Revisiting an earlier interest in openness

Working at the open University for 17 years inevitably colours one's perceptions of what openness is about. Here it has always had a significant political dimension.

As one who's 'office' is located in the Jennie Lee building (Labour Minister for Education 1967-69), and who occasionally has a drink in the cellar bar in the company of photos of Harold Wilson (Labour Prime Minister 1966-70) and Nye Bevan (Labour architect of the national health service 1948) I can't help being reminded of the roots of the concept in the ideals of social egalitarianism and the socialist politics of the post-war period.

I reflected on some of this in a chapter I wrote in 2007 about equal access and widening participation, for a book edited by Joe Lockard and Mark Pegram called 'Brave New Classrooms - Democratic Education and the Internet' (Peter Lang).

I concluded in that chapter that the OU's original commitment to equal access to higher education for all had transmuted over the years into a mission to provide access to higher education for all who were equipped and prepared to participate in the larger national economic interest.

I wonder where our current concept of (technologically defined) openness fits into this ideological spectrum? The sight of Martin Bean and David Cameron both extolling open education in India the other week, the one because it will benefit the have-nots, the other because it will be good business for the haves, made me wonder if it can really be such a win-win proposition?

(Robin Goodfellow)

Open Ed MOOC

Back to blogging again after a bit of a lay-off, for the Open Education massive open online course that Martin Weller has set up in the Open University OpenLearn environment.

Not sure I care much for the 'massive' bit, but as I'm doing some writing about educational open-ness in general at the moment I thought it would be useful to get some inside experience of this version of it.

The course starts on March 16th and goes on for 7 weeks, which overlaps with my study leave in New Zealand, so I'll be interested to know if anyone else is doing it from there too!

(Robin Goodfellow)

Oxford Dept of Education – Learning and New Technologies Research Group December 5th 2012

This talk considers the processes and outcomes of an ESRC-funded seminar series, held between October 2009 and April 2011.

The series brought together researchers and practitioners involved in four research projects that were focused, in different ways, on literacy, tertiary education, and digital communication (LIDU 2010).

The seminars set out to develop an agenda for new research, drawing on the range of conceptual, methodological, pedagogical, and political approaches brought to the discussions by participants from the different projects. But bringing these disparate people and approaches together was one thing -- ensuring coherent outcomes was quite another! In this talk I will review some of the problems we ran into, and the lessons we learned, trying to find common ground amongst linguists, social theorists, and learning technologists, talking about texts, practices and technologies.

I will describe how we eventually overcame most of these problems, and identified three major themes around which to propose future literacy-oriented research: ‘digital scholarship’, ‘post-human pedagogies’, and ‘the borderless university’. These themes are further explicated in an edited book called ‘Literacy in the Digital University’ to be published by Routledge in 2013, which I will plug shamelessly during the talk.

References:

Barton, D., Hamilton, M. & Ivanic, R. (Eds) (2000) Situated literacies: reading and writing in context. London: Routledge.

Bayne, S. (2010) ‘Academetron, automaton, phantom: Uncanny digital pedagogies’, London Review of Education, 8(1): 5-13.

Goodfellow, R. [2011] Literacy, literacies and the digital in higher education, Teaching in Higher Education, Volume 16 Issue 1, 131

Goodfellow, R. (2009-11)

Blog posts  in Literacy in the Digital University http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/

 LIT meets TEL. Tuesday, 20 October.  http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/lit-meets-tel.html

The great LiDU Twitter debate!  Friday, 23 October 2009. http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/great-lidu-twitter-debate_23.html

If Literacy is social practice why do we need to talk about Texts? Thursday, 5 November 2009 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/if-literacy-is-social-practice-why-do.html

'Literacies and Technologies' or 'Why I think we need to keep talking' Friday, 6 November 2009 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/literacies-and-technologies-or-why-i.html

3rd Seminar report Monday, 18 October 2010 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/3rd-seminar-report.html

Summary of seminar themes - towards a research agenda for Literacy in the Digital University (long post!) Tuesday, 30 November 2010 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/summary-of-seminar-themes-towards.html

Digital literacy events: Revisiting the twitter debate (rather long post) Friday, 2 December 2011 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/digital-literacy-events-revisiting.html

Goodfellow, R. & Lea, M.R. (2007) Challenging E-learning in the University. Open University Press McGraw Hill.

Goodfellow, R. & Lea, M. (eds) (2013) Literacy in the Digital University: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. Routledge

Gourlay, L. (2012) Media systems, multimodality and posthumanism: implications for the dissertation? In Andrews, R., Borg, E., Boyd-Davis, S. & England, J. SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses. London: SAGE, 85-100.

Hemmi, A, Bayne, S and Land R (2009) The appropriation and repurposing of social technologies in higher education. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25(1). pp. 19-30.

Ivanič, R., Satchwell, C., Edwards, R., and Smith, J. (2007) ‘Possibilities for pedagogy in Further Education: Harnessing the abundance of literacy.’ British Educational Research Journal,. 33, 5, pp.703-721.

Lea, M R. and Jones, S (2011) 'Digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and technological practice', Studies in Higher Education 36 (4) 377-395

Lea, M., & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education, an academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–172.

Literacy in the Digital University (2009-2011) Series Home Page. http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/lidu

Littlejohn, A., Beetham, H., McGill, L. (2012) Learning at the digital frontier: a review of digital literacies in theory and practice. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Volume 28, Issue 6: 547–556

Links to the SCORE Microsites collections of OER resources

These two portal sites to open educational resources were created here in IET in 2012 with funding from the OU's SCORE project and the Higher Education Academy,

They are aimed at post-graduate research students internationally, but after 6 months of being 'out there' it looks like R2R has found a niche, but DS hasn't. One of the problems with 'digital scholarship' as a title is that some international readers assume it means 'funded scholarship' and are disappointed to find that it's just another collection of resources.

Are we heading for OER inflation I wonder?

Ready to Research


Digital Scholarship



(Robin Goodfellow)

References for Edinburgh SRHE

References for a talk at Society for Research in Higher Education Digtal University Network seminar, Edinburgh University, November 1st 2012

Andresen, L. W.(2000) A Useable, Trans-Disciplinary Conception of Scholarship. Higher Education Research & Development, 19: 2, 137 — 153

Barker, D. (2004). The Scholarship of Engagement: A Taxonomy of Five Emerging Practices, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 9, 2, p. 123.

Beetham, H. (2009) Academic Values and Web cultures: points of rupture. Literacy in the Digital University, ESRC Seminar, Edinburgh University, October 16. Online at: http://kn.open.ac.uk/LiDU/Seminar1/Beetham_text.doc (Accessed 09 March 2011)

Borgman, C. (2003). From Gutenburg to the Global Information Infrastructure. MIT Press.

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered : priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, N.J., Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Online at: https://depts.washington.edu/gs630/Spring/Boyer.pdf (Accessed February 14th 2012).

Calhoun, C. (2006). The University and the Public Good, Thesis Eleven, 84, 7: 7-43.

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2009) Signs of epistemic disruption: Trnasformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal. First Monday, 14, 4-6: Online at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2309/2163 (accessed June 2012)

Courant, P. (2008) Scholarship: The Wave of the Future in the Digital Age. In The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, R.Katz (Ed), Educause: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/PUB7202t.pdf

Engestrom, J. (2005) Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality, Blog posting (April 13, 2005) http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why-some-social-network-services-work-and-others-dont-or-the-case-for-object-centered-sociality.html

Fransman, J. (2013) Researching academic literacy practices around Twitter: Performative methods and their onto-ethical implications. In Robin Goodfellow and Mary Lea (eds) Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. London: Routledge

 

Goodfellow, R (2006) From ‘Equal Access’ to ‘Widening Participation’: the Discourse of Equity in the Age of e-learning. In Joe Lockard and Mark Pegrum (eds) Brave New Classrooms, Educational Democracy and the Internet.  Peter Lang, New Formations Series

Holliman, R. (2011) The struggle for scientific consensus: communicating climate science around COP-15 in Wagoner, B., Jensen, E. and J. Oldmeadow (eds.) Culture and social change: Transforming society through the power of ideas. Information Age Publishers, Charlotte, N.C

Jenkins, H., Puroshotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. (2005). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century:  Online at: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf. (Accessed February 14th 2012)

Jensen, M. (2007). Authority 3.0: Friend or Foe to Scholars? Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 39,1: 33-43.

Knorr- Cetina, K. (1997) Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies. Theory, Culture and Society, 14,4: 1-30

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2012) ‘New’ literacies: technologies and values.  Revista Teknokultura, (2012), Vol. 9 Núm. 1: 45-69. http://teknokultura.net

Lievrouw, L. A.(2010) 'Social Media and the Production of Knowledge: A Return to Little Science?', Social Epistemology, 24: 3, 219 — 237.

Palmer, Carole L., & Cragin, Melissa H. (2008). Scholarship and disciplinary practices. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 42

Pearce, N., Weller, M., Scanlon, E., Are Kinsley, S. (2010) Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work. In Education 16,1: Online at: http://www.ineducation.ca/article/digital-scholarship-considered-how-new-technologies-could-transform-academic-work

Savage, M., Ruppert, E., Law, J. (2010) Digital Devices: nine theses. CRESC Working Paper Series, No.86. http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/digital-devices-nine-theses

Schön, D. (1995/2000) The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology. In Learning from Change: landmarks in teaching and learning in higher education,

Weller, M. (2012) The Ed Techie. http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/

Weller, M. (2012) Digital Scholarship, tenure & barometers. (Blog post) online at: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2012/09/digital-scholarship-tenure-barometers.html (accessed October 4th 2012)

Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury Academic Press. Online at: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml  (Accessed March 23rd 2012)

That Zengestrom post - scholarship or just 'sociality'?

Some colleagues and I at IET spent an hour yesterday discussing Jyri Engeström's six-year-old posting about 'object-centred sociality' (nb: my earlier posting on this). (I include some of the notes I made about the post itself below).

I introduced this as a topic for our (face-to-face) reading group partly because I'm interested in the theory of object-centred sociality but also because I wanted to see whether talking about a blog post would be different from discussing a journal article, which is what we usually do in the reading group. This seemed to me to be relevant to our ongoing consideration of what is involved in digital scholarship.

In the event, I thought it was a different kind of discussion, although I'm not sure my colleagues agreed with me.

For a start, the presence of the text itself was ambiguous. Usually everyone prints out the article & sits around in a circle holding it in front of them. In this case, one or two people had printed it out, a couple had it on their laptops  (although not necessarily open in front of them), another had it on his phone, another didn't have it at all (although they said they had read it.)  It all felt a bit ephemeral to me, with some of the more extended features of the text (its links out,  its later follow-up postings etc.)  not present at all even when they were being discussed.

And then, I felt that the discussion was more reflexive than usual – with people talking more about their own experiences with social media rather than about what Engestrom might be saying about Knor Cetina's theory, or what the commenters might be saying about Engestrom's views.

Lots of interesting points were raised however: the relation between links in a blog post and references in an academic article; the effects on the persistent text of its links becoming broken over time; knowing where the boundaries of a blog text actually finish...    

On the issue of digital scholarship, it seemed to down to whether we see Engestrom's post as a kind of  mini-example of 'good ' conventional scholarship (well-researched, concisely structured and expressed, appropriately referenced etc.)  or whether we are prepared to take the whole set of connected texts (comments, linked sites follow-up texts) as representing a different kind of, more collaborative, scholarship.

Whilst I'm broadly in favour of the latter view, my problem with it in this case is what has happened to Knorr-Cetina's principled notion of 'objects of sociality' in the translation from Engestrom's invoking of it to account for the failure of some social networking practices in 2005 (45 citations in Google scholar), to, for example, Hugh McLeod's distinctly non-scholarly appropriation of it to publicise his artwork 2 years later (2950 hits on Google).

Reading through the 100 comments on Engestrom's post I only managed to find two  that referred back to Knorr-Cetina.  Most of the other constructive ones ran with the issue of  what makes social networking successful or otherwise, without really bothering whether it might be evidence of a 'post-social' turn  in contemporary social life or not!  Understandable it may be, but rather more digital than scholarly I thought.

****************************

Some notes  on Engestrom's post:

This was prompted by a blog post from Russell Beattie http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008411 explaining that he had decided to close his LinkedIn account because he had too many contacts and nothing to say to any of them, and the system would have required him to delete them individually.

E. claims there is a 'profound confusion about the nature of sociality' due to the use of the term social network to refer to a 'map of the relationships between individuals’.

He proposes an alternative approach to social networks – based on Knorr Cetina - and sets out to explain how this approach accounts for why some social networking services succeed while others don't.

Summary of comments:

<><><>  <><><> 

Content topic	No. of comments
Google Maps, Flickr and Camera Phones as an infrastructure for new location-centred social software	7
Open question/development of original topic	28
General approval/re-blog	20
Own site/blog/talks/promotions	24
Trackbacks	5
Critical	7
Personal	2
Misc/irrelevant/spam	18
Responses from JE	1

Google search: Jyri Engeström "the case for object-centered sociality" -site:www.zengestrom.com/

Approx 2760 results (in all languages), 1930 in English

 Approx 45 citations found by Google Scholar including articles in: - British Journal of Educational Technology, Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, Interactive Learning Environments, Open Learning, Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group, Computers and Composition…

 Subsequent posts on Zengestrom.com on the theme of sociality:

 June 10, 2005 –announcing his talk on object centred sociality at Reboot conference in Copenhagen (links to summaries on David Weinberger's blog, Bohellz blog, PowerPoint and PDF no longer work).

19 comments on this post: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/06/speaking-on-object-centered-sociality-at-reboot-updated-with-slides.html#comments

December 3, 2006 – announcing his talk at the MSN-sponsored Innovate event in Stockholm, on social objects (link broken).

3 comments on this post: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/12/social-objects-talk-in-stockholm.html#comments

September 17, 2007 – comment on cartoonist Hugh MacLeod on wine as a social object with reference to a label created for Microsoft and its employees. Link to MacLeod's website (May 18, 2008)  'Free cartoons as social objects http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/cat_microsoft_blue_monster_series.html

10 comments

 August 15, 2008 –  comment relating object centred sociality to Google Readers updated Shared Items functionality. Chat conversation as a social object.

February 13, 2010 – another message about Hugh MacLeod on social objects for beginners (from 2007) (http://gapingvoid.com/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beginners/)

6 comments

Digital literacy events: Revisiting the twitter debate (rather long post)

I'm going to talk a bit about the LIDU twitter debate at the Society for Research in Higher Education conference next week, so I thought I would revisit it here and create a handy link for myself, for the talk (which makes this post a kind of meta literacy event!).

The twitter debate illustrates the ideological dimension of literacy practices - how communities use them to include or exclude others - so it's quite a good case to use to combat the relentless digital-literacy-as-online-skills discourse that seems to be rather setting the agenda for these kind of discussions at the moment.

I've illustrated it to break up the textiness a bit...

************************************************

It was four o'clock on a sunny autumn afternoon, and the seminar had reached its final plenary session. CJ, in his role as discussant, was summarising the events of the day. Behind him was a large data projection screen. There were about 30 people in the audience, sitting informally in rows. Some of them had notebooks in which they were writing, others were using laptops. Plenty were just listening. It was a typical academic seminar in 'winding-up' mode.

To illustrate what he was saying  about the difficulty of separating technology from practice, CJ projected a view of the live twitter stream to which a few of the audience had been, and were still, posting. The twitter stream remained displayed on the wall behind him while he continued his summary, scrolling occasionally as people in the room continued to post comments.

When the summary had finished, and the audience was invited to respond, a participant said that she felt a surprisingly strong reaction to the the twitter stream (still projected on the wall) which was distracting and intrusive. She felt irritated by the people who were tweeting, as if they were absenting themselves from the live group in order to talk to unseen others.

The tweeters responded that being able to maintain contact with their remote networks enhanced their participation in the seminar. One said that coming from the learning technology world it had not occurred to her that people might object to tweeting, or to the stream being made public.

Others joined in the dispute, but it was relatively mild, nobody punched anyone, and the whole thing was put to rest after about 10 minutes when the projection was switched off and the conversation took another tack. However, most of the tweeting stopped.

Moreover, the episode left its mark on the memories of several of the participants. Feelings were involved: objectors experienced strong negative reactions, some of the tweeters felt got at,  exasperated by the objections. Also, the event disrupted the 'knowledge agenda' of the group: a seminar about literacy in the University was forced to see its own practices as problematic, not just those involved in teaching students. The discussion was followed up a few days later on the seminar blog. It was still being referred to 12 months later, in the third seminar, and here am I rehashing it again after two years.

For me it illustrates the ‘ideological’ dimension of literacy as social practice really well. It was an example of contested social action -- a struggle for the legitimacy of a certain kind of text. The twitter stream, both online and as projected onto the wall of the seminar room at this time, is the text – its legitimacy as part of an academic seminar is under attack.

Social literacy has operational, cultural, and critical dimensions. At the operational level there are skills involved in using twitter to communicate. But it isn't inability to use the tool, or to write the kind of things that tweeters write, that causes the non-users to object. They don’t want to use it. I make this rather obvious point to demonstrate the problems of ‘competence deficit' models of literacy. Whilst using twitter may be an aspect of 'digital literacy', not using twitter can’t (yet) be seen as indicative of digital illiteracy.

(It is possible that there are aspects of the operational skill of tweeting which are to do with managing the general communicative context, rather than the specific requirements of the tool, and which might prove taxing for anyone who wasn't practised at it. For example, an engaged tweeter will not only be posting their own comments in parallel with their participation in a face-to-face discussion, they will also be receiving and replying to the comments of others, both present and remote. Multitasking of this kind is characteristic of digital social communication in general and is supposed to be easier for ‘digital natives’ to do successfully, because of personal disposition and, some say, cognitive adaptation (see Prensky and others). But the key word here is 'successfully' because determining what is successful in terms of communication is a cultural as well as an operational matter. In literacy, performance enacts social relations as well as individual skills.

If twittering is seen as a literacy practice for this seminar, it is clear that operational and cultural dimensions are aligned for some participants but not for others. For one participant, prominent as an expert in the learning technology community, there is no reason not to tweet at an academic seminar. For another, recognised as expert in the literacy community, it feels as if people are engaged in private phone conversations with others not present. The management of focus of attention at an academic seminar is a cultural practice that has developed over time. The purpose of maintaining a single focus of attention, as far as possible, is to further the practice of debate, an academic tradition. At one level those who were tweeting could argue that their activities were not undermining debate, but at another level, some of their colleagues clearly did feel undermined - there were other conversations going on, to which they were not party, somehow devaluing the seminar itself as the focus of the discussion.

Both groups in this case seemed to feel that they were being marginalised or otherwise disempowered by the practices of the other. Empowerment and marginalisation are the central 'problem' of literacy at the critical or ideological level.

Both online and face-to-face debate are characteristic of academic discourse around learning technology. But when they happen at the same time participants can come to see others' alignment of operational skills and cultural practice as disruptive or constraining to their own expression. This is fertile ground for the emergence of a critical sensibility, focused firstly on whose practice has appropriated the right to dominate, and then subsequently on how to recognise the rights of all. The critical dimension of literacy is its ideological expression, the manner in which practices function to 'normalise' power relations, including marginalisation, in a social group. Both traditional academic debate, and contemporary social networking, argue for their role as forces for the democratisation of knowledge. However, as we've seen, the practices of each can be perceived as disruptive, or oppressive, by the practitioners of the other. In bringing these (unsuspected, problematic) perceptions into the open and accounting for them through a social theory, such as the theory of literacy as social practice, a larger truth underlying their apparent opposition can be signalled -- the truth that all communication practices privilege some and disadvantage others.