good intentions which some may take home with them can be soon forgotten in the subsequent days and weeks, as busy schedules take over. In addition, people trying social media for the first time often ‘don’t get the point’ of them because their affordances only become evident once a level of maturity is attained.

In the recent sessions I ran with LeRoy Hill, we adopted similar methods of presentation and discussion to those which featured at the Digital Researcher event (albeit on a far less ambitious scale). In the subsequent weeks that have followed, though we’ve not conducted any formal evaluation, anecdotal evidence would suggest that the take up of these tools has been patchy at best. Reflecting on our sessions, we identified that whilst such initiatives can raise awareness, the need to scaffold them with ongoing support such as drop-in open workshops and online discussion groups becomes apparent.

Tristram Hooley rightly points out that students were best supported at Digital Researcher by actively working with each other, sharing personal perspectives and good practice. Arguably, follow-up activities can be scaffolded in similar ways. However, whilst the initial focus can be on the event itself, and within the core group of attendees who are keen to continue participating, that motivation will soon dissipate, as the event and the group become increasingly irrelevant to individual practices, disciplines and networks. How do we make the transition?

Having recently created the 1000th bookmark on my Delicious site, it’s as good a time as any to pause and reflect on social bookmarking.

I think Delicious itself is one of the most smartly realised websites out there. Its pared-down 2008 redesign – with its two-colour, modular interface – perfectly suits my design sensibilities. Not only is this one of my most important social media resources, but is one that has significantly changed the way I think about collecting Web-based content. I can confidently and routinely save and forget about the resources I tag, yet easily find them again when required (evidence that tools can and do shape practice). Any ‘intra-personal’ tagging inconsistencies are quickly resolved by occasional housekeeping.

Folksonomies would seem to represent a radical democratisation in the ordering, managing and sharing of digital content. Yet part of my role as a critical researcher is to challenge the rhetoric that routinely surrounds Web 2.0 technologies, and in considering social bookmarking, two issues in particular spring to mind:

Just how social is social bookmarking?

I’m fully aware of the social and collaborative affordances of social bookmarking sites like Delicious, yet I consider my own resource as predominantly a personal rather than social bookmarking site. Clearly there are specific strategies and methods that can be adopted to utilise participatory features such as networks and subscriptions, yet I’ve never been motivated to apply them regularly. Is this use of Delicious typical, or am I oblivious to widespread social and collaborative practices across bookmarking sites?

Replication

I also wonder how distinctive folksonomies represented by the collective tagging of a platform like Delicious actually are. When I’ve occasionally used Delicious as a social search engine, results have been interesting, yet I’ve not been inspired to adopt this activity regularly. If the majority of users are saving Web resources based on Google searches and social networking interactions, does social bookmarking merely replicate existing and more dominant systems? I’d be interested in any thoughts on this.

To date, according to my stats plug-in, the five most viewed posts on this blog are:

• Visitors and Residents (7 November 2009)
• Zotero or Bust (22 November 2009)
• Visualizing Social Bookmarks (11 January 2009)
• Future Minds (20 October 2009)
• The (Mis)Education of Lennie Godber: ‘Stir’ as a Community of Practice – or – Situation Comedy meets Situated Learning (9 December 2009)

Two videos have recently appeared on the Web which address the student perspective at the University of Nottingham. Jonathan Kogan and Nic Gilbert’s celebrated Student Learning Experience has amassed over 20,000 hits on YouTube, whilst the slightly less irreverent Student Voice video we made for the Visual Learning Lab (VLL) has been ‘on tour’ in staff workshops around the University. At the most recent of these events, a number of attendees – responding to some of the negative comments on teaching practice described in the video – expressed surprise and a little concern that it was showing on the University YouTube channel. I pointed out that the video had gone through the not inconsiderable vetting processes of both the VLL core team and the University YouTube selection panel. Maybe, I suggested, they recognise that showing students actively developing critical perspectives of their own learning experiences might actually be seen as progressive.

Though very different, both these videos can claim to represent an authenticity that is lacking in the slick promotional videos which many Universities (including Nottingham) routinely distribute. I suspect many potential students become somewhat immune to these. Of course, the University are hardly likely to officially endorse Kogan and Gilbert’s film, but if you search for Nottingham University on YouTube, it’s their video that comes up first, and, at least for a certain demographic, it might be one of the best recruitment tools they have. Take it away boys…

We had another great turn out for our third and final social media session at Jubilee Graduate Centre last week. We are now looking into taking this to the main campus, though we might consider merging the three sessions into a single all-day event. This may allow time for lengthier and more interactive discussion activities.

During the second of our social media sessions at the Jubilee Graduate Centre, I mentioned that I had recently responded to a tweet from one of my followers on Twitter. He posted a link to an article he was desperate to read but unable to access as his University wasn’t subscribed to that particular journal. I quickly found out I had access to the article through my University of Nottingham account, and uploaded it to GoogleDocs for him to pick up. For all I know, others may have responded in the same way.

Interestingly, the response to this in the session was mixed. Most I’m sure, appreciated the time and effort I saved this guy; the inter-library loan service is an invaluable yet often frustratingly time-consuming provision which many of us rely on. I used the opportunity to emphasise the expectation of reciprocity in social media interactions; that I would hope others would do the same thing for me. Perhaps the uneasiness evident in some of the responses was a natural reaction to the way this small, virtually insignificant act represents one of the ways social media challenges traditional channels of academic access to knowledge. And the recognition that we all influence, and depend on, the complex socio-economic structures that bind Higher Education and academic publishing.

Last Friday, we continued our series of sessions in social media at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. Nineteen PhD and Early Career Researchers attended and kept us on our toes throughout with interesting comments and questions. The response and feedback was terrific, and I look forward to seeing many of them back for the final session on 17 February. Here’s the presentation for Session Two:

I have embedded this video rush of an interview with Stephen Fry – made as part of the BBC TV series The Virtual Revolution – more for what it represents than for its content. That’s not to say Fry’s typically eloquent defence of the Web is not worth a viewing. But this is, I believe, the first time the BBC have released video content and code in this manner.* This and similar rushes have been released under an international permissive “Share-Alike’ licence (inspired by, but not identical to, the Creative Commons Licence), and form part of an impressive looking Web resource.

Whilst this experimental move is clearly designed to align open-access/code sensibilities with a promotional ecxercise, lets hope it points the way to further commitment in this area.

The video can also be downloaded and comes with a full transcript.

* This service may not be available to users outside the UK.

The death of J D Salinger this week gave me an excuse for digging out my old copy of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a few years since I last read it but, along with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s probably the novel I’ve re-read the most. Indeed for several years it became a ritual to read it on my way home for Christmas, in homage to Holden Caulfield’s narrative.

As I’ve got older, I’ve increasingly warmed to Mr. Antolini – Holden’s empathetic highball-swigging ex-English teacher. Debates on his ambiguous homosexuality in Chapter 24 often overshadow his eloquent words on the painful transition to adulthood, and the values of scholarship and learning:

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

On his excellent blog, Mohamed Amine Chatti asks ‘Are Communities of Practice Dead?’ I would suggest, to paraphrase Mark Twain, that death in this case may have been greatly exaggerated.

I think a key issue here is that the concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) has become so widely adapted and translated – particularly within the KM field – that in a sense, the term has become almost meaningless. It is equally important to re-emphasise Etienne Wenger’s early ideas (including those from his original work with anthropologist Jean Lave) which appear to have been either lost or re-imagined in some discourses.

For an excellent account of the ambiguity in CoPs literature read Kimble (2006). Of course, as Kimble admits, theoretical models naturally evolve, and systematic approaches help formulate empirical study and practice; a process in which Wenger himself has been most active. But Kimble suggests this has been “not a linear progression but a dislocation” (230). Some interpretations have seemingly disregarded the original complexities and tensions between practice, participation and membership, to present overtly positive and consensual views of organisational CoPs. Citing Mutch (2003), Kimble argues that whilst “we can use familiar concepts in new ways, or take concepts from one context to another and play with them” we must also “pay careful attention to our sources, making sure that we give due care to the consequences that the use of a concept brings with it” (231).

Perhaps Chatti’s reading of CoPs literature has been largely limited to the KM field, as his claim that “CoPs are organised from the top down” would seem to conflict with much of its original principles. Wenger (1998) stresses that CoPs develop naturally through emergent, bottom up processes, coordinated by the community members themselves. What he has increasingly developed over time is the idea that CoPs can be guided or nurtured in some way by one or several significant individuals, which has become manifest in the notion of stewardship.

Chatti eloquently describes how social media and open resources have brought about a fundamental shift in how many of us increasingly configure and articulate the way we study and work. This shift from community-based structures to a more open and distributed networked individualism has been well documented in the wider socio-technical field by people like Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman. To me, as a PhD student who is currently engaged in negotiating a workable model for analysis, how we conceptualise this shift is a fundamental methodological challenge, and one that I believe lies at the heart of how we should be studying current Web-based learning.

Despite the attraction of personalised and self-directed approaches to learning, we cannot deny our natural inclination to actively form, participate in, and seek recognition in communities. To take a predominantly network-based approach (such as Siemen’s connectivism) runs the risk of recognising such formations purely as clusters or hubs, and such approaches frequently seem to confuse groups – which may be highly structured and institutionalised – with communities. Perhaps Dave Cormier’s upcoming book chapter suggests a way forward in the network vs. community debate.

My gut feeling is that concepts like CoPs and Activity Theory (AT) are effective in ‘humanising’ social structures, emphasising the inherent link between practice and identity formation, whilst recognising forms of technological reification and power relations. A key problem seems to be that models such as these are limited by the fact they were initially formalised around the study of essentially ‘bounded’ domains (Chatti himself highlights this in a discussion on AT in an earlier post). Wenger has always asserted the concept of multi-membership – indeed in his latest book, Digital Habitats (co-authored with Nancy White and John D Smith), the notion of ‘extreme multi-membership’ is introduced. Engestrom has been developing his concept of ‘knotworking’ to extend his well-used Activity Systems model, whist Actor Network Theory (ANT) offers further possibilities.

My quest goes on…

References

Kimble, C. (2006). Communities of Practice: Never Knowingly Undersold. E. Tomadaki & P. Scott (Eds.), Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing, EC-TEL 2006 Workshops Proceedings. 218-234.

Mutch, A. (2003). Communities of Practice and Habitus: A Critique. Organization Studies, 24(3), 383-401.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.