Reflections on Visitors and Residents as CPD in Learning Technologies module

The metaphor of the Digital Native is still very much used in academic circles - perhaps because it is easy to understand. Many academic staff feel comfortable to describe themselves as digital dinosaurs (or immigrants), separated from their students' apparent ease with technology by a gulf so fundamental that it cannot be bridged. When pushed, they do accept that students are ill-prepared to use tech in their educational lives - unable to navigate the VLE, not aware of file types, completely fazed when faced with a zip file. But still, the Digital Natives narrative persists and is accepted as a truth, an excuse.

Read Donna Lanclos on The Death of the Digital Native.

At the outset of my module on Learning Technologies (#cel263 on Twitter) I ask my group of participants - all academic staff - to reflect on their comfort in using new technologies for teaching¹, by writing a group blog post. Despite including works by Donna Lanclos and David White in the readings for the module, still the Digital Native rears his head in these reflections, every year. This last month, a number of staff quite happily identified themselves as Digital Immigrants, describing their discomfort with technologies that are effortless for their students. 

I think this is a good start. By explicitly articulating this in the group, in writing, it gives me a chance to gently challenge the position. 

The Digital Visitors and Residents metaphor, approached through a 90 minute workshop derived from David White and Donna Lanclos excellent guidelines, allows my module participants to focus, not on the technology they use, but on how they use the technologies. By working through the mapping process, creating their own maps while working and discussing in small groups, they get to explore their own interactions and purposes. The maps themselves aren't so important, but rather the follow up questions "so what?" and "what next?" By reflecting on their own maps, each participant can take ownership of their own technology use, and purposely determine what they want to do with it. 

How we did it

The guide produced by Donna and David is for a full day workshop, with a second day for more strategic use within an institution. Having participated in such a workshop, run by Donna and David last year, I found this a very valuable experience. But I only have 90 minutes, as part of the second workshop (of 7) in my module. 

The first reflection, about comfort in using new technologies, is an outcome of workshop 1. And without any encouragement on my part, the Digital Natives narrative always comes up. Though commenting on the reflections, I can begin to suggest that the Natives theory doesn't work, and maybe there's an alternative. 

Before the face-to-face 2nd workshop, I ask participants to watch David's short video explaining the V&R theory, as preparation. By the time I meet them, it's clear that at least some of them have watched it, and nobody admits otherwise. So, my intro can be short, referring to the video and also to their reflections. There is great hilarity as they Google each other - some definitely more discoverable than others - but everybody with a trace.

I spend some time working though the drawing of my own map, deliberately leaving out Wikipedia initially. This brings up various questions, which we discuss a little. But my intention is to get them working on their own maps as quickly as possible. They do this in small groups of just 2 or 3. Initially quiet, within 5 minutes the room is full of the sounds of discussion. I circulate, commenting and asking questions. 

One observation is about whether somebody's name, in the case where it might be unusual or unique, might have an effect on how comfortably open they might be. Anything on the open web would be immediately associated with that person. Somebody with a common name might find it easier to hide. 

Another group had quite a discussion around e-commerce apps and tools. While not discoverable, there was some anguish about online security of data. 

After a while, we stop and discuss a little. I draw Wikipedia onto my map, still a little to the Visitors side of the axis. We talk, in general, about the clustering or spread of activities on the maps, and what it might mean. We talk about a third dimension, which some have identified, and how they have use colours or shapes to represent this on their two dimensional grid. They spend another few minutes considering the So What?

In the last 15 minutes of the workshop we start to think about What Next? I explain my relationship with Wikipedia as a fledgling editor and how I am deliberately trying to move that block to the right of the V&R axis. I leave them contemplating the What Next question on their maps. Before they leave the room, we have a quick gallery walk. 

In the 2 weeks between each workshop, each member of the class writes a workshop report as a post on the group blog. This week the report is to include an image of the map with some explanation and a consideration of the So What? question. It takes some time for these posts to start appearing - which may be a good sign. Either they are still reflecting, or just too busy to get around to the report. 

Suddenly, a week after our workshop, there is a deluge of reports. Almost everybody indicates that the activity was of value and that they have learned something new about themselves and their technology use. Each person has identified some direction they want to take, either by eliminating some aspects or changing others. 

With a group of academics who are now more self-aware and purposeful, I now have a solid base to begin exploring the use of technology in teaching and learning. I look forward to the many discussions over the next 5 workshops. 

Some Participant Comments

I have asked my group if I might share some of the comments from their workshop reports. None of the participants are identifiable from the comments.

"In order to construct the V&R map, I had a think about where I go online – and one thought usually led to another, and there's certainly some things I've left off."

"This activity was extremely useful to me in relation to getting an accurate idea of my use of online tools."

"I wasn't aware that I was consistently using so many tools and I also underestimated my visibility online."

"Upon first consideration, I foolishly thought there should be a clear divide between my personal and institutional online activities. However, as I started to give it some attention, I found that while some activities were clearly separated into different categories, there was more overlap between groups than I had expected."

"In the first report, I wrote that I consider myself a beginner in terms of using technologies in teaching. After creating the map last Friday and after a few days contemplation since then I am not so sure any longer."

"By using David White’s system of mapping ones online activities, I have been able to clearly see how I interact with the web, and the roles that my online activities play in both my personal and work life. That brings me to the stage of thinking how I might be able to use the web in more effective ways."

"I was surprised by the way this exercise helped me to articulate my feelings towards email. It is by far the biggest influence on my life and it has become almost uniquely work-related."



[1] The prompt for the first reflection is:

Write a short report (no more than 3 paragraphs) answering the following question:
How would you describe your level of confidence in using and learning new computer based technologies?

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Guest Post: Vene Vidi Recordari

My last blog post - on the Etiquette for Tweeting at Conferences - got quite a bit of attention, and a number of comments. One person who commented is Dr Andrew Flaus (@andrewflaus) who sent me a long email including a discussion on etiquette for students in lectures. I invited him to contribute a blog post on the topic.

Crayons

My wife is an early childhood teacher so people sometimes ask her what she teaches to 3-4 year olds: “Everything”. Children who are new to the school environment start by learning etiquette of the classroom: How to wait in turn to answer, how to respect the efforts of others, how to share crayons.

The recent post about twitter at conferences reminded me how fresh we and our students are to the use of technology in our lecture theatres.

Whether they are “digital natives” or not, most students reflexively use smartphone technology for a variety of activities. If a student can see or hear something they have the technology to record it in their hand. They are also very savvy about the usefulness of this recording, yet many seem to be naive or oblivious to the etiquette of this copying.

Last month I presented a secondary school outreach activity in a PC Suite. Our computing support has professional security practices so I dutifully obtained temporary user IDs and passwords then distributed these to the students on a sheet of paper. Several students simply photographed the sheet and handed it on.

Very resourceful and not a big deal, but the concept of etiquette when dealing with security credentials clearly does not occur to the students.

(flickr photo by Dominique Godbout https://flickr.com/photos/dominiquegodbout/5157516276 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license)

Assume every teaching activity might be recorded 

Sit at the back of any undergraduate student lecture and you will see lots of smartphones on desks. Look carefully at the direction of those phones: At least a few will have the bottom (microphone end) facing the lecturer. If you watch as the lecture begins you might even see students turning on their audio recording apps.

I don’t have a problem with being recorded. I’ve given up caring. Anything that reduces the rate of despairing exam answers is ok with me. But I’m not sure every lecturer thinks that way. I also doubt the students are too worried about what we think.

It’s hard enough work to be interesting about protein structure and function, let alone controversial, so I doubt there is a back catalogue of Andrew’s Best Bits. And I’m not deluding myself about competing with Kanye West or Taylor Swift on my student’s smartphones. OK, I admit I’d like to be ahead of Justin Bieber ...

Who knows how the illicit audio of our lectures is subsequently shared. While I don’t mind being recorded in general, I would like to be confident that this is for personal study and revision only. Nothing else.

A handful of years ago when disabilities support issued voice recorders there was an etiquette of students asking before recording lectures, but I can’t recall anyone actually asking me this in recent years.

 

Be explicit about etiquette for invited speakers. 

As a research-led university we should be exposing our advanced undergraduate students to “real research”. For example, we have final year students write short summaries on a selection of departmental research talks given by invited speakers.

But real research is harder than predigested lectures, and it’s often delivered by people from research-led research institutes that have no idea about learning objectives. This places extra temptation for students to capture a recording of these research talks from invited speakers.

Recently we had a very interesting human clinical genetics speaker. I noticed one eager and ambitious student front and centre taking smartphone snaps of slides, including unpublished data and clinical cases. In fairness the cases were appropriately anonymized, but I doubt the student understood this or had thought about the sensitivity of clinical research. He had definitely not asked permission.

A couple of years ago I even saw a student bring a laptop into a research talk, dim the screen, turn it round and use the webcam to record the talk as a video.

In the days when we had smaller advanced undergraduate classes our students were more directly mentored and we could expect them to imbibe our etiquette implicitly. In the heady days before massification it wasn’t possible to record things anyway. What came on tour with the visiting speaker’s film slides stayed on tour.

Nowdays, what goes on tour ends up on Facebook.

 

Whose crayons are they? 

Our wonderful classroom full of learning technologies gives new and unique ways for students to engage with information to develop their understanding.

However, it’s important for them to understand that recording data inappropriately is just as improper as reproducing it inappropriately. Are we helping them to appreciate that everything they see and hear is not fair game for recording and publishing?

I came and I saw, not I went and I copied.

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Campus Create - A daily dose of creative challenges at NUI Galway

In December, a PhD student, Sally McHugh, called into my office to tell me that she had successfully received Explore funding for a project called Campus Create, with Dr. Tony Hall in Education. The idea was to promote and encourage creativity in all its forms, including within digital media. Sally and I had talked before about Digital Storytelling DS106 from the University of Mary Washington, and the work of Jim Groom, Alan Levine and colleagues. They had been working for many years, encouraging people to make art, to create, share and remix, in an open way, cognisant of copyright and domain ownership. Our heroes.

http://campuscreate.eu/

Before Christmas, Tony, Sally and I met to talk about how we might explore and enact these ideas at NUI Galway within the Campus Create project. We came up with the notion of having twelve weeks of themes, to correspond to the first twelve weeks of semester 2, and to post daily create challenges, similar to projects like the Daily Create, the Daily Post, and the 12 Apps of Christmas.

Things progressed further, and after a furious effort in the first week of January with collaborators (including support from Alan Levine) and developing the technical infrastructure, the experiment began.

It's now week 2. The theme is Sound. Well, the jury is still out on whether that's a literal statement or not, as yet. Getting the daily create prompt together for the website and cross posting on Facebook and Twitter has been become a daily (and late night and weekend) challenge for us too.

Thanks to the good work of John Caulfield and Connell Cunningham, users' contributions have visibility on the large video wall in the library and on display screens  around the campus. This is a display of the latest moderated user posts via six or seven social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, etc.), once the weekly hashtag is used within a contribution on any social media platform. These are also accessible live on the website on http://campuscreate.eu/category/your-creations/ No mean feat.

So, Campus Create is off to a promising start. The warm encouragement and strong participation from many around campus has heated our frozen winter feet. I'm looking forward to the next few weeks and seeing how it all unfolds.

Check out the next creative daily prompt on http://campuscreate.eu/ (and register if you want to receive the weekly email). I hope to see your 'creates' join the conversation.

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Research Seminar with Caroline Kuhn H.

CELT RESEARCH SEMINAR: 

Supporting students in developing their digital research skills

Thursday, July 16th, 11am – 12noon, AM 207 

 (Arts Millennium Bldg.) 

Presented by visiting scholar Caroline Kuhn - Institute for Education, Bath Spa Univ.  

How can universities encourage and support students in developing their digital research skills — in particular through the design and implementation of their own Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)? Caroline Kuhn will share research from her current PhD study in this area and looks forward to engaging in discussion with participants. 

Further information:

Caroline Kuhn research blog  

Twitter: @carolak 

Any questions?

Please contact Catherine Cronin catherine.cronin@nuigalway.ie

On the afternoon of July 16th, you might also like to join the #GREAT15 Conference, also being held at NUI Galway. 

Update (27 July)

We are delighted that Caroline's seminar was recorded and can be viewed online.

Caroline has also written a blog post based on the discussion following her talk last week.

More on Getting Real about Virtual Learning...

We've finally gotten around to uploading Doug Belshaw's keynote from last month's symposium...

 

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#celt15: Getting Real about Virtual Learning

Last Friday (19th June) was our CELT Symposium on the topic Getting Real about Virtual Learning. It was a fantastic day (despite the weather) with about 200 participants and plenty of learning.

Twitter at #celt15

Thanks to the twitter team (@gramcgrath, @marloft, @allaboardHE, @catherinecronin, @rosenidhubhda, @TELtales) and all the lovely tweeps at the conference, there were almost 1200 #celt15 tweets on Friday alone, and we trended in Ireland for most of the day!

The quality of the backchannel was quite amazing. I've created a semi-structured archive of all the comments and pictures using storify, which gives a sense of the day.

A beautiful TAGSExplorer visualisation of all the tweets for the hashtag was created by Martin Hawsey's Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS). From here you can find the top tweeter from the conference (@iainmacl) and the top conversationalists (@worried_teacher and @sharonlflynn). TAGS also produces a searchable archive of the conference tweets.

Keynotes at #celt15

Both Sian Bayne and Doug Belshaw gave very exciting and thought-provoking talks at #celt15. These have been recorded and we should be able to make them available soon.

In the meantime, Doug has already made his presentation available on Slideshare:

Identifying, scaffolding, and credentialing skills in an ever-changing digital environment from Doug Belshaw

And Sian Bayne's paper Teacherbot: Interventions in Automated Teaching is also available online.

Presentations from the event

At least one presenter has shared his presentation using Slideshare. If anybody else has shared their presentation, please let me know and I'll add it here:
 

Blended Learning: Feared or Misunderstood? (CELT15) from Tony Burke

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Marvellous Mapping: Reflecting on online identities and practises using Visitors and Residents Mapping

Last month CELT hosted a workshop, "Marvellous Mapping: Reflecting on online identities and practices using Visitors and Residents Mapping".

The workshop facilitators, David White and Donna Lanclos, took the time while they were here to sit down with Catherine Cronin for a short chat and here it is...

Learning at #cesicon 2015

I wasn't sure which identity to bring with me to #cesicon, the annual conference of CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland). Billed as an event for those who are interested in integrating technology into their teaching and learning, it seems aimed mostly at first and second level education. Since my professional experience is embedded firmly in higher education, I wasn't sure what benefit the event would be for me.

The free stickers went down well

In my new found interest in all things Wikimedia, however, I wanted to support the Wikimedia Community Ireland group who were presenting in a session called Wikipedia for Education. And so, I signed up as part of An Lucht Vicí. With my new (purple) avatar on twitter, I can no longer hide easily at events, and so I brought along my "me" identity as well.

The one identity that I tried to leave behind was the parent of two children in secondary school. My experience is that parents and teachers don't mix, unless it's at highly structured parent-teacher meetings, organised by the school.

I had a great day, which was full of learning. I was very impressed by the crowds of professionals that attended, mostly primary and secondary teachers, giving up their Saturday to learn and share. I was very impressed by the young people from St Brendan's National School, who were there to sell copies of their newsletter, the Eyrecourt Examiner, and even offered subscriptions and advertising space. It was great to finally meet some twitter friends such as @donenda and @simonmlewis.

And I learned too - more than I expected. Gareth Callan (@gar_callan), from Coláiste Bhaile Chláir, gave a wonderful presentation about flipping the (second level) classroom. To be honest, I wasn't even sure that this was possible at second level in Ireland, but I'm convinced after Gar's talk. After a workshop with Mary Jo Bell (@7MJB) and Ciara Brennan (@PrimEdTeacher), I'm now creating and sharing videos with Vine, and made my first Animoto creation.

The Plenary Panel Discussion was excellent, particularly the young lady who spoke so eloquently about the disconnect between the technology she uses at home and the technology used at school. She asked a simple, but obvious, question: why don't teachers ask their students about what tech they use and might like to use as part of their learning?

By the end of the day, I was tired, but buzzing, especially after John Davitt's very entertaining keynote (talking sheep included). I had come to the realisation that we all have something to learn from each other and it might be no harm to step outside our boundaries occasionally.

But a week later, and as the parent in me reflected, I have a huge sense of regret about the event. My regret is about the teachers who were not there. It's almost 30 years since I did my Leaving Cert (yes, I am that old) and the learning experience of young people at secondary school has not changed significantly since then. I was particularly saddened by a statement over the weekend from one of the teachers' unions, that teachers NOT attend certain CPD opportunities.

Sometimes it's hard to balance multiple identities! Thanks to everyone at #cesicon for your enthusiasm and dedication.

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Wikipedia Belongs in Education

St Leonard's Hall

The EduWiki 2014 event was held on Friday 31st October in the stunning St Leonard's Hall at the University of Edinburgh. Ever since I heard Toni Sant (Education Organiser with wikimedia UK) speak at the International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference (see previous post), which led me to join the Wikimedia Ireland Community working group, I have been fascinated at the potential of using Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) to support student development in higher education. So, I was thrilled to be at the one day event in Edinburgh to find out more about the Wikimedia UK education projects.

This was always going to be a different crowd from my usual conference network, and there wasn't much tweeting in advance of the event, so I was a little nervous when I turned up at the social event on the evening before the conference. I needn't have worried, the small group that had gathered were as welcoming as could be, including a nacho-eating dog, and several wikipedians. A collection of tweets from the conference and the lead-up was captured using storify by Brian Kelly, who spoke at the event.

Floor Koudijs: Why Wikipedia is great for students

The event itself was opened the next morning by Peter McColl, Rector at the University of Edinburgh, and followed by a presentation from Floor Koudijs from the Wikipedia Education Program at the Wikimedia Foundation.  Her message was a simple one: Wikipedia belongs in Education. Using Wikipedia in the classroom, students will start as readers, but they are future contributors. There followed some discussion about academic staff attitudes to Wikipedia, where it is often not seen as a valid resource. But even academics will use it as a starting point for research, so the suggestion was: instead of fighting it, why not embrace it?

Wikimedia in Education

During the morning, we heard from a number of interesting speakers, including Wikimedians in Residence at various UK institutions including JISC, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the National Library of Scotland. Of particular interest to me was a presentation from Marc Haynes, former Wikipedian in Residence at Coleg Cymraeg, Wales, which enables teaching through Welsh in the universities in Wales. Marc described his role: working with academics across Welsh universities, training them in wiki editing, sourcing content that could be shared under a suitable Creative Commons licence, and building up content on the Welsh Wicipedia. Since NUIG has a particular responsibility to the Irish language, there would seem to be opportunities to do something similar for Vicipéid, the Irish language wiki. 

Also of immediate interst to me was a very accessible presentation from Martin Poulter, former Wikimedia ambassador at JISC. Martin spoke about his approach to academic staff development around using Wikipedia in education: a Wikipedia comprehension exercise. Rather than starting with how to edit, he demonstrated an approach which highlights academic qualities of Wikimedia articles - the quality scale, citation guidelines, peer review, authorship, collaboration, cultural differences and opportunities for translation projects. Coming at this from the angle of supporting academic integrity, rather than a focus on the technology, is a fantastic approach and one that I hope to use in the future. 

A presentation from Greg Singh, lecturer at the University of Stirling, showed Wikimedia projects in action. I was particularly impressed by the WikiBooks project Digital Media and Culture Yearbook 2014, where students worked in 12 groups of 6, to collaboratively produce an open publication. Marks were awarded for content, understanding and engagement. Student feedback was almost all overwhelmingly positive (11 out of 12 groups).

Beginners Workshop for New Campus Ambassadors and Educators

Instructor Basics

In the afternoon I attended the workshop delivered by Toni Sant and Martin Poulter  for people who are getting started, or thinking of getting started, with Wikipedia in their own institutions. The first part of this was based on the excellent Instructor Basics: How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool publication. Based on 5 key policies (free content, reliable sources, neutral point of view, notability, good faith), we were led to consider different types of student assignments that can be used to help achieve various learning outcomes. 

Rather than create a new Wikipedia article, which could be quickly removed due to lack of "notability", we were encouraged to think about: translating an article (useful for building up content on Vicipéid, for example); copy editing to improve the grammar or readability of an article; uploading illustrations to Wikimedia Commons on a particular topic or theme; adding new content to an existing article; using Wikidata as the basis of an assignment. Wikipedia also has a number of sister projects that could be used as the basis of students work: Commons, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wiktionary...

At all times, the importance of interacting with the existing Wikimedia community was stressed, through writing messages on a user's talk page or on an article's talk page. This allows a student to practice skills in collaboration, not just with their classmates, but with a whole world of volunteer editors. 

Of course, students are likely to make mistakes when it comes to Wikipedia etiquette and although we were assured that the majority of Wikipedians will be supportive of fledgling editors, there are also stories of less than helpful behaviours. To support students and educators, we were introduced to the Wikipedia Education Extension which allows educators to register their institution and courses, and within this, identify clearly which articles students may be working on.

There is an impressive amount of online training for educators and for students, and my next step is to become a Campus Ambassador so that I can start to roll out projects at NUI, Galway.

WikiProject Ireland/NUIG National Monuments Editathon Nov 2014 

As a first step, I'm really excited that we are hosting our first An Vicipéid/Wikipedia Editathon this Friday!

Organised by Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge, CELT and the Wikimedia Ireland Community, the aim is to highlight the value of An Vicipéid/Wikipedia as a learning resource and to improve its quality by encouraging Irish traslation students to participate in the event. The event’s theme is The National Monuments of Ireland. This was chosen on account of the Wikimedia Ireland Community’s previous collaboration with the international photography competition Wiki Loves Monuments.

For more information see the event invitation.

No doubt you'll be hearing more about Wikipedia projects at NUIG soon!

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Learning about Digital Literacies at EdTech 2012

The last couple of weeks have been busy, between the EdTech 2012 conference organised by ILTA, our own CELT conference, and then a presentation to the WRSLAI event last week. I haven't had time to think!

So, before my memories fade completely, I'll write a couple of blog posts about all these events. I'm starting with the keynote speakers at EdTech 2012, compiled from my notes and tweets, using storify.




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