On finishing a Master’s

I did my first Master’s degree, in English Literature, in the early 1990s. I would like to have invested more time and energy in it, but my lifestyle wasn’t always conducive to study back then.

A few years later I managed to drag my PhD thesis (also in English) over the finish line.

Now, ten years later, I have completed a second Master’s, this time in Online and Distance Education, and it has been transformative. This is due in part to the fact that I’m at a different life stage, but it’s largely due to the fact that I teach and manage in H.E. and so there’s a symbiosis between my learning and professional lives. Quite simply, the best learning has to be relevant to the learner. Most of what I learned at school was utterly useless.

More widely, my work on the Master’s has made me reflect on the nature of learning itself. I like Etienne Wenger’s (1998) argument for centripetal learning, that learners move centripetally from the periphery to the centre of communities. This rings true for many experiences, from work (where training courses are limited, but actual participation in the workplace enculturates us far more effectively) to the experience of being a student at university. However, recent work by Engestrom (2007) challenges Wenger’s analysis by pointing out oppression by dominant figures in communities, and rebellion by apprentices. Therefore, learning is not smoothly and necessarily centripetal. Instead, the movement of learning is shaped by learning’s participants. Those at the hub of the learning experience would appear to exert the greatest influence.

So, for educators, the challenge is to create benign learning communities, in which learners can and want to move to the centre. Therefore, for all that technology and advanced pedagogy can do, learning is fundamentally about relationships and therefore fundamentally about people.

Or, as the old folks say round our way, it’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice.

References
Engeström, Y. (2007) ‘From communities of practice to mycorrhizae’ in Hughes, J., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. (eds) Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives, London, Routledge.
Wenger, Etienne (1998, repr. 2005), Communities of Practice, Cambridge , Cambridge University Press.

Stop learning and do something else instead

Facing the last lap of this MA, I’m putting my final, 6,000 word piece of work away for a few days.

Setting work aside for a while is recognised as a good thing. Certainly, from an editing point of view, setting the work aside allows you to return to it with fresh eyes and see all its faults.

The other thing that has passed into received wisdom is that, while the work sits there unmolested, the unconscious works on the material. This seems to ring true in the sense that most of us recognise this kind of experience. When we say ‘I just thought of that,’ it might be more accurate to say ‘I just stopped thinking of it.’ But when we say that putting work aside for a few days allows the unconscious to work on it (as I have said in academic writing courses I have written) we usually don’t know what we are talking about. Most of us haven’t benefited from training in psychology or psychoanalysis.

I’m not sure this matters, as long as it works. But if setting a subject aside is a good way to allow thought to ferment, should we start building digressive activities into the courses we write? Do we need ‘Google Time’ in learning, the opportunity to just create; for example a fifteen minute slot in the middle of a workshop to talk about latest films watched, books read, websites discovered, games played?

I’m currently doing a lot of tutor observations, and I encourage tutors to play around with media, to mix things up so it’s not just the tutor talking. But maybe we should mix things up further and spend 10-20 minutes just doing something because it’s fun to do it, and then return to the matter in hand. If we give thought time to think then we may see the benefit.

The twenty-first century scriptorium

I’m beginning to understand Brabazon’s (2008) objections to Web 2.0: ‘The long tail of proliferating mediocrity, where bloggers link to other bloggers and podcasters namecheck other podcasters, is the great cost of Web 2.0.’ Having started this blog as part of the final component of my MA, I realise that there is, essentially, no audience for one more educational blogger.

It makes me thinks of monks in the medieval scriptorium. They produced beautiful psalm books, for example, but in a cultural context in which literacy was marginal. They had drawings, too, accompanying the script. Sometimes these were didactic, underlining the point of the psalm (and providing a learning experience for those who could not read) but they also did funny drawings, sometimes with a surreal quality that Terry Gilliam would be proud of. I remember seeing one in which a knight has approached a lady, and has slain a unicorn lying between them. The unicorn was a symbol for chastity (no idea why, given the horn in the middle of its head), the idea being that the knight has removed or is about to remove said maiden’s chastity.

Maybe they were bored. I suspect you can only write about the Lord’s greatness a few thousand times before it starts to lose its gloss. But I wonder, too, if they were ever beset by a sense of futility, that they were investing their time and labour in something that wouldn’t achieve much. Maybe not, and I accept that their sense of selfhood can’t be conflated with selfhood as we understand it in the twenty-first century. But, in the absence of an audience and communication, the lone mind undertakes some odd journeys.

Learning needs friction sometimes, so maybe, for a blogger to have a satisfying experience in a quiet room, they need to just play with the technology, think about the creative potential of blogging, and let the learning and teaching ruminations (the content) come after the form has been figured out.

Try
Brabazon, T. (2008) ‘Nothing to lose but our mobiles: review of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations”’, Times Higher Education, 3–9 April, no.1, p.839.

Net or gross?

For as long as I’ve been involved in online learning, the term ‘the network’ has been thrown around as a beneficence in itself.

We were going to deal with everything through networks, which tended to be posited unproblematically as harmonious communities, manifestations of the principles of anarchism, in which we all shared and all contributed.

However, work I’ve read recently by Jones (2004) and Ingraham (2004) makes it clear that networks have never been like that. They are as likely to be contested as utopian, with peaks of influence, or hubs that extend their own gravitational pull.

For example, I follow some people on Twitter because they are authorities in their field. Not all of them follow me back. Similarly, I’ve had some students and ex-students who follow or have followed me, and I haven’t followed them back. This isn’t a question of rudeness, but of keeping my network manageable.

So, all the time we were citing networks as the exemplar of everything that was new and exciting and democratic about learning in the digital age, we were actually looking at all the old power structures in learning, but from a new angle. As with so much of the net to date, it replicates existing social relations within a new context. It’s still more part of the superstructure than the base.

Those of us who were entranced by the possibilities thrown up by digital learning anchored our faith to the network. Each of was a digital Blanche Dubois, always relying on the kindness of networks. I hope the gentlemen in white coats don’t come for us.

Try:
Ingraham, B. (2004) ‘Networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks – a commentary’, Association for Learning Technology Journal, vol.12, no.2, pp.189–94; also available online at http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ login?url=http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 0968776042000216237 (accessed 11 August 2009).

Jones, C. (2004) ‘Networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks’ ALT-J, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 81-93.

Lowest Common Best Practice

In a provocative article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Thomas Docherty argues that the Higher Education Academy is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that, directly contrary to its ambitions, drives quality down to the lowest common denominator. In its place, he extols the virtues of the apprentice model of instruction, in which one generation imparts its expertise to the next.

A couple of paradoxes occur to me. First, while Prof Docherty seems uncomfortable with modern developments in higher education learning and teaching, his proposed solution falls neatly within John Seely Brown’s cognitive apprenticeship model, or even Etienne Wenger’s Community of Practice, with the novice moving centripetally towards a community’s centre. Moreover, while we all had excellent lecturers when we were undergraduates, we all had some pretty dreadful ones too, which suggests that the previous system for instruction was not all good.

The HEA is well conceived in the sense that it allows for a ‘quality stamp’ for those of us who came to H.E. teaching via the degree/Master’s/PhD route, without any formal training in how to teach. However, Prof Docherty raises a legitimate concern. I was recently drafting competencies for an academic role, and was told by someone more experienced in the field (note the expert/apprentice model) that when you devise competencies, people perform to the competencies but then stop. So, the HEA does have a problem in the sense that by defining competent performance in H.E. teaching it may also unintentionally limit it, and hence the pursuit of best practice may indeed be dragged down to the lowest common denominator.

How do we measure good performance in H.E. teaching without limiting it? Answers on a tapestry, please.

Edgar Allan’s

Most of us already have Personalised Learning Environments. It’s just that we haven’t named them yet.

I went to a one-day conference at Durham Uni in 2008 and enjoyed a presentation by Lawrie Phipps of JISC. He had done some research with postgraduate students which asked them to do screen captures at random moments. What he found was that students run a range of applications at any one time. These may include an institution’s VLE, but they may also include Facebook, or Twitter, or a music file. The research suggested to me that technology facilitates the melding of our professional and social lives. We can all be multi-taskers now, even those of us who are men with less substantial corpus callosums.

Maybe, therefore, we’ve all got ‘Edgar Allan’s’, that is POEs: Personal Online Environments.

In terms of institutional responses to PLEs or POEs, institutions have to work with them rather than against them. Institutions can provide materials and activities and a drop off point for assignments via VLEs, but then also encourage students to network (either with staff or amongst themselves) via social software. If individual academics set up a Twitter profile, for example, then they can make new articles, blog posts and video resources available to their network, thereby encouraging engagement with current scholarship across a range of media.

It’s time to get up close and personal, and institutional VLEs can’t take us all the way there.

The Early Adoption Agency

In 2007 I used a Blog as an online bulletin board for postgraduate students at King’s College London. The blog is averaging 7000 hits a year. Subsequently, I set up a Twitter profile for King’s postgrads. The point here is that these innovations were not prompted by the institution. There is a VLE (Blackboard WebCT) at King’s, but thereafter technological innovations come down to individuals.

Similarly, at the Open University I took a series of haiku written by my students and played around with them using Xtranormal. Again, this was not prompted by the institution, but by my own interest in technology-enhanced learning.

At this point I should moan about the lack of institutional support for technology-enhanced learning, but I won’t. This is because top-down efforts to impose educational technologies seem doomed to me. Real change, in higher education as elsewhere, happens from the bottom up.

Therefore, the best thing institutions can do is give support to early adopters. Encourage them to share their experiences with the rest of the institution. Equally, give them time to play and experiment with new technologies, the equivalent of Google Time. Given that many of the tools and services available are free, the institution is not being asked to put its hand in its own pocket.

Institutions that try to impose a technology from the top down will find it’s like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. Instead, they should give space to their technological innovators, and happily declare themselves The Early Adoption Agency.

The loner with no persona

With the spread of tuition fees and the significant scaling down of grants, more students are paying for higher education. Consequently, there is an extent to which higher education has been brought within a ‘goods and services’ mentality. This is a problematic perception, in the sense that, in higher education, the outcome is significantly dependent on the input from the student/ customer, but the perception exists nonetheless.

In selecting a university, a prospective student is more likely to use the website than a print prospectus.

If students expect to encounter their university online, then it seems likely that they will expect to be able to encounter their lecturers online. Otherwise, they will perceive a barrier between themselves and their lecturers, a barrier which will impede effective learning.

If we want people to have satisfying learning experiences and outcomes then we want them to perceive themselves as part of a learning community. This is why the support function of a university is so crucial. Support is broadly defined, and incorporates lecturers making themselves available to students, physically and, increasingly, online.

Lecturers ought not to think of having an online presence as an act of uncomfortable self-exposure. Whoever creates the online persona is sovereign to a large degree. While they cannot control all the meanings that a reader of a screen may generate, they can control the amount of information that they make available online. Learners already create online social presences via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, et al.. They encounter their peer group and their family members as online presences. Consequently, they won’t want to be glancing skyward (as through a glass darkly) at impenetrable, remote figures in ivory towers.

It has become a truism to talk of the movement from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. In the twenty-first century, it will be important not to be the loner with no persona.

Watch this space…

I’ll be launching this blog shortly, exploring the construction of online academic identity, as part of Open University course H800, ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’ which comprises the final part of my MA in Online and Distance Education.