Mobent

Hot on the heels of mobilage, you could be forgiven for thinking I actually like making up new words for the sake of it but sometimes it does help my thinking... keeping it on track... So, here's another one... mobent... as in, to 'have a mobent'. This word attempts to describe the familiar experience of that moment when you are entangled, perhaps just staring, into your phone because it's not working as expected. I suppose a colloquial example would be 'buffer face', as in the celebrated adverts for a mobile network featuring Kevin Bacon. I'll save you any attempt to link networked learning and 'six degrees of separation'... Here's the back-story to mobent which I have been writing up today:

"Heidegger refers to two modes of relation between dasein and the tools at their disposal. His classic example is of a shoemaker’s hammer in use. Most of the time, the shoemaker is unaware of the hammer, it is ‘ready-to-hand’, zuhanden. If the hammer breaks, the ‘spell’ is also broken and the shoemaker becomes aware of the hammer in a different way, reflecting on it as an object ‘present-at-hand’, vorhanden. This dichotomy is sharply challenged when applied to a phone:

• "The extensive and extending range of uses to which the phone may be put and ongoing innovation in mobile technologies and app development together with a society-wide growing awareness of the significance of mobile means that the phone can increasingly be incurred in almost any activity, regardless of whether that activity is shared on social media using the phone.
• "The extended stack of technologies upon which use relies for its fulmination. For example, mobile phones are designed to accommodate variations in Internet connectivity. This is dependent on many factors, such access to effective infrastructure which is itself in constant need of maintenance, subject to ‘legacy effects’ (additional work required to sustain aging technologies, borrowed from ecology (Cuddington, 2011)), and the pressures of responding to industry-wide innovation.
• "Industry has a commercial interest in encouraging greater uptake and use of their products and Internet connectivity enables smartphone companies to gather user data and use this to inform and target marketing communications into every handset.
• "Phone notification systems are complex, with many apps offering reasons and means to alert users and thence hold their attention.

"At the least, we should note the phone’s greater propensity for oscillation, albeit of varying severity, between zuhanden and vorhanden. In another reference to Actor Network Theory, dasein can easily become entangled in this oscillation, to the extent that vorhanden becomes the ‘ordinary everyday’, as if the hammer were continually asserting itself into consciousness. To capture this idea of mobile entanglement, I have coined the blend word mobent which also chimes with the experience of hiatus such moments incur. I want to also make a cultural reference in the sense that ‘having a moment’ is a private affair between two individuals characterised by a raised, likely piqued, emotion. "

I'll get around to explaining myself at a better sound level now I've got a USB-C OTG cable for my phone. My next appearance is at the SOCSI education seminar 1pm 17/1/2018.

Cuddington, Kim. ‘Legacy Effects: The Persistent Impact of Ecological Interactions’. Biological Theory 6, no. 3 (1 September 2011): 203–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-012-0027-5.

Mobilage

I've been trying to prioritise my thesis... not easy part-time. It does force you to go back in and out of the same thing - a curse but also a crude, if not cruel, way of revisiting and reinitiating myself with this project - I'm trying to do phenomenology afterall... Yesterday I was mangled into doing some more to it having offered to give a presentation of my methods for my school at the monthly lunchtime seminar. One of the comments afterwards suggested that I needed to get the concept/phenomenon that I've coined 'out there'... so, here it is - make of it what you will. The audio is quiet - apologies for that!

On unsophisticated document dumps

It is said that staff do not use expensive, sophisticated learning technologies in sophisticated ways. Repeated audits over many years show that the virtual learning environment (VLE) is used as a 'document dump' (noting pejorative metaphor). This view trivialises situated use of 'documents'. I just came across an example of how documents are used by students in my data and thought I would share here. Very simply, a student mentioned how they were about to access a learning task guideline in the VLE to check if they were following it properly in preparation for working on it the following day. I'll just make two points, neither with any claims to 'originality', before I go back to my coding:1. The 'document' is framing the plans of the student, not just while they are accessing it but when they are not using the VLE at all, shaping their planned engagement in learning activity, as well as afterwards. The document itself and the words in it constitute the substantial learning technology, the one that is having a deep effect on the students' trajectory, their life as a learner. I think I'm being sensitised to this 'historical' angle by Gadamer...
2. A lot of hot air and political capital is invested in the quest to make patent and profoundly effective use of learning technologies. It's a common enough rhetoric that frames academics as resisting opportunities to make the most of an institution's considerable investment in software licenses, hardware, support etc. With their specialist knowledge of the potential affordances of technology, learning technologists do learning itself potential harm by endorsing the 'academic as Luddite' line. This overlooks the need to attend to what the student is actually doing in terms of learning. As Goodyear and Carvalho (2014), when learning tasks are set for students, there is a 'loose coupling' between task and activity where the student interprets and engages with the task requirements. 'Teaching-as-design' should attain greater significance in people's minds than any given learning technology per se. A well-constructed reading list can be a powerful 'learning technology' but enacting this sort of view does not make headline-grabbing demands on an institution's infrastructure and attention. Indeed, it potentially dissolves the need for whole layers of management and support... which makes me wonder why higher education took this technologistic road in the first place...

Fishbowl Seminar Instructions

Fishbowl seminars. I dont know who thought them up but I like them. I keep having to cook up a description of them, find images of the set-up etc. So I thought I'd put it here, partly to make things easy for myself - not because it necessarily has anything to do with networked learning... except that the first place I encountered it was in the Aalborg NLC.
So I've made this image (yes I am colourblind). 

And these are the instructions for my setting - tweak to suit :)

This is a way of a managing a group conversation. It needs at enough people to form a decent circle, plus three. So 10 is a good number but I have seen it done successfully with many more than this (see https://flic.kr/p/c8iyWj for example).

Preparation:

You will need to rearrange the room so that there is a circle of chairs around three chairs in the middle. In smaller fishbowl seminars, it's good to avoid someone sitting directly behind someone else, especially the 'main speaker'. 

You will need about 20 sheets of A4 paper and lots of post-it notes (the number of members, squared).

Divide the time available by the number of members to find out how long each round will be. Allow for a couple of minutes for 'handover'. 

Method:

Three people are in the middle of a circle of chairs. One is for the 'presenter', the other is a tutor, and  another 3rd person - the latter two kick off with questions.

If anyone wants to speak, they have to take one of the seats in the middle. They do this by rising from their seat and tapping the shoulder of the tutor or 3rd person to replace them in the middle. 

 

Notes: 

It is good to give the people sitting around the centre something significant to do so that they are actively listening and contributing even if they do not enter the centre. For example,

1. Each round, appoint a different person to keep the time. They should announce when 2 minutes are left on the current round. 
2. Ensure that each person around the outside has at least one postit note. They are asked to write some brief (it can only be brief!), anonymised feedback on the postit. Sharing email addresses can happen a different way! At the end of a round, the postits for that round are stuck to a single a4 sheet.

Probably you have suggestions which could enhance the above, if so, please share :)