buddy, can you spare a paradigm?

this is another one of those sessions that i started writing copious notes about...and then realised that the recording is available. d'oh! i have a feeling that this will lose a lot if i try to translate/write it up - and i can fully recommend spending an hour or so listening to the recording. this is the 'publish or perish?' session, which you can get to from here.

i took an awful lot away from this session, and i'm not sure that i've had time to process it all yet. but just thinking about the ways in which information sharing and (informal) publication of research is shifting is mind boggling. the speaker talked about a number of things, including:

• social vs static learning - is 'static' presentation (ie, traditional research journals) really an adequate or appropriate medium for sharing this?
• the emergence of 'millennial scholars' - students with teaching roles and staff with learning roles are blurring the boundaries between staff/student skills [and an interesting aside on the perceived barriers to technology engagement: students concerned about using technology for learning, eg, "we know how to use technology, but not how to do anything with it"] and how it's difficult for people to publish and share their work in appropriate, dynamic and accepted peer-review ways

there were three fairly cool applications or sites mentioned that may help research/publication. in no particular order [although the first one is probably my favourite]:

• academic intersections - part of the apple learning initiative - a way of publishing media rich, peer-reviewed research. it looks good, and with a much quicker turn around than traditional journals
• diigo - looks like a useful and usable version of refworks :)
• zotero - a firefox extension [for those of you who are foxy fans] that bills itself as a 'next-generation research tool'

i think i particularly enjoyed this session as our presentation was about open/web2.0-ey data generation methods, so it's interesting to think about the evolving research cycle as it goes full-circle from data to peer-review publication. and the presenter was funny, too, which always helps.

wrong, wrong, right!

nearly caught up with writing up sessions now!

this one (wrong, wrong, right! creating an academic digital storytelling program that works) was ace, and looked at a program at ohio state. they started off by sharing a digital story that a lecturer had created - which was a great way of getting people hooked in to the power of the medium.

they've had a digital storytelling program in operation for a while, and the focus of the session was on 6 revisions they've made to make it more successful. the 6 elements are:

• development of a 3-day intensive workshop
• a scriptwriting pre-workshop activity
• shift from personal stories to academic-focussed [pretty much a move from academics making stories, to academic stories created by academic and non-academic staff]
• outreach to new 'unexpected' participants [including those staff who have completed the course helping their colleagues to develop skills]
• application process [interested staff have to submit their ideas and give an idea of what they hope to achieve
• screenings of completed stories a couple of weeks after the course had finished

you can look at additional resources and examples of the stories here.

a few things (possibly) worth highlighting from the session:

• students from multimedia courses help with hands on teaching of techniques
• during the workshop, they maintain a check list of tasks - tracking activities that individual have completed, and still need to complete
• the selectivity/application process helps participants focus on their reasons for applying - eg, what story would you like to share?
• they set a 400 word limit for the summary of the story - one key point of the course is how to use images, sounds, etc, to convey meaning rather than relying on text
• academics are using the resources for teaching and learning as well as dissemination of research
• after couple of weeks break to allow fine tuning of the stories they hold a screening to show the end products - and they usually get 50/60 people attending to find out more

they did (rather cruelly) make us think during the session, and asked us to talk about existing groups on-campus who might find digital stories a useful way of sharing information. i thought maybe something like the integrated e-learning course would be interesting - so to embed some similar techniques into an extended version of the course, and get participants to tell stories about the things that have inspired them (if that's not too strong a word) to revisit their curriculum and/or take the course in the first place.

any more for any more?

chair envy

well, i survived our session, which was about the twitter/informal learning project we ran last year. the session format was interesting: the session lasted 2 hours in total, and we were in a medium sized room set up in 5 herman miller kitted out 'zones' - 3 of them had tables and chairs (the same sort as the ones that are in the cafe area in the adsetts extension), with the remaining 2 having these lovely things (cream and orange swirly patterns shouldn't work, but it does!):

so there were 3 presentations going on simultaneously for the first hour - each presenter sat at one of the tables, and gave a 20 minute overview of their projects; at the end of each 20 minutes, a zen like gong - actually, this zen like gong:sounded meaning that attendees should move on to the next presentation. over the course of an hour, people were supposed to circulate around the room and listen to the presentations, then use the final hour to talk informally to each other and to the presenters.

it kind of worked, and we got a lot of interest in the project - mainly people think that we're very cool for trying twitter as a data generation tool, and are thinking about how they can steal our ideas for their own work. of course, the difficulty with semi-structured sessions is that not everyone plays ball - so some people dipped in and out of all the presentations in the first 20 minutes, and one of the presenters in particular didn't seem too bothered about sticking to the 20 minute limit. but it was nice and informal, which was good, and people were asking questions as the session went along - i do prefer that less structured approach (who'd have thought it - me liking something lacking in structure! will wonders never cease...).

for the non-tweeters reading this, i'm sure louise can fill you in on the strange coincidence of following someone at the conference tweeting snippets from our presentation which was about tweeting. this has been a good conference for tweeting (if you're into that kind of thing, of course) and it's been nice to meet up with people i only vaguely know through twitter.

and for no apparent reason, here's a picture of a giant peanut cookie - mmm mmmmm!

michael wesch keynote

you can see the recording of this session (and other featured sessions) here - if you get chance, i'd recommend checking it out. most of you will probably be familiar with the videos from his cultural ethnography students - even so, if you haven't heard him talk before, it's nice to hear his own spin on the way things have developed, and the fact that he seems to be quite overwhelmed by all the attendion. also, check out the digital ethnography netvibes page for a sense of the dynamics and busy-ness of what's going on in his classes.

one of the things i find interesting about this conference is how there are lots of parallels between individual sessions - but that in the majority of cases, they're presented with enough of a spin on them, and with enough substance behind them, that it doesn't get boring or cliched (yet!). for example the idea that media literacy is as much about instilling a sense of social responsibility as it is about giving students the skills to use new tools and technologies has been quite strong in some sessions, and this one was no exception.

there are also some interesting comparisons between the current 'revolution' in education and the changes in the 1960s; and a look at how current criticisms of teaching new media literacy (it's pandering to students, abandoning traditional literacy, difficult to implement) can also be turned around as criticisms of the 'back to basics' movement.

well worth checking out, anyway.

multimedia scholarship

ok, i really enjoyed this session. i had a few (well, alot of) qualms about scalability, but will try to keep a lid on these while looking at the messages behind it. there were also lots of very big words and worthy ideas which (not for the first time) resulted in me feeling really really stupid. but i'll try to keep a lid on this, etc, etc, etc.

the session looked at a multimedia scholarship course. it's an add-on, 2 credit (!) course open to students from any discipline or level, and the intention is to show students how to use cinematic imagery and techniques effectively to convey message. the speakers were at pains to point out that it isn't a film-making course - instead it's about visual textual imagery (or something) and visual theory. so the aim is to let students explore new techniques, help them find a topic that is relevant to their own field of study, and to present it in an engaging way. the course is also designed to be participatory - to encourage students to recognise their responsibilities in joining in scholarly conversations, and to present complex ideas in ways that will hook non-experts in and allow them to explore further. it's not about simplifying the content or the message, but about layering it so that people can engage with succinct ideas to begin with.

from what i can gather, the stimulus for the course is a film about iraqi doctors (itself the product of an earlier project at the university) and some of the difficulties they face. students view this, explore the things that strike them about it, or that they can relate to, and then take this idea further. so, for example, a journalism student looked at some of the parallels between the landscape in the film and his own experiences growing up in a very remote part of california, and used this to explore areas of commonality. another student (and i'm taking a wild guess that she was studying political science) picked up on the very damaging effects of sanctions, and used this to explore the unintended consequences due to unavailability of vital medical equipment. and so on.

why were they doing this? well, one of the speakers used the lovely phrase that "documentary is the new black" :) there was very clearly a strong social responsibility message running through the course, and part of the course was examining the strengths of certain technologies for getting ideas out into the world (eg, when would you present something in a wiki vs promoting it via a blog?) and about initiating and shaping conversations out in the real world [as an aside, there's been quite a lot of buzz around real-world vs acadaemia in almost all the sessions here]. they did help students initiate conversations within established networks or through existing contacts - bringing the external voice into the work seemed to enhance students' views of the value they were bringing through their own work.

there was a lot of focus on exploring re-use and mashups using existing sites and resources such as remix america as a starting point and as a stimulus. they also made use of kaltura and reelsurfer for developing the projects - though it was also about giving students the confidence to use new and emerging tools as they appeared (michael wesch made an interesting point in his keynote earlier that things are changing so fast that nobody can really be classed as a digital native - we're all learning together).

they showed a couple of examples of the final products and showed how the image-based artefacts linked very closely with text-based materials too - so you end up with a very rounded product. i did like the idea of having a common stimulus (ie, the film) and then encouraging students to find their own angle; and developing confidence with new techniques and/or tools as part of the process of creating something concrete.

the scalability thing really does bother me though. they were dealing with very small numbers (13 in the last cohort) and meeting for 2 hours a week. some students reported spending 45 hours of self-managed time developing the ideas and products - which for a 2 credit module seems insane, but it was voluntary so they were obviously getting a lot out of it. there must be less intensive ways of doing the same thing - and i get the impression that the next phase of their work will involve looking at how they could roll the course out in different ways.

(2 of the slightly intimidating words they used were punctum and studium - which got me thinking that an uxbridge dictionary definition of punctum could be a rebellious stomach)

opening keynote

been struggling to write this up as although the speaker was very engaging, the topic of the session - virtual worlds - is one that just leaves me cold. i'm relieved to know (via a combination of talking to people here, tweeting, and e-mail) that i'm not alone in this - so will try to articulate my problem with it (and not get caught up in the but-they-just-look-horrible-and-nerdy gut reaction that i always have).

the speaker began by stating that virtual worlds are naturally occurring online learning environments, and that by harnessing them we can start to engage students with the sorts of debate and problem solving activities that they carry out within these environments. at this point, i was open to being convinced that there was something in this - she showed examples of the strategies that players use within things like world of warcraft, and how they come together to gather, analyse and debate data, but that all they really think they're doing is trying to cheat the game. there was lots of analysis of the processes of scientific enquiry, and about the social networks that people develop - she talked about how virtual worlds act as 'the new golf' - ie, as a culturally significant way of developing and gelling networks. she also talked about how analysis of the discussion forums demonstrate that the vast majority of posts tend to be about social knowledge construction; and compared the sort of mobilisation of neighbour-networks used by the obama campaign (yes, every session yesterday made reference to the election in some way. apparently it's quite significant?). anyway, back to nerdual virtual worlds - these points are very well and good...except...

it seems to me that the sorts of behaviours she was talking about are developed within a very particular forum, with a very particular purpose - it's an unforced leisure pursuit that people do for fun. do those sorts of behaviours really transfer out of the context? are the behaviours mirrored in other interactions, other pursuits in the real world, let alone in education? and if we try to replicate these behaviours and processes with a different aim, will it really achieve the same end - when it stops being something that's done for leisure and becomes something with a very definite purpose and for a specific reason, won't that change the dynamics?

there was a question about whether the sorts of behaviours discussed were representative of all players (inhabitants? i'm not sure what to call people who use/live in virtual worlds?), and also about whether it's the game or the discussion of the game which is the most important element.

hmmm, that doesn't quite sum up everything i wanted to say, but my battery is running low, and i need to go and set up for my session. maybe return to it later - in the meantime, any comments, questions or counter arguments are more than welcome :)

in the absence of having anything coherent/intelligent to say

i've decided to continue living by the old picture-says-a-thousand-words adage - so if i just keep flooding the blog with pictures, hopefully no-one will notice that i haven't got around to writing the sessions up properly yet.

so, here are a couple from the launch of the horizon report, firstly to prove that anyone who's anyone thinks that it's a key report to get hold of:

you can check out the horizon report at http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/2009-horizon-report-released so i won't repeat anything that you can pick up more articulately from elsewhere. one interesting thing that did come out was the notion of a 'device ecology' of mobile, wireless devices, and the question about whether we're living in a world of diminishing privacy (there was some mention of people taking/receiving phone calls in the, erm, bathroom, which i won't go into here - the very thought of it! - though i do recall someone who was temporarily based somewhere on level 7 using the toilets as a place to make private calls. i never did get what that was about.).

on a more serious note, one of the key technologies highlighted in the horizon report is the semantic web. now then, i used to struggle with understanding what the heck this semantic web lark was all about, but i think i've finally cracked it. i wouldn't expect any of you to be able to grasp the intricacies of it, so have tried to re-create it visually for you as an equation - while claiming 2 tony hart bonus points for myself, hopefully this will help you begin to understand: