Using Blogs to Promote Writing and Student Interaction

I have had an increase in enquiries from staff in the college recently about using collaborative tools for learning. The fact that people are beginning to see the benefits of these collaborative spaces is a welcome development.

With that in mind, this is a timely research paper from Miriam Sullivan and Nancy Longnecker from the University of Western Australia:

Class blogs as a teaching tool to promote writing and student interaction

The study looked at the use of class blogs in four science communication classes. The students felt that the benefits of blogging to them included:

• improvements in their writing,
• intellectual exchange with other students, and
• motivation to write better.

They also benefitted from reading what other students had written. Making a weekly contribution mandatory increased involvement and the students saw the assignment as having greater value. Where blogging counts towards assessment, even if it's only a small percentage, contributions increase (JISC 2009), and if blogs are not integrated with other assessments then they can be ‘underutilized’. Other problems that teachers may find are an increase in marking and large differences in the quality and quantity of posts from students.

Blogging can prepare students for a class, having already thought about the issues and expressed a view. This allows the teacher to move quickly to deeper learning rather than having to coax contributions out of students who are staring at their feet because they haven’t done the reading! It also allows quieter or less confident students the opportunity to compose their contributions and to have their voice heard.

Sullivan and Longnecker believe that group blogging “fits squarely within current pedagogical recommendations for authentic learning in web 2.0 environments. It provides real-world context; requires sustained activity; allows multiple perspectives; collaboration; and articulation of knowledge.”

References

JISC (2009) Engaging Learners in Critical Reflection - University of Edinburgh in Effective Practice in a Digital Age, JISC (2009) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2009/effectivepracticedigitalage.aspx#downloads retrieved October 2014.

Sullivan, M., & Longnecker, N. (2014). Class blogs as a teaching tool to promote writing and student interaction. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 30(4).

Learning from the Early Adopters

Recent research by Liz Bennett (2014) looks at the drivers that motivate educators to use technology in their teaching. She took a framework (Beetham and Sharpe 2011) used to model students’ digital literacies and applied it to lecturers’ digital literacy practices. The intention was to examine the motivations for lecturers in adopting Technology Enhanced Learning.

Bennett found that lecturers were mainly motivated by a desire to achieve pedagogical goals and to support improved outcomes for their students in their learning, rather than by a desire to become digital practitioners and ‘self-actualising as digital pedagogues’.

Bennet’s Digital Practitioner Framework (DPF) has four levels:

At the top is the Attribute level, which relates to aspects of the lecturer’s personality that enable them to make use of technology. The ways of working with technology become assimilated into their ways of operating, and become normalised ways of doing things. This assimilation is different from merely identifying a skill set, it is ‘embedded into the lecturers’ values and beliefs’.

At the Practice level, lecturers were using technology to address pedagogical needs, not using technology for its own sake.

At the Skills level lecturers reported a detailed knowledge of how technologies operated, but there were some who felt that their level of skill was not up to that of their students. However, this was not a worry because while their skills may have been lacking, their relationship with students could counteract this. The lecturer’s role is one of teacher and researcher, and they have the subject area expertise. This is what the students expected of them for their part of the relationship. Lecturers could admit to students that they have a lack of technical knowledge, because they are not technologists. This allows them the space to explore and try out technologies with their students who understood that it was being done for the enhancement of their learning.

The deficit model is often used to explain the lack of engagement with technology - it is the lack of skills that is the barrier. However, in this research skills did not seem to be the main barrier to the uptake of technology, rather it was the perceived usefulness of the technology.

At the Access level lecturers acknowledged that there was need to invest time in learning about new technologies, and that it meant new ways of working. There was an acceptance of a blurring of boundaries between between home and work. This was dealt with by strategies to manage the expectations of students about when they would be available online.

The implication of this research (caveats about the small scale aside) for the way in which digital technologies are promoted and developed in education is that it emphasises the need to concentrate on how technology can enhance teaching and learning rather than on technology for its own sake. The Digital Practitioner Framework provides a way to begin to engage lecturers who are not using technology or who are sceptical - encouraging and supporting practices builds confidence and skills in using technology and develops attributes.

References

Beetham, H. & Sharpe, R. (2011) ‘Digital literacies workshop’, Paper presented at the JISC Learning Literacies Workshop, Birmingham [online], Available at: http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/40474566/JISC Digital Literacy Workshop materials

Bennett, L. (2014). Learning from the early adopters: developing the digital practitioner. Research in Learning Technology, 22.

The Problem with plagiarism detection software

                   
  photo credit: Jisc via photopin cc


Here’s a discussion between two students ‘from a prestigious university’, reported by McKenna and Hughes (2013): 

Don: what is the extent to which we’re allowed to plagiarise, 17% or something?

 Mark: No, it’s just like 20%, but I mean that’s all with just the bibliography or literally a couple of words which they highlight and you just ignore that, but obviously if you’ve got a paragraph then….

What is the role of plagiarism detection software (PDS) in creating this sort of misunderstanding? McKenna and Hughes suggest that PDS has the following effects:

1. It potentially changes the relationship between student and teacher, especially in terms of academic trust. There is already a difficult power relationship to be negotiated between student and teacher, and student and university. PDS has the effect of grounding that relationship in mistrust from the outset. It suggests that students are not to  be trusted, that they are not partners in scholarship - their learning is individualised - they are lone dynamic individuals, responsible for their own actions, rather than participants in a cooperative and collaborative exercise. Processing of assignments via PDS  “lends an air of objectivity and neutrality to what is actually a system with implicit issues of trust, control and surveillance. PDS is seen as a routine part of assessment with no debate about what values are being communicated to students and indeed teachers.”

2. It increases the sense of writing as a product. In routinely processing assignments through third party PDS the students are further removed from the connection they have with their departments. Assignments become digital artefacts, uploaded to the PDS which becomes the sole arbiter of of what is ‘allowable’ when it comes to plagiarism. Instead of using drafts and ‘process-oriented’ writing, which encourages peer- and self-review, process and drafts are subjugated to the technology. Students are creating a product - a commodity to be judged.

3. A loss of the understanding of plagiarism With PDS ‘plagiarism’ becomes simply about copying text, and about percentages. This is not helped by, for example, the colour coding system in Turnitin. The  ‘similarity index’’ is either blue (no matching words); green (up to 24% similarity); yellow (25-49%); orange (50-74%); or red (75-100%). So, you can plagiarise up to 24% and you get a green light! And green means good to go, right? Discussions of plagiarism are fraught at the best of times, but PDS adds more weight to the discourse of plagiarism as  ‘fraud, transgression, control, immorality, and dishonesty’. It ignores the complexities that are involved when people are novices, when they are writing in a new language, or educational context, or subject. It ignores the nuances of scholarly discussion, or of different disciplinary and linguistic contexts.

4. It promotes a view of writing which demonstrates little awareness of the potential of digital technology for multimodality, and new ways of presenting academic texts. PDS are premised on an increasingly outmoded ‘print literacy paradigm’. This fails to acknowledge the potential for digital technology to be used for multimodal and hyperlinked texts. PDS is based on matching text (it is actually text matching software, not plagiarism detection software), so cannot assess ‘images, animation, colour, or other modes of meaning-making’. PDS may have the effect of discouraging such novel forms of scholarship and expression.

What can be done? It’s not all bad. In an age of massive amounts of online material, PDS obviously helps to spot potential plagiarism quickly and efficiently. Simple practical measures to address misunderstanding plagiarism would include teaching students what the ‘similarity index’ in Turnitin actually means, and how the index can be interpreted. Turnitin has a feature which allows drafts. The similarity index can then be used as an aid to teaching about plagiarism before the final draft is submitted - that it’s not just about copying and percentages, or how much plagiarism is ‘allowed’. Encourage students to reflect on the processes of their own learning by discussing the sorts of political and moral arguments about educational technology that McKenna and Hughes have highlighted. Each social science subject area should be able to contextualise the arguments about the uses of educational technology in this way.

Reference McKenna, C, Hughes, J. (2013) Values, digital texts, and open practices - a changing scholarly landscape in higher education In Literacy in the Digital University. Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship, and Technology R. Goodfellow and M. Lea (eds) (pp. 173–184). London: Routledge.  

Lecture Capture and Data Capture

I attended an excellent debate on lecture capture yesterday, held as part of the University of Leicester’s IT Focus week. There were good arguments for the use of lecture capture, and the arguments against were not anti-lecture capture per se, but rather its possible detrimental effect on the learning and teaching experience. However, as is usually the case at this sort of event I was disappointed by the lack of discussion and, seemingly, awareness of the wider political and ethical issues of learning technology, in particular issues surrounding the use of learning technologies for the gathering of metadata.

As Neil Selwyn and Keri Facer (2013) have said the study of educational technology remains “stuck stubbornly in its ways - dominated, at best, by an optimistic desire to understand how to make an immediate difference in classrooms and, at worst, in thrall to technicist concepts of ‘effectiveness,’ ‘best practice,’ and ‘what works’.

The discussion of any learning technology will understandably concentrate on teaching and learning. However, I feel that academics, learning technologists and students have a restricted view of learning technology when they ignore the actual use of technology to gather data for performance management and ‘learning analytics’. And while this data gathering can be used to enhance learning and teaching it can also be used for disciplinary and surveillance purposes.

We are seeing the increasing marketisation of Higher Education (and education in general) with governments and private companies seeing universities as sites for the extraction of profit. Maximising profit requires (among other things) analysis of business performance to enhance efficiencies. Digital technology provides the data required for that analysis, and in education that includes metadata from various content and learning management systems - lecture capture and VLEs are two such systems. It is naive to think that university managers won’t at the very least have an interest in exploring the analytical potential of these systems. There doesn’t seem to be any possibility for a change of direction any time soon in the view of universities as an economic good, so such investigations of the potential and actual use of metadata will happen - it has to because that’s how the system works. It forms part of what Jenny Ozga (2009) describes as the ‘governance turn’ in education - “the shift from centralised and vertical hierarchical forms of regulation to decentralised, horizontal, networked forms”. Such a way of thinking “is a reflection of a constant search for more complete state knowledge, for a ‘bridge’, that allows panoptic visions and strategies while ensuring compliance.”

I was pleased to hear yesterday at the debate that one senior member of staff was adamant that he would not work at university which uses data in an unethical manner, and that the university has ethical guidelines in place to guard against the use of data in such a way. As a senior member of staff he will be in a position to influence the debate, unlike a mere VLE monkey like me!

However, If we are to guard against the use of data for surveillance and performance management to create efficiencies for the extraction of profit then it requires a wider debate across universities, and not the odd, lone voice.

As a learning technologist I appreciate how the use of digital technology can provide fantastic opportunities for the enhancement of learning when it’s used appropriately and creatively. It’s what I do for a living, so I’m certainly not anti-technology. Lecture capture can be a valuable tool for students with accessibility issues, or those with learning difficulties, those who have English as a second language, and non-traditional learners. Nor am I opposed to the gathering and analysis of data from digital systems, it can be used to enhance learning and teaching. What I am ‘anti-’ is any top-down, technodeterminist, solutionist approach to the implementation of learning technologies, and the view of the university as an economic good rather than a public good. Learning technologists, and those researching learning technology have been too quiet about its use in supporting a data-driven managerialist audit culture. It’s time we started to shout a bit louder about it.

Ozga, J. (2009). Governing education through data in England: From regulation to self‐evaluation. Journal of Education Policy, 24(2), 149-162.

Selwyn, N., & Facer, K. (Eds.). (2013). The Politics of Education and Technology: Conflicts, Controversies, and Connections. Palgrave Macmillan.

Photo credit: James Vaughan CC: BY-NC-SA

The Hidden Curriculum

MSc Reading Notes

Based on:

Edwards and Carmichael

Secret Codes: the hidden curriculum of semantic web technologies

And:

Santo: Towards hacker literacies: What Facebook’s privacy snafus can teach us aboutempowered technological practices

There is a history of the examination of the ‘hidden curriculum’ in education. It refers to those elements that are implicit or tacit to the formal goals of education. The hidden curriculum has been criticised for its role in reproducing the unequal relations of power in the social order. Students become socialised into a particular social order because they are hidden messages about what is available to them and what their education is for.

There is also a hidden curriculum in the coding of educational technologies that makes assumptions about learners and knowledge. The view is taken that this coding should be seen as an actor in the educational process, in the way that it enables and constrains learning. The coding and linking of data, and the way that decision making and reasoning are articulated in computer code makes things like search engines and e-assessment systems perform in particular ways, and makes them actors in the pedagogic process.

Educational technology cannot be seen as simply a tool by which the curriculum is delivered. Forms of classification and standardisation are important. We need to look at the standards and coding and their effects on the representation of information and knowledge, and the forms of teaching and learning that are made possible. This relates to the use of ed tech in the commodification of education, and the discourses of ‘efficiencies’ and standardisation, measurement etc. The semantic web means that data can be reused, shared and aggregated- as this happens the ‘pre-history’ of the data and the application of rules and standards applied to that classification disappears. Assumptions are coded into applications, including educational technology.

This emphasises the view that technology is never neutral. Quote from Rushkoff (Rushkoff, D. (2011). Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: O/R Books.) -

“...as technologies come to characterise the way that we live and work, so the people programming them become increasingly important in shaping our world and how it works.”

The coding and standardisation of the information infrastructures required by semantic web and ed tech also has an effect on the way in which people work - their work also becomes standardised to fit the applications that they are using to do their work and the way in which they teach and learn. Adopting particular standards for technology represents a statement on the part of the manufacturer. It could be argued that it is not the tech or the semantic web that is influencing the way that we do things, it is actually the coding and the standards behind it.

There is a strong rhetoric about computer software leading to efficiencies, institutional change, and professional competency. Teachers are expected to see the tech as a natural part of their work and that its use in the classroom should be seen as unremarkable.  The dominant metaphor is technology as a ‘tool’. Computers are seen as a kind of prosthesis, rather than as more complex assemblages within which the software is one element, and which involve users in a wide range of socio-material relationships. They preclude certain kinds of social and spatial relationships, they reconfigure absence-presence - see the stuff on movement and mobilities.

The standardisation required for data to be open, and for certain platforms (OERs etc) to be open means that data often ends up fitting into ‘flattened’ hegemonic categories.  Content reuse and interoperability requires standards - this means that information is affected by both human and non-human actants. There are multiple hidden translations that are incorporated into ed tech applications through codes, ontologies and metadata - it is layers upon layers of tacit assumptions about the way in which ed tech should work, and the way in which people and institutions should work. The problem is that trying to change this, and make different assumptions creates layers of a different kind. But perhaps layers that are predicated on what it actually means to be a learner, and on how people learn best, rather than trying to fit them into systems that see learning as commodified and individualistic. There is also the issue that even with ‘open’ and cooperative movements, there is still ‘benevolent concealment’ of of complexity by coders who have to balance the complexity of coding with usability.

But won’t this always be the case? There is no way to get around this unless everyone is a maker and coder, providing their own custom-built applications and software.

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Minor Urbanism and Mobilities

MSc Reading Notes

Based on:

Shepard, M. (2013). Minor urbanism: everyday entanglements of technology and urban life. Continuum, (ahead-of-print), 1-12.

Shepard points out that we think of the entanglement of life with ‘a range of mobile, embedded, networked and distributed media, communications and information technologies’ in terms of an overlay of data onto material fabric. This sees a duality, between information and physical fabric - or online and offline.

This leads us to view the technology in terms of the interface between the two, rather than the entanglement as a whole. The result is an ontology that retains the maintenance of the dichotomy. It presents a good argument against digital dualism.

I think that this has relevance for the mobilities paradigm of mobile and e-learning outlined by Enriquez. In her view there is a breakdown of defined spaces, the lines become blurred, they are created and interact with the people who use and inhabit them. There is a breakdown of the duality of spatial and social activity.

The Cloud and UbiComp as ‘messy’

‘The Cloud’ has become the dominant metaphor for describing the infrastructure that allows ubiquitous computing. The impression given is of a seamless interaction. The truth is that it is much more messy, with a ‘heterogeneous assembly of technologies’. This idea of seamlessness ignores the many social and cultural, political and economic forces at play. The ‘real world’ is composed of human and nonhuman actors, and has situations that are recursively performed and enacted. Again, there is a link here with the mobilities paradigm, as well as the obvious reference to ANT.

Minor Urbanism and its relevance to e-learning

Shepard uses the example of parkour - a form of movement through an urban space using athleticism and gymnastics. They move through the city using paths that are outside of those designated by urban planners. In doing so they disrupt the patterns of movement within an urban space. Shepard points out that these types of movements - seen metaphorically as well as physically via parkour - reside ‘beneath and between the smooth and seamless landscapes of the neoliberal city’. If we substitute ‘city’ for ‘space’ we can see how such an approach to learning can undermine the neoliberal discourse prevalent in education. Acts that slip beneath the surface, and between the gaps and can shape a different collective experience of learning. They could reconfigure, recircuit and redirect normative systems and infrastructures ‘and open them up to alternate social and political dynamics’.

What type of learning are we looking at though? What types of activity? I think that an educational/technological version of ‘minor urbanism’ would be a useful way of envisioning an alternative to the pervasive discourses around education at the moment.

This type of minor urbanism can move us towards an alternate ontology than that ‘posited by the cloud for describing the relations between people, technology and space’. It puts actors - human and nonhuman into the foreground of the production of space and data. Again, another link with the mobilities paradigm and the creation of spaces.

Final point - futurology

Shepard, talking about ‘design fiction’, says that ‘designing implications involves imagining not just new products but also the social and cultural contexts within which they are situated.’ While this enables us to look at things (or technology) in terms of how it interacts social and cultural conditions, it also makes the point that futurology needs to be able to look at future social and economic conditions when making predictions about technology, if it is to be a useful practice. Otherwise it is simply the description of ‘cool stuff’ that might exist in the future.

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What mobilities means for mobile and e-learning

 MSc Reading Notes

From:

Enriquez, J. G. (2011). Tug‐o‐where: situating mobilities of learning (t) here. Learning, Media and Technology, 36(1), 39-53.

Would a focus on bodies change how you currently think about e-learning? Why or why not?

How do I currently think about e-learning? I think of it as learning traditional topics/courses/content etc but mediated by technology. So the technology allows different ways to interact with the material, and with each other. It allows the use of different modalities to present material. The tech allows the building of communities outside of the formal community of the classroom/course.

I think that e-learning, as an online activity shifts the sense of identity and self (even if unknowingly). It disembodies the self, and enables it to shift around different places and spaces, and allows the forging new new aspects of the self.

So, I have thought about e-learning in the traditional sense of minds meeting minds - in the sense of an ‘encounter of intellects mediated by tools’.

The focus on bodies as inhabiting created spaces changes that view. The use of mobile tech to access learning materials also means that the space of learning changes depending on the place the learner is at physically - this space may have to be negotiated with others, differently to the negotiation of space that takes place in a traditional lecture theatre or classroom. There isn’t the segregation of space and social interaction, but the lines are blurred, and the space can be reinterpreted or recreated - the flow of information is altered in online spaces.

‘Learning is not just an encounter of intellects mediated by tools, but is a bumping into of bodies in spaces as part of ways of knowing in motion.’

This enables a more ontological relationship with technology, rather than one that considers learning from an epistemological point of view. Learning becomes intrinsically linked with the space of learning, the mobile device that is being used, or the computer that is being used. The sense of self and identity of the learner is therefore re-written contextually - their identity is one of a learner in a particular space or set of spaces, interacting with other learners, and course content.

‘The self is made mobile as a series of traces in mediated spaces.’

In this sense the standpoint of mobilities is a phenomenological one - it considers learning and the relationships of learners from the point of view of how they see and interact with the world, their emotions and feelings. This phenomenology is different to that of the student in the classroom or the lecture theatre. It is a different type of relationship to learning.

Looking at the body rather than just the technology, or the outputs of technology forces us to consider people as placed in a culture and society - they have their own history and narratives, and memory, and bring that to their learning. It is a more holistic approach, and less deterministic. They are not simply led by technology, or applications or software, or content, but form a part of the learning experience - they become signified by the technology, as well as having their activity mediated by it.

Currently when we talk about mobile learning, what we talk about is devices - it is very device-centric. There is discussion of mobile pedagogy, and of design for mobile learning, but even then it is in terms of the devices and how they work, and where they can be used. They are still thought of in terms of ‘the encounter of intellects mediated by tools’ rather than bodies in spaces.

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