When 'good enough' is actually 'best'

At Cardiff we've had a long-running 'pilot' of persistent group chat (PGC). Chris Graves has been instrumental in this. PGC is like a chat room but a history is kept in the room of previous conversations so the experience is in between synchronous and asynchronous. There is also an element of presence awareness.

We've used the free Pidgin software to access XMPP 'rooms'

Yesterday a colleague was telling me about a time when they had spoken about the use of persistent group chat for tutorials at a conference for Welsh Further Education staff. Another colleague was explaining how they had found that holding tutorials in Second Life helped students to express themselves. If education is fundamentally conversational then conversations are useful to that end. However if education is fundamentally about collaboration (I think Andy Blunden makes this point but need to read more!) then evidently you need to be building something together, a conversation can certainly be supportive of that, wherever/however it happens but talking will only get you so far.
Our PGC advocate explained how their live demo did not start well when they were unable to connect with the student that they'd planned to. However, coincidentally, a colleague was online and doing a tutorial at the time. All agreed to help with the live demo and the audience watched as the live conversation continued. As the remote tutor was signing off, literally just triggered by the text displayed on the screen, members of the audience at the presentation instinctively voiced their goodbyes. Some of them then caught themselves doing that and felt daft realising that they were waving at some text on a screen. This demonstrated very much how vivid the experience of humble text-based communication can be, especially synchronous or near-synchronous.
Where the academic practices of the given discipline or field are primarily text-based, that is really where the focus should be, around developing confidence, style and sophistication (even epistemic fluency!) with that mode of communication. When 'voice-to-voice', it is easy to enter into almost a therapeutic relationship with students and talk with them and to them for hours, whereby they may indeed reveal all manner of interesting details and walk away having had a lovely time. But that is very different to developing writing skills by practising them. Writing is very difficult. Focusing on writing, even deliberately limiting students to writing, may not be very glamorous but it cuts right to the beating heart of an apprenticeship in knowledge work. Second Life, second best IMHO.

Contextualising information fluency

It was time again to deliver my 'collaboration lecture' morning. I blogged about this previously in July 2011 in terms of the activity I set students upon as part of it. This time I went in with a discussion about digital literacies still buzzing around my mind. Joe was probing about the ways in which, for example, presentations, happen in clinical areas, giving the 'digital' practice a compelling context that students could see themselves participating in when joining the workforce. Conveniently, the students were just back off placement, returning for the final theory block of their second year - they were chatty, especially with each other!
The module assessment requires them to work in groups towards a summative group presentation (which has 10% of the marks awarded by their peers for their contributions towards the groupwork). In order to build a case for learning about and through collaboration I decided to ask them what had they seen of presentations, broadly defined, out in practice areas. Out of 80 or so students, I had about four or five responses. Here is a flavour:

• Mufti-Disciplinary Team meetings, where the patient's notes and scans support case reviews.
• A doctor leading a session for patients about their condition.
• A nurse, leading a small group teaching session

That last example was the only one featuring a nurse actually doing the presenting. So I called upon the fact that nurses have a professional commitment to the continuing development of themselves and those around them. They could expect to be responsible for the practice-based learning of their own students one day. More than that, on qualification and registration, all nurses are duty-bound to act as 'Stage 1 Mentors', meeting the requirements set for that role by the national regulatory body, the NMC, "you must facilitate students and others to develop their competence" and that could well imply the development or use of an online resource.
In another context, it is a real possibility that they would deliver a conference presentation at some point in the future. I tell the students that working alone is 'easy'. You can be as lazy about the way you work as you like on your own. Once you involve others in a collaboration, it becomes vital that they make some key decisions about how they are going to work together. Part of that must include how the group will curate artifacts of the collaboration (agreed search strategies, articles found, summaries compiled, ideas noted, the presentation itself, etc.) and communication, including discussion, either face-to-face or online. Of course, these methods are useful when working alone but collaboration opens up the potential for a richer, perhaps riskier learning experience.
So the students get some ideas about how to manage the artifacts of collaboration, but little or nothing about the act of parleying with the knowledge acquired or presented by them or their collaborators. This is where epistemic fluency comes in, a key transferable skill - but a rare and shy 'animal'. Goodyear et al only capture a glimpse of it in their study... If it is so scarce, is it too difficult, too ambitious to expect to be able to conceptualise and present to students (or staff, come to that) as something really vital? And yet, have the students really got the most out of collaborative learning projects without actively trying to leverage the opportunity to maximise gains in epistemic fluency?

Goodyear P, Ellis R, Brew A and Sachs J (2007) The development of epistemic fluency: Learning to think for a living. In: Transforming a university: The scholarship of teaching and learning in practice. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2115

Flavours of graduateness

I've been thinking about 'epistemic fluency' for quite a while now. Then, a similar concept popped up in a parallel session at NLC2012 I was privileged to chair. Richard Walker from York was talking about 'Blended PBL' (this is the link but it'll break when they move the proceedings over to the archive). Richard refers to Fox and MacKeogh's 2003 '16 categories of cognitive thinking' as informing the coding of his data. It was interesting though that Fox and MacKeogh merely refer back to, more or less, the same source as Peter Goodyear, i.e. Stellan Ohlsson (1995).
Then I was reading Brad Mehlenbacher's book and it occurred to me (eventually) that his concept of 'Rhetoric Design', which was forcefully argued for as needing to take a central place in the design of learning opportunities in higher education. However, Brad does not go back to Ohlsson or Collins (as Goodyear does). His background is in rhetoric so it's natural for him to refer, in page 179, to folk like Bahri and Petraglia (2003) who, 'explicitly connect cognitive science with rhetorical theory, defining "rhetorical intelligence" as "the cognitive abilities required for inquiry, and interpretation with a view to pursuing argument and change.' See also Spinuzzi (2006), who, after being quoted saying, 'knowledge workers need to become strong rhetors...', Brad adds (p182):

Central to the business of formal instruction is a rhetorical design perspective where learners come to understand ways of knowing (inquiring, analyzing, interpreting, synthesizing, etc.) and articulating through shared discourse sophisticated arguments within particularized disciplines of knowledge. 

I wonder how many others have made a case for a similar approach separately. That's two so far...


However, I think there's something to say about rhetoric compared with epistemic fluency. Brad deals with the familiar slur on rhetoric, that it is something of a 'dirty word' in common parlance, because of the potential to lapse into mere sophistry. Brad defends rhetoric, rightly in my view, as a vital skill for members of higher education institutions. However, I still have worries that a focus on rhetoric leans towards a focus on the external or performed knowledge, rather than the implicit metacognitive emphasis that I feel is carried by epistemic fluency as a concept.

Clay, S. (2006). What Do We Need to Teach About Knowledge Work? ( No. 060925-1). White Paper. Austin TX: Digital Writing and Research Lab, The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved from http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/research/what-do-we-need-teach-about-knowledge-work
Fox, S.,. & MacKeogh, K.. (2003). Can eLearning Promote Higher-order Learning Without Tutor Overload? Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning 22, no. 2: 121-134.
Ohlsson, S. (1995) Learning to do and learning to understand: a lesson and challenge for
cognitive modeling, in P. Reimann & H.Spada (Ed) Learning in Humans and Machines:
towards an interdisciplinary learning science (Pergamon, London).
Petraglia, J., & Bahri, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects for Rhetoric Education. State University of New York Press.

Epistemic what?

This is the response you'll likely get if you voice 'epistemic fluency' as an aspirational outcome for students in higher education... unless you've looked at Peter Goodyear's work on it. Maria Zenios recently published a paper in J-CAL which extended...

Ohlsson's (1995) list of epistemic tasks to include activities such as reasoning, negotiating, comparing, exploring, clarifying meanings, and offering new perspectives. (p9)

Back at the office, we were discussing how a proposed workload metric could account for 'corridor conversations', having been chatting over some key/current issues.
We're looking at developing a new curriculum and I waved a copy of Maria's paper around in the hope of getting a chance to advertise epistemic fluency. Another issue was a complaint about the behaviour of a group of students in a session where they would learn a practical clinical skill. I wasnt that familiar with it so youtubed to locate a few examples. The tutor immediately started to critique the video I'd found. I suggested that this was exactly the activity that we would want students engaging in. One nice thing about video is that they include cultural settings and artifacts, like uniforms, experienced/expert staff: exactly the conditions that students face and have to challenge when they enter the clinical area. I challenged my colleague to come up with an 'epistemic activity' that framed the way that students would search for, find, evaluate and share those videos, supporting their learning of the clinical skill. It's the first time I'd really seen clinical skills as something wider than merely teaching a person to perform a physical task, and the first time I'd made such a concrete connection between epistemic fluency and learning a primarily physical skill.

Zenios, M. (2011). Epistemic activities and collaborative learning: towards an analytical model for studying knowledge construction in networked learning settings. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00394.x 

IT Heuristics

Here is a list of IT Heuristics. I'm sure I collected and wrote these down somewhere before but anyway.... this batch is (mostly) taken from my chapter in the rather expensive Social Information Technology book. But I may add a couple more in here, as they come to me... let me know if you think of any more.
These are the kinds of things that serve experienced IT users on a daily basis, once they've got over the various sets of inhibitions (hatred of IT, etc.) and inhibitors (access to working IT, a job or some other imperative that makes them use IT on a daily basis, etc.) that prevented them acquiring these heuristics all along.

1. Throw the bone.
2. Lock up the lions or they will eat you.
3. Double-check your belt. The monkey probably stole your keys.
   After that, you're on your own initiative, right?
4. Work out your support network: who can help you best with what?
5. Learn about “backing up” and versioning: delete nothing, version it instead. This is done for you with the likes of googledocs or dropbox.
6. Error messages: Try and act on their advice but if you dont understand what to do, guess, and learn from what happens next.
7. If something goes wrong, don’t blame yourself – its usually the computer’s fault.
8. If something doesn’t work or is taking too long, be pragmatic, find another way – there usually is one.
9. In design, simplicity is genius: ICT allows you to be creative but that may just waste time and/or obstruct your message.
10. If you forget how to do something, 'google it' or use a program’s help system to remind yourself.
11. A key function of computers is that they are good at storing, managing and searching for information. What are the implications of this? Here's one: don't spend ages hunting for a file or sentence, the computer knows where it is - get the computer to search for you.
12. ICT is made up of files: learning to manage files is key.
13. Typing is still an important skill: Use a “learn to type” program to gain efficiency and confidence.
14. Copy and paste: it works between applications although Paste Special, unformatted text is useful to avoid carrying over the formatting.
15. Become familiar with these 4 shortcuts (there are more): WindowsKey+e (Windows Explorer)or WindowsKey+d (show desktop), Ctrl+c (copy) Ctrl+v (paste).
16. Right click to access task specific functions (e.g. open link in new browser).
17. ICT can not be trusted.
18. Everything is owned by someone (beware of copyright)
19. Never use the space bar to align text – use tabs, indents or a table instead. Find out about these from the help system.
20. Use heading styles in Word (enables table of contents, document map, etc.)

There are probably a few more, but that's quite enough to be going on with. I identified this as a major flaw in attempts to get students doing networked learning. If they can't or won't use IT, they will not get very far with networked learning. In 2001, the Guidelines authors assume that the mere passage of time will soon negate any problems of engagement and access. In 2010, that assumption seems as strong as ever in my corner of higher education. We have to crack this to move these people on, and the usual tick-box approach to teaching IT skills will not cut it. ECDL, or something like it, may be an option, if students of it are fully engaged, but, as a qualification, it's soon reduced to 'learning to the test'. Organisations can be just as results-focussed, and the learning opportunities they implement suffer as a result. We must 'promote connections of meaningful IT use in the minds and lives' of learners. It is suggested that just such an heuristic-level approach may get them off on a better footing than sitting confused in an IT lab and, when they leave, forgetting everything they learned inside it just minutes before.

abbreviations - a golden opportunity

So the new arrivals and returners are mostly up and running. Each time a new BN cohort starts I try to 'promote connections' by creating a small number of discussion lists in Blackboard. This year there are three: 'General support, feedback and collaboration'; 'Profiles' and 'Set Rep'. During induction sessions I encourage students to use them by:
1. Describing how the forums are different to facebook (no-one yet has succeeded in getting all the students into a single facebook group)
2. Reading out a really useful discussion that took place some years ago about student placements.
3. Encouraging students to 'subscribe' to the forums so that they get email alerts when a new message is posted.
4. Letting go, telling them that the forums have great potential but that this will only be realised if they participate meaningfully.
After some initial buzz, the lists tend to quieten down somewhat. But I had reason to hope that some lights might have come on when a student posted up a list of common nursing abbreviations for the general good, adding that the order they were listed in made sense to them and if anyone wanted to contribute some more, they'd be welcome.
This started alarm bells ringing for me because threaded discussion is a poor tool for accumulating knowledge. Threads get lost over time and only one person can add to the original list. So I posted the abbreviations into a wiki page. This wiki has been up for years, in a place where all the students on this programme can access it, but none of them really 'get' what it's for, in spite of my attempts to seed it with useful suggestions. I've had about fifteen 'views' of this new abbreviations page now so I'm hoping it'll at least plant the idea in a few heads.
I believe that this kind of opportunism could be at least as effective, 'pound for pound', for promoting networked learning (as an element of their nascent epistemic fluency) amongst students as anything else I could say or do.