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.