Tama’s eLearning Blog

As readers of my main blog will know, I spent Friday at the Australian Blogging Conference at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane. It was a fabulous, stimulating and intellectually rich conference and a great end to Tama’s-month-o-conferencing. I was the facilitator for the ‘Blogging and Education’ session so thought, in the spirit of the conference, I’d better get my notes up here:

Blogs and Education

The session ran for two hours, with a good balance between K-12 educators and those of us from the Higher Ed sector. After a brief (well, brief for me) introduction, the session was loosely structured around three main questions…

Why blog in education?

The Pros

* Allowing students to connect with community, family and an intellectual arena beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
* While most educational institutions have some sort of Learning Management System (such as Blackboard), the architecture of these systems tends to be inward-focusing, getting students thinking that everything they need is inside the walls of the black box. Blogging, by contrast, is outwardly-focused and keeps students focused on the broader (potential) public or audience they may be writing for. Thus, if we’re teaching life-long skills, blogs are often better platforms, due to their openness, than other closed systems.
* Blogs can meaningfully extend the educational experience, giving students a space to engage, write and communicate beyond the tutorial room. The uptake of this opportunity will often be uneven, but it’s often the less confident students who flourish in blogged communication.
* in certain contexts, blogs can become ’student property’ once a particular unit of course is over, thus allowing students to continue to build and use their blogs (this clearly differs depending on the context and aim of an educational blog, and on the age of the participants).
* Blogging as an ethos is about sharing knowledge, building ties and acknowledging the input of others - all key characteristics of good pedagogy!

The Cons

* Having purchased the (usually quite expensive) Learning Management System, the majority of schools and universities invest most of the training, support and infrastructure costs to maintain the hardware and use of this system. Blogging is thus often done using peripheral tools which educators must teach themselves to use rather than getting central support.
* Many institutions desire to contain and control everything that students are producing, both in terms of protecting student privacy and in terms of protecting institutional intellectual property or even just keeping work away from outside scrutiny. While this can be overcome, it’s often IT and central policies which have to be convinced and converted to make the use of blogs (and other web 2.0 tools) feasible.
* At times education in Australia is still focused on the idea of a digital divide - where the aim is to get every student access to a computer - whereas the meaningful discussion needs, really, to shift to the idea of the participation gap - where the focus needs to be on ensuring all students are familiar with network and digital literacies, thus being able the meaningfully utilise social software and other tools, which is a lot more than just having occasional access to the internet.
* The mythos of the digital natives tends to scare many educators because it suggests that many younger people (dubbed digital natives as they’ve never know a world without the internet) will always have more familiarity than their teachers (who are dubbed digital immigrants since the web appeared at some point during their lifetime) and thus teachers are worried about not being knowledgeable in these areas.

Examples and reflections?

K-12 Examples

* Year one ‘Little Gems’ blog - Amanda Rablin demonstrated this outstanding blog by year one students (!) which not only broadened their classroom experience, but also showed a level of reflexivity well beyond the primary school level!
* PodKids Australia - From a year 4/5 class in a WA country town who have used podcasting (and their blog) to communicate with their parents and the wider world in a sensible, thoughtful and safe manner.

Higher Ed Examples

* Self.Net Tutorial (Monday 2pm) blog - An example of a blog used to expand the engagement of students in the tutorial process, and extend their potential interaction beyond the confines of the classroom.
* iGeneration Honours Unit blogs - A full university unit where the entire curriculum is online (collaboratively constructed by the unit coordinator and the students) as well as all of the students work - which include critical evaluations of blogs and podcasts as the major assessment item - and the week-by-week tutorials in the course.
* Communication Studies 1101 link blog - the least exciting of all the examples, but nevertheless useful, this blog is simply a series of links to useful material for students in a first-year Communication Studies course at UWA.

(All three Higher Ed examples use Creative Commons licenses to make legally explicit the intention that students’ content can be build-upon by others, on the condition of citation. I was particularly pleased to see both Elliott Bledscoe and Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia in this session!)

Missing from these examples was the best use of blogging as per blogging as a participatory cultural form which is a course-length blog maintained across the three to five years of a degree. One good example I’ve found now that the session is over is Sarah Demicoli’s Looking Up? blog; notably Sarah is a student in Adrian Miles’ Labsome Honours cohort.

Should academics blog?

This question ended up being divided into two parts: should K-12 teachers blog, and should academics (and doctoral students) blog? The first question proved far more complicated in that there is an expectation that teachers in the K-12 environment will share less of their personal lives with the world. The accountability that comes with being a teacher - especially from parental expectations - means it’s something of a challenge to share too much of a teacher’s life publicly, less it be seen and critiqued by parents or students. Likewise, the important line between teachers and students was one of those areas where teachers need to be especially careful when using social networks like Facebook or MySpace because ‘friending’ students might inadvertently be read as entering into a social dynamic with students which is generally something of a taboo. Some folks felt this was particularly complicated since some teachers using social networks might be less familiar with the social norms of the platforms and accidentally cross a line - or be perceived to cross a line - by accident. Sadly, excessive accountability seems to be one of the major reasons that teachers would be hesitant to blog - or at least only blog on a narrow band of topics. That said, there was still a sense that teachers would blog if they found the right reason or topic, but that the boundaries as to what other personal information would find its way online would be a very solid boundary indeed!

On the ’should academics blog?’ front, things were decidedly more optimistic. There was a strong sense that academic blogs were a rich source of information, insight and commentary and that these were often far more accessible than other forms of academic writing. I asked a particularly loaded question - should academics feel obliged to blog since in publicly funded institutions the onus is to share our thoughts, research and ideas with the public, not just a our peers via peer viewed gatekeeping - and a few people were enthused by this idea, although there were a few comments about the need to have peer review before academic ideas escape into the world. The confusion surrounding danah boyd’s MySpace/Facebook class paper, and her subsequent reflections on the process, proved a useful example. That said, the biggest boundary to academic blogging seemed to be the amount of time it might take, but most people in the session thought it was time well spent!

I should add that these notes are re-constituted from rather poorly recorded keywords during the session, so further reflections, comments and notes on this session are most definitely welcome!

The Rest of the Conference

I don’t have terribly detailed notes from the other sessions I attended (which might be a blessing since caught the red-eye from Perth the night before the conference was thus a little less than coherent in the morning sessions), but thankfully being a blogged event, there are plenty of posts about the conference worth reading. Reflections well worth reading include those from Senator Andrew Bartlett, Australia’s most web-savvy politician. Derek Barry has posted three detailed reports on the Morning Panel discussion, The Politics of Blogging session and the panel on Citizen Journalism. Mark Bahnisch, one of the Politics of Blogging facilitators, has also posted on the ’state of political blogging’ specifically for that session. Robyn Rebollo has notes from the conference which include reflections on the Legal Issues and Blogs session. Nick Hodge was one of the facilitators for the Business Blogging session and has posted both his notes and powerpoint slides. Likewise, Joanne Jacobs has some useful notes from The Future of Blogging closing session, and Kate Davis’ notes from the parallel ‘Building a Better Blog’ session are useful, too. Conference notes and reports keep emerging, so watch the blogoz tag on Technorati for more.

I should say, as well, that I was fortunate enough to catch up with a whole bunch of folk I’ve known through blogging, social networks, shared research interests and so on, but never actually met in the flesh before. It was great chatting with Brian Fitzgerald, Jessica Coates and Rachel Cobcroft, as well as Elliot Bledscoe who I met a few weeks earlier, all of whom are part of the Creative Commons Australia team, which Brian leads. Given their enthusiasm and energy, I’m sure CC Australia has a lot going on in the future, and with any luck I’ll be involved with some of the CC and Education things as they emerge. I also chatted to Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns, all of whom are blogosphere friends who its nice to see annually (or thereabouts) at conferences. Quite unexpectedly, I ran into Sarah Xu who I’ve met through local fannish events, but I hadn’t realised she’d landed in sunny BrisVegas to write her doctorate, which is creatively exploring the important question: “how can cyberfeminist practice and Web 2.0 applications be used to recode gendered representations of women on the Internet?” Sounds like a thesis worth watching!

Finally, a huge congratulations to Peter Black who put the conference together and assembled a fascinating group of people to participate in some really meaningful exchanges! Time to start planning for next year …

[Cross-posted from my main blog.]

Update: Peta Hopkins also has some notes from the Blogging in Education session, including a several things I’d forgotten we’d talked about (including ebublogs.org).

The big news of the day is that The Australian Blogging Conference, a fabulous-looking free one-day event exploring everything about blogging in Australia (including education and Creative Commons!) now has a date: Friday, 28 September 2007 in sunny Brisbane! All of the details are here. I’d write more, but I’m now running around to see if I can get myself from Perth to Brisbane for the day of the conference!

As part of UWA’s Teaching Month (which, to be honest, is “Teaching 17 Days” but that just sounded naff on flyers and banners), the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is running a group blog in which a number of academics, professional staff and at least one student are exploring the place of blogs and blogging in higher education. The blog is entitled Blogs: The New University Workspace? and so far topics that have been covered include:

• Writing and Thinking in Public
• Blogs and/as Digital Literacy?
• Multiliteracies for the digital era
• Of Students, Blogs, and Relevance

At this point, the bloggers would be absolutely delighted if anyone from the university community or beyond who has an opinion or thought about any of these topics could drop by the blog, have a read and, if you’ve time, leave a comment. We’re hoping that this can be one of those opportunities were a community of interest really does emerge!

Also, if you’re interested in following through on any of these ideas face to face, and you’re in Perth, staff and students across campus and beyond are invited to attend a Discussion Forum on Monday May 14th, from 12-2pm (including lunch) in Social Sciences Seminar room G2.08. The Forum will initially be led by those blogging in the Arts blog, but will be open to all ideas and opinions!

I hope to see you in the blog and, hopefully, face to face next Monday as well!

[Cross-posted from Tama Talk's Blogs.]

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Sue Waters who produces the Mobile Technology in TAFE podcast, which looks at different eLearning tools in Tertiary and Further Education. It was a fairly wide-ranging conversation, but the two biggest topics (and the subject of the two podcasts) were the use of Lectopia, especially in terms of podcasting, and the use of blogs and other social software (and eLearning tools) more broadly. I won’t be rude and direct-link to the media files, but you can find them here:

• How Universities are using Lectopia of Podcast Lectures [Audio] [Video (mp4 with still images)]
• Using Social Software with Students [Audio]

If you’re interested, please go and have a listen. Feedback is most welcome!

In exploring the role of participatory media forms in higher eduction, media scholar Henry Jenkins recently penned an article entitled “From YouTube to YouNiversity” for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a great read, but this passage particularly caught my attention:

Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master’s degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program’s home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.

Henry teaches at MIT, leading the Comparative Media Studies Programme, which is globally respected and watched as a high-powered hub of ideas and pratices regarding emerging (or emergent) digital media and the interactions facilitated by those media. His words about the importance of blogging for graduate students resonnate widely, suggesting that blogging and social software are here to stay in higher education and are especially important for postgraduate research students.

As the the article may disappear behind the Chronicle’s paid firewall at some point, Henry has re-posted the article in his own blog here. Go and have a read …

In the past month, two important reports have been released in the US which detail the current state of digital media literacy in both the K-12 environment and tertiary education. These reports are extremely valuable in thinking about curriculum design and about wider social, cultural and political concerns relating to digital media and technology. A quick overview …

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

Recently, the Digital Media and Learning section of the US MacArthur Foundation made the following announcement:

The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.

An an integral part of this push toward fostering and enhancing young people’s understanding and participation in digital technology and related spheres, the MacArthur Foundation colloborated with Henry Jenkins who wrote their white-paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century [PDF version].

Rather than giving the technologies centre-stage, Jenkins argues that it is extremely important to educate young people and facilitate their full potential in engaging with what he terms participatory cultures (an idea familiar to readers of this blog or to those familiar with Jenkins’ Textual Poachers or more recent Convergence Culture). A snippet from the report:

That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture. Many young people are already part of this process through:

Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

The MacArthur Foundation has launched an ambitious effort to document these activities and the roles they play in young people’s lives. We do not want to preempt or duplicate that effort here. For the moment, it is sufficient to argue that each of these activities contains opportunities for learning, creative expression, civic engagement, political empowerment, and economic advancement.

Through these various forms of participatory culture, young people are acquiring skills that will serve them well in the future. Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate. A growing body of work has focused on the value of participatory culture and its long-term impact on children’s understanding of themselves and the world around them.

The full report contains a great deal more context, detail and has the potential to act as a coherent and robust blueprint for incorporating digital media literacies into K-12 environments and the has clear implications for the tertiary sector as well. Jenkins also recently blogged “Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape” which was originally written for the white-paper but cut for length reasons. If you find the report of interest, I’d recommend checking out that post as well since it provides important context (and a useful shorthand for explaining the state of digital media literacy in the US and elsewhere).

The Horizon Report

The Horizon Report is produced by the NMC (New Media Consortium) and EduCause, two of the peak US technology and education organisations focused on higher education. The report examines the current state of technology use in the US tertiary system and signposts a number of technologies to watch and their estimated rate of implementation on a broad scale. The full report is released under a Creative Commons license [PDF version] and comes complete with a project wiki. I’d heartily recommend diving into the full report, but to give you a taste of what’s inside, here’s a sample from the executive summary:

Social Computing. The application of computer technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration, a practice known as social computing, is happening all around us. Replacing face-to-face meetings with virtual collaboration tools, working on a daily basis with colleagues a thousand miles away, or attending a conference held entirely online is no longer unusual. An interesting aspect of social computing is the development of shared taxonomies - folksonomies - that emerge organically from like-minded groups.

Personal Broadcasting. With roots in text-based media (personal websites and blogs), personal broadcasting of audio and video material is a natural outgrowth of a popular trend made possible by increasingly more capable portable tools. From podcasting to video blogging (vlogging), personal broadcasting is already impacting campuses and museum audiences significantly.

The Phones in Their Pockets. A little further out on the horizon, but rapidly approaching, the delivery of educational content and services to cell phones is just around the corner. Among the keys that will unlock the true potential of this technology are improved network speeds, Flash Lite, and video: as new features that take advantage of the capabilities of these appear in phones, barriers to delivery of educational content will vanish.

Educational Gaming. A recent surge in interest in educational gaming has led to increased research into gaming and engagement theory, the effect of using games in practice, and the structure of cooperation in gameplay. The serious implications of gaming are still unfolding, but we are not far away from seeing what games can really teach us.

Augmented Reality and Enhanced Visualization. Currently in use in disciplines such as medicine, engineering, and archaeology, these technologies for bringing large data sets to life have the potential to literally change the way we see the world by creating three-dimensional representations of abstract data.

Context-Aware Environments and Devices. Advancements in context-aware computing are giving rise to devices and rooms that respond to voice, motion, or other subtle signals. In the ultimate application of these technologies, the computing part simply disappears, leaving an environment transparently responsive to its human occupants.

Together, I think these two reports go a long way in illuminating the issues, challenges and vast potential related to technology, media and education in the coming years. Both of these reports are focused on the US, but the issues raised are equally relevant to the Australian context. Perhaps the uptake of certain technologies is further away, but in my opinion the issues raised should be addressed now across all levels of education, both K-12 and tertiary, to ensure that digital literacy is at the core of the Australian student experience.

[Cross-posted from Ponderance.]

As James Farmer has been busy upgrading edublogs to the spiffy new full-version of Wordpress-Mu (finally at 1.0), I thought I’d take the opportunity to upgrade the look of this blog as well. Ever since I posted my wonderful graduation iPhinished iPod silhouette I’ve wanted to get around to doing a custom header, so I’ve swapped to the more dynamic Regulus theme, minimised the many links in the blogroll, created a header-image I’m happy with and with any luck will carve out a little more time to blog here in the near future.

The only thing that I couldn’t do (which is a limitation of a mulitple-blog installation like Mu) is edit the template so I could put my Creative Commons license details in the footer. However, I think the ‘Some Rights Reserved’ page-link as part of the header is a reasonable work-around for now.

Also, I realised today that four days ago, Tama’s eLearning Blog celebrated its first birthday! I should really rename this my Flexible Delivery or Mixed Mode blog, but I think I’ll stick with eLearning for now since it sums up where I was coming from in my thinking when the blog started. It’s been a fun journey so far …

A new service called Slideshare caught my attention the other day; it’s styled on YouTube, but is for sharing slideshows (specifically PowerPoint slides). It has all the tagging and comment functionality of YouTube, and lets users embed slides the way you can embed YouTube videos. It seems like a great way to share slides. Here’s an example with the slides from my iPodium presentation.

Currently you have to ask for an invitation to use the service (which is also needed to view existing slides), but I got one within 24 hours of requesting and I imagine once the service heads into the familiar beta territory access should be easier. [Via Smartmobs]

I’m back in Perth after spending most of last week at the Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences conference which was held by the Association of Internet Researchers. It was a great conference and I heard some thought-provoking papers (which I’ll write more about in a day or two when time permits). The “Participatory Pedagogies: Convergence and the Extended Blogosphere” panel I was part of when well despite James Farmer sadly being unable to contribute as originally planned. Adrian Miles and I ended up with a whole panel which actually worked pretty well since his paper, “Networked Knowledge Objects (videographic pedagogy for new knowledges)”, and mine shared a lot of ground, with my focus on podcasting and audio, and his on video more broadly. Partially to record the event, and partially to test the new Belkin TuneTalk microphone for my iPod, I’ve created an mp3 recording of my talk. I’ll be writing up the paper on which the talk was based, but as I’ll be making some changes based on feedback at the conference, that’ll probably take a little to appear. For those interested, for now feel free to listen to a recording of my talk along with the powerpoint slides …

Abstract:

The term podcasting is a combination of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’ and describes type of syndicated digital audio that results in automatically downloadable files which are playable in portable media devices, such as (but not limited to) the iPod. Podcasting has proven extremely popular in the last year and a half, with many online citizens creating their own regular online audio shows. Australian universities have been making lectures available as streaming audio for some years now, but with learners anchored to a computer in order to listen. Podcasting has also allowed students to take lectures and other audio wherever they go, but this ‘coursecasting’ or ‘profcasting’ model still relies on the top-down structure of lectures as academic content for student’s to consume. However, in The University of Western Australia’s Communication Studies course, in an honours-level unit ‘iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture’ the tables have been turned somewhat and students are also podcasting in the tertiary setting. For their major assignments, students were asked to create an innovative audio podcast which engaged with the notion of participatory culture and the results ranged from a ‘pod play’ in the style 1930s RKO radio theatre to an alternative commentary for a Simpsons episode focusing on consumer culture and intertextuality. These podcasts are also cultural output themselves – they will remain downloadable indefinitely, allowing students to use them in future ePortfolios and also providing a resource (or entertainment) for others. Moreover, the same system which enables the creation of streaming and podcasted lectures, the iLecture or Lectopia system, is also been used to host and deliver student podcasts; in effect, students are stepping up to their own iPodium. With student’s having an opportunity utilise the iPodium, student podcasting acts as something of a leveling process, allowing two-way street for teaching and learning.

Extrapolating from the iGeneration experience, this paper argues that student podcasting can be usefully situated as part of a broader range of emerging participatory pedagogies wherein the socially-emergent tools and modes of participatory culture allow a more meaningful traffic between tertiary settings and the broader community. For students, podcasting can be far more than a content-delivery mechanism; it can be part of their ongoing participation in knowledge communities in both tertiary settings and beyond. Student podcasting also levels the playing field in relation to ideas of content-creation and can be part of the processes of helping learners develop the tools of cultural interaction, not just consumption, which are increasingly an essential part of digital literacy. This paper also focuses on student podcasting as something which can easily take place without reliance on institutional infrastructures. As such, student podcasting blurs the boundaries of formal educational settings and points to digitally enabled learning and teaching modes which link educational and social spaces via a nexus of creation, discussion and interaction enabled by digital tools and technologies.

The presentation: mp3 recording (with many other formats available); and the powerpoint slides .

The podcast and powerpoint slides are hosted by the Internet Archive using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Feedback is most welcome!

[Cross-posted from Ponderance.]

I’ve just watched “Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog” which is a pithy 15-minute introduction to a number of the issues relating to citizen journalism, blogs and vlogging. It was created by a team at Cambridge Community Television for a class project on documentary making, by the following team: Jason Crow, Shaun Clarke, Darcie Deangelo, Amy Mertl, Buz Owen, Jason Ong, Matt Landry, and Mayana Leocadio. They’ve released their doco using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so others are free to view it so long as they give credit and don’t make money off the screening. Having recently given a lecture on blogging and citizen journalism, I think this is a great resource. Take a look.

I’m also impressed with the general structure, services and layout of BlipTV who are hosting the doco file in various formats. The creators of the doco actually used BlipTV to post online early recordings and a rough-cut of their piece, which is really useful for others to see how the process of editing a doco works. A great teaching tool and a nice little doco. [Via SmartMobs] [Cross-posted from Ponderance]