marcusodonnell.com: blogsperiment

Learning to become

Another fine paper from Ulises Mejias: A Nomad's Guide to Learning and Social Software. (Thanks to Will Richardson for the link) His insights on the cultural working out of social software technology is as astute as usual and his framework is superb:

At a more fundamental level, models of learning based on social software can facilitate the shift from what Brown and Duguid (2000) call learning about to learning to be, or to give a more Deleuzian connotation, to learning as becoming. Learning about implies a passive consumption of knowledge in the form of facts. Learning to be implies the application of knowledge in the development of skills that allows us to fulfill a particular (professional or non-professional) role in society. But to highlight the fact that being is not static, I’m using learning as becoming to signify an ongoing process. Learning, as constant becoming, is the work of nomads, to use another Deleuzian image explained below by Semetsky (2004):

“Nomads must continuously readapt themselves to the open-ended world in which even the line of horizon may be affected by the changing conditions of wind, shifting sands or storms so that no single rule of knowing that [learning about] would ever assist nomads in their navigations, perhaps only knowing how [learning to be, or learning as becoming] would” (Semetsky 2004:447, italics in original; my additions in brackets).

Semetsky continues by quoting Casey. ‘The local operations of relay must be oriented by the discovery (and often continual rediscovery) of direction (Casey 1997:306)’. Becoming, as this continual rediscovery of direction, takes place in relation to the world and to others. What social software can do is to help us re-situate learning in an open-ended social context, providing opportunities for moving beyond the mere accessing of content (learning about) to the social application of knowledge in a constant process of re-orientation (learning as becoming).

Technorati Tags: social software

Gone Carnivalesque

I guess I've been buttoned down and not hanging in the blogsphere enough recently but I've just discovered the whole “carnival” thing (thanks Clancy here and here).

They are great peer produced collections of blog posts around a designated issue. There are some great postings in the recent Teaching Carnivals. Everything from New Kid on being the hearty professor to a great post by Scott Barnett on what he's doing (or trying to do) when he asks students to blog:

When I finally decided to use blogs in a writing course, I did so from a position of advocate, of someone who sees great value in the act of writing as often as possible. Not to get too Dead Poets Society here, but I wanted my students to use blogging as a way to see the world differently, to walk around as I have in the past year with that strange and exhilarating Eye that not only finds in moments those ideal (and often unusual) blogging urgencies, but that takes pleasure as well in their all-around weirdness.

I too am getting my students to blog in a summer course I am taking and have been thinking about the many imperatives of blogging. It's a media studies course for journalism students and the blog is meant to be a way of getting the students to become reflective media critics. But like Scott I am also very keen to simply get them to write. To my great delight some of them have taken to it like ducks to water and are slowly beginning to produce some wonderful stuff that has that great bloggy mix of personal tone, connectedness and insight.

I think it is in the mix of those three elements that blogging has a great role to play in education. It helps us move beyond rigid forms of academic writing which teach students to only value that which is complete and finished. I have been saying to my class that blogging is all about cumulative, linked meaning making not about conclusive arguments. It's a form of research as well as a form of publication. It is writing as discovery.

Technorati Tags: blogs and higher education, teaching carnival

Blogs versus Discussion Boards

I've been thinking again about blogs versus discussion boards. I have always been very anti-discussion boards because personally I don't like them as a reader or user. I find them aesthetically uninviting and their folded in structure always makes me want to give up. But last semester I had students who responded quite enthusiastically to an assigned online discussion group. The usual problems arose in many groups and much of the valuable content consisted of fairly isolated postings but in a couple of groups the dynamic really worked. I think this was helped by the fact that for part of the semester I used the same groups in tutorial discussions so the message board discussion became a continuation of the face to face work. A few students noted this in the evaluation session.

While thinking about this I stumbled across this posting by Lee Lefever (via Seblogging) which provides an interesting set of metaphoric differentiations that get passed some of the usual technical distinctions:

• A blog post says "Here it is, dig it"
• A message board post says "your turn"

• Comment implies "if you want, not required"
• Reply implies "I'm not done until you do."

• A blog is my back yard
• A message board is a park

• A blog has readers
• A message board has lurkers

• A blog is all about ME
• A message board is all about US

• When things go quiet on a blog, the onus is on one person
• When things go quite on a message board, the onus is on everyone

Sebastian Fielder goes on to make the comments:

Discussion forums and message boards require a consistent effort of a group to work. They fall apart if people sign off and go quiet or if somebody starts to get outright destructive.

Networks of Weblog authors are much more robust. If one goes quiet or produces rubbish nothing major happens to the collective or a single Weblog authoring project which can quite happily stand on its own and develop new connections... and cut off old ties that seem to have lost its value anymore.

None of this gets around the fact that in an educational setting facilitation and modelling is key to helping students get the most out of these types of projects. But I think that Fiedler and Lefever's distinctions point to the fact that blogging is potentially more adapatable - although there is a definite me/us bias across the two technologies, blogging accomodates social networking more readily than message boards accommodate construction of individuated prescence.

This reminds me of the discussion at Blogtalk Downunder about comments: a number of people, but primarily Mark Bernstein, made the point that comments are not the real facilitator of dialogue, they can in fact be quite destructive and often are trivial. The real communicative element of the blogsphere - what Fiedler calls the "robust" nature of blog newtorks - lies in the linked communication that occurs between blogs.

Blog Talk: Sebastian Fieldler

Sebastian Fieldler in the final keynote contrasted two ideas: innovation/revolution and renaissance.

He noted Carl Bereiter's work that innovations in education are often taken up with great enthusiasm but that most often they do not tgake root, they are not sustained because the resources and frameworks are not built or made available.

He contrasted this with Douglas Rushkoff's notion of a renaissance as a “recontextualisation” Rushkoff writes:

I prefer to think of the proliferation of interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we have the opportunity to step out of the story, altogether. Renaissances are historical instances of widespread recontextualization. People in a variety of different arts, philosophies, and sciences have the ability to reframe their reality. Quite literally, renaissance means “rebirth.” It is the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. A renaissance is a dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence changes.

Blogs wikis web feeds are a “reconquista” of the web built over the static web. It is a reinvigoration of the early internet pioneers of the two way web. Now the prototypical tools are authoring or networking tools not just browsing tools.

But there are still problems in the educational domain:

• We are focusing on introducing novices to blogs but not documenting onging long term usage
• We are attempting to squeeze blogging into existing educational practices
• Educational blogging rarely transcends temporal (semester) boundaries of educational institutions.

Technorati: blogtalkdownunder

Technorati Tags: blogtalkdownunder

Blogtalk: Storybox

Ben Hoh talked about a project using blogs with young refugees

A lot of “digital storytelling” follows the traditional narrative arc of problem/process/enlightenment in thier life story project with refugees Ben and his colleagues deliberately chose to use blogs with the idea that they are a more aggregative model that builds narrative idiosyncratically.

Also explicitly talked about the project in terms of “narrative therapy” it reminded me of Marc's comment this morning that it is ok if it's only your mother who reads your blog - also OK if your blog is therapy, even though this is a well voiced criticism of blogs.

Ben has developed a very interesting textual analysis of some of the emerging hybrid vernaculars that traverse the traumatic and the mundane and has come up with a very interesting notion of “neveryday” life:

So it is not really a matter of what these new vernaculars “actually mean” in a representational sense, but what they enable: a reconception of what used to be the spheres of everyday life and the political, into something else — into whatever space that can be apprehended with such a vocabulary. Call it “the neveryday” — an alternative platform upon which de Certeau’s model of “textual poaching” (de Certeau 1984) can be modified; in de Certeau’s model, the poacher is forever destined to be guerilla-as-loyal-opposition to “the writer”, but a “neveryday” mode of enunciation is more waywardly “queer” and less heroic, and yet also seems necessarily based on a transgressive, sometimes incomprehensibly extreme platform of an underwriting trauma, a crack in subjectivity. And while the embodied specificities of the refugee experience are irreducible, this crack is not — the coherent subject is an impossibility, and that this inevitably involves trauma; I would therefore suggest that the Storyboxers’ “neveryday”, with its underwriting trauma, could be a useful model for how both casual mundanity and affectual extremities are often modulated through each other in the blogging of the self.

Technorati: blogtalkdownunder

Technorati Tags: blogtalkdownunder

BlogTalk Downudner: Conversation and reflection

Ian McColl from UQ gave a very interesting paper on blogging in their studio based IT design course.

Lots of interesting things about studio practice (the architecture model) that could have relevance to a journalism course.

The studio stream is the defining feature of the two degrees, and students complete a studio course each semester with similar characteristics to those outlined above for Kapor’s course. There are two temporal cycles that operate through our degrees: one within each year, and the other through the three years of the degrees. Generally speaking, first semester studios (Studios 1, 3 and 5) are more divergent, emphasising designing and conceptualising, while second semester studios (Studios 2, 4 and 6) tend to be more convergent, emphasising building and resolving. There is also a progression through the years of the degree: first-year studios tend to focus on single-machine, screen-based work, second-year studios focus on distributed non-screen-based work, and third-year studios focus on socially-based work with opportunities for student-generated and student-selected projects working with academic and/or industry advisors.

Good stuff on “converstaion” from Fiedler and Schon:

Fiedler is concerned with externalising the learner’s internal conversation, and formalising the learner’s external conversation with a learning coach. In the studio process, the conversations are between the participants in the process (Schön 1987), and also between individual and groups of participants and the materials of the design (Schön 1992).

Technorati: blogtalkdownunder

BlogTalk

Day two, I'm a bit more relaxed today as I presented yesterday.

Mark Bernstien led a very interesting discussion to start off the day on the value of comments. He essentially suggested that comments - which are often either brief or harshly negative or hit and run – are not all they are cracked up to be. He emphasised that commentary and dialogue can occur between weblogs and this is a slower more dispersed dialogue but just as valuable or even more valuable. This proved very contentious.

Other points:

At this moment of blog triumphalism we must begin to think about “saving” the blogsphere…we could wreck the blogsphere by accident by ways we didn’t even know were harmful

Its ok if only your mother reads your weblog…it’s a better way to write home!

Many blogs are in the tail of the graph that shows the spread of blogs against blog readership: a group of A-list bloggers with big readers and then a tailing off to a big group who have few readers.

Keep the tail healthy – the people who are only ready by 5 or six are critical to the health of the blogsphere

The notion of professional journalists versus amateur bloggers rests on a misconception that journalism is a profession. It is a craft/trade. (I'd of course disagree with this!!)

Help bloggers to write better notes and make better links: make it easy to do the right thing. We can’t help the tail by regulation

Things don’t start in order we don’t put them in order because we are changing all the time

Don’t blogroll A-list blogs, cycle your blogroll.

Don’t stop linking to the tail because its easier to link to the NYT. If you link to a weblog that no one has heard of it’s a better service to your reader.

Ten tips for writing the living web

Technorati: blogtalkdownunder

New survey: blogs and journalism

A new survey (another report here) of journalists and members of the public just released by University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy shows a wide divergence of views between journos and the GP on a range of key issues about freedom of the press and trust in the media.

On blogging:

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists....

Blogs showed their growing influence among those polled, as 83% of journalists reported the use of blogs, with four out of 10 saying they use them at least once a week. Among those who use them, 55% said they do so to support their news-gathering work. And even though 85% believe bloggers should enjoy First Amendment protections, 75% say bloggers are not real journalists because they don't adhere to “commonly held ethical standards.”

Overall, 61% of the news pros say that the emergence of the Internet has made journalism better.

I think this set of contradictions is indicative of the fragile emergence of blogging into the journalism field as a part of standard practice. There is a lag here between belief/rhetoric and practice. Usage seems to indicate that journalists are accepting blogs as apart of a standard repertoire of tools, they acknowledge First Amendment rights but still can't bring themselves to say outright that bloggers are journalists. Part of this problem is the refusal to accept that there are in fact a range of journalisms with a range of ethical practices and that “the journalist” is no longer a monolithic category.

The debate over adherence to ethical standards needs to be seen in the light of the general public's views about bias and accuracy in news media:

While 72 percent of the journalists said their profession did a good or excellent job of reporting information accurately, only 39 percent of the public felt the same way. At the same time, 61 percent of the citizen respondents said they disagreed with the statement that ''the news media tries to report the news without bias.“

The journalists' refusal to accept bloggers as journalists is part of boundary control/paradigm repair. It is a process of ”othering“ ethical lapses and rhetorically affirming the high-minded standards of traditional journalism. It is a new version of the tabloidisation debates or the attempts to draw distinctions between television and print journalism.

Blogtalk Downunder

For various reasons I haven't posted here for a while but I have been busy preparing a paper for Blogtalk Downunder our first homegrown blogger confest. My abstract is below, readers of this blog will recognise some of the thoughts from previous postings!

Much of the published discussion and research on blogs and teaching and learning in higher education focuses on evaluation of blogging as a communicative technique. This type of discussion largely assumes that successful integration of blogging into course delivery should be judged against a pre-existing and unchallenged pedagogical model. This paper argues that to leverage its full educational potential blogging must be understood not just as an isolated phenomena, but as part of a broad palette of “cybercultural” practices which provide us with both new ways of doing and new ways of thinking. The paper looks at the ways broader theoretical models associated with the development of the blogsphere might challenge or enhance current theories of teaching and learning. Spatial metaphors inherent in network models of blogging will be contrasted with the surface/depth model of student learning. The paper will argue that blogs should not be seen merely as a technological tool for teaching and learning but as a situated practice that must be brought into appropriate alignment with particular pedagogical and disciplinary practices. A model of blogging as a networked approach to learning suggests that blogging might achieve best results across the curriculum not through isolated use in individual units.

I draw on lots of wonderful work by other people but I found Martin Jacobsen's notion of “cyberdiscursivity very useful as a way of drawing out some of the new dimensions of blogging as a practice situated within a wider cyberculture. Here's the key quote from Jacobsen:

Where oral rhetoric is embodied and literacy is disembodied, a cyberdiscursive rhetoric is virtual, characterized by remotely centred interactivity and instantaneousness…the concrete rhetoric of orality and abstract rhetoric of literacy become dynamic in cyberdiscursivity via the continuous, productive nature created by virtuality and user agency…oral rhetoric's aggregative structure and literacy's hierarchical structure give way to an emergent structure in CMC, pieced together by a user who does not recognize a structure until it develops before her through a random choice of fragments which seldom, if ever, remain cohesive, and which usually become impossible to trace…the communal nature of oral rhetoric and the individual nature of literacy move toward an idiosyncratic rhetoric in which reader/user agency transforms the textual experience into an epistemologically challenging game which shatters rules as basic to print texts as one word following another.

I was led to Jacobsen from Ulises A. Mejias' excelent paper on online discourse

If you are interested in reading the whole paper download this pdf

Bloggers and the First Amendment

San Francsico Chronicle reports on the Apple versus bloggers case currently before a local court: Net buzzing on bloggers' status / First Amendment issues become hot topic in chat rooms.

The case could affect the future of bloggers and Web site publishers because lawyers defending the sites have asked Judge James Kleinberg to rule that the sites should be granted the same First Amendment protections afforded to traditional journalists. Kleinberg has told lawyers for both sides he was leaning toward ruling in Apple's favor.

"Boy, if Apple wins this case, rumors will dry up faster than a puddle in the Mojave,'' said one comment posted anonymously on MacDailyNews.com.

One blogger named "LoomisBoy'' found Kleinberg's tentative ruling "a troubling development, but most likely only a temporary setback for First Amendment rights.''

"Every new form of media in the last 200 years has gone through a similar rite of passage. Blogs (like mine) are as valid a form of 'press' as the pamphlet was during the American Revolution," the blogger continued.

"Citizen journalism via Web logs is every bit as protected by the First Amendment as the work of the New York Times and CBS. If the current judge in the Apple Computer case doesn't recognize that, someone higher up the appeal chain will.

"If Apple is upset that someone within its organization leaked confidential information, they should peruse internal means to stop the leaks and to deal with the offenders. But, in attacking the college student who writes PowerPage (and others), they exhibit a sad lack of appreciation for a free press.''

All sorts of illustrious precedents are being evoked including the Pentagon papers. It's an interesting case. The general question about blogger's first ammendment status is pretty much a slam dunk from my perspective but I think there are also complex issues which complicate this particular case.

In what sense is revealing Apple's latest plans "in the public interest" and in what sense does it hurt its commercial interests? In what sense are these techno rumour sites any different to Drudge and his political/celebrity rumours? Does Drudge or any of these sites really come under the auspice of "citizen journalism"? Drudge is constrained by defamation and privacy laws, what laws should or do protect commercial information. Do these laws over-ride source protection claims?

I think we are comming to a really interesting stage in the evolution of blogger journalism. Blogging can certainly be a form of journalism but in claiming to be a form - even a new form - of journalism there must be some questions about standards of practice. Citizen journalist bloggers may actually develop their own code of practice that is different in some ways to the ethical constraints of mainstream journalists. But there must be a framework for the everyday decision making that goes on in the practice of blogging, a framework that goes beyond I am doing this because I can.

It appears that this case is inspiring this debate to take place. Even in the blogging community there are different perspectives on whether this information should have been published and whether Apple has the right to demand the identity of the source. These are of course two slightly different questions that could well have different answers.