Goldsmiths, Learning, Teaching & Web 2.0

A sketch~~~

Mira Vogel and John PhelpsGoldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit

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Overview

• Change• Learners• Learners in institutions• Academics and learners experimenting at

Goldsmiths• Institutional responses• Questions and discussion points

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John is with his family today

Change is here!

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Change

• Web 2.0 – the social, interactive, participatory web– The US election campaigning 2008-9 – Twitter and the Trafigura gagging injunction (2009)– Commercial interests

• Civil society moving online - government’s ‘Twitter Czar’• Openness; cultural commons (Boyle 2009)• Democratisation of authoring

– Wikipedia; YouTube; Lulu (micro-publishing); Guardian’s CiF

• Established media disrupted– explosion of choice, individualisation, fragmentation

• Implications for education

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Andrew Stott, £160,000 Twitter Czar

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Change

• Web 2.0 – the social, interactive, participatory web– The US election campaigning 2008-9 – Twitter and the Trafigura gagging injunction (2009)– Commercial interests

• Civil society moving online - government’s ‘Twitter Czar’• Openness; cultural commons (Boyle 2009)• Democratisation of authoring

– Wikipedia; YouTube; Lulu (micro-publishing); Guardian’s CiF

• Established media disrupted– explosion of choice, individualisation, fragmentation

• Implications for education

Learners

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Learners and technology today (Melville, 2009)• Own laptop and phone• Digital divide (e.g. bandwidth, skills, access, vision, mobility)• 9/10 students use social networking sites

– ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘see’ spaces for private interaction, group interaction, and performances

– But collaboration is haphazard

• Information literacies - a deficit area– Question-finding (formulating effective searches)– Critically analysing the results– Making sense of; synthesising– Working together

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A vision of students of today

• Michael Wesch is a digital ethnographer from Kansas State University:

–a cultural anthropologist exploring new media, society and culture

–Wired mag calls him “the explainer”

• Watch Wesch, M (2007) A vision of students today. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

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Rumbles

“Only the Catholic Church has been around longer and, like the Catholic Church, universities today bear a striking structural resemblance to what they were in medieval times.”(Davidson & Goldberg 2009).

“In the years to come, we will say that it was a quiet decade, with the existing system having remained largely unchanged, almost unsuspecting, even, of the major changes that were to follow.” (Downes 2008)

Learners in institutions

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Strategies!

• “The Strategy will, therefore, outline the ways in which we intend to support students to become self-motivated learners, enabled to take responsibility for, and control of, their learning whilst at Goldsmiths and beyond.”

• “We will explore the development of more informal social spaces and other tools including social software, communication (e.g. wikis and blogs) and conferencing tools, video streaming and assessment tools to enhance learning, facilitate widening participation and improve opportunities for student feedback.”(Goldsmiths, 2007)

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A local strategy

• “Encourage our students’ reflective abilities through innovative learning, teaching and assessment supported by a developing infrastructure of information and communication technologies”

(Goldsmiths Sociology Department, 2007)

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Universities are also concerned with continuity

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The HE system is largely self-sustaining

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Great Expectations (JISC Ipsos MORI, 2008)

Familiar

Unfamiliar

ComfortableNot comfortable

Instant messaging

Text messageadmin updates

Administrativematerials online

Using existing online socialnetworks to discuss coursework

Emailing tutors

Course-specificmaterials online

Posting questionsOnline to tutors

Web CT

Using social networkssuch as Facebook asa formal part of thecourse

Submittingassignmentsonline

Using podcasts

Making podcasts

Making wikis

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Great Expectations (JISC Ipsos MORI, 2008)

Use Second Life

Contact tutor

Submit essays

Social Networking

Scholarly websites

Non-digitalresources Online library

resources

Discuss coursework

Online course info

University portal

Course specific materials

% Students using approach regularly

Use

fuln

ess

(Sca

le 1

-4)

0 20 40 60 80 1001

2

3

4

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Learners adapt to gain their qualification“The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. …Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary”.

(Melville, 2009)

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Little demand for Web 2.0 from learner or teacher roles – some resistance

"By the standards of e-university marketing consultants, I had done everything wrong … I had conducted all the lectures and tutorials, working way over workload ... I did not record my lectures in any form. I did not even use PowerPoint. If students missed a session, there was no way for them to 'catch up'. I was inflexible, disciplined and demanding ... I transgressed all the dogmatic rules for flexibility established by educational managers…”

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…

…Yet the students stood and cheered at the end.”

(Brabazon, 2007, p217)

Academic teachers and learners are exploring

technologies …

… independently, in their own ways

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Opening up – learning commons

• Understanding that courses are more than their lectures and notes

• Learning reconceived:– Social– Facilitated, not

transmitted– Mostly informal– Experiences

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Participatory learning

“… virtual communities where they share ideas, comment on one another’s projects, and plan, design, implement, advance, or simply discuss their practices, goals, and ideas together.”

(Davidson & Goldberg 2009) Goldsmiths Design students independently raised money for their end-of-year show with a line of accessories and a vast community on Facebook.

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Mobile or ‘untethered’ learning

• Independence of time and place; “a meshing of schedules” (Downes 2008)

• “…instead of delivering content to the student, they can require the student to go out and get it – or even better, to go out and create it.” (Downes 2008)

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Liquid course reader

• A proposed project in Art, Design and Media• To involve students in negotiating and curating

their own course reader– Open access– Web-based– Innovatively designed– Negotiated face-to-face and also online– Guided by academic teachers

• Example– http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/New+Cultural+Studies:

+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader

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Goldsmiths Library on our VLE

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Winkball – made in Goldsmiths

http://www.winkball.com/walls/Press_Officer/Goldsmiths_Open_Day

Challenges(i.e. headaches)for institutions

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Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (2008-9)

• Balancing / integrating Web 2.0 and institutional VLE – Managing risks

• Should tutors be on Facebook?• Online collaboration• Involving non-academic service (e.g. Libraries)• Electronic portfolios • Accommodating personal devices

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Assessment and standards

“as more and more of a person’s life becomes available online, the need for certification will diminish, as people acquire reputations of their own … Where certification is granted, people presenting certification without having acquired a reputation for work in the community will be viewed with suspicion.”

(Downes, 2008)

Google’s PageRank technology as mass peer review (Boyle 2009)

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Internet sites as learning institutions

“To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education. To miss how much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the foundations of learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self-destructive.”

(Davidson and Goldberg 2009)

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Learners cannot replace teachers

• The Web is no Oracle; students still find it hard to– Construct effective searches– Critically analyse - make sense of - the results– Create, synthesise

• Rowlands et al (2008) debunked the idea of a fundamentally different ‘Google Generation’– Learners don’t tend to understand how the Web ‘works’

• The main difference is today’s proliferation of information sources– Universities don’t have to transmit information any more,

we can help students make sense of what is out there.

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Scaffolding learning today

"The aim of this process is to give students - and citizens - the ability to move text into diverse contexts, and observe how meanings change … Critical literacy remains an intervention, signaling more than a decoding of text or a compliant reading of an ideologue’s rantings. The aim is to create cycles of reflection. Operational literacy – encoding and decoding – is a cultural practice of reproduction. Critical literacy requires the production of argument, interpretation, critique and analysis.”

(Brabazon, 2007, pp29-30)

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Questions

• Is it appropriate for institutions to expect to insert learning into social environments?

• What do higher education institutions have to offer which isn’t readily available on the Web?

• How do we envisage teachers evolving their roles?

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References

• Boyle, J., 2008. The public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, Available at: http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf.

• Brabazon, T., 2007. The university of Google. Education in a post-information age. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.• Davidson, C. & Goldberg, D., 2009. The future of learning institutions in a digital age. Available at:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf.• Downes, S., 2008. The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On. Available at:

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html [Accessed May 15, 2009].• Glenaffric Ltd, 2008. HEFCE : Publications : Research and evaluation reports : 2008 : Review of the 2005 HEFCE

Strategy for e-Learning. Available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2008/rd20_08/ [Accessed September 16, 2009].

• Goldsmiths Sociology Department, 2007. Goldsmiths Sociology Department Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy and Action Plan 2008/9 - 2011/12. Available at: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/learning-teaching/deptstrategy-sociology.pdf.

• Goldsmiths, University of London, 2007. Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy for Goldsmiths, University of London. Available at: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/learning-teaching/LTAcontext1.php [Accessed September 16, 2009].

• Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2009. HEFCE : Publications : 2009 : 2009/12 : Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology - A revised approach to HEFCE's strategy for e-learning. Available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_12/ [Accessed September 14, 2009].

• Johnson, L., Levine, A. and Smith R., 2009. Horizon Report. Available from: http://www.nmc.org/horizon• JISC Ipsos MORI (2008) Great expectations of ICT: How Higher Education institutions are measuring up. Available

from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/greatexpectations.aspx.• Melville, D., 2009. Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World : JISC. Available at:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/heweb2.aspx#downloads [Accessed September 18, 2009].• Rowlands, I. et al., 2008. The Google generation: the information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Available at:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf.• Wesch, M (2007) A vision of students today. Video. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o