PhD Blog (dot) Net

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:

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

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.

Not that many years ago, when I first started using the Web as a participatory medium, there was such a thing as ‘netiquette’. Remember that? Funny how you don’t hear that phrase anymore (I always thought it was a bit naff anyway). I recall some very strict membership rules on some forums. These days, social media conventions and practices seem to be emergent and socially negotiated. Who was the first person to retweet using RT? How do these things form, develop and gain momentum?

Following the hugely popular video The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch at Kansas State University, the equally hypnotic Information R/evolution explores how Web 2.0 has changed the way we find, create and share information. You can download all Wesch videos here.

I was happy to attend the lecture by Roy Pea at the official opening of the LSRI at the University of Nottingham last night. In the first half, he presented an overview of the learning implications of the paradigm shift – a term I’m happy to use if he is – in participatory culture through Web 2.0 technologies, largely referencing the recently published report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning which Pea co-authored. In the second half, he focused on his work around collaborative video discourse and his involvement in the DIVER Project. The lecture was video-recorded and will, no doubt, be available on the LSRI website very soon.

My favourite website at the moment is digg labs. Providing a ‘broader (and deeper) view’ of Digg activity, it presents 5 visualization formats of real-time activity. Design-wise, this is amongst the most effective info-viz sites I’ve come across, and offers a glimse of how we may browse our social bookmarking and networking sites in the future.