Doing hanfod.NL things

With apologies for not putting anything new in this blog for ages - part of the reason for that is hanfod.NL kicked in and that has been quite productive. Maybe check it out...?

A Networked Learning Disposition? Round Table at NLC2020

I am looking forward very much to the online/lockdown version of the Networked Learning Conference next week. A lot more people will be able to attend now that it's gone fully online so it will be a very different experience in various ways.
I'm delighted to be hosting a 'round table' discussion on the first day from 13.30-15.45. I'm expecting a lot more people in the room but also, because there's no physical movement required to room-hop, I think people will be far more transient in their attendance - there will be drive-by's.
The topic of 'disposition' is one that has been gnawing at me for a while. The round table format should allow plenty of time for others to also chew back at it. The question I have is whether there is a disposition towards being the ideal networked learner. It relates to a previous question I framed on this blog in 2008, 'what characterises the networked learned'? Are there things about you (apart from sheer privilege!) that make you a good match for networked learning? This is not the same as learning styles although some of the trait words used there may crop up here. I've been working up a mindmap about disposition and I'm looking to my partners in next week's round table discussion to help with developing and refining ideas and implications of this for networked learning practice, design and research. The mindmap for that is embedded below - it's a wikimap so if you want to, go ahead and add some ideas. It makes sense to try and write it all up and I'm keen to acknowledge any contribution. Probably there are whole swathes of knowledge about 'disposition' I'm unaware of so even a tip-off would be appreciated. If you wish to suggest any, please go ahead and add them to the References GoogleDoc: https://bit.ly/nlc2020dispositionrefs

For a bit more context, Michael Gallagher took up the idea of 'disposition' for his paper at Zagreb's NLC2018. His paper is in the NLC archive and his blog post includes the slides. Among many excellent points, he addressed the critique of 'disposition' being deterministic: post-human perspectives of shared agency should also allow us to avoid that dead-end.
It was great to share the same session with Michael to present my paper on mobilage, originally blogged here in 2017.

NLindex

A few weeks ago, a brief exchange on twitter highlighted a difficulty common to many fields: how to enable a way in to the literature.
There are lots of ways of providing an index. Google Scholar does some of it. I don't think any of the databases cover the NL conference archive, and we might want to include other non-NLC sources anyway. We have a saying, 'he who has the vision gets the job'.
Joe used Kumu for his Knowledge Hub. Kumu allows for various ways of presenting the same information, so was preferred over CMAPS, as good as that is. Kumu's free for public maps. Anything that requires effort needs to be reasonably durable and Kumu appears to have that. It also has an CSV import, which, data cleaning notwithstanding, could save a lot of time hand-coding. There may be no way to avoid some of that.
Although in lockdown, Alice kindly sent me 3 exports from the SCHED app used in the previous 3 conferences. So, when I can get to it, this presents a viable way forward. It will still require a fair bit of data cleaning and there are some decisions to make... E.g. whether to re-host the papers, where possible. If anyone is interested to help with this project, do get in touch. There could be some bread pudding in it for you...

Networked Learning metaphors #23432: The Synapse

It seems like a classic ivory tower pursuit.... a bunch of academics coming up with metaphors for networked learning, and especially getting whimsy about it. But this was one of the memorable aspects of the conference back in May. However, as ideas, metaphors can spawn insights, hone analysis or enhance practical organisation of learning and teaching. Perhaps it is something we need to do more of...
I want to publish some work I did last year but I have lost access to a book I need to refer to. It was an expensive library acquisition from Lancaster. I guess, for a small charge, they'd send it to me again as a distance learner. But I thought I would see if I could get it at home. Apparently not. This would be best done through an inter-library loan, so I was told. This conjures up the horrible chain of events that is the British Library's secure download system. It is the information management equivalent of traveling by slow-motion train crash.
At the networked learning conference I cheekily added some bits to my presentation that were not in the 'full' paper - especially the postscript:

NLC2016 legitimising non-peripheral participation 4x3 from Mike Johnson

I think I mentioned 'chain of weak links' back in 2008. In this slide though, I've likened the network in networked learning, to a neural network, especially the aspect of neural networks that sees a weaker messages fail to arrive due to synapses. In my 'resource' example, the library has proved to be a synapse too far, for now... In competition with everything else I have going on, the added hurdle to access the resource I need, although only requiring a small further push, is crowded out. I found time to write this instead of submitting the ILL request!
For me, motivation is one of the things that strengthen the signal, allowing it to traverse synapses. Motivation is a key aspect of learning, and the intentionality which actor-network theory is said to lack, by the way.

I should just add that the other two points on this slide refer to the following:

Rubbish and link-rot

I dont like litter (thus a picture of a spring tree instead without any litter in sight for a change) and broken links are a kind of litter of the internet. 

A student kindly pointed out a link I'd created was now giving it the big '404'. This was to the Virtual Training Suite tutorial on finding online images. I have referred students to this for many years.

But, sadly, it seems that VTS ceased a while ago. I read that the resources were being parked somewhere but who really wants to use something that's growing mold before your eyes. So I headed off to find an alternative in JISC Digital Media's excellent site. Ah. Except that their funding's been pulled too it seems. Grim. Well. I thought, I cant believe at all this rich information is so useless to everyone in this age of trying to promote 'the digital' - it must be that JISC are just having a re-org. I'll head off there. jisc.ac.uk is a very different animal though. Much more aimed at researchers, with a sideline in L&T - just my perception anyway. Over at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/advice I'm offered to go to 'JISC Digital Media'... er  no. Nice for now, but not for something I want to create a link to.

So I search the guides. I scan through the 'Refine' topic options on the left. Who came up with these..? The closest I would get to what I'm after is in 'Content' or 'Blended Learning' but that judgement is reliant on my obscure knowledge of what might lie behind these terms. 'Creating blended learning content' apparently only takes 5 mintues to read so I dont think I'll bother....oh, go on then. At least it was updated 16th March. According to our experts, Alistair McNaught, Lynnette Lall and Scott Hibberson, I can make my content engaging by 'reading our guides on finding the best content that the web has to offer'. Snag is, this points to http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/finding #ironynoted So, now my options are... build it myself, check whether Nottingham have been kind enough to put some effort in this direction. Nope. Pay more tax? Too long term and fraught. Perhaps another country has a nice resource... likely candidates: Canada, Australia. However, both of these operate on different legal footings to the UK... Anyway, perhaps JISC will have to link to them soon too so, after a quick search, best options seem to be Laura Gibbs resource at: http://onlinecourselady.pbworks.com/w/page/68074413/findimages and Sarah Christensen at http://guides.library.illinois.edu/images Thanks both!
Oooff! Just found another reference in something I wrote to JISC Digital Media... this time it's their very nice tutorial about Making and using Clinical Healthcare Recordings at JISC Digital Media. I wonder if that will get ported and/or maintained. 

So there are two take-homes for me here (both raised in Chris Jones' 2015 book on Networked Learning).

1. Who pays for this kind of thing - a 'guide to finding and using digital images'? The government, the institution or the keen kind skillful individual scholar? I think this relates to a debate about digital scholarship that I was reading in Robin Goodfellow's 2013 chapter, 'The literacies of Digital Scholarship' where he compares the free-and-easy Edtechie Martin Weller's book with Christine Borgman's more 'traditional' scholarship. The latter is concerned with curation and knowledge building. As Goodfellow says, 'Borgman is trying to make digital scholarship more scholarly, Weller is trying to make it more digital'. Out of interest I was pleased to read a bit of Borgman's book and found she was homing in on this key question of information being a public good, borrowing an economics term for items like street-lighting, refuse collection, litter picking. 
2. Posthumanism. Bear with me. In the same edited collection as Goodfellow's chapter, Sian Bayne and Jen Ross set out, 'Posthumanism in heteroscopic space: a pedagogical proposal'. I'm too dull to get the real point of it but... Anyway, some of the chapter is given to describing students' responses to assessment in Edinburgh's MSc in E-Learning. Jeremy Knox produced what looked like a traditional essay but each of the 2000 words had been carefully hyperlinked. This was a text "'full of 'holes', of material routes out of the formal academic essay and into the vast network which functions here as materially co-authoring the final piece of work. It is an apparently simple, but in fact deeply critical piece of work which challenges academic literacy norms by using the conventional essay form as merely a facade, a permeable front and interface to the digital network which is both its theme and its object of critique. The essay gathers, assembles, links, connects, and pushes well beyond the tight association of the stable authoring subject with the stable print text; it equally discusses and enacts a posthuman moment" p109. Except that, I couldnt help wondering how many of those 'holes' were not at all networked any more, given the speed of link-rot. Unless Jeremy had used DOI links or something like that... Try as I might, I also couldnt find this essay anywhere. Anyway, the moment has passed and in order to do digital scholarship we really do need the infrastructure, very broadly defined, even including a resource on 'how to find images', even to facilitate the kind of 'less scholarly' digital scholarship as advocated by Prof Weller and certainly to accomplish the kind of scholarship that enables knowledge building, the architecture of productive learning networks must be insulated from linkrot so as to endure longer than 'posthuman moment' and let us all get on with our jobs instead of wasting time hunting down (worse building) alternative, likely inferior, resources and then taking the trouble to actually moan about it on a blog. At least I gave the world a nice picture without litter or (at least for a bit) linkrot.

Bayne, Sian, and Jen Ross. ‘Posthuman Literacy in Heterotopic Space’. In Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship, and Technology, edited by Robin Goodfellow and Mary R. Lea, 95–110. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013..

Goodfellow, Robin. ‘The Literacies of “Digital Scholarship” - Truth and Use Values’. In Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship, and Technology, edited by Robin Goodfellow and Mary R. Lea, 67–78. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.

Weller, Martin. The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Changing Academic Practice. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2011. 

Book Review: Chris Jones "Networked Learning" 2015

So I review books occasionally for the British Journal of Educational Technology. Last year I put my hand up to review Chris Jones' new book and they sent me my copy. I am a busy guy and things do not always get the right priority. By some happenstance, Springer also sent a copy of the book to a scholar in Iran who has clearly got his act together better than me because when I eventually sent my review in (having actually read the book - it's a conscience thing) I was told by the reviews editor that BJET had already published a review on it!! So I thought I'd look elsewhere. Seems not many learning tech journals bother with book reviews now. I found one that did and I'm giving up on emailing them a third time. I have a blog. That'll do nicely. Here it is...

I was excited to see that Professor Chris Jones had published a substantial contribution to this topic. He was my personal tutor in Lancaster from 2002-2008 and I have since followed his published work with interest. He is one of the only scholars I would trust or expect to take this project on and carry it off. 

NL an optomistic enterprise

We've been reading Feenberg (1999) and Hodgeson et al. (2012) on the doctoral programme. I studied economics a little bit when I worked for a bank and at Aberdeen. But I suppose many people will have heard of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'... It helped me to apply this to 'technology' when reading Feenberg. I think Feenberg is explaining that different ontologies leave one with very different views as to whether 

1. We can/can't really control 'the invisible hand'
2. Does that matter? 

In the case of Marx, he is saying that not only can we not control the invisible hand, the hand's effects are, at worst neutral. However, some, like Feenberg (also cites Foucault and Marcuse who I have barely heard of still less read), are deeply suspicious of what the hand ('hooded claw' better?) is really up to.

From http://hanna-barbera.wikia.com/wiki/Hooded_Claw

There could be a connection between Feenberg's argument, that we 'should be asserting human control' and Hodgson et al's stated ontology (p292) for networked learning, and even the expanded definition of networked learning which, enacted through programmes like the Lancaster PhD, pushes back against strong tide of 'economic-pragmatic discourse' (Hodgson et al 292). Hodgson and Feenberg's view of the world 'as we would like it to be', may well clash violently with the daily realities of, say, learning technologists who are...

1. trotting out multimedia at the bequest of unwitting lecturers with no better agenda than that it could look good/modern, appeal to the millennial students (sic) and may save them time/effort in the long run
2. Rolling out moocs, to pay their mortgage and other bills, as an extension of the university's marketing department

Do you recognise these 'value laden' examples as such? Are they real to you? If they are, does that really matter? If it does, can/should we be doing anything about it? Feenberg is saying we certainly can and should.

Do we agree with the political angle in these readings, however ambitious it might be? After all, there is a sense in which, on programme like the one I'm on, we're very much part of attempts to enact it - if you have or are on such a programme, how was/is it for you? You're paying handsomely for the 'bus ride', did you realise where it was hoping to take you?

I spent a while yesterday discussion a proprietary tool with our learning technologist who was bemoaning the impossibility of making 'progress' with staff who are so ardently Luddite, in their opinion. This is a fairly typical moan for a learning technologist to make, and it falls some way short of 'the Feenberg perspective'. What would be the impact of such a blithe embrace of 'all that technology can offer' on your place and even society as a whole. Would we become super efficient but/and/or loose our humanity in the process? Which of those things really matter?

Or should we be enacting learning designs which are 'appropriate and suited to live in a digitally connected and networked world where sharing and collaborative ways of working are the norm rather than the exception' (Hodgson et al p292 again) and 'we all live happily ever after'?
Networked learning, to the likes of Hodgson et al, is an optimistic enterprise... What alternatives are there when (if?) one sees 'market failure' in all directions?

• Feenberg, Andrew 1999 Questioning Technology. London ; New York: Routledge.
• Hodgson, Vivien, David McConnell, and Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2012 The Theory, Practice and Pedagogy of Networked Learning. In Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning. Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Vivien Hodgson, and David McConnell, eds. Pp. 291–305. New York, NY: Springer New York.

Reporting back from the Networked Learning Seminar at Cardiff 6th May 2015

On Wednesday 6th May 2015, two friends from Bristol University traveled to Cardiff to head up our networked learning seminar: Dr Sue Timmis and Dr Jane Williams. At just after 1pm, around 30 of us were welcomed by Patricia Price (Pro Vice Chancellor Pro Vice-Chancellor, Student Experience & Academic Standards) who was on hand to open the seminar, kindly sponsored by the recently formed College of Biomedical & Life Sciences. I was personally very thankful to Emma Humphries from the College. Her fulsome help with the administration of the seminar was superb - it was so reassuring all through the surprisingly long run-up to the seminar.

Sue Timmis expertly traced out the tensions in Higher Education that keep the learning and teaching theory-practice gap wide open. For example, that theories of learning are far more contested than those within many disciplines. However, Sue challenged us to seek and engage students in participatory learning activities.  PowerPoint MP3




Jane Williams discussed her work with medical students who elect to develop e-learning materials for their optional module. Unlike the more programmatic materials developed by the department, the students target courseware that directly addresses content areas which they found challenging, thus increasing its value for ensuing cohorts. This was a perfect example of ‘participatory’ collaborative and cooperative learning that Sue had offered as a means of enriching and deepening learning. MP3


After a brief comfort-break, it was the turn of the Cardiff three... 
Karl Luke outlined a small-scale study in which he explored Nina Dohn's critique of the assumptions made in education when Web 2.0 tools (especially wikis) are deployed in hopes that they will succeed unproblematically. He went on to offer practical solutions to Dohn’s points. PowerPoint MP3

  Joe Nicholls used his slot to present long-standing work around 'learning literacies'. He argued that only a fully integrated approach to deploying these literacies could be effective and that, even then, context was key for securing worthwhile outcomes. PowerPoint MP3

Sadly, a few things, not just my relaxed approach to time-keeping, made us run out of time, leaving me with just a few minutes before the close. But even in a very short presentation there were practical and theoretical lessons gleaned from a mini-project carried out last year into aspects of informal learning by staff using an innovative application of blogs for shared academic supervision record-keeping. PowerPoint MP3

I was personally very pleased with the way that the seminar gave a real flavor of the conference. Networked learning does not do 'snake oil' and that can be confusing in learning technology circles... much the same as when my landline rings these days, I expect a sales pitch in broken English. The source of networked learning's 'non-splashy' power is in the humanistic values, transparent evidence and scholarly insight, and that should be good enough for anyone. Concluding comments MP3

Networked Learning Seminar 6th May 2015 1-4pm 2.21 Tŷ Dewi Sant, Heath Park

The Networked Learning Conference runs biennially, and next year is the 10th at Lancaster University. So this year is 'fallow', interregnum, 'writing up' space in time for the 5th October deadline... I thought it might be nice to organise a 'fireside chat' among friends who happened to be doing advanced degrees in learning technology. I wanted us to share some of the good stuff we've learned on our studies that otherwise might never see the light of day. Probably we'd ask if anyone was around and wanted to listen in, probe a bit, etc.
I'm delighted to say that it has turned into a College-sponsored seminar, bringing the networked learning marque and experts Dr Sue Timmis and Dr Jane Williams to Cardiff next Wednesday afternoon (here's a link to their paper from the last conference).

We're dividing the three hours up as follows:

13:00-14:00 Welcome and introductions, followed by:

• Dr Sue Timmis - Senior Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning at University of Bristol Graduate School of Education http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/people/14185/index.html
  “Mind the gap! The power and the challenges of connecting theory AND practice in University learning and teaching”
• Dr Jane Williams – Director of Technology Enhanced Learning Team at University of Bristol Medical School https://twitter.com/bristoluniHStel
  "Handing over the keys: unlocking the potential of students as developers and researchers of elearning"

14:00-14:30 Refreshments/networking

14:30-15:30 Three short papers from:

• Karl Luke - E-Learning Technologist, Cardiff Institute of Infection & Immunity Studying MSc Learning, Technology and Society at Bristol University. https://twitter.com/karl_luke
  “Squashing Others”: Appropriating and Repurposing Social Collaboration Tools in Higher Education Online Courses. Using “Participatory Web” Tools in Education: Expectations, Practicalities, Roles, Tensions and Challenges 
• Dr Joe Nicholls - Principal Consultant: Digital Enablement. The role is concerned with enabling the development of staff and student digital literacies at Cardiff University. Studying MSc in Digital Education with the University of Edinburgh  https://twitter.com/JoeNicholls
  “Discovering alternative ways of learning and teaching through representations of practice” 
• Mike Johnson – Lecturer Information Management and Teaching at the School of Healthcare Sciences, Cardiff University Doctoral candidate in Technology Enhanced Learning and e-Research at Lancaster University https://twitter.com/agentjohnson
  “When is a blog not a blog? Domesticating blogs through academic supervision”

15:30-16:00 Panel summary and Q&A to close.

If you're free, do please feel free to come along too!

This is a link to Cardiff University Estates page for Ty Dewi Sant 2.21

The SHARP learning cycle

Just knocked this up for use in a session in a couple of weeks. I like it - wish I had time to say more. Perhaps will come back again and do that. For now, thanks to Peter Goodyear! Here's a 'bit more'...(updated 22/10/2014)
The fairly subversive pedagogy of a networked learning activity rides bareback on the conventional hegemony of the student/staff dichotomy where the students are 'encouraged', almost as an act of faith, to take up the reflective and generative practice of knowledge work; through internalisation and externalisation, they bring their own practice under the reflective scrutiny of authoritative theory. They 'feel their size', and this brings on a minor crisis: it is expected that they will not understand everything they read, they realise that the bar is significantly higher than they had appreciated. Coming to terms with this discomfort is an important aspect of 'affect' in learning. Even to appreciate that 'higher ground' exists may be novel and generative in itself. But, more significantly, the mind is piqued into confusion, frustration, arousal and enquiry. Sense/meaning-making can commence, even if only through a stumbling advance. The 'stumble' metaphor here intentionally implies an iterative wobble 'back and forth', attempting stability, between the theory-laden artefact and the learner's own reified, tentative understanding. It may only be after this that the 'third space', an online forum, is deployed and the shared object(ive) of the scripted task invokes a collective sharing of the experience, providing the learner with contextually rich alternative attempted 'takes' on the theory and its application in practice, not least the practice of learning.
These 'affective' elements of learning are vital for what Illeris (2008,p13) terms,

"accommodative or transcendent learning.", where "one breaks down (parts of) an existing scheme and transforms it so that the new situation can be linked in. Thus one both relinquishes and reconstructs something, and this can be experienced as demanding or even painful, because it is something that requires a strong supply of mental energy... In return... (the learner has) understood"

Peter Goodyear comment in response to Neil Selwyn

I decided to post from the conference having greatly enjoyed Neil Selwyn's keynote. I had been anticipating his session with Chris Jones for a while and would have loved Chris to have been able to participate more rather than keeping to the chairing role. Anyway, there were some useful contributions from the floor and one of those was from Peter Goodyear...

"I enjoyed that talk much more than I really wanted to. The point that I keep grappling with is that if you've got the luxury of working for a living where what you have to produce can be critique then there is not so much of a problem with this. 

Many people who work in the edtech area do not earn their living in that way and they have to engage in various forms of action, and that action is very constrained by the politics, the economics, etc.  of the circumstances in which they're operating. And so, the question for me then is to what extent can a critical perspective, disposition or midset, become a resource for action in those constrained circumstances and it seems to me that part of the answer is to develop an ability to understand what the scope for action is in a specific set of circumstances so that one can ask questions about what is doable amongst a range of things that might be doable and what action one might then take.

And I think that gels with your notion of being modest about the effects that we can have and not trying to be revolutionary and change all the world.

The one thing I do then worry about is that if you've got the freedom to act as a critical commentator you can always trump that local action, you can always say, "hey, yeah, but it's pointless really'."

There were several other contributions from the floor which amounted to a plea along the same lines from where each person was speaking. Someone even admitted that pessimism was getting the better of them...

Finding I need to think more about sharable representations of practice

Well this was going to be a tweet but even the quote was too long. Having had one student volunteer a complex flowchart to demonstrate a technique they'd developed, and which caused another student to balk at it, gave me the urge to send a Peter Goodyear's (2005,p120) quote into the ether:

'much of what is worth learning in a rapidly changing field of practice already exists as 'working knowledge' embedded in the working practices of professionals in the field.'

The trick is, how to facilitate that, especially at a distance. There are 'tool' and 'training' issues, some of which are explored in http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/11162/12858#

Goodyear P (2005) Emergence of a Networked Learning Community. In: G. Kearsley ed. Online Learning: Personal Reflections On The Transformation Of Education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Available at: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8INcUQxCb2EC&lpg=PA113&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=fals

Goodyear P and Steeples C (1998) Creating shareable representations of practice. Research in Learning Technology. 6 (3). Available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/11162

On chosing not to 'promote connections'

I am working up a project evaluation and, as ever, with networked learning in mind, I have a strange feeling that something is not quite right. The project in question relies on a finely balanced set of access rights and priviledges - who can see and edit, who can alter the access settings...? On the one hand, we have the students. For this project, we do not want students viewing another student's private online discourse. We also do not want 'just anyone' to have access, although Blackboard makes us lean towards giving admin staff more access than we would like, simply because otherwise they are prevented from doing their work. This leaves the academic staff who should all be able to access every students' writing. While there are a multitude of ways of doing exactly this, finding the most efficient way in the long term is more tricky, but not impossible. But the point of this message is to make the point that the 2001 definition of networked learning does not account for learning which happens under the kind of access constraints I've detailed. It seems obvious to say that not everything a student types should be made available to everyone, just in case a serendipitous learning connection can be established, or activated if such a connection already exists. If connections are being deliberately fenced off, instead of being 'promoted', does this still equate to 'networked learning', or am I simply driving too hard at the definition? Yet the definition is designed to encourage productive, 'high-quality' learning (as opposed to the less pedagogically, more technologically oriented definitions you can find for 'e-learning': see http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/esrc/ )
The question that arises in my mind is therefore: in a given planned learning intervention, what connections are being promoted, by whom, and, in particular, which ones stymied?

Something else that occurs to me along these lines is the presentation at Networked Learning 2012 by John Dron and Terry Anderson about https://landing.athabascau.ca
This system gives students full control of what they post and how public to make it. I made the point to Terry that one slip of the permissions could land healthcare students in big trouble with their governing body. But this is also a problem for anyone working with sensitive information. I have to think twice about how much intellectual property to put on show in this blog. This is another one of those implicit skills or aspects of knowledge that we can easily overlook in the rush to get everyone working and learning online.

Thanks Chris!

I look back with great affection at the times I get to learn from Chris. I've been mulling over the symposium about the place of technology in networked learning he led in Maastricht ever since. What does the technology do? Can we ascribe agency to it or does it just transmit human intentionality? He quoted the example of 'Siri' which, when asked for an abortion clinic, would point you towards a pro-life advice centre. The ethics and intentionality were embedded within the device and the code that runs it. Where is cause and effect there?
Chris doesnt participate that much online, as far as I can see, most of his tweets are about his left-leaning politics :) But I came across a discussion on Leigh's blog, and, as I read down, I was just willing him to return to carry on the debate about the nature of networked learning. Thanks for giving so much to that Chris - very useful contribution.

Health Professionals learning Twitter

The new group of post-grad students I've been meeting today have reminded me how very different Health Service IT systems and administration are compared to those in Higher Education. Even trying to visit an online social network is met with a window announcing that this attempt has been blocked, logged and reported to the system administrator. How can health professionals become responsible professional participants online in the face of genuine risks and adverse, if not actively hostile, environments? I suspect the answer is that it's happening and will continue to happen. I only hope the collateral damage will be minimal.
For years now I've been challenging undergraduate nurses to get using Twitter for their professional development. I have an opportunity early in their 3rd and final year to suggest ways of engaging in networked learning. In recent months I have been delighted to see a real growth in engagement from a range of nursing and midwifery professionals and professional bodies, which gives newcomers an instant network to connect with (I began a list ages ago to help with this but it's had some significant additions recently).
In the first year, first week in fact, of the pre-registration Bachelor of Nursing programme, it seems only right to confront frivolous use of online social networking (see links at the foot of this post). I got a strong sense this year, at inductions in March, that, following a lecture on the subject, students were deleting their Facebook accounts, slamming the door to social media and throwing away the key. Suddenly, social networking was the enemy, as a single slip could prevent students from ever realising their cherished ambition of joining the registered ranks. Added to the risk of personally making a single simple costly mistake is the problem we all face when driving... How many of us have thought/said, 'It's not you I'm worried about, it's the [possibly insert the word "other" here] idiots on the road"? As much as this can be true in social media, it never stops us hopping right back into a car (because the destination and mode of travel is worth the risk).
As someone who has benefitted hugely from the networking Twitter enables, imagine my delight last week at finding this 'Nurses and Social Media' article, via Twitter, on the Department of Health's pages of the Chief Nursing Officer:

Nurses and social media cno.dh.gov.uk/2012/04/20/nur…. Very well done to @annie.coops for creating and sharing this
— Pam Nelmes (@PamNelmes007) April 20, 2012

Emboldened by this article, I've been encouraged to mention Twitter more than ever. But the professionalism question is never far away. For example, what to do about undesirable followers? Those 'other idiots on the road'? Amidst all the messiness of using social media, learning to accept that, just like the more appalling type of spam email you have to somehow learn to deal with, keeping your public profile 'clean' enough to avoid 'bringing the profession into disrepute' by association, means learning to be vigilant about blocking and reporting vile spam followers. How many Health Service users who stumble across your profile understand that you dont choose your followers, in fact you have to 'un-choose' the nasty ones. And that could predictably include service users! This kind of insight is easily missed in the nervy path towards trying to reap the rewards of networked learning. In leading students to leverage social media rather than safely dismiss it, it's a hard balance to strike, knowing which aspects of the territory to treat, and how. Newcomers to Twitter have a tough time grappling with the concept of what Twitter is without also taking on a 'sufficient' number of specific techniques to ensure their nascent use is not strangled at birth. It's like plugging a PC into the Internet without any anti-virus protection. That computer may only last a few seconds before it's compromised.
If you have any thoughts about what those specific techniques are, please let me know, or start a list somewhere and point me to it. Thanks!

Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery's own guidance is here. It is based on The NMC Code, and the specific social networking advice page.

What constitutes Networked Learning activity?

Having previously asked, 'What does it mean to be network learned?', I am now thinking about what networked learning looks like from the outside. I wouldnt presume to be able to measure or define what happens inside the brain, but the results of neurological synapses can surface in various kinds of networked learning activity. Since we are not able (yet) to use telepathy, and since many non-face2face interactions are possible, if not actually carried out, via the Internet, it must be possible to recognise and come up with a reasonably complete list of these networked learning activities.
As a start, there is:

1. writing something in a shared space 
2. reading something someone else wrote
3. replying to something
4. rating something (selecting a score from a list of options to express your opinion of value)
5. building and maintaining a network (and all that goes with it - i.e. needs unpacking),
6. sharing a link via social bookmarking

If you know of more, please comment or get in touch.
Of course, implicit in this some of the items in this list is an ethic that values sharing and an in-built commitment to and awareness of the network(s) in chosing what move to make while engaging in learning activity. If we are to see students becoming networked learners, they will not only have to perform the items in the list with sufficient elan, they will also have to become 'network aware'. Is this too much to hope for? Or is it possible to so design curricula and constituent activities that require networked learning activity for long enough for students to become wired to 'think the network'?

CEQ and group-based networked learners

Following my chat with Andrew again a week last Friday, I finally got around to looking at Community Equity (CEQ), which plugs into Confluence quite nicely. I wrote a bit about my ideal VLE before and this post is about thinking whether CEQ could fit some of those requirements.
I detect a growing consensus that group-based activity and the dialogue it promotes is gaining ground at many levels of education (I've been reading Littleton and Howe's book about educational dialogue).
When the group has divided up its work and separated, how can their activity be measured? Networked learning is about 'promoting connections' and this needs to happen in the minds and lives of people, not just by designing engaging learning materials, or even a highly relevant and stimulating learning activity. CEQ can incentivise social network activity by making that activity transparent. Contributions to a wiki in terms of edits, comments, bookmarks, ratings, etc., can paint a fine-grained picture of a person's online effort towards the group endeavour.
Perhaps that's enough. Perhaps awarding marks towards a degree classification may only distort the learner's focus, reducing them to a special case of myspace/facebook piracy. There's work to be done on defining performance levels, even if adopting the simple 'pass or fail' system, where a certain level of activity would get students over the finishing line. Hopefully, by then, they'd have become networked learners.
Of course, this is still very formative. I have no idea if we can bring CEQ together with automated 'space' creation/population, based on student information system data... but I'm warming to the idea of a pilot.
The other thing that slightly chills me is the whole development lifecycle of open source software.... but that's for another post...
Here's a video about CEQ...

See also http://kenai.com/projects/community-equity

Contingency in use of Digital Tools

Once again, on the theme of implicit digital literacies...
I have been talking with students recently about reference management software. Amongst others, the students can choose between:

1. Endnote
2. Endnote Web
3. Zotero

The first two are 'supported' at Cardiff University: there are 'styles' for both the School's in-house Harvard as well as Cardiff University's variant. Option 1 is expensive while Option 2 is quite clumsy to use (requires signup on-campus and 'nasty' passwords). Zotero is a dream to use and it's free, although the School's house style for Harvard is not available currently (another job for muggins perhaps).
However, with the recent demise of drop.io, it could be argued that recommending the open source, unsupported Zotero exposes students to an unacceptable risk. What happens when the student fails to submit coursework on time because Zotero failed? Of course, couching recommendations with cautionary remarks chill-off students from engaging with and benefiting from a tool that is unlikely to fail.
Expert use of tools like Zoterio and drop.io will have incurred a certain amount of investigation into the robustness/life expectancy of the tool. An expert will have a sense of whether it is necessary to devise a contingency plan in the event of the tool's unavailability, whether temporary (read a book for a bit) or permanent (start looking for an alternative that might be compatible with your archive).
Whether using email, online filestore, collaboration spaces, blog, mindmapping, bookmark sharing or reference management, all of them may suffer 'outages'. But this is something users have come to live with, it is implicitly part of working in these ways.
It is easy to demonstrate the benefits of Zotero. Communicating the 'small print' is far more tricky. But I am at a loss as to how to convey the 'tool appraisal' and 'back-up and rescue' skills mentioned above without completely losing my audience.

The ideal VLE

Reluctantly, I was tried to form an answer to the question of what would make up the ideal Virtual Learning Environment... I usually maintain that point 1 is the most important in the following list:

1. Do a good job of handling programme/cohort/group affiliations and keep those affiliations while handing students over into groups within 3rd party tools like Grademark and Questionmark Perception.
2. Integrate with GradeMark and QuestionmarkPerception
3. Allow easy and quick organisation of content (I spend half my day waiting for the browser to refresh)
4. Allow easy dissemination of information - via announcements and bulk email
5. Allow interaction, perhaps via discussion list, blog, wiki-type activity, with reasonably fine-grained permissions
6. Allow embedding video, and various other media... like this (cue attractive picture to liven things up a bit):

Well - some of that sounds a bit like what we have already... But it might be worth thinking, no, lets not do the VLE thing (toolbox of generic technologies for organising learning and assessment). Let's think how something like an enterprise wiki could play to it's strengths and work powerfully for promoting connections and networked learning...

1. Where collaborative authoring is required as part of the activity, the wiki could show me, and other readers, what a person has done very easilly and transparently on a page. One of the things that happens with wikis is that people lose ownership of what they've done in the wiki which is a dissincentive for them to engage with it. In our present wiki tool (campuspack), clicking on the person's name in the list of page authors just takes me to their profile. I want to click on it and see their contribution highlighted, and possibly even award them marks for that there and then... see next point...
2. I would like to be able to allow easy, on the fly, recording and reporting of my and others' assessment of what they've done, indicating their opinion, along a series of criteria and levels of performance - perhaps a pop-up box that I could define. This would break with the notion of single points of assessment, and therefore learning for that assessment alone, as students would be contributing and being rewarded for their ongoing activity.
3. Assessment of networked learning activity. Whether we like it or not, assessment drives everything in Higher Education. Students are unlikely to share without some incentive linked to their final assessment. For networked learning, how can I monitor what each person has done in terms of contributing to everyone's learning. This could be based on stats for access, usage, and other's usage and opinions of what I, the student, have done. For example, if I share a hyperlink through my blog to a resource I get a mark, if someone clicks on it I get a mark, if someone indicates they find what I did useful, that gets a mark for both of us, if someone includes a link to my blog post, that gets a mark, and so on... Over a period of years, this could build into quite a large amount of 'marks', a powerful evidence-base upon which to evaluate someone's performance as a collaborator/sharer/team-player. This would be a way to reward the individual for work done in support of others... always a tricky matter for assessment. Hopefully the fine-grained rewards would assure participants that each and every contribution was counting for something.

I am certain that none of this is particularly unique; the first two occurred to me after a conversation recently and the latter one came up in conversation a while back as becomming possible. These ideas may also not stand up to scrutiny, especially in the environments where they have to be enacted! But that's part of what this blog is all about...

Where to put this wiki...

Students are working in groups to produce a page of evaluated links to resources around a certain topic in healthcare. Where do I put the wiki?
In their own VLE module? Sadly, this limits the audience and thus the students' awareness of that audience.
In their programme-level VLE module where all students on their programme can access it? As this task is run twice a year, it's soon going to get hard to navigate and muggins is going to have to maintain it. At least building one per cohort keeps it manageable with no overhead of maintaining it.
Somewhere all of our students can see it? This would mean farming them out to a different wiki-space not normally associated with learning and teaching.... politically sensitive! Plus the need to do all the 'gardening' implied in '2' above.
Sigh - looks like I stay with option one. It's, as ever, a trade-off between wanting to do the right thing educationally and yet keep it manageable...