PhD Blog (dot) Net

It seems to me that all forms of curation (including online) are fundamentally defined by three characteristics:

Content
What is included (and what is not).

Arrangement
How the content is arranged or presented. How it is ordered or grouped – by taxonomy, chronology or other forms of narrative. Is some content emphasised over others? Is there intentional comparison or juxtaposition between (sets of) content?

Annotation
Basically, anything in addition to the original content.

In considering these; how much is the subjectivity of the curator(s) and their identity and status (purposely) foregrounded? In addition, what options are there (if any) for viewer / reader agency?

Academics who actively engage in social media often get asked how they manage to find the time. I hear this quite a lot in my workshops. Such concerns are understandable, yet are often raised under a misconception that participating in these activities necessarily constitutes additional workload. I tend to argue that over time some of the academic practices you can develop through using social media can replace, supplement or enhance existing tasks. But how do we go about developing concrete examples, and what’s the best way of communicating them?

In a recent workshop, I explained how participating in academic-oriented networks (such as through Twitter or Facebook) and following multiple blogs (most efficiently aggregated through an RSS reader) can significantly contribute to resourcing new publications in one’s research field. Examples such as these relate emergent social media practice to existing problems that academics encounter in their everyday work, in context with the methods they may already employ to resolve them (in this case, using established database search and alert systems).

Generally, academics will only consider integrating social media in these types of activities if they are seen to be either a) adding more value or quality (however these are perceived), or b) providing more efficient (i.e. time-saving) methods. In reality, such transition is rarely straightforward, and its effectiveness may not be immediately realised. It may be partial i.e. new activities may augment rather than replace existing methods. (In the example above, it may be necessary – and indeed well-advised – to continue using database systems, albeit at a reduced level.) Further, social media are multipurpose, in quite complex and ambiguous ways. The initial motivation for adopting specific platforms may constitute one of many potential benefits and risks. Therefore, any shifts towards social media-facilitated activities will tend to be multiple and interrelated, within various loosely-connected timeframes.

This highlights the limitations of instrumental perspectives inherent in learning and adopting new technologies, and the problems associated with attributing affordances to social media. This is often accentuated in training environments, which tend to be incentivised towards rather abstract and non-contextualised learning outcomes. Therefore, we might need to emphasise a more ecological perspective, which positions the role of social media within the emergent socio-cultural shifts taking place in academic practice. Thinking about the example above, increased engagement with social media represents a shift from purposeful to speculative or opportunistic ways of sourcing knowledge, which are reliant on (and only realised through) developing online networks and communities, which invariably involves a period of maturation.

With this in mind, training programmes can incorporate more inclusive forms of shared practice and opportunities for ongoing mentorship and peer support (some of which might be appropriated through social media themselves). I explored these ideas further here (towards the end). Crucially, in relation to communicating how activities might be facilitated by social media, we should not necessarily focus on convenient ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons, but acknowledge and incorporate the messy (and sometimes unsuccessful) periods of transition, recognising also that these are multiple, interrelated and ongoing as new social media and related practices are considered.

What are the most useful criteria for categorising social media? What characteristics help define or distinguish specific tools or platforms? What, for example, is most typical or unique about a blog? The reverse chronological ordering of posts? The ability to comment? Or something more related to its social or cultural significance? In other words, what is it that essentially determines the ‘blogness’ of a blog? But then, how does a WordPress blog differ from a Blogger blog? How do we distinguish a blog from a tumblog or a microblog?

If it quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But the delineations between social media are increasingly blurry. This is partly down to the mixed and often interchangeable ontological approaches we take in defining social media – by platform, brand, modality, community etc. In addition, within these often reside multiple components or features that may be common to several social media.

Therefore, we might choose to define or categorise social media by how and why we are using them. Some in the educational technology field have adopted the idea of affordances within user-centred design paradigms in an attempt to correlate specific tools and features with specific purposes and activities. But as Martin Oliver (2005) suggests, interpretations of Gibson’s original notion of affordance have been problematic (and often uncritical), describing one attempt as a “conglomeration of claims about perceptions, actions and characteristics” (p.409).

Many research projects in the ed-tech field also tend to focus on a specific platform (tool etc.). This is understandable, given that they may be oriented towards supporting its adoption, development and/or evaluation in a particular educational context. In addition, tight budgets or timescales can limit the scope of research to single platforms. But in my own PhD research with doctoral students, where participants were actively using a range of social media, I was keen on challenging this platform-specificity. Through reviewing the literature and conducting my pilot study, I came to recognise a number of key factors that indicated researching academic uses of the social web may be best facilitated by examining multiple forms of social media:

• Underlying technologies and related processes (e.g. aggregation and tagging) provide effective means of interconnectivity between different social media
• The adoption and use of social media is transient in nature, and subject to changes in technologies and design, and to social and cultural trends
• The communities and networks in which individuals engage through social media encompass multiple, overlapping professional and social contexts

Crucially, adapting a holistic approach in this way supports attempts at framing the categorisation of social media within dynamic and contextualised sociocultural practices. Recalling Latour’s notion of ‘assemblages,’ we can think of any digital artefact (such as this blog post) as incorporating a history of multiple sociotechnical and cultural arrangements, processes and influences. In choosing to use Activity Theory in my analysis, I attempted to unpick these by constructing multiple and interconnected activity systems oriented towards key doctoral practices.

But in developing such activity systems, one has to attempt to delineate the social and cultural parameters that situate the practices under investigation. I recognised that my participants’ digitally mediated communities and networks did not only overlap, as suggested above, but they were also characterised by different levels and types of interaction, participation and audience. In addition, whilst specific social media (especially recognised ‘brands’ like Twitter and Facebook) have their own cultural identities, these exist and are constantly reconstructed and influential in the wider cultural norms of web 2.0 generally. Often in my study, key catalysts for change in my participants’ social media practice (manifest as ‘contradictions’ in the activity systems) arose through a coupling of:

• Conflicts between the platform-specific and general web 2.0 cultures and the (often deeply embedded) cultural norms of academia
• The participants’ need to negotiate the professional, social and cultural landscapes of multiple practice contexts

During the early stages of analysis, I was drawn to the genre studies literature, particularly key texts (e.g. Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993) which represent a shift from literary and formalist genre traditions to more sociocultural and dialogical perspectives. These recognise the complexity, spontaneity and interconnectedness of genres (Spinuzzi & Zachry, 2000), and support studies which are inclusive of, and focussed on, the social interactions, activities and practices in which genres are embedded. Given the similarities with Activity Theory, I began to use genre, not as a specific analytical unit, but rather to inform my activity systems development. (For activity theorists out there, identifying these genres presented me with a way of addressing the dual conceptualisation of the ‘Tool’ component of the activity systems, that is: (i) in conceptualising the materiality of Vygotskyian mediation, and (ii) in constituting, or at least contributing to, the development of cultural tools.)

In time, I became aware of my participants’ conscious and purposeful refinement of what could be seen as emerging social media genres, and with it, their awareness of the representational and performative roles they play – akin to what Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) describe as ‘genre knowledge.’ However, I found that these genres were challenging existing conventions of genre definition. For example, I found the notion of blogging as a specific genre of writing (or if you prefer, the blog post as a specific genre of text) ineffective in addressing the nuances of my participants’ blogging practices. Multiple and distinct forms of writing styles, formats and motivations were emerging, often in context with other, non-blogging texts, and occasionally transcending multiple platforms. I for one, have advocated single-author academic blogs as personal spaces for freedom of expression and experimentation. Compare for example, the length, format, modality and style of this blog post with this one. Further, whilst blogging in particular is still dominated by text, social media generally are becoming increasingly multimodal and multipurpose, and as such, increasingly disruptive in terms of genre definition. (Read the account of one of my participant’s ‘scrapbook’ style blogging in my last post.) As Clay Spinuzzi suggests, social media genres are becoming increasingly multiple and complex in relation to frequency, context, social interactions and audiences. This would suggest that in any analysis of this kind, we are looking at multiple and hard-to-define, interrelated and potentially conflicting sets of genres.

Why, one might ask, is this at all important beyond these predominantly theoretical and analytical concerns? Partly I think, because the way social media genres are defined and socially constructed influences our perceptions of how we use (or ought to use) these digital tools and platforms in various contexts, which within academic environments often become manifest in the form of best practices, which, as I have discussed previously, are themselves culturally loaded. This social construction often draws from popular discourses on the transformative, radical and disruptive potential of social media, in which seemingly new technological trends often represent a cultural (re)branding of established practices. These can become powerful cultural artefacts in the marketing of technological development within educational and research contexts, as is evident in the institutional leveraging of social media towards impact and outreach agendas, and in the commercial redefining of MOOCs.

Academics have generally used genres to reinforce the values and belief systems of the (inter-)disciplinary cultures in which they participate. For doctoral students, increased familiarity and engagement with established academic genres is seen as a crucial part of their learning trajectory and socialisation within the scholarly community. The emergent genres that are thrown up by participating in social media can challenge, augment and subvert these established genres and their role in reifying academic practice. In negotiating these new spaces of contestation, genre knowledge – or as I see it, the ability to recognise and contribute to the social construction of these genres – becomes an increasingly important digital literacy.

References

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1993). Rethinking genre from a sociocultural perspective. Written Communication, 10(4), 475-509.

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication: cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Oliver, M. (2005). The problem with affordance. E-Learning, 2(4), 402-413.

Spinuzzi, C., & Zachry, M. (2000). Genre ecologies: An open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation. ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, 24(3), 169-181.

I’ve been asked to present various aspects of how I use social media at a number of academic events and training sessions recently. I’ve always been reluctant to over-emphasise my own social media practice in my workshops for reasons I’ve explained previously, but I welcome any opportunities for shared practice when it allows for multiple and diverse perspectives.

If I have to nail it down, there are only four platforms I would really call essential. This blog and my Twitter account are those most known to external audiences. I use a desktop-based RSS reader, Vienna (Mac OS X only) to aggregate feeds from approximately 200 blogs (listed here in my blogroll) and various additional websites, and for many years I have used social bookmarking for collating and managing web resources (I switched from Delicious to Pinboard in response to the much-publicised ownership and design changes, though keep both sites active). Many academics are rightly concerned with how time-consuming social media might be. Therefore, I’ve found it useful to conceptualise how I engage with these key platforms through varying schedules within an informal workflow of key interrelated academic activities.

In developing this, I’m reminded how I have so far chosen not to routinely use any of an increasing number of emergent social media such as Pinterest, Scoop.it and Bundlr (beyond the usual playing around with them). These and other sites represent a diverse range of ostensibly visual platforms that have been loosely referred to as ‘curation’ tools. One can see how they might fit conceptually in such workflows, but do they offer us anything original? How does one attempt to contextualise the potential of these sites within established social media practices beyond that of a reified set of new tools or just another web 2.0 buzzword?

The term implies the addition of a more purposeful creative output or narrative. In short, we might refer to curation as the collecting and managing of web-based resources but with added context, or:

Curation = collecting + managing + context

These social media offer the potential to extend the type of time-efficiency processes of sourcing and collating content described above by incorporating enhanced social and performative affordances. In doing so, they introduce new opportunities for educators and researchers to organise and themetize resources, synthesise key concepts and narratives, and develop personal and collaborative digital ethnographies and datasets.

Here’s another angle. One of the participants in my PhD research (let’s call him Jack) pre-empted the emergence of these media in his explorative blogging activities. An interdisciplinary PhD student with an Arts-practice and teaching background, Jack began developing a ‘scrapbook’ style blog (using Posterous) with numerous and frequent posts comprising short notes and ‘jottings’, digital photos, short videos, and visual scans of sketches and mindmaps. He then began tagging these posts and reassembling them thematically through some quite extensive experimenting with third-party gallery themes and the digital note-taking site Evernote.

He primarily used these as part of a daily exercise to explore wider conceptual themes related to his research, often through the development of visual metaphors and various pattern forming techniques. Jack drew on educationalist Joe Kincheloe’s interpretation of ‘bricolage’ as a holistic framing of research project work, in which the positionality of the researcher is seen as a legitimate methodological tool. He explained to me:

“I just see it as a way of expanding on the potential conceptualisation of the project, the PhD generally, and where I am right now… a way of sort of re-establishing myself in the project everyday.”

Jack had originally developed these activities ‘offline’ using paper, pens and clippings, and the shift to a digital space enabled him to develop a more sustained and reproducible platform for documenting the process. The widespread emergence of the aforementioned curation tools coincided with the tail end of Jack’s participation in my research, and I left him contemplating their potential usefulness. He has recently launched a new Pinterest site – no doubt partly hastened by the imminent shutting down of Posterous – where he is currently exploring similar creative processes.

There is no doubt that Jack’s prior explorative work represents a far more nuanced, purposeful and practice-led approach to his current activities with Pinterest than can be claimed by most users. How many of us adopt specific social media without prior recognition of a need? Often it seems, they provide solutions to problems we didn’t realise we had. At least in Jack’s case, Pinterest provides a ‘ready-made’ approximation (of sorts) to a process he had previously attempted to resolve in his Posterous/Endnote work-arounds, and there is a lot to be admired in that personal trajectory. There is now perhaps the danger that in the transference of this activity to Pinterest, it may represent a form of reification, which, as Wenger (1998) suggests, can ‘ossify’ the creative and productive process.

My continued reliance on feed reading and bookmarking web resources seems positively ‘old school’ in comparison, but I believe these are reliable and effective methods which I have been able to integrate and refine within reasonably efficient everyday activities. I’m yet to be convinced how the current crop of curation tools can add value to what I personally want to do right now, but I remain open to future developments.

References

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

Tomorrow I’ll be contributing to an Information Services training session at the University of Nottingham for PhD students in Engineering, Medicine and Science. Its theme is ‘keeping up to date’ with resources, and I’ll be presenting how social media might be used to augment the use of database search and alert systems for sourcing formal publications. In particular, I want to emphasise the role various social media can play in accessing and managing more informal genres of academic content, and explore how these emerging practices are challenging the notion of what it means to ‘be resourced.’ I’ve put together a few preliminary slides to help establish context.

I’m particularly pleased to support this session as it is an example of integrating social media practices into core doctoral training programmes; something which I argued for in a recent post.

As an educational researcher, I often find the notion of ‘best practices’ problematic. The effectiveness of any particular educational practice in one context may not necessarily apply to another.

When it comes to using social media in academic environments, we recognise that practices are emergent; subject to the relatively new and transient nature of the technology, and its tentative adoption by the academic community. As such, ‘good’ or ‘best’ practices tend to be instigated – formally and informally – by early adopters, and are therefore heavily influenced by the cultures of the academic disciplines and specialist fields in which they reside. This allows for biases, assumptions and prejudices – however unintentional – to factor, even to a point where best practice claims can become ritualised as forms of cultural hegemony. This risks marginalising those from less represented disciplines who tend to follow on later (typically under the influence and guidance of the early adopters themselves, who by this time have often ‘moved on’ to the latest technology or trend).

To an extent, this can be seen as a necessary process, particularly by the ed-tech community, who are actively engaged in adopting, promoting or integrating technologies and related practices into institutional platforms and pedagogies. It can be argued that, in contributing to best practices, early adopters are providing a service for other academics and researchers who are too preoccupied in their own work to do so themselves. Further, by drawing on their informed knowledge and expertise, they provide guidance that is both authoritative and trusted.

I’m particularly mindful of this as someone who – as an early career researcher loosely associated with the educational technology field – is active in advocating the use of social media through workshops and other activities, often to audiences from other disciplines. With this comes a responsibility to recognise the privileged position and perspective within one’s own social media practice, which are manifest in a number of ways:

• Social media practices are culturally normalised within my field
• I can draw on a critical mass of users within my online communities and networks
• I have a professional interest, and am well–informed, in the latest advances in social media and related web technologies

A few points to note at this stage. Firstly, it is easy to homogenise the ed-tech ‘community.’ As Selwyn (2010) indicates, it often serves as a flag of convenience for a loose assortment of technologically minded educators, researchers and developers, with different and potentially conflicting roles, affiliations and policy agendas. Secondly, there are other academic disciplines and fields in which early adopters of social media predominate, such as Cultural and Media Studies and Journalism. Thirdly, influence is not exclusive to particular disciplines. For example, increasingly pervasive neoliberal models of networking, social capital and identity production are permeating research practices and academic training, often at the neglect of discourses on the participatory affordances of the social web, and the collaborative and egalitarian scholarly traditions it can potentially support.

These observations also raise fundamental questions over the nature of the relationship between technological developers and invested communities. Critical theorists such as Andrew Feenburg (2002) argue for more participatory and inclusive forms of technological design and development. As Friesen (2010) reminds us, social media represent an ecology of tools and platforms that are essentially founded on a ‘commercial imperative.’ Yet it has been suggested that the ‘perpetual beta’ of social media development – shaped by user trends rather than necessarily ‘hard-coded’ into original technological design – presents a more democratic process. Think of how the emergent practice of retweeting became formally integrated into the Twitter toolset. However, this only emphasises that it is often the early adopters who establish the most sustainable shifts in design change.

So whilst a professional elite of technologists and the ‘media savvy’ will invariably be the first academics to engage in new technologies, they should recognise the cultural baggage that comes with how they use them, and support opportunities for inclusivity, engagement and discussion in establishing best practice claims. In summary, I draw on my own research into how PhD students are using social media to offer a few suggestions relevant to the context of academic training:

Focus on ‘shared’ rather than ‘best’ practices

Adopt critical approaches to considering what constitutes best practices by incorporating multiple subjectivities and perspectives. Above all, support opportunities for sharing practices that may be comparative or conflicting, and include experiences of discontinuation or non-use of social media.

Promote inclusive and participatory approaches

Develop opportunities for cyclical, ongoing processes of shared practice that are participatory and culturally inclusive of different research cultures. Identify the cultural norms of social media practices in specific academic disciplines, whilst recognising the advantages of sharing practice in interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary environments. Engage sources of expertise such as learning technologists and educational researchers, whilst encouraging opportunities for participation from other disciplines. In particular, champion early adopters from under-represented disciplines.

Provide timely and sustainable support

Make opportunities for shared practices relevant as social media are adopted and used. The identification of key concerns, problems and potential solutions that characterise good (and just as importantly, bad) practices should emerge from experiencing the everyday use of social media in real case situations. Here, social media practices are authentic and essentially peripheral to ongoing academic activities, unlike many training scenarios where, as the focus of attention, they are abstract and prioritised tasks. Mentorship programmes can be particularly useful here.

Integrate training programmes

We should work to integrate (basic) social media practices into established training programmes. How often, for example, is the use of social media considered in graduate training sessions around conferences? Such a joined-up approach to training can be effective in normalising social media practices, contributing to their wider adoption and integration, as well as potentially enriching professional development in specific academic activities.

References

Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Friesen, N. (2010). Education and the social web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative. First Monday, 15(12).

Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 65-73.

In his highly readable book What is Education?, Philip W. Jackson, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, attempts a total rethink of education ‘from the ground up.’ Taking a John Dewey lecture from 1938 as his lead, he proceeds to drill down into what is the ‘essence’ of education. Jackson builds his arguments around a series of largely corresponding dialectical relationships, primarily drawn from Kant and Hegel, from Dewey himself, and from the theologian Paul Tillich.

In the concluding chapter, Jackson draws on a previous text of his (1986) to introduce two corresponding pedagogical traditions, the ‘mimetic’ and the ‘(trans)formative.’ There is, he suggests, an instinctive resemblance between these and the ‘informing’ and ‘forming’ goals of teaching; that is between the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge, and the shaping of character. But Jackson’s most recent thinking on this has caused him to re-evaluate his position:

“I now see it as involving not only those teachers we encounter face-to-face but also those whose influence has been far more distant and symbolically transmitted.” (88)

He speaks warmly of the ‘enduring impact’ of key philosophers and thinkers on his own learning, gained primarily through the reading of original texts. And whilst acknowledging the significant contribution of some of his teachers, he suggests others only played a peripheral role:

“Many of those teachers I have long forgotten. Their influence was transitory, even though it may have left me more knowledgeable and better able to do this or that. They’re like the textbooks that, once read, were set aside and never consulted again. They may have served a very useful purpose at the time, but the mark they left turned out not to be personally indelible.” (89)

Jackson here is blurring the distinction between primary and secondary, and physical and symbolic sources of knowledge, whether they are realised through the student’s direct relationship with a supportive teacher, or through the inspirational words of a dead philosopher. This challenges the notion of ‘informing’ texts (or, if you prefer, learning content) as neutral artefacts that are utilised by teachers who exclusively provide the transformative process of shaping student understanding. Indeed, when considering the potential cultural baggage that comes with the mimetic tradition, Jackson’s initial attempt at a definition of education as “a socially facilitated process of cultural transmission” (10) is useful.

This raises some interesting questions regarding the social web. How might that social facilitation be disrupted by a student’s increased appropriation of distributed and multimodal forms of content, by her access to a wider range of sources of expertise, and by her engagement in more participative forms of content production? And what if any, do increasingly self-directed and participatory forms of enquiry contribute to the apparent blurring between the mimetic and transformative traditions Jackson describes?

What struck me most about the author’s re-evaluation was how it introduces a ‘conceptual distance’ between the source of knowledge and the student, underpinned by a ‘mutual recognition’ that Jackson – referencing Hegel – suggests is essential in influencing and shaping the student’s empathic relationship with the knowledge provider. This may be evident (or evidently absent) in the traditional student-teacher relationship. Yet the gulf between the student and expert is typically too vast to engender any sort of reciprocal relationship. As Jackson observes:

“Most of us can never be recognized by the most renowned of our intellectual and spiritual progenitors. We can only admire them from afar by reading their works or reveling in the enjoyment of their artistic creations.” (90)

One can assume this is diminished as students progress into postgraduate study and enter academia themselves. So how might the increased complexity, informality and connectivity we associate with the social web influence this act of conceptual distancing? I’ve discussed previously the potential role of social media in signposting the complex social and cultural interrelations underlying contemporary academic discourse. Further, how might the student develop and refine her conceptual distancing as she progresses into postgraduate and doctoral study, and engages in the reciprocal processes of identity transformation and recognition in her chosen field?

References

Jackson, P. W. (1986). The practice of teaching. New York: Teachers College Press.

Jackson, P. W. (2011). What is education? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Here are the slides from the second of my social media summer workshops from earlier today at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. Once again, a really nice group of PhD students – lots of enthusiasm and discussion.

Earlier today, I ran the first of my social media summer workshops at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. There was a good turn out from a nice mix of PhD students from across the disciplines, and some interesting discussion. Hopefully, I’ll see most of them again next week for the second workshop. Here are the slides.

It’s workshop time again at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. Following previous programmes over the last few years, at Jubilee and across the University, I’m running two more lunchtime sessions. The workshops are open to all PhD students at the University of Nottingham, and are designed primarily for those with little or no experience in using social media in their academic practices. However, more experienced users are very welcome to come along to share their experiences and contribute to the discussions. As always, I hope each workshop will be informative and interactive. I’ll be demonstrating key social media and facilitating discussion around emerging practices.

Social media summer workshops – Towards a more participatory and collaborative scholarship

Workshop 1: Social Networking and Collaboration
Thursday 26 July, 12.00-2.00pm.

Using Twitter, social networks sites, wikis and online community sites for networking, information sourcing and collaborative working.

Workshop 2: Sharing and Managing Work Online
Thursday 2 August, 12.00-2.00pm.

Informal dissemination and sharing of work through blogging and content sharing sites, as well as managing content through social bookmarking and bibliographies, curation tools and RSS.

Places can be booked here.