Tuesday 29 July 2008

Grassroots Video

My Space or yours?
Until very recently, getting video onto the Internet involved quite a bit of know-how. Now it just takes a phone and You Tube. According to the Horizon Report 2008, grassroots video is one of the six emergent technologies that are set to transform teaching, learning and creative expression, with a ‘time-to-adoption’ horizon of one year or less. It is redefining notions of what is a useful bit of video: ‘more and more, it is a two to three minute piece designed for viewing in a three inch browser window or on a mobile phone’.[1] Is this the future of learning objects? Why don’t we make more use of the vast array of learning objects out there on YouTube? What will this mean for traditional teaching methods? Is the lecture dead?

There is some evidence that far from killing off the lecture, You Tube and My Space TV can be used to repackage the lecture. Recording lectures offers students the chance to reprise their learning. Far from giving students an excuse not to attend the lecture, there is anecdotal evidence that recording the lecture and making it available on YouTube lets students see what they are missing. It is also a great marketing technique, reaching out beyond the university to the whole world. Big higher education institutions like University of California Berkeley, USA, and The University of New South Wales, Australia, have invested heavily in getting branded space on YouTube. They are not only aiming at students who can’t attend lectures but secondary-school students as well. Check out UNSW Lectures Go Live. And because grassroots video is disruptive technology, with low barriers to entry, there is nothing to stop individual tutors taking their course materials online.

[1] The New Media Consortium, Educause Learning initiative, The Horizon Report 2008 Edition, (2008)
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf Accessed 29 July 2008

Social Networks

‘Here comes everybody’
Facebook has become a massive part of how students communicate with each other and organize their lives. How much should tutors use it to communicate with students? Would students resent the intrusion?

The findings of a recent JISC study Great Expectations of ICT: how Higher Education Institutions are measuring up (June 2008) found that 91% of students in their survey used social-networking sites regularly, the technology being far more familiar to students than wikis and blogs.

The interviews with the students made it clear that where ‘social networking emerges organically from among the students, it is more successful than social networking systems put in place by the teacher (which can feel overly formal and “fake”)’. Students gave examples of where WebCT discussion boards were ignored, the conversation shifting to Facebook.

Universities have started to engage with Facebook, using it to advertise and promote their functions. Widgets have started to emerge on Facebook, allowing users to search full text databases and catalogues (JSTOR widget, SUNCAT widget). Will Facebook be the main interface through which users access online resources in HE? Or as universities colonize the site, will students leave? As staff and students create their own networks using freely available applications and social networks, what will happen to corporate networks?

And how should you behave on Facebook? Are students aware of how to protect their personal data and manage levels of privacy? If you leave your 'Search' visibility as 'Everyone' on Facebook, everyone can find you and see what you write. Informal Tutor Appreciation societies on Facebook may be just a bit of fun but when does free speech and the right to criticize tutors become cyberbullying? The Times Higher Education Supplement has highlighted a number of cases recently.[1] Anonymity breaks Facebook rules (Terms of Use, User Conduct) and is no protection from prosecution. The High court has just fined someone £22,000 in damages for libel and breach of privacy for posting fake and malicious entries about another party on Facebook.[2] Once an image goes on Facebook, can you remove it? Do you have any control over photos taken by friends? What happens if those photos are ones you wouldn’t want a prospective employer to see? What happens if the press gets hold of them?


Other social networks are emerging that will have an impact on how we communicate and interact: Linked In for professional networking and Ning enabling the creation of customized social networks. Here at UCLan we have Communities at UCLan https://elgg.uclan.ac.uk/ running on the ELGG social network software. Beyond this, social networks are emerging in professional communities of practice, sometimes promoted by commercial publishers (Nature Network from nature.com, BioMedExperts from Collexis Inc) sometimes by professional groups (Pronetos, ResearchGATE Scientific Network, Academici). Whilst the research networking and collaboration application is going to grow in importance, perhaps the real question is what kind of impact are social networking sites going to have on teaching and learning?


University policy on use of social networking sites

[1] Binns, Amy, ‘Staff suffer bullying by students on the web’, THES 2 March 2007
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=208037
Accessed 29 July 2008
[2] Fallon, Amy, ‘Ex-friend’s Facebook revenge costs £22,000 in damages’, The Guardian, 25 July 2008

Your Facebook? MySpace?

An Online Survival Guide...

As part of the UCLan Students' Union 'Give it a Go!' series of events 22nd September - October 5th 2008 we would like to hold a staff student debate and discussion on digital literacies.

Tags:
Social Networking, Grassroots Video, Plagiarism Online

Issues:
  • Protecting personal data online
  • Ethical and legal behaviour – free speech, cyberbullying, defamation, privacy, intellectual property, plagiarism
  • As tools for teaching, learning, communicating

Probable date/time: Friday 3rd October 16:00-17:30

Probable venue: Media Factory, Studio Space, 3rd floor

Contact: If you would like to come and take part, contact

Jonathan Westaway, Learning and Information Services, jwestaway@uclan.ac.uk

Nicola Rolph, Students' Union Sports and Events Co-ordinator, nrolph@uclan.ac.uk

Friday 4 July 2008

Oral Communication

YouTube Colloquium...
I have been talking with a number of colleagues recently about the importance of oral-communication skills and how they are supported and taught (or not, as the case may be). Various commentators have noted that in a knowledge and service economy, lack of articulacy puts people at a disadvantage in terms of employability. Communication and narrative skills seem to be going up the agenda in education. Cambridge now gets its Ph.D. students in science to undertake two minute public expositions of complex ideas, as part of its public understanding of science remit, fulfilling some of its RCUK Joint Skills Statement obligations for postgraduates.[1]

We have specific disciplines where the need for oral communication is made explicit (mooting in law for instance, 'pieces to camera' in Journalism and TV Production). We also have research expertise in specific areas. For instance, Prof. Bernie Carter in the Department of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire is researching the role of narrative enquiry in diagnostic encounters between patients and medical professionals, drawing on insights from professional storytellers. On the whole though, I suspect that students are not well prepared for all the ways in which they need to communicate orally: seminars, break-out sessions, presentations, interviews etc. There is also evidence in the literature that 'giving a presentation' is one of the least favourite forms of assessment, though students grudgingly recognize its value afterwards. I was wondering if we could highlight oral-communication skills and make them more fun by harnessing the potential of Web 2.0 technologies.

Could we, as part of the undergraduate research journal Diffusion for instance, invite students to submit an oral presentation of their research on YouTube? Keep it short, make it a competition, with a prize. The best candidates get to present live to an invited audience, who can ask questions, with a further award. This achieves a number of objectives. Whilst our students are perhaps unfamiliar with debating societies, YouTube is a paradigm they understand, with very low barriers to entry. It could link research with its public communication and dissemination aspects, which would prepare students well for giving papers at conferences, surviving their viva or a job interview. Getting them to pitch it to an informed public audience would get them thinking about target audiences and the need for clear exposition of complex ideas. It might also get them thinking about the ways formal academic discourse can sometimes cloud understanding.

This is only one approach. What about updating the prize essay for the ‘Google Generation’ and getting students to submit both written and/or oral entries? In 1749 the Academy of Dijon set a prize essay, advertised in the Mercure de France: ‘Do the Sciences and the Arts contribute to the corrupting or the or to improving morals?’ Upon seeing the advertisement in the paper, the eventual winner, Rousseau, noted ‘I saw another universe and became another man’.

[1] Swain, H., ‘Spice up your science’, The Guardian, Education, Tuesday 19 February 2008, 12. http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/postgraduate/story/0,,2257835,00.html Accessed 3 July 2008.