“clmooc TAGS” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
For almost ten years now, whenever I’ve been involved in an activity that involves Twitter conversations I’ve headed over to TAGS and set up a copy to collate tweets and produce visualisations like the one above. So earlier this month, as I was tweeting to the #ETMooc2 hashtag, I was devastated to realise that it was now broken (I knew it was going to be, but I didn’t want to believe that it had happened). I’m too upset to explain the reasons why, and anyway Alan has already done that, I just wanted to say how sad I am that TAGS has gone. My PhD thesis about serendipitous learning was shaped by my ability to collect #CLMooc tweets easily and see what the community conversations looked like, my research into lurkers with Aras, AK and Len used TAGS and similar apps.
So a huge thanks to Martin for all the TAGS. It was great while it lasted.
An interesting paragraph in a book I am reading at the moment (Lurking, by Joanne McNeil). We are used to talking about learners as lurkers, but here’s another perspective. What images do we invoke when we think about the researcher as lurker?
The picture of researcher as outsider – as a profiteer swooping in to steal content and to cherry pick meaning to fit their own agenda – was one that gave me pause during my own PhD (I am sure some of you remember the story of the ‘researchers’ who came across a Google Doc that some of us were using to start writing a journal article and used it in a conference presentation without asking or attributing – the affront we felt at that unethical behaviour has stayed with me). I chose participatory research as my methodology, and ultimately ended up writing an autoethnography because I wanted to try to allow my community to have a voice in what I was doing, and to make it clear that what I was saying was my own interpretation.
Of course Twitter is public, and the ToS make it clear that researchers are permitted to use tweets without attribution, but imo that is not the full story – there are also ethical considerations (I say some things about this in my PhD thesis if anyone is interested).
I’m not sure where I am going with this yet – as always I am writing to find out what I am thinking.
On Monday I passed my PhD viva. This thesis has been a long time cooking – I began on Jan 7th 2013, took a year out due to ill health, had two changes of thesis title and lost three supervisors along the way. At times I thought I would never finish, that my research was not serious enough, that I was not cut out to be an academic. I’ve been through redundancy and two job changes, I’ve got married and moved house. And, despite a pandemic, I finished. Somehow, over the last few months, I have cobbled together enough words of sufficient quality to be able to call myself a doctor. I have a few small revisions to make (including far too many typos!), and then I can work out what I want to do with all this research.
But for now, as I want to thank the community that made it possible. Thank you CLMOOC for all the fun and inspiration. As soon as my revisions are approved I’ll share a copy of my thesis with anyone who is interested.
Nearly there. This week I spoke to my supervisor and my Graduate School and I have sent off my “intention to submit” by March 31st 2021. It’s almost done- I just need to finish the final chapters and give it a thorough edit.
It’s been a long journey – as I scrawled down on a scrap of paper this week, my thesis has gone through changes from looking at collaborative learning, through to thinking about peer interactions and ending with a rich picture of participatory learning.
I’ll leave the thanks for the acknowledgements, but for now I will give a shout out for my loyal little research assistant, who keeps me going through it all.
Today I gave a presentation for the #SocMedHE20 conference. It was a conference with a difference as it was all online – presenters were asked to submit up to 5 tweets which we then scheduled to be tweeted from the conference account. Here’s mine – partly done to nudge myself to write a paper about it (the conference will have a special issue of the Journal of Social Media for Learning). Here’s what I said as a warm up:
10th today we have @NomadWarMachine talking about Who cares what we do? The importance of an audience for open learners #SocMedHE20
— Social Media for Learning in Higher Education (@SocMedHE) December 17, 2020
Identities on social media are "deliberately constructed performances" (Pearson). "All the world's a stage" and we can choose how we present ourselves. But we are still vulnerable, and care what others think of us @NomadWarMachine#SocMedHE20
— Social Media for Learning in Higher Education (@SocMedHE) December 17, 2020
When we work in the open, we assume there is an audience, Knowing others are watching helps to keep us accountable. We hope that others care what we do @NomadWarMachine#SocMedHE20
— Social Media for Learning in Higher Education (@SocMedHE) December 17, 2020
On the internet, no-one can hear you scream. Posting out to social media can be scary: I bare my soul when I share my creations. Thank you for caring. Lurkers liking my posts give me confidence in what I do. @NomadWarMachine#SocMedHE20
— Social Media for Learning in Higher Education (@SocMedHE) December 17, 2020
The more I post, the more my confidence grows. I feel connected to others in my network. I care, you care, we all care. This is how we build a community. @NomadWarMachine#SocMedHE20
— Social Media for Learning in Higher Education (@SocMedHE) December 17, 2020
— Social Media for Learning in Higher Education (@SocMedHE) December 17, 2020
My basic idea is that, at least for those of us who practice and share out in the open, learning can be seen as a performance – in a similar way to the thought that teaching is a performance (the sage on the stage). I’ll be using #CLMOOC and #DS106 to illustrate my answer.
In November, I took part in 4 weeks of a 5-week MOOC offered by the University of Edinburgh via the edX platform, Data Ethics, AI and Responsible Innovation. I had various difficulties with the course itself, culminating in a barrier to my continuing.
You can read my notes on the course, including a personal reflection, at the blog I kept on the MOOC.
“Community…..” flickr photo by Kamaljith shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I’ve been involved in open learning for several years now. It started almost by accident, when some guy called Dave ran a crazy learning experience that we called rhizo14, carried on serendipitously into a sister experience called CLMOOC, and gradually became a part of my daily ritual as I started participating in Daily Creates. Much of what happens in these open, online experiences can appear to be random and unstructured, but beneath and behind them is a set of core principles and values and a tried and tested design. Those can be broadly summed up as belonging to an educational framework called connected learning. That’s helped me to learn some tricks to help all of us (staff and students) to teach and learn online. They’re at the end of this post, for those wanting to skip straight to the punchline.
Connected learning is a work in progress. It begins from an (intuitively plausible, I think) set of beliefs in the value of learning that is interest-driven, peer-supported and academically relevant, and harnesses the power of social media in order to make these types of learning better integrated into learners’ lives while attempting to make it accessible to anyone who wants to participate (equity is a core value). As such, it is platform and technology agnostic, although the values of open education are central to what practitioners do.
At the heart of connected learning is the thought that we live, nowadays, in a participatory culture. Sometimes people describe this as “Web 2.0”, but participatory culture is actually a richer concept than that. Henry Jenkins contrasts the concept of “interactivity”, which he describes as a relationship between a customer and a software company and a property of some social media platforms, and “participation” which is a relationship between people (which can be facilitated by use of social media). This means that we can’t take student engagement for granted, we have to explicitly design it into our courses. For those familiar with the terminology, I might use this distinction to explain the differences between xMOOCs and cMOOCs. I say this to note a difference, and not to imply that cMOOCs are always superior – knowledge acquisition and participation in learning are not, imo, contradictory concepts – each has its place. Anna Sfard makes this point better than I could.
To an outsider, learning in the open can look unstructured and random, and those new to this type of learning and teaching can feel overwhelmed, out of their depth, unsure of their own abilities, frustrated, scared or even angry. This goes for both learners (often called participants) and educators (often called facilitators). This is why it is so important to design these experiences carefully, and to think carefully about the types of support that can be provided. I think, in the interesting times that lie ahead of us, we are all going to need all the support we can get – both to keep ourselves going, and to help our learners. Teaching and learning online can be an isolated experience, as those of us who do it know only too well.
So how can all of this help us now? First of all I should stress that I’m not suggesting that everybody immediately abandons whatever they are doing and redesign their courses so that they are connected learning experiences – I’m not trying to make more work for anyone. What I am going to tell you about is some tried and tested strategies that have helped the community that I am a part of to emerge and continue. I’m not pretending to have invented any of these strategies either – just to have used or experienced them for myself.
Remember that your learners will be in many different time zones, some of which will have better connectivity than others. People who can’t participate are likely to feel very left out and uncared for. Think about asynchronous activities as well as synchronous ones.
Some learners will have state of the art technology, others … won’t. Think about designing activities/resources that can load on different devices.
Realise that there is no such thing as a digital native: some (staff and students) will find it easy to adapt to this new way of teaching and learning others … won’t. We can’t predict who will and won’t adapt. Think about how to support staff and students who just can’t work out how to log in/submit/engage.
Don’t rely on one platform or one mode of delivery. Systems could be overloaded, or not available for a particular device, or not available in a geographical area (YouTube content, for example, can be restricted by geographical area). Yes, this could mean duplicating important content/messages in order to ensure that everyone who needs can access them.
Don’t force anyone to use a particular platform (other than official, institutionally supported ones). Your students might well have ethical objections to using a particular one. Respect those. Never require anyone to sign up to a (non-institutionally supported/“official”) platform in order to participate. Data rights are human rights.
Tap into the altruism of others. Nurture a community that helps each other (both staff and students). Model this yourself, watch for others doing it and publicly thank them. Think about the types of roles that might be needed to build a learning community: as well as you (the teacher), you might look for particularly active and/or knowledgeable students to become mentors.
Structure informal activities that people can engage in if they want. These don’t have to take a lot of time to design – you might ask students to share something unique about where they are living, to tell others about their hobbies, pets, or family. You could ask them to do this by sharing a small image, a link to a website, or a forum post. These help participants to feel that they belong and can build a sense of community over time.
And, finally, reach out to others around you. Use your networks and don’t be afraid of saying that you are finding something hard. My initial experiences of all of this was a baptism of fire. Those who watch me nowadays often think that I always find it easy to participate, and have always found it easy, but that’s not true. In fact, I nearly dropped out of an early connected learning experience (CLMOOC 2015) because I was feeling lost, confused and overwhelmed. What happened next was, I realise, due to the carefully designed support structure that was in place. I shouted out into the void and someone answered. The rest, as they say, is history.
Were were you six years ago? When I asked myself that question earlier this week I realised that I was participating in the first week of rhizo14
So much has happened since then – so much that I don’t know where to start. I tried to remember who I met for the first time then and put tagged some people in a tweet:
Kevin suggested that we all write something to mark the occasion:
We could all write something up, like “this is what I have been doing/not doing since then” — a pop-up #rhizo14 reunion with no leader (just like Dave told us we didn’t need)
So here’s an open invitation – to anyone who wants – let’s have a rhizo reunion. Let us know what you’ve done since rhizo14, or 15, or whenever it was that you first encountered this networked learning that we do. Tag it #rhizo, if you like, and share it with us.
