The unbearable lightness...

... of being; H800 style.

As suspected, much of this turned out to be a re-hash of the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog]

On the internet, indeed, nobody knows you're a dog, or a scared newbie, or an international expert, or sitting through an online tutorial in your pyjamas...

More seriously, as Sian Bayne, Senior Lecturer in Education, Community and Society at Edinburgh University, put it in 2005:

'within cyberspace identities are more freely transformable, boundaries less firmly drawn, and possibilities for metamorphosis of the self more open'

She argues that students feel anxious about learning online because they feel vulnerable, their identities threatened by this new shifting reality. Although she also acknowledges the scope for adopting a different persona online, she seems more concerned about the way this can lead to deviance (and fear of becoming a victim of deviance) than with its potentially liberating effect. 

Certainly there's a tendency for people to say things to each other online that they wouldn't dream of uttering face to face - as moderator of some 'lively' student forums, I'm all too aware of that. 
In my experience, though, it's learning itself, rather than the medium, which students find unsettling.  What Bayne describes are just old anxieties in new clothes. Instead of worrying about turning up in the wrong room, today's students worry about clicking the wrong button on the module website; instead of worrying about whether their tutor can read their handwriting, they worry about  saving their assignment files in the right format. Students have always fretted about 'showing themselves up' but many find security in hiding behind a screen. Many, of course, are actively seeking identity change through learning.

Bayne also seems to over-state the distinction between students and tutors. I didn't recognise her portrait of confident tutors authoritatively negotiating the boundaries of this new world to project their 'teacherly personas'. I've more often encountered considerable resistance and anxiety amongst colleagues being obliged to 'perform' online without the benefit of cues from eye contact, body language, and what the linguists call back-channelling. 

Learning is indeed about identity: we are who we are because of what we've learned, formally or informally. I remain to be convinced that introducing technological tools to the process presents a threat.

Do behave!

That's the mnemonic I used many years ago for the three core auxiliary verbs in English: do, be & have. Now I've met them again in learning theory. We've been looking at the two prevailing metaphors for learning - the acquisition model (having) & the participation model (doing) & the argument for adding a third category: personal change/identity (being).

The first two are summed up in Anna Sfard's 1989 paper 'On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One'. Sfard is a lecturer in maths education based at Haifa University.

[https://www.msu.edu/~sfard/]

The acquisition metaphor treats knowledge as goods which can be accumulated, combined, used to construct meanings, transferred from one place to another, shared. There may be debate about the most efficient way to acquire such commodities, but the underlying metaphor has been happily accepted by instructivists & constructivists alike.

The participation metaphor is less interested in knowledge than in knowing: the ongoing process rather than the end product. Learners are integrated into a community by learning to speak its language and to behave in accordance with its norms. They are no longer individual entrepreneurs, but parts of a greater whole. Such learning cannot be detached from its context.

Sfard is at pains to stress that this distinction is not the one frequently made between individual & social methods of learning (both of which use the acquisition metaphor & more recently the participation metaphor too) but one that captures an ontological point about what learning is.

She concludes with an appeal for 'metaphorical pluralism': both metaphors have a valuable contribution to make to research & practice alike, one which should not be sacrificed to 'theoretical exclusivity and didactic single-mindedness'. Metaphorical hegemony risks distorting our sense of what is normal and desirable, with potentially damaging effects on educators and, more importantly, learners.

'Being' is for tomorrow!

The trouble with podcasts...

... is that you can't glance at them.

Our tutor has posted an audio file with some tips about time management around using the module forums. I can see the benefits:

• more suited to auditory learning styles
• more accessible to visually impaired learners
• enables tutors to 'speak' to the whole group without incurring the costs (in time & money) of making multiple phonecalls
• a stable resource, not ephemeral like the spoken content of  a phonecall, unrecorded Skype/Elluminate session or F2F tutorial
• flexible in terms of tutor/student schedules because it's asynchronous

But... but... but.... I still resist. 
 The idea of making a similar podcast for my own students founders on the reefs of so many objections:

• it would be less likely to reach them than a group email. It's hard enough persuading them to log on & participate even passively in the forums
• it would be time-consuming. I'm not comfortable recording spontaneously, so the podcast would have to be scripted - in which case, why not simply email the script?
• these are level 1 Humanities students: they want to learn about history & literature & art, not 'all that techie stuff'. 
• hypocrisy: if I find it hard to recall what I've heard in a podcast, what right do I have to reproach my students for sharing my reluctance to learn this way?
• I hate the sound of my own voice!

I'm taken back to my own learning experience almost 40 years ago during my first undergraduate degree, when most of the teaching took the form of lectures, which I had to treat as speed-dictation exercises. I remember the distress & panic during the spring term of my final year, when chilblains on my fingers meant I couldn't write fast enough to capture everything. I remember my anger: if they wanted us to know this stuff, why didn't they put it on a handout for us, instead of privileging those students who could write faster?

So our tutor offered six tips for coping with the forums. I don't have a problem with the forums, so perhaps I didn't need to take them all in, but I can only remember two of them. To capture the full set, I would need to replay the podcast & take notes. A two-minute recording would expand into ten minutes of start-stop-write-start. A forum post could have been re-scanned in seconds. 

That's the trouble with podcasts.

Singing Together

That's all I remember of schools radio broadcasting in my own primary school days. I've no idea whether we listened 'live' or just used the printed song booklets in place of scores. Perhaps the teachers listened, learned, & thus acquired the confidence to get an overcrowded class of scruffy uncultured youngsters 'singing together'. I do recall that when I left for secondary school, I begged copies of some out-of-date books so that I could learn to play the songs on my recorder: The British Grenadiers, The Minstrel Boy, The Oak and the Ash and the Bonny Rowan Tree* - all good rousing traditional stuff for the 50s!

Some reminiscences fom others here:
Singing Together
SINGING TOGETHER on schools radio in the 60s

What intrigues me, looking back, is how little I remember of the shared classroom experience, yet how clearly I recall the titles I taught myself to play, from illustrated black & white booklets (still on my bookshelf!) alone in my room at home.

I'm not sure what H800 lessons to draw from this reflection. Week 2 sees us touring the world, considering audio-enhanced education  from early Canadian experiments in the 1920s (George H. Buck (2006) 'The First Wave: The Beginnings of Radio In Canadian Distance Education') to a more recent initiative in post-apartheid South Africa using radio in the drive for universal literacy (Potter & Naidoo (2006) 'Using interactive radio to enhance classroom learning and reach schools, classrooms, teachers, and learners’ - only available to students, but some findings incorporated into this chapter). We're also debating John Seely Brown's claims about groupwork:

'one of the few deeply robust result in most educational theory today is, in fact, the best indicator of success in college has to do with whether or not you know how to form, join, participate in study groups bar none.' (OpenLearn 2007 webcast)

an orthodoxy to which H800, it seems, wholeheartedly subscribes. My own experience with schools radio suggests I would have been just as happy with a tape-recorder & a booklet. But then I always was anti-social!

*Pedantic footnote: all the versions I sampled on YouTube had the chorus lyric as 'the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree' but my memory is corroborated by this entry in the folkinfo archives.

Getting stuck in

Starting to enjoy the opportunity to engage in authentic debate!

We've been looking at a supposed 'law' of technology, that short term effects are often over-estimated & long-term ones under-estimated (Naughton). My example was this:

Example of a technology that supports the 'law': the car. Its invention & eventual mass production had wide-reaching social effects that cannot have been predicted - not only 'sweeping changes in employment patterns, social interactions,infrastructure and goods distribution' but also arguably 'the use of non-renewable fuels, a dramatic increase in the rate of accidental death, social isolation, the disconnection of community, the rise in obesity, the generation of air & noise pollution, urban sprawl, and urban decay'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_automobile_on_societies

A fellow student argued for unpredicted effects of the internet, such as downloadable media leading to the recent collapse of familiar names such as HMV & Blockbuster, & I was swept straight back to the 90s & debates about Napster...

Here's what I posted. It's all very reminiscent of T171!

I wonder if those negative impacts could be thought of as unanticipated medium-term effects, with the full impact yet to emerge? Certainly digital music has led to very unfortunate consequences for people in music retail losing their jobs. But maybe in another 10 years we'll be looking back on the idea of buying music on physical media as a quaint 20th century habit & wondering why people made such a fuss about its disappearance? People will always make music & listen to music, & there are already signs of alternative market models emerging - the Pledge system, for instance, where potential customers commit their payment in advance, with funds going directly to the creative people rather than being syphoned off by record companies for the benefit of their shareholders.
Bringing that back to the topic of learning, I suppose a parallel would be the move into MOOCs & self-directed learning - all part of the democratising effect of the internet

Holding my tongue

(Not a pretty sight!)

Ran into the old problem of not knowing how much to write in response to the activities. Asking students to send a 'brief message' to the forum is fine, but when there are multiple questions to answer & you're still trying to make a good impression, it's hard to know when to stop. This is where the decision not to release TMA questions until later has an unfortunate side-effect. If we're being assessed on our contributions, which will count for more: demonstrating understanding of the subject matter by a thorough, carefully crafted post that addresses all the points raised for consideration, or demonstrating understanding of the medium by a selective & incisive response to just a couple of issues?

Content versus form, innit?

So I posted a few 'ones I prepared earlier' then did the sums: (12 students x 5 activities x 500 words) + (12 students x 2 responses x 60 initial posts) = Too Much.

There's a balance to be struck between ensuring a learning forum remains active/vibrant, & not letting it become overwhelming for anyone who logs in a few days later than the others, takes one look & decides life is too short to plough through all the verbiage that's already there. I do already try to strike that balance in the online tutorials I run for new undergraduates: I post single questions & have a standard form of words to encourage tongue-holding ('Just a couple of sentences please - this is a discussion starter, not an essay'). On the other hand as a student I resented the invitation on a previous module to discuss Deep Issues in no more than 50 words. It's tricky.

So for the next activity I abandoned my pre-written answer & started an argument about plagiarism instead ;-)