Twisted intentions

Virtuous, human-centered, intentions can quickly be co-opted by systems and hierarchies to more instrumental ends. It is common to hear of organisations populated by ‘good people’ that nevertheless perpetuate negative or oppressive practices because the institution, or broader environment, demands it. 

This twist is something I explored at OER19 through the notion of ‘Openness as a performance of surplus’. Open Educational Practices are generally thought of as an antidote to the traditional hierarchical gate-keeping of knowledge and opportunity. They are seen as a way of using digital networks to counter ‘standard’ institutional modes.This is all to the good but only institutions with enough surplus can ‘generously’ be open at scale. If we consider the big players in Open Education then it’s perhaps no surprise that they tend to be high status and wealthy institutions (I’m thinking of the institutions behind some of the major MOOC platforms for example). 

This is not to say that there aren’t good intentions or effects in ‘massive’ or institutional-level approaches to openness, it’s more a call to be alert to the risk that these intentions can get subsumed by agendas around status and profile – they can quickly be drawn back into the business ideology they (in theory) attempt to circumvent.  

The Big Moka approach to generosity

In the OER19 session I explored how generosity can hide poor intentions through the story of Ongka’s Big Moka, an ethnographic film from the 70s I was shown as an undergrad*. The film follows Ongka, a leader within the Kawelka people in Papua New Guinea, as he attempts to collect together enough pigs and other items of value to put on a successful Moka event. In the ceremony Ongka gifts all that he has amassed to the ‘big man’ of a neighbouring community. Ongka’s aim is to give gifts of a greater value than he received in the last Moka and thus demonstrate, through generosity, that he is the ‘bigger man’. As Ongka says when he is successful: 

“Now that I have given you these things, I have won.
I have knocked you down by giving so much.”

Ongka

I worry that this is how the values of Open Educational Practice are twisted when institutionalised and scaled. A sincere generosity becomes warped into a performance of surplus or power which risks perpetuating digital forms of colonialism.

Who cares?

The danger of these twists is something myself and Bonnie Stewart want to explore in the context of ‘Care’ at OER20. In the workshop we are asking if open forms of pedagogy can help to scale care. The workshop is shaped by our concern that care is usually framed through the development of relationships – it’s a social process. Given this, it’s important to consider how care might work in massified education systems.

“On all fronts within higher ed the responsibility to respond with care converges on front-line teaching staff who may be oxymoronically required to offer emotional labour within ambivalent or uncaring structures, creating pedagogical commitments which may not be sustainable, or may foster feelings of inadequacy (Bryant, Lanclos, and White, 2019). What do we achieve if only those who are privileged enough to have few students, or an abundance of time, are in an actual position to invest in an ethic of care?”

OER20 workshop submission

Technology doesn’t care

Many of us are concerned that technology is being proposed as the ‘solution’ to care-at-scale. With terms such as ‘personalisation’ and ‘predictive analytics’ often being used in a way which implies that the tech can take the strain as long as we feed it enough data. This is why the subject of care-at-scale within education is so important to discuss. Especially where it risks becoming a technologically supported institutionalised asset which we have to then build safe, human-centred, spaces of authentic care outside of (or to hide from it). 

I think it’s fair to say that myself and Bonnie are not convinced that open pedagogy can help to scale care, or even if ‘scaling care’ is a valid idea. What we are sure of is that this is a discussion that needs to take place, especially in education systems where, despite the promise of technology, the burden of care is often with overworked members of staff in precarious roles.


*Part of Granada Television’s Disappearing World Series which ran from 1969-1993. It was first aired in the UK on 11 December 1974
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ongka%27s_Big_Moka
I studied on a ‘Time-Based Media’ course which was developed from an ethnographic film making course. As such, key academics were Anthropologists interested in how digital technology opened up new modes of storytelling and narrative. It was an excellent course.

Bryant, P., Lanclos, D. and White, D. (2019). Precarious voices: The shared hopes and dreams of those teaching and supporting learning in digital contexts . https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/20694/precarious%20voices.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

Love of Learning society

An online society open to all dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the love of learning.

“For the LoL”

This is an idea that was developed with the help of Simon Thomson at the Jisc Creativity Workshop run by Lawrie Phipps.

CC - https://www.flickr.com/photos/pollyann/329186325
CC – https://www.flickr.com/photos/pollyann/329186325

The LoLs 10 Tenets:

  1. Not for profit
  2. No credentials or qualifications given or required
  3. 100% online
  4. $5 lecture fee
  5. All lectures happen live with no limit on the number of students
  6. All lectures to be funded in a ‘kickstarter’ style with visible speaker fee
  7. Anyone can run a lecture as an expert
  8. 50% of lecture running time to be Q&A/discussion with questions chosen by the students
  9. All sessions released as a recording under an open, noncommercial license
  10. All income (after expert fee and admin) to go to educational charities that work to widen participation and make knowledge freely available

The following to be decided by the expert for each lecture:

  • Subject focus
  • Lecture length (must be a prime number of minutes between 7 and 29)
  • Speaker fee, which will be visible to the potential students (the fee will either be waived or a prime number)

LoLs student (sLoL) journey:

  1. Become a member of the society by signing up to the LoLs platform.
  2. Seek out an interesting  lecture and pledge $5. (It will be clear how close the lecture is to the minimum funding level needed. Beyond this point all income goes to charity. All lectures have a set start time.)
  3. If they make a pledge early (before the minimum funding has been reached) they can submit a question to be asked during the Q&A portion of the lecture. If they are in later than this then they can vote potential question up and down. The number of questions used will be proportional to the length of the lecture.
  4. They might explore some of the pre-lecture links if any have been submitted by the expert. They can also check the lecture hashtag to get involved in pre-lecture discussion and connect with others who have pledged.
  5. If the minimum funding level is reached they receive a reminder of the lecture time and an access code of some sort.
  6. The lecture runs in a Google Hangouts style platform with a video feed from the expert, a hashtag driven back channel and a text chat area. More confident experts could use whiteboards and polls etc. All lectures are supported by a facilitator to assist with the tech and to moderate. Facilitators can work for free or be paid in $5 lecture tokens. Experts will be encouraged to respond to the backchannel and text chat as much as possible.
  7. At exactly half-time the lecture moves into Q&A mode with the facilitator stepping through the top questions as voted for by participants. If there is time left they can respond to questions that have emerged from the backchannel and text chat.
  8. Exactly on time the platform shuts down the lecture with extreme prejudice (automatically 🙂
  9. The video feed is then placed on YouTube or a similar channel under an open, non-commercial license.
  10. Discussion can continue on the hashtag.
  11. Participants can rate the lecture and the expert within limited LoLs criteria.

LoLs expert (eLoL) journey:

  1. Become a member of the society by signing up to the LoLs platform.
  2. Experts must have participated in at least two lectures before having the option to create their own lecture and have completed a LoLs expert tutorial.
  3. Create a lecture by submitting the following:
    • Subject area, title, blurb etc
    • Level (novice, intermediate, advanced)
    • Associated material and links
    • Pick a speaker fee for themselves
    • Pick a lecture length and time
    • Pick a charity or charities (from a LoLs list) that any income over the minimum will go to
  4. The expert can mark what they think are good questions with an expert tag during the voting process but can’t create questions.
  5. The expert might join in the hashtag based discussion.
  6. They may also promote the lecture via their networks to ensure it reaches the minimum funding level.
  7. If the funding level is reached they are given an expert code of some sort to access the lecture space which they can visit as much as they want to set-up.
  8. The lecture runs (all they need is a webcam and headset). Experts and facilitators arrive 30 minutes before the start time to ensure the tech is working smoothly.
  9. After the lecture the expert can chose to join in with any additional hashtag based discussion. The expert or the facilitator may put a link to the recording in appropriate Wikipedia articles.

So that’s about it in simple terms. It’s based on a number of principles:

  • People like to be involved in live events even if this is less convenient than watching a recording. (See ‘Eventedness‘)
  • The format is honest about paying the experts if they want a fee. The $5 format also negates the need for advertising (depending on what platforms are used) or sponsorship.
  • People like to influence events and have input – in this case via submitting or voting on questions or via the live discussion. 
  • Most people can relate to ‘classic’ nomenclature such as ‘lecture’, ‘expert’ and ‘student’. This is a deliberate choice and has no bearing on the style of pedagogy experts chose.  
  • It allows for huge mainstream lectures and niche ones designed for no more than a few students.
  • People like to lead up to and away from live events – in this case via the lecture hashtag.
  • ‘Big names’ can chose a big fee or munificence.
  • in keeping with the LoL principle only lectures that people are truly interested in will run.
  • Popular lectures are very likely to bring in income for the chosen charities as there is minimal (if any) cost as student numbers increase.
  • People tend to be more invested in something they have paid for even if the fee is minimal (and incidentally a prime number).
  • The format encourages both the expert and keen students to promote the lecture.
  • No knowledge is withheld as all lectures are freely available as recordings.
  • Anyone can get involved in hashtag discussions.

I’d estimate that a LoLs pilot could initially be developed by stitching together a number of free-to-use platforms. The difficult part is managing the way the money flows around. I suspect a bespoke pilot platform could be put together for less than the cost of developing the materials for a mainstream MOOC.

So, who’s interested? 🙂

P.S. If this got off the ground then I’d form a parallel organisation called the Love of Learning institute ( LoLi – pronounced lolly). This would also be not for profit and would handle any commercial interests in LoLs content. For example a number of LoLs lectures under a given theme could be built into a curriculum structure and accredited. The LoLi protects the tenants of the LoLs and would hopefully feed more money to educational charities.

Visitors and Residents mapping process: the video

This is a video of the mapping process which we first piloted at Educause last year. It’s designed to help you explore and reflect upon how you engage with the digital environment and then investigate how your students/users/staff engage with what you provide. Feel free to use the video to help plan your own mapping session and let me know how you get on. The video is CC licensed so it’s ok to embed it into your work/courses directly with an attribution if that’s helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EyH-JZWtoI&width=450&height=320

Firstly, I should apologise for my appalling handwriting in the video. I hope that the gesturing opportunities of the whiteboard outweigh the lack of legibility. As a back-up I have included the two maps I draw in the video in digital form at the end of this post.

This video has been created for ‘The Challenges of Residency’ project I’m piloting as academic lead for the Higher Education Academy. The project is exploring the way Resident forms of practice might differ across disciplines. A larger call for that project will be coming out in the autumn, so if you are interested and UK based keep an eye out for it.

As mentioned in the video the mapping process is an output of the Jisc funded ‘Digital Visitors and Residents’ project which is a collaboration between Jisc, Oxford, OCLC and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. The Jisc project has run the mapping process a number of times face-to-face in the US and the UK, with design sessions planned for a library focused ‘infokit’ on V&R being run at SUNYLA and ALA. The video will hopefully become part of that infokit, recontexualised to shift the emphasis toward information seeking.

In conjunction with this we are going to use the mapping process in a course we are developing with Jisc Netskills based around V&R. The course is designed to help higher education teaching practitioners explore and possibly incorporate Resident forms of practice into their work.

In the video I also make a passing reference to some work facilitated by Alan Cann at Leicester who used the V&R continuum to map the preferred modes of engagement of a complete cohort of students.

The process itself is in three parts:

  1. Map your personal engagement with the digital environment
    This is a good way to tune-in to the issues and will make visible how Visitor or Resident you generally are in different contexts.
  2. Map how you think your students/users/staff engage with what you provide
    This can include your practice online (teaching, support, information provision etc) or the services you provide in terms of platforms (VLEs, catalogues etc). In most cases your practice and the service you provide will be interwoven.
  3. Gather a small group of students/users/staff and ask them to map how they engage with what you provide

Depending on your role you may find large overlaps between maps 1 and 2. The overall aim here is to compare maps 2 and 3 to explore where expectations are being met or are being miss-interpreted. As I mention in the video discussions around the process tend to move from a technology focus to the underlying motivations and attitudes which inform the modes of engagement employed online. I think this is the strength of the process as it helps to avoid the technology-as-solution approach and instead focuses on practice and what it means in a range of contexts or online ‘places’.

For more information on Visitors and Residents:

  • The original video outlining the V&R idea and continuum
  • Our paper on Visitors and Residents for First Monday
  • The progress report of the Digital Visitors and Residents project (pdf)

Or you can contact me at david.white at conted.ox.ac.uk

More legible versions of the maps I create in the video:

My personal map (with a little more detail):

Personal map

My map of how I imagine students engage with what I provide online

Student map

The Learning Black Market

Last week I gave a talk about what I call the Learning Black Market at a Guardian seminar on the uses of Social Media for learning and teaching in higher education. It’s something that I have seen emerging from the data we are collecting for the Visitors and Residents project and from interviewing students for our study on the use of Open Educational Resources. In simple terms students personal use of the internet is generally very effective for their education but they are nervous that their practices are not valid and don’t reveal them to their tutors. The messages or lack of messages from educational institutions on these practices is generating a learning black market which masks the sheer scale of these new modes of engagement.

Scott Room at the Guardian
Printing press outside our Guardian seminar room

The Visitors and Residents project is capturing student’s motivations to engage with the web for learning in as broad a manner as possible. To guide our understanding of the interviews with students in the UK and the US we have added a vertical axis (see below) to the Visitor and Resident continuum. The Personal/Institutional axis allows us to plot student’s online learning activity and accepts that this activity is not bounded by resources and opportunities provided directly by the institution they are studying at. As the project progresses we hope to plot students trajectory through this digital landscape. It should also be possible to use this map as a tool to reflect on institutional approaches to digital literacy.

The learning black market exists largely in the Personal area of the map. Our data from the Transitional education-stage (Late stage secondary school + first year undergraduate) is indicating that learning activity in this area has two main elements:

Vistors and Residents map

1.    Emergency collaboration

Many of the students we have interviewed wait until the night before coursework is due then IM their friends in Facebook to confirm what they have been asked to do and to check they are taking the right approach. If they can’t find their friends in Facebook they text them to either ask for clarification or to encourage them to log-in to Facebook. There is an expectation that someone from their class will be in Facebook when they need them which is one of the reasons that coursework can be left to the last minute. I suspect that Facebook IM is used extensively for homework as it’s convenient and immediate. It’s also private and a very low risk way of collaborating with a fellow student. The extent to which coursework is actually completed via this method rather than just clarified is difficult to assess. There is a lack of understanding amongst students as to what constitutes plagiarism in this scenario and a consequential wariness around discussing this type of practice. The line between collaboration and plagiarism is not easy to define and I believe students would benefit from this area being openly discussed. This practice is also an interesting reminder that much of the activity in Social Media is not visible. Wall postings and twitter streams only represent a portion of the activity in these spaces meaning that platforms such as Facebook are effective at facilitating Visitor style approaches.

2.    G.W.R.

The majority of students activity is information seeking, this could be via another person but is usually a more direct engagement with ‘content’. What appears to be a common practice (we are still in the process of analysing our data) is this very simple process.

Google > Wikipedia > References

A search on Google to help complete an assignment commonly returns a Wikipedia article. As we know Wikipedia articles are pitched at an ideal level and length to get a handle on a new subject which is something our Transitional students have to do a lot. The problem is that most of the students in the Transitional education stage we have spoken to in the US and the UK have been told not to use Wikipedia and so keep this practice a secret. A simple way to do this without losing the value of the platform is to cite the references attached to the Wikipedia article rather than the article itself.  This appears to be a very successful strategy for coursework but can be done without any substantive learning taking place.

Learning Black MarketThere appear to be two main reasons that students have been told not to use Wikipedia. The usual, culturally acceptable, reason is that it’s not accurate because ‘anyone can edit it’. It’s difficult to support this claim and as Jimmy Wales said recently the decline in Wikipedia editing activity is partly because many entries are now so accurate that only key experts could add to them. There are examples of what I would call knowledge vandalism but these tend to be so farcical that they are easily identified. Even so the students are wary of Wikipedia despite rarely finding it lacking when they use it:

“…a lot of the times teachers say don’t use .com or don’t use Wikipedia, they like hate when we use Wikipedia.  But Wikipedia is always right, so I always use that. “

The second and more telling reason which is rarely expressed is because it’s too convenient. One of the US students asked a tutor outright why they didn’t like Wikipedia and got this response:

“The problem with Wikipedia is it’s too easy.  You can go to Wikipedia, you can get an answer, you don’t actually learn anything, you just get an answer. ”

The tutor then goes on to say that the process of learning is about collating and critiquing multiple sources not simply taking in a correct answer i.e. the path you take in forming a new understanding is as important as the resultant knowledge. The very valid ‘show your workings’ standpoint.

Student at laptopThis is fundamental to the debate around technology and learning and the real issue at stake. Describing the web or Wikipedia as ‘inaccurate’ or negating the use of sources that have been written by multiple ‘non-expert’ authors has little impact on the actual practice of students (or the success of those practices). The debate should be around how we evolve educational processes to take advantage of or to account for these new forms.  We cannot continue to teach the literacies that have been the mainstay of the educational system in their current form because the web smashes traditional paths to understanding.

There are good examples of the ways in which the web can be used to facilitate learning, new approaches which accept the situation has fundamentally changed and that learning is now less likely to be the result of successful information seeking. Many of these methods involve a more Resident approach to negotiating understanding and use classic scholarly notions of discourse to encourage learning over and above the now largely redundant retention of knowledge.  Unfortunately it appears that many practitioners are turning a blind eye to these issues and are stigmatising emerging learning practices by simply banning talk of platforms such as Wikipedia.

“They don’t fail you but you get ridiculed in front of everyone for sourcing Wikipedia.”

This is generating the learning black market in which is it all too easy to simulate understanding for coursework and formal assessments. Worse still, it is a market in which genuine learning can take place but is not being recognised because resources and practices are not seen as valid and therefore do not become visible to the formal education system. Students have told us that they learn from Wikipedia but also skim read the textbook to cover their backs in case they are asked a direct question…

Whatever the case it is clear that students need guidance on how to engage with the web for their learning and would greatly benefit from clearer messages around what it means to learn in the twenty-first century and how their practices may or may not intersect with the formal educational frameworks they find themselves in.

 

Images:
Scott Room – David White – CC attribution
Visitors and Residents map – CC attribution
Learning Black Market – Gilderic http://www.flickr.com/photos/lanier67/5253473681
Student at laptop – cindiann http://www.flickr.com/photos/trucolorsfly/438068232/

Disappearing digital resources

One of the most striking aspects of our JISC funded Open-Educational-Resources Impact study was the extent to which using digital resources has become embedded in teaching practice. Digital resources are ‘disappearing into use’ as they become part of the fabric of higher education.

We interviewed strategists, academics and students to find out how they found and used digital resources. It wasn’t surprising to find that students were Googling for anything they could get their hands on but the extent to which academics are doing this as well was unexpected. The difference between the groups was that staff have the expertise required to critically evaluate what they find while the students are nervous about waiting-time using resources which might prove to be off-topic. They are also uncertain of how to cite non-traditional resources or if they should admit to using them as all. This is a good example of where digital literacy and traditional research skills are both essential.

But what about licensing? Well, those whose practice was highly visible on the web and therefore closely tied to the reputation of their institution were keen to use openly licensed materials. E.g. an online distance elearning team or groups that make modules which are rereleased out onto the web. Those in course or programme teams were less focused on licensing because their practice is largely private – within the VLE, in the lecture theatre etc. In day-to-day teaching the technicalities of reuse come second to the potential of a resource to make the student’s learning experience richer.

The OER Impact project analysed the link between the value of use and its impact in teaching and learning. There is a full research report and a shorter ‘accessible’ report available for download from JISC. Or you can watch the short video below to get an overview of our findings.

The video is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY)

OER Impact project team-

Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning:
Mr David White
Ms Marion Manton

Learning Technologies Group:
Dr Elizabeth Masterman
Ms Joanna Wild