Are you buying steam?

In the July 2013 edition of Wired magazine, Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law Professor and author of The Future of the Internet) warns of the danger of censorship now we are moving to the cloud. Zittrain is worried about the possibilities of 'censoring, erasing, altering or restricting access to books', and argues that digital texts are 'increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers or libraries.' He has a point. The provisionality of digital media - that is, the capability to change or edit an entire text instantly - and the cloud based storage that makes one version available for all to access but not to own in the physical sense, make it likely that the system could be abused. Purchasing and downloading a book for your e-reader, he warns, won't necessarily protect it from disappearing from the web, because unlike physical copies of books (or music), users only purchase a licence to read (or listen), not the entire work itself. Digital media is volatile, and is a likely to be withdrawn over copyright issues as it is prone to censorship.

So what is the future for digital text? Will there be a danger to our use e-books? Will we be put off by lack of protection of our purchases? Isn't purchasing an e-book a little like buying steam? Or is the next generation of readers already sold on the idea of digital only versions of books? They certainly save on physical storage space, but just how secure are they? How many will still subscribe to e-book purchasing if some of their texts disappear without warning, perhaps because an author has decided his work is flawed? What happens when a publisher discovers some books in their catalogue have been published erroneously, but are not yet in the public domain, and have to then withdraw them for legal reasons? The copy you have purchased will disappear from your Kindle. You bought the licence, not the book, remember? This actually happened in 2009, says Zittrain, when online retailer Amazon withdrew George Orwell's novel 1984 for that very reason.

Zittrain reserves most of his concerns about preserving the integrity of literature. What is to stop someone changing, adjusting or completely revising a text, when it is centralised and in digital format? he asks. He recommends that libraries could act as the arbiters of truth in this instance, monitoring and continually comparing their physical book stock against their digital counterparts to ensure no changes have illicitly taken place. That's a long shot though, and I wonder just how many libraries actually have the resources and staffing to be able to perform such a fastidious and time-intensive service?

I think the future of e-books is secure. Unlike some digital content, the e-reader isn't going to go away, and many millions worldwide have already subscribed to the concept. Opinion is still divided over which is preferable, reading from text or reading from a screen. Yet the biggest debate is probably yet to come - how to address the many legal, ethical and technical questions that remain about who owns the content you have purchased.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


Are you buying steam? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Global digital tribe

If you are immersed in technology mediated communication, there are no apparent barriers to membership of your community of practice. It is your personal network. It is your virtual community. Call it what you wish. To me it resembles a global digital tribe. It is tribal because the global online community exhibits many of the characteristics of traditional, territorial tribal practice. Whether or not we realise it, if we regularly use social media, we are members of the world wide digital tribe. Most anthropologists agree that a tribe is a (small) society that practices its own customs and culture, and that these define the tribe. Tribal identity in the age of the Web transcends ethnicity, traditional cultural expectations and geography (Wheeler, 2009). The global digital tribe has many smaller sub-sets we can call clans. These often exhibit customs and cultural values that separate them from activities that occur in 'real life' contexts. It would be ridiculous for example to 'poke' people in real life. People feel free to say much more on Twitter than they would dare to say to someone face to face.

There is a history behind this. Industrial society eroded the tribal gatherings of more primitive societies and redefined community. Vestiges of ancient tribal culture were often preserved only in large gatherings at public events such as football matches (where two opposing clans were likely to clash), and in smaller community gatherings seen for example in the ritualistic gatherings in the local pub or at a church service.

Post-industrial society saw the emergence of personal computers, the Web and a global communication network of mobile phones.  Social media, the most social of all modern technologies, provided us with shared virtual spaces where we could 'meet'. We now regularly find ourselves gathered around digital totems, where we tell our stories, give our warnings, share our ideas. We celebrate, commiserate and collaborate, and the digital totems we gather around are the virtual clannish spaces that facilitate these actions. We have, it seems come full circle, and 'community' has once again been redefined.

Facebook is currently the largest of the digital totems in the social media universe. The Facebook clan (a sub-set of the global digital tribe) attracts in excess of one billion tribal members, many of whom are busy telling their stories, celebrating success, sharing images and videos, showing their allegiance to their idols (liking a pop star page or a movie premier), playing social games and engaging in frivolous behaviour. There are many other smaller digital totems to choose from. One is the Flickrite clan, who gather to view and discuss photographs. Another is the Wikipedian clan, which exists to create knowledge. Yet another is the Google Hangouts clan, whose totem has a number of affordances to support all of the above tribal activities as well as the collaborative sharing of spaces, and video linking for synchronous communication that overcome physical constraints such as geographical distance. These are probably some of the richest digital totems in terms of their media communication capabilities, but there are many others, some global, some regional versions, some specific to particular languages, some aligned to particular interest groups or age ranges. Digital mediation and connection are becoming a societal norm for many in the Western industrialised world, transcending time and space constraints, providing communities with their social glue.

I once wrote: "Where digital communication has fractured the tyranny of distance and computers have become pervasive and ubiquitous, identification through digital mediation has become the new cultural capital" (Wheeler 2009, p 68). By this I meant that each individual who habituates into regular use of digital media enters into membership of their particular digital clans. We begin to identity ourselves through the relationships we have developed with others during the time we spend around our digital totems. Some we know in real life, others we only know through the digital connection. Either way, we tend to go where our friends are, and that changes over time. Membership of digital clans can be volatile, as has been demonstrated in the sharp rise and decline of once popular tribal online spaces such as Bebo or MySpace.

Whereas in real life space, we connect with each other through commonalities such as interest, age or gender ethnic similarities, and identify with like-minded others through our body language (postural echo) and clothing (costume echo), in tribal digital spaces, we express our affinity and interest by liking, favouriting, retweeting, poking, following and tagging. These are visible expressions of friendship and belonging that amplify their presence across the connected tribe, in a similar way that drumming, dancing and story telling have always been the cultural capital of tribal life around traditional totems. Internet memes - units of digital cultural knowledge - are very easily propagated and amplified across social media platforms. The transmission of such memes can become viral, with exponential spread of content, often initiated by the desire to share interesting content with the members of one's community. Such activities could be construed in the tribal context as 'marking of territory', or expression of ownership over artefacts (Wheeler and Keegan, 2009).

How can we harness the power of these tribal characteristics in organisational learning? Many of our digital tribal activities are performed on an informal basis. People use Facebook or Twitter because they want to, not because there is an organisational requirement. It is a strange conundrum that most organisational learning that is presented in digital format is delivered through Learning Management Systems (LMS) - many of which are so poorly designed or difficult to navigate that employees and students tend to avoid using them. My students tell me they use the LMS when they have to, but they use Facebook when they want to, because their tribe meets there. The tension between formal and informal learning sometimes can be reduced to such prosaic choices such as this.

Organisations should beware of silencing the voice of the individual. Many tribes 'embrace the status quo and drown out any tribe member who dares to question authority and the accepted order' (Godin, 2008, p 4). Social media tools offer members of the tribe, even a tribe as large as a multi-national company, the means with which to make their individual voices heard above the cacophony of daily working. Blogs, video sharing and other personalised technologies can enable anyone to contribute to the discourse.

Another thing we need to acknowledge is that a lot of learning is social. Employers need to see the opportunities that social media can present for employees to engage socially, wherever they are located. Further, because people learn from each other informally, informal meeting spaces should be seen as vital to the learning process, rather than undesirable distractions that need to be eradicated from the workplace. The most familiar social space, particularly for distributed work teams, is the social network. Next, learning and development leaders need to realise that not all learning can or should be provided from central sources. Increasingly, tacit forms of knowledge are important, and this can often best be acquired within the tribal community. Finally, learning should be situated. The best learning is acquired within the same spaces in which it will later be applied. For knowledge workers in particular, the place where learning will be applied is invariably online, in amongst the shared virtual spaces, and around the totems of the global digital tribe.

References

Godin, S. (2008) Tribes: We need you to lead us. London: Piatkus.
Wheeler, S. (2009) Digital tribes, virtual clans. In S. Wheeler (Ed.) Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures: Cybercultures in Online Learning. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Wheeler, S. and Keegan, H. (2009) Imagined worlds, emerging cultures.  In S. Wheeler (Ed.) Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures: Cybercultures in Online Learning. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


Global digital tribe by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Beneath the facade...

If we scratch just below the surface of education, and we examine the nature of knowledge, we see an interesting challenge. It is increasingly apparent that knowledge as we 'know it' is inextricably linked to those who are in control of it. The knowledge gate-keepers have been in charge for some time, and knowledge is power. But all of this is already changing, as those beyond the inner circle begin to understand that through technology, they can create knowledge too. Our conceptions of knowledge could be said to be in a state of flux and uncertainty. If we accept that there is no monopoly anymore we need to ask some questions. In an age where anyone with an internet connection can create content, who now decides what we accept as a 'fact', and who is in control of our representations of reality?

Evidence from a number of sources has indicated that our conceptions of knowledge are indeed changing and that new and emerging technologies have a key role in the process (Guy, 2004; Lankshear and Knobel, 2006; Kop, 2007; Kress, 2009). Personalised tools lead to personalised learning, and the impact of this should not be underestimated. It is clear that tacit, informal knowledge resists explicit, formal knowledge. This is largely due to the fact that tacit knowledge includes the concepts, ideas and experiences that we have internalised personally, as opposed to the formalised knowledge we have learnt that is often decontextualised (Wheelahan, 2007). For many in today's technology rich, rapidly changing, networked society, personalised learning has acquired more value than anything that can be offered by organisations. Person-specific, individualised knowledge trumps generic knowledge that was suited to the needs of the industrial era.

Bates (2009) reinforced the view that generic, academic knowledge is no longer enough to meet the needs of the networked society:

"...it is not sufficient just to teach academic content (applied or not). It is equally important also to enable students to develop the ability to know how to find, analyse, organise and apply information/content within their professional and personal activities, to take responsibility for their own learning, and to be flexible and adaptable in developing new knowledge and skills. All this is needed because of the explosion in the quantity of knowledge in any professional field that makes it impossible to memorise or even be aware of all the developments that are happening in the field, and the need to keep up-to-date within the field after graduating."

Lyotard (1984) went further, suggesting that the boundaries between disciplines are eroding (many consider that they were always a false distinction anyway), and that traditional forms of knowledge transmission would be supplemented (and in some cases supplanted) by new methods of knowledge acquisition through technology. 30 years on, Lyotard's predictions are uncannily accurate. Citizen journalism for example, is rapidly becoming a key component of contemporary news reporting, appearing  in many major TV News channel broadcasts. Everyone who has a smart phone it seems, is a potential photo journalist. Wikipedia has for many replaced Encyclopaedia Britannica as the first port of call for knowledge acquisition. The fact that anyone with an internet connection can now contribute to knowledge is anathema to those who believe that knowledge generation should be the sole preserve of experts (Keen, 2007). Regardless of any such objections, user generated content is the dominant form of knowledge available on the web, and continues to grow. The checks and balances being implemented by the likes of Wikipedia are attempts to ensure that such knowledge is accurate and relevant. The users themselves will ensure that it is kept up to date. As Kop (2007) points out, 'knowledge is no longer transferred, but created and constructed', and that 'the validity of knowledge has become judged by the way it relates to the performance of society' (p. 193).

Are we witnessing the demise of the knowledge gate-keepers? Will we now see a decline in the Ivory Tower mentality that for centuries has held sway on learning for higher education? And how responsible is technology as a disruptor of this old paradigm of knowledge representation? Who is now in control of knowledge? We all are. What we do with that knowledge will determine the future of education.

References

Bates, T. (2009) Does technology change the nature of knowledge? Online Learning and Distance Learning Resources (Online publication)

Guy, T. (2004) Guess who's coming to dinner? cited in Kop, R. (2007) Blogs and wikis as disruptive technologies: Is it time for a new pedagogy? in M. Osbourne, M. Houston and N. Toman (Eds.) The Pedagogy of Lifelong Learning. London: Routledge.

Keen, A. (2007) The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Kop, R. (2007) Blogs and wikis as disruptive technologies: Is it time for a new pedagogy? in M. Osbourne, M. Houston and N. Toman (Eds.) The Pedagogy of Lifelong Learning. London: Routledge.

Kress, G. (2009) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006) New Literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The post-modern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Wheelahan, L. (2007) What are the implications of an uncertain future for pedagogy, curriculum and qualifications, in M. Osbourne, M. Houston and N. Toman (Eds.) The Pedagogy of Lifelong Learning. London: Routledge.

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Beneath the facade... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

EDEN in the Land of the Midnight Sun

I'm very much looking forward to taking part in the EDEN Conference in Oslo between June 12-15 this year. Last year I was unable to attend EDEN, due to pressure of work. This time I made sure I would have the time, by blocking out my diary for the conference week. I'm glad I did. I have been given the honour of being invited to chair the keynote sessions of Sugata Mitra and Sir Ken Robinson, and to moderate a debate between them both on the future of education. Sir Ken will be speaking live via satellite from the USA and Sugata will be present at the conference in Norway.

Alongside a great team of people, I will also be live blogging and tweeting throughout the event, and may even get some time to interview some of the delegates, speakers and organisers. Watch this space to read my own blog posts, as well as those of the rest of the EDEN blogging team over the next few weeks in the lead up to the conference, and then during the event itself.

I'm looking forward to seeing Norway again, and my first visit to Oslo, especially during the time when the nights are at their lightest. It's always difficult to sleep in the land of the midnight sun, where in mid summer the night skies are so bright and the sun never seems to fully set. But I intend to spend as much time as possible awake anyway, so I can enjoy the conference and spend as much time learning as much as I can. If you are going to EDEN this year, I hope we bump into each other. If not, stay in touch through the EDEN conference website, to watch the live streaming, and watch this space for news, views and reports.

Photo by Marcus Ramberg on Fotopedia


Land of the midnight sun by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning theories for the digital age

I pointed out recently that many of the older theories of pedagogy were formulated in a pre-digital age. I blogged about some of the new theories that seem appropriate as explanatory frameworks for learning in a digital age. These included heutagogy, which describes a self-determined approach to learning, a new model of peer-peer learning known as paragogy, a post modernist 'rhizomatic' learning explanation, distributed learning and connectivist theory, and also a short essay on the digital natives/immigrants discourse. I questioned whether the old models are anachronistic.

Is it now time for these new theories to replace the old ones? Do we need them to describe and frame what is currently happening in an age where everyone is as connected as they wish to be, where social media are the new meeting places, and where mobile telephones are pervading every aspect of our lives. Are the old theories still adequate to describe the kinds of learning that we witness today in our hyper-connected world? Do Vygotsky's ZPD theory or Bruner's Scaffolding model still cut the mustard? Or can they work together with the new theories to provide us with a basis to understand what is happening. How can we for example describe learning activities such as blogging, social networking, crowd sourced learning, or user generated content such as Wikipedia and YouTube using older theories? How might we begin to understand the issues surrounding folksonomies, peer learning, or collaborative informal learning that seem to occur spontaneously, outside the classroom, spanning the entire globe - using old theories that were written to describe what happens in a classroom? Sure, I'm being deliberately provocative here, but it's needed discussion: Are the old models adequate, or are any of the new theories that are emerging more apposite, or more fit for purpose?

I finally got around to creating a slideshow that highlights some of the above issues, and features many of the theories I have previously written about. I stated in the presentation that theories are important for at least two reasons: Firstly they enables us to explain what we are seeing from a perspective. Secondly, they can inform and justify our professional practice as teachers. I suggested that although the new theories are useful, we still need to take transformational learning theories into account, and we need to reconsider some of the social learning theories that we are already familiar with. I created the slideshow below as an accompaniment to an invited webinar I presented for ELESIG - hosted by the University of Nottingham. I will be interested in your views.

Learning Theories for the Digital Age from Steve Wheeler

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An audience with...

We learn best when we are fully involved in the process. John Dewey advocated 'learning by doing' and Seymour Papert called it 'learning by making'. These are theories that guide many educators today. Mindful of these theories, I have recently been working alongside students to encourage them to write for an audience. Nothing new in that, you may think. Normally, in higher education, students write for an audience of one. They write essays, projects and dissertations that will be read only by their tutor or marker. What would happen, I wondered, if I gave my students an audience of hundreds or even thousands? I did some early studies into the effects of this when I implemented a programme wide use of wikis in 2006. I published the results of the study in 2009, revealing that when they were aware of an audience, students raised their game. They improved their academic writing skills by concentrating on better sentence construction, grammatical accuracy, critical articulation of theory, ensuring that their referencing was accurate and the avoidance of plagiarism.

Earlier, in a 2008 article 'The Good, the Bad and the Wiki', my colleagues and I had reported that students became very protective over 'their content' in collaborative spaces such as wikis and took pride in presenting their ideas to a wider public audience. Subsequent implementation of blogging across whole classes revealed that students could find new ways of expressing their knowledge, and that audience dialogue was important for their development of further academic skills such as making arguments, engaging critically with theory and defending their position against attack. Clearly these are all very desirable graduate attributes, and needless to say, wikis and blogs now feature as essential 'learning by doing' tools in many of my undergraduate programmes.

I decided to take this concept a step further. Following the submission of some high quality third year degree projects, I approached students who had been graded at 80 per cent or higher, and encouraged them to develop their assignments for publication. I worked alongside them and we soon had our first success, when one of my BA students, Dan Kennedy was successful in publishing his work in an online open access journal called The Student Educator. The journal had been previously set up as a showcase for the best student writing in Plymouth University. Dan's piece was a well written, insightful article on the future of virtual learning environments and is well worth a read.

The next step was to push the idea further and encourage students to present their work in front of large live audiences such as conferences and symposia. The feedback and questions from audiences often add an extra dimension to the learning experience, because they highlight questions and issues the presenter may not previously have considered. I invited Dan to co-present with me at the ALT-C Conference in Manchester in 2009. He presented in front of almost 100 people, by far the largest audience he had spoken in front of at that time. I believe it was a transformational experience for him. It was at that point I decided I needed to find ways of encouraging more students to do similar things. I received some funding from a European project which enabled me to take students on overseas trips to work with our partner university students in Germany, Poland and Ireland. Over the three years of the Atlantis Project, 12 of my B.Ed students took part in presenting at research seminars in Darmstadt, Warsaw and Cork. Subsequently, each of them presented their work at the Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conferences in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

With the encouragement of my colleagues Peter Yeomans, Oliver Quinlan and myself, students also presented at a variety of Teachmeets, both in the South West, and further afield at large events such as the BETT Show in London. At Pelecon 2013 five more students presented their work. Two of those students - Becky Harcombe and Lucy Kitching - are currently working with me to prepare their assignments for submission to peer reviewed academic journals, with me acting as their second author. Lucy has also been successful in having her paper on Games Based Learning accepted for presentation at the EDEN Conference in Oslo, this coming June. I plan to support other students to achieve successful publication and conference presentations in the coming years.

You can imagine what such exposure can do to build students' confidence and how it can raise their professional profiles. Being able to include peer reviewed publications and international conference presentations on your CV when you apply for your first teaching job has to be a real advantage. Being able to evidence critical thinking, academic engagement at the highest level looks impressive on anyone's resume. It is also superb preparation for anyone who is about to embark on a career in education.

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Just how far can they go?

Some while ago, I wrote a post entitled 'Lurking and Loafing' about students who are on the peripheral of learning, and whose activity is often to 'lurk' without appearing to directly or productively participate.  If you are involved in education you will know exactly what I mean. The silent student who sits in the corner, watching, but not overtly involved. Ask them a question and they stare back at you blankly, shrug, or declare that they don't know. It looks as though they really don't want to be there. Students who are on the periphery can also be an annoyance to their peers, especially where collaborative work is required, and they don't appear to pull their weight. In the wider world, this is referred to as social loafing. It occurs especially where there is a large number of people present, and where a diffusion of responsibility is easy to accept.

In my post, I discussed the challenge this presents to teachers, especially where it can be less noticeable in online environments. I particularly highlighted the concerns teachers have about students who don't seem to engage, and often appear to be socially loafing, when other students are working hard. Yet not everyone views it as problematic. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger argued that some forms of peripheral activity can actually be legitimate participation, and can lead to deeper involvement within the core membership of the community over time. Through such legitimate peripheral participation they suggest, newcomers hold station in low risk and low profile positions on the edge, while they learn about the tasks, social rules and practices of their community, and eventually are drawn into the centre as productive members. But what if that doesn't happen? What if the students continue to lurk, fail to commit, and offer nothing of real substance, while their peers are working hard? Is this a problem? If so, how can it be resolved?

We know intuitively that people learn best when they really want to. Motivation is essential for the deepest and most engaged learning. Sometimes this motivation comes from outside (extrinsic) but more often than not it is intrinsic, an internal desire to better ourselves, gain more understanding, solve a problem, learn a new skill. The engagement of learning triangle below has several sources, but in its current presentation, I have added my own perspective around the use of digital media.

The Engagement Pyramid

(Adapted from Altimeter Group)

The pinnacle of engagement is clearly the ability to generate one's own content and then add value to it for others. Teaching others cannot be underestimated as a powerful motivator for many, and it is also essential that those who teach really know their field of expertise and have engaged deeply and critically with it. We learn by teaching, and if learners know they have to present something in front of their peers and tutors, they are prompted to prepare well and research widely. Encouraging students to share their content (videos, podcasts, blogs, etc) online for a potential global audience is a sobering but exciting challenge for them. Asking them to curate the content of others and add value to it can be even more challenging, but in doing so, they will usually read more widely, and are then in a position to assimilate multiple perspectives.

Engaging students through social media and mobile technology taps into an area that many are knowledgeable. Their familiarity with using these tools can often be just the spur they need to engage more deeply in their learning.

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Just how far can they go? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Self organised learning spaces

"I never teach my students. I only provide them with the conditions in which they can learn." - Albert Einstein

The social web is replete with self-organising spaces. Take Wikipedia for example. It is now the largest single repository of knowledge on the planet and continues to grow with over 4.2 million articles in English, and many more in other languages. Currently, 750 new pages are added each day on just about every topic known to humanity. It's the first port of call for many web users when they wish to check a fact or statistic. Who creates and maintains this huge, ever expanding repository of knowledge? We do. You and I. Us and an army of similar minded volunteers who love learning, and want to share their knowledge. All Wikipedia has done to promote the vast ever expanding storehouse of knowledge, is to provide the environment within which it all takes place. And that should give all of use some clues as to how to facilitate self-organising learning spaces.

Self organised learning - where learners control their own pace and space or learning, and often decide on what content they wish to consume - is a growing force in education. From individual students learning informally by browsing on their handhelds, to small flipped classrooms, to vast groups of learners following a programme of study on massive online open courses (MOOCs), education is changing to become learner driven. Yet many academics and teachers struggle with the concept of self-organised learning. Often this is because it is something of an alien concept to them. When they were in school, college or university, they were probably required to attend lectures and classroom teaching sessions where they were expected to 'receive knowledge' and then go away and attempt to make sense of it in an essay, project or examination. Clearly, the temptation is to perpetuate this kind of didactic pedagogy approach when one is expected to teach. Many however, are breaking out of this mould, and are launching into new kinds of pedagogy which enable learners to take control, and where teachers are another resource to be called upon when needed.

Wikipedia facilitates knowledge generation, sharing, remixing and repurposing because it is an open, accessible space where everyone can participate. It may be error ridden, but these errors are usually addressed and content revised, deleted or extended accordingly, and often within a short space of time. Yes, there will be disputes, just as there are 'edit wars' within Wikipedia, but hopefully, learners will also learn from this how to gain confidence in their own abilities, how to defend their positions and how to think critically. If this kind of learning occurs within a psychologically safe environment which is blame free, success can be achieved. Self-organised learning spaces should be similarly founded on psychologically safe principles, where if errors are made, those who made them can learn and adjust as they discover the 'correct approach' or the 'right answer'.

Working within self-organised communities enables a vast amount of learning to take place, but it also allows for individual differences and personalities to flourish. Teachers who adopt the approach of facilitating self organised learning must be willing to allow learners to take their own directions and find their own levels. Exploration, experimentation, taking risks, asking 'what if?' questions and making errors, are all essential elements of self-organised learning. However, probably the most important component is the ability of the learners themselves to direct their own learning, and to be able to call upon the resources they need, when they need them. We can learn a lot from Wikipedia, and not just from the knowledge it contains.

Photo from Fotopedia by William Murphy


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Twitter and the death of distance

It's something we already know, or at least have suspected for a long time. Social media sites such as Twitter span huge distances to connect people around the world. My own father, now 84 years old, started a Facebook account so he could keep in touch with distant relatives in such places as New Zealand and Australia. He's having a whale of a time. There are many stories of people developing and sustaining friendship, or even romance and eventual marriage, after 'meeting' on a social media site. I have co-authored several books with colleagues whom I have never met, where social media tools were used to co-create the content across the distance. The stories go on and on.

Many of us regularly communicate with multiple Twitter and Facebook friends and acquaintances instantaneously even though they may be in another country. Sometimes those friends can be several time zones away. It doesn't seem to matter that much any more where people are located. It's hard to believe that not so long ago, (pre-internet, pre-World Wide Web), this would have been nigh on impossible. We now take it for granted that we can upload and share photos and videos, text chat in real time, see and hear each other, or play games together in the same online social space, across vast distances.

Distance does not seem to be an issue any more, and research is unearthing evidence for what was already common knowledge. A recent study from the University of Illinois reports on the use of the tweets sent by 70 million Twitter users found that on average, tweets and retweets were sent by people located more than 750 miles away from the message originators. This study, published in open access online journal First Monday is intriguingly titled: Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter. Here is the abstract:

In just under seven years, Twitter has grown to count nearly three percent of the entire global population among its active users who have sent more than 170 billion 140-character messages. Today the service plays such a significant role in American culture that the Library of Congress has assembled a permanent archive of the site back to its first tweet, updated daily. With its open API, Twitter has become one of the most popular data sources for social research, yet the majority of the literature has focused on it as a text or network graph source, with only limited efforts to date focusing exclusively on the geography of Twitter, assessing the various sources of geographic information on the service and their accuracy. More than three percent of all tweets are found to have native location information available, while a naive geocoder based on a simple major cities gazetteer and relying on the user-provided Location and Profile fields is able to geolocate more than a third of all tweets with high accuracy when measured against the GPS-based baseline. Geographic proximity is found to play a minimal role both in who users communicate with and what they communicate about, providing evidence that social media is shifting the communicative landscape.

One of the key findings of the research is that Twitter is transforming our conceptions of communication at a global level. The study also confirms at least two other things: Not only are we now a virtual, distributed society, we are also increasingly comfortable with the fact that content, especially knowledge, can be disseminated around the world, via huge networks of users, in seconds. I suspect that the 'ripple effect', where content is spread and amplified through sub-groups across networks, is only just beginning to gather pace and will continue to exponentially grow as more and more people start social media accounts, and then begin to connect with others across the globe.  What this will do for massive online courses and other forms of distance education remains to be seen.

Photo by Artemis Crow


Twitter and the death of distance by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Follow you, follow me

A recent longitudinal study may provide clues about why some have more Twitter followers than others. The study, entitled A Longitudinal Study of Follow Predictors on Twitter analysed the social behaviour and message content against follower growth for more than 500 Twitter users over a 15 month period. The research concludes that if you want to attract more followers, your content has to be good quality, and how you say it also matters.

Here's a breakdown of the three main findings: Firstly, message content significantly impacts audience growth. It was found that negative sentiments (comments and content) were less likely to attract more followers than positive sentiment (this result is probably a 'no brainer', but it's useful to see the statistics). The authors speculated that this was probably because Twitter exhibits weaker social ties than other social networks such as Facebook, and therefore many Twitter users are less likely to want to connect with relative strangers who transmit negativity.

Secondly, social behaviour choices can dramatically affect network growth.Who a user follows and the profile cues they make available (Twitter identity, personal details disclosed and avatar) could increase or decrease their social capital. If you stay an egg all your Twitter life, don't expect too many followers.

Thirdly, variables related to network structure are useful predictors of audience growth. Connecting ties must exist between users and their audience, so if you want others to follow you, you may need to follow a few back to keep their interest. However, this finding should not be privileged above the first two findings, the authors say.

One area the authors also briefly discuss, as an exception to the above findings, is the celebrity effect. Many people will follow their favourite celebrities regardless of the content that is presented. It seems that all it takes to gain a huge following is to be a popular film star, rock musician or author. For the rest of us, content, connection and presentation style are everything, it seems.

The study is worth reading if you have any interest in how Twitter works at a more dynamic, macro level.

Image by AJ Cann


Follow you, follow me by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Are you a meerkat or an ostrich?

Are you a meerkat or an ostrich? Why am I asking you this strange question? Read on...

Etienne Wenger recently declared: 'If any institutions are going to help learners with the real challenges they face...(they) will have to shift their focus from imparting curriculum to supporting the negotiation of productive identities through landscapes of practice' (Wenger, 2010).

We live in uncertain times, where we cannot be sure how the economy is going to perform today, let alone predict what kind of jobs there will be for students when they graduate in a few years time. How can we prepare students for a world of work that doesn't yet exist? How can we help learners to ready themselves for employment that is shifting like the sand, and where many of the jobs they will be applying for when they leave university probably don't exist yet? It's a conundrum many faculty and lecturers are wrestling with, and one which many others are ignoring in the hope that the problem will simply go away. Whether we are meerkats, looking out and anticipating the challenges, or ostriches burying our heads in the sand, the challenge remains, and it is growing stronger.

Wenger may have given us clues to what we should do. Stop emphasising the teaching of curriculum subjects, and spend less time transmitting knowledge, facts and structured content that can often go quickly out of date. It means breaking down the traditional silos of division and opening up classrooms and lecture halls to other possibilities beyond passive reception of content. It requires that we should begin to break down the false boundaries between subjects, developing lifelong learners who will be able to adapt quickly and flexibly to changing contexts, unfamiliar problems and new challenges as they arise. This means creating environments in which students can learn to problem solve, negotiate meaning, develop their digital identities, and practice new communication methods through a variety of different platforms and media. It means exposing them to experiences where they can practice creating and sharing their own content, remixing existing content, reflecting on their practice, thinking and arguing critically.

All of these are skills and competencies graduates will need if they are to face a brave new world where nothing is yet clearly defined and where everything is up for negotiation. Such flexible, learner centred activities will be key to meeting any possible number of futures that may be out there. MOOCs and flipped classrooms are just the start of the movement to create this shift in education. They will not be the only methods employed. We can only begin to guess at what will happen next as education begins to evolve to its next level. Will you be looking out to see what is on the horizon, or will you hide your head in the sand?

Reference
Wenger, E. (2010) Knowledgeability in Landscape Practice, in S. de Freitas and J. Jameson (eds.) The eLearning Reader.

Photo by Ray Morris


Meerkats and ostriches by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.