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In Vannever Bush’s As We May Think, he argues that the human mind operates by association.  “With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.” Apparently, I discovered yesterday […]

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El mes de mayo ha empezado con dos magníficas noticias: la publicación de dos artículos académicos en las revistas Comunicar y Telos, de la Fundación Telefónica, que firmo junto a otros compañeros y compañeras de la Universidad de Málaga y la Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, respectivamente. El primero de ellos, cuyo preprint ya está disponible, [...]

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I stumbled upon this Storify “Twitter for Academics: Advice for Users,” hoping that the comment thread captured in Storify would provide insight about how to use Twitter, both professionally and in my classrooms.  I’ve had a Twitter account since participating in an online course development initiative last year, and aside from a few feeble tweets […]

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Here in #becomingeducational we have encouraged you to follow this blog to revise the course and gather fresh insights. We have asked you to ‘write to learn’ in your own blogs – and to share those blogs with each other. We have wanted the various blog spaces to encourage learning dialogues between us and you – between you and us - and between you and each other.

Blog it: In this final run in to the end of the course – we want to use this blog rather than emails to answer out-of-class questions about assignments. More importantly – we want you all to start answering each others’ questions rather than relying on us.


You are Becoming Educationalists – and we are becoming obsolescent!


So here are our notes on the report; the logs; the essay… if you want more, we will be covering the writing in class – and you can help each other here in this blog.


The Report

The Report part of your Research Project is where you report your findings – you discuss what the raw data might mean – you draw conclusions as to their relevance to *this* context (for you were analysing an aspect of HE study) – and where applicable you make Recommendation for Practice, that is, suggestions for how to improve the learning for University students, based on your analysis of your research data. This is the formal structure required:

Findings

Discussion

Conclusions

Recommendations for Practice

Bibliography


Tip: stop worrying about this as ACADEMIC WRITING; stop worrying about this as an ASSESSMENT: think about it as having something to SAY to REAL PEOPLE.


Of your RESEARCH PROPOSAL readers would have been asking:

So what are you going to investigate? - INTRODUCTION

Why are you interested in that topic? – BACKGROUND/CONTEXT

What have other academics already discovered about that topic? – LITERATURE REVIEW

How will you carry out your own research? - METHOD

Why have you chosen to carry out the research in that way? - METHOD


Of your RESEARCH REPORT readers will be asking:

So what happened when you conducted your research? What are the key highlights? – FINDINGS

What do your findings mean? – DISCUSSION

What overall conclusions do you draw about University teaching/learning? – CONCLUSION

What should we do differently because of what you have found out? – RECOMMENDATIONS


In a 1000 words – be concise and analytical.


TIPS:

  • Talk to other people in the class: what is baffling when we are alone with our worries becomes sensible and do-able when we work with other people!!

  • Read and Model: read the free online journal: Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education covers exactly the sort of research that you are doing – and will offer excellent models for how you should write up your work: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe


The Learning Logs

The Learning Logs are worth 30% of the overall mark for the course as a whole – so STOP – THINK: what do you think you will have to do to get those marks? What do you think a great reflective log will have to look like?


Three half pages of notes won’t do it will they?


Show you know

The point of the learning log and the blog is to improve the quantity and quality of your learning by making the learning conscious. You do this by engaging in reflection and what we call meta-cognition: realising what we know – how we know it – and how we might apply it and so forth.


Good reviews should indicate an awareness both of the ‘point’ of a lesson – and the ‘point’ of the review process itself. Reflections should be crisp and clear – but relevant and useful. Some of you have already shown some brilliant, detailed and most important of all ENGAGED blog posts, submit those! For those of you who are less certain about what to do – at the very least your reflections should follow a trajectory like this:

What: what are all the different things that we did this week?

Why: for each activity - WHY did we do that – what was the purpose?

Reaction: how did engaging in those activities make me feel? Why did I react in that way? How can I harness my positive reactions? How can I harness my negative reactions?

Illustration: how would I illustrate this week’s learning to make it more memorable?

Learned: what have I learned or gained or become aware of – through ALL of the different activities that we did? How might I apply this learning in my practice now as a student? How might I apply this in the future in my professional practice as an educationalist?

Next steps: what reading, writing or other follow up activities will I do in the light of al these reflections? Then – evidence that you did do some of that follow up work…

Appendices: given that you will be submitting three pertinent log/blog extracts for assessment, add Appendices – where you demonstrate the application of the learning and the follow up activities that you did.

Tips: Appendices might contain notes of further reading that you did, pictures of further collages that you made, links to artefacts that you produced to illustrate your learning, short free write extracts …



The Essay

We have covered the essay generally and this essay in particular over several weeks already – check out http://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/w22-becomingeducational-the-essay-our-essay/


Things to think about:

What is an educationalist? What is an inspiring and empowering educationalist? What sort of educationalist do you want to become?


Why have we designed the module the way that we did? Think about the module contents – and also the teaching and learning style – the different things we have wanted you to think about and do… the ways that we have wanted to you to act and interact… What was the point of all that?

Tip: Check out our Conference presentation – delivered in class in W26 – and delivered at the ALDinHE Conference over Easter – MOST IMPORTANTLY read our summary of how Etienne Wenger-Trayner describes education as becoming: http://lastrefugelmu.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aldinhe-conference-2014-learning.html


What THREE things are you going to write about?

  • Did you enjoy the interactivity – all those discussions and presentations?

  • The research project – from participant observation to digital artefact?

  • What about the Developing Digital Me project – where we asked you to engage in #ds106 or a MOOC as part of your ‘reading’?

  • Were you engaged by the Visual practices (collage, drawing, illustrated notes) or the  role playing and simulation or that we wanted students in charge (peer mentoring, conference workshop, student workshops)?

  • Were you surprised by the free writing or the topic mediated dialogue?

  • Was the Music or the Dance workshop the thing that made a difference?

  • Was there anything that you thought was interesting – or well designed – or powerful – or effective…?


Tips: Do not DESCRIBE, ANALYSE; refer to the LITERATURE to justify your arguments; think about these questions: what was the point of that? Did it work? How and why did it work? How might you use yourself in the future?   


Help each other

From now on, we really do not want to be answering individual email queries about the assignments. We have designed all the assignments to promote active learning – they are assessment asand for learning – not just of learning (though do enjoy the opportunity to show what you have learned). We will be covering the assignments as part of our active learning in class over the last few weeks of the course.


BUT – if you have queries, comments, suggestions and examples – POST THEM HERE – so that your class mates could answer – and so that if we answer, that answer is going to every body in the class and not just one person!



All the best – enjoy these last few weeks – and enjoy helping each other in class and here in cyber space.

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View the story “What digital literacies do physicians need? #ccme14″ on Storify

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This week Quaco led the lecture session with a cracking account of the real purpose of research – making connections with your Research Project – and especially with the Research Report that everybody had to write to finish off this part of the analytical process. This Report and this process is not a pointless assessment hoop to jump through!

The point of research is to investigate an aspect of our world and then to tell people about what we did, why we did it – what we discovered – what it might mean – and what practical applications it has in the world.




There’s no point in keeping research to yourself!

In Education particularly it helps us all if research relates to our real experiences – it all makes much more sense when we know what is happening and why – if we can see a practical purpose to the work. And that is the point of this Research Project. You were asked to investigate an issue or an aspect of teaching and learning that you found interesting. You are supposed to use your interest to help you do the work. You are supposed to use that interest to help you make sense of your findings: you should know WHY you were investigating what you did – so you should know WHAT you want to tell the world about what you have discovered.


So – one last time: The Report

The Report part of this Project is where you report your findings – you discuss what the raw data might mean – you draw conclusions as to their relevance to *this* context (for you were analysing an aspect of HE study) – and where applicable you make Recommendation for Practice, that is, suggestions for how to improve the learning for University students, based on your analysis of your research data:

Findings

Discussion

Conclusions

Recommendations for Practice

Bibliography


Try to stop worrying about this as ACADEMIC WRITING – try to stop worrying about this as an ASSESSMENT – try to think about it as having something to SAY to REAL PEOPLE.


Of your RESEARCH PROPOSAL that would have been asking:

So what are you going to investigate? - INTRODUCTION

Why are you interested in that topic? – BACKGROUND/CONTEXT

What have other academics already discovered about that topic? – LITERATURE REVIEW

How will you carry out your own research? - METHOD

Why have you chosen to carry out the research in that way? - METHOD


Of your RESEARCH REPORT they will be asking:

So what happened when you conducted your research? What are the key highlights? – FINDINGS

What do your findings mean? – DISCUSSION

What overall conclusions do you draw about University teaching/learning? – CONCLUSION

What should we do differently because of what you have found out? – RECOMMENDATIONS


Okay – so it is all in just 1000 words! So no room for a lot of description – but quite a lot of *concise* analysis and discussion required.


AND – if you are still struggling with this – talk to other people in the class – what is baffling when we are alone with our worries becomes sensible and do-able when we work with other people!!


BUT if you do not want to talk to anyone – read some educational research and see how other people write it up. As we have mentioned before – the free online journal: Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education covers exactly the sort of research that you are doing – and will offer excellent models for how you should write up your work: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe


Conference session

This week in the Workshop time, students had the option of continuing to work on their assignments or attending a session where we shared our Conference  presentation. This year we presented at the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education Conference upon the topic of blogging your learning – with a particular focus on the blogging that we have asked you to do here in the Becoming module.


The workshop was a chance for us to show you what a formal academic conference presentation might look like – and to show you the sort of research that we engage in as educationalists ourselves. If you missed the Workshop – or would like to find out a bit more about the conference itself – please go to our Least Refuge blog: http://lastrefugelmu.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aldinhe-conference-2014-learning.html. It would be great if you popped in a Comment or some feedback!



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Spaces and Places
This year’s ALDinHE Conference took place in – and was facilitated by HuddersfieldUniversity: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/news/6/aldinhe_conference_2014:_registration_closed.html?p=7_6

There was a full programme of workshops, events and fabulous Key Note speakers, including Lesley Gourlay and Etienne Wenger-Trayner – on the topics of:

  • Who owns Learning Development?

  • Changing Staff and Student Identities: the impact of Learning Development

  • Addressing the Marginalisation of Learning Development

  • Working Collaboratively to support Learning Development.


Communities of Practice?

Like many people in Education I have been aware of Etienne Wenger-Trayner (EWT) and his Communities of Practice arguments in theory and for many years. EWT in practice and in person was a revelation: warm, inspiring and profound in his outlining of the learning trajectory which takes us from peripheral encounters into the centre of various communities of practice – and various learning identities.


EWT locates his theory in studies of apprenticeship practice. Apprentices especially at the beginning rarely interact directly with a ‘master’ but engage more in apprentice-to-apprentice interactions. In this way learning is ineffably located in the group and in our group interactions: learning is social, embodied and whole person.


For EWT, learning experience models this apprenticeship trajectory. He described ‘learning’ as circled by complementary processes involving community (which offers belonging and a meaningful cadre with which to negotiate and define competence); practice (what we do – and how meaningful and valuable it is); meaning(that is rooted with relevance in the now – and not deferred to some indefinable point in the future); and identity(who we are becoming). In this model learning is not the transmission of a corpus of knowledge nor even a process or set of processes with which to engage with a corpus of knowledge; learning is how we negotiate a range of processes of becoming – that oscillate between the individual and the group.


Becoming

The EWT model allows us to see learning as becoming: it involves a realignment of competence and experience; it is socially defined – but personally experienced. Learning involves negotiating identity in a complex dance in complex landscapes of practice that navigate multiple tensions and meaning.  It is identity-construction in a time of super-complexity: it is a learning relationship between the social world and the personal.


The community is the curriculum

As one who is still part of the ongoing MOOC: #rhizo14: the community is the curriculum, I could not help but see parallels between the EWT model and the rhizomatic model of learning espoused by Dave Cormier – and as poetically described by Deleuze and Guattari (1997, 2005) in A thousand plateaus. Cormier - who spoke at last year’s ALDinHE in Plymouth - gave birth to our radical un-MOOC. In #rhizo14, learning is/emerges from the connections, contingent or purposeful, between the participants in the different learning spaces we inhabit – Forum, FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, Blogs, Zeega… - and which are fruitfully complicated by the diversity and complexity and internationality of the participants. It is a tricky trickster idea – but actually very helpful when we take back to our classrooms whether F2F or virtual: for to enable learning to happen we must at the very least foster human relationships between the participants.


‘I Robot’? Voices from the margins: narratives of LD in a Digital Age

Following on from EWT, and after Julia Dawson and Peter Bray speaking on ‘Peer Support reaching out beyond the institution’, from Plymouth, it was our presentation where we asked: What are the stories that students and staff tell themselves and each other about studying at University?


‘We have developed creative blended learning practice and embedded this within our Becoming an Educationalist and its paired Peer Mentoring in Practice modules. We and our students write reflective learning logs and online blogs to engage with our materials - to write to learn - and to struggle with narratives of the self in times of transition… We wish to share narrative extracts from these places of struggle, voice and play (Winnicott 1971) and discuss the lessons that we can learn about our students and our own blended practice. We also want to explore how we can celebrate and sustain such creative practices.’


How cool is that?

We were very happy to follow on from Wenger and his arguments about learning as a process of becoming – and to talk about our Becoming module and its various practices which we think facilitate these processes: Role playing and simulations; creative and visual learning strategies; Inquiry Based and Problem Based Learning; Reflective learning; Visual practices development; Poetry and Prose analysis and discussion; Analysis of Case Studies; Real research and other projects; Digital artefact and resource development; Peer-to-peer learning: both face-to-face and virtual; Student contribution to the University’s annual student-facing Get Ahead conference; Blogging and other Social Network activities to support learning (Becoming Educational blog: http://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/and

Learning Development Blog: http://lastrefugelmu.blogspot.co.uk/).


Spaces and places/fissures and cracks

Our students swim in educational currents composed of the over-riding narratives of assessment, SATs, League Tables, OFSTED, moral panics about plagiarism – and the ‘dumbing down’ of education – for which they are personally blamed: There are Mickey Mouse students for whom Mickey Mouse degrees are quite appropriate (Starkey 2002/3). They are caught on a cultural cusp (Medhurst in Munt) negotiating tricky academic space which is more of a trickster space for them – for just how far are they supposed to lose themselves and become another in this alien landscape; and who gets to choose the transformation – and where do the boundaries lie?


Why writing? The essay – The blog

Arguably the academic essay as a genre exemplifies academic writing per se: it is non-polemical - yet invites certainty of argumentation. It is ‘your’ argument whilst excluding ‘you’: the personal, the emphatic, the confused, the flippant and the humorous. In many ways it can be seen as a metonym for the academic world our students have entered: implacable, reified, classed. It is the space where they most feel like ‘a fish out of water’.


We want our students to succeed in academic writing for it is the sine qua non (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_qua_non) of the University experience. But we wanted writing that was not the ultimate erasure of the self. We wanted a space where students could have something to say, could have their struggle to achieve authorship; but without the ‘jostling voices’ (Carter et al. 2009) asking them to ‘write and reference properly’ and to ‘be more academic’ – and less like the passionate, engaged and committed whole people that they are. We suggested blogging and wanted their blogs to be a powerful virtual tool – a quasi-academic, multimodal, public space in which to perform the self as it becomes academic – and to perform that more wholly than in an academic essay.


A little bit of Deleuze will do ya

Blogs especially can constitute the cracks – the boundaries – the borders - the space for disruption, irruptions and eruptions: the place of collision and encounter. Those representations become where space and time collapse – compressed – intensified – because finite – become finite – existing in a fixed place and time. Their composition emerges from a compressed space, time and setting: meaning and communication become one narrative. And as Deleuze might argue this offers an opportunity not to re-trace the compilation of the sign – but a moment – just before it becomes fixed – when all the potential and possibilities still exist. A moment of and for transformation – for recognition of the self… A crack in space and time to re-territorialise educational spaces – to become educational nomads.


And our student voices said:

‘Week 9 was all about my nightmare….drawing!

My drawings always mock me:

“Ha! I have defeated you! You may have many words, but give you a pencil, and watch the intelligence disappear! That’s not how you wanted it to look, is it? Is that a person or a tree? Dumbo!’’

In a class of five year old children, I am quite happy to display my ridiculous sketches. I explain to the children that drawing is not my strong point, and they assure me that I have done a very good job of representing the characters, props and scenery in the storyboard. However, if someone were to come in, they would be quite convinced that the children had drawn the pictures – and not the most artistically gifted children, either!

At the moment, I feel afraid of failure, but I have to remember that I have been here before. In 2011, I graduated with merit at the Barbican, from a Foundation Degree in Education: Primary Pathway. So I need to keep three things in mind:

Keep taking risks!

It will be worth all the hard work!

There are people to help me on my journey!’

                     

‘In this week’s lecture, we were subjected to a 10 minute free writing exercise. If we stopped writing, then we were to write the reason why we did so on a separate piece of paper. Seemed easy enough, but the question given was very ambiguous to us: Winnicott (1971) argued that play is necessary to           counteract the implicit threat of transitional...

“What?” I asked myself. “Who is Winnicott? What does he mean by play? Implicit threat?” I started writing, even though I had no idea what the question was asking. It took three attempts to get my writing flowing.’


‘Today has been so proactive that I hardly had the time to take down any academic notes and just kept on listening. There was a guest speaker today, Chris O’Reilly, who spoke to us about the presentation and making of a short 3 minute film and what kind of research and methods go into making and preparing for it. I was so intrigued and fascinated throughout the whole piece that it just had given me so many ideas. I was bursting to how these ideas could relate to my research project Report.’ 


Nomads all!


Talking of re-territorialising: do we want a Learning Development MOOC?

And so to Andrew Doig, Becka Colley, Carol Elston, David Mathew, Sandra Sinfield and our workshop on the nuts and bolts and why and ‘what fors’ of a Learning Development MOOC. The session had a great energy and buzz - and we are hopeful that a positive working group will emerge from those present – and from others in the LDHEN if they want to join in.


cMOOC, xMOOC, SPOOC – OOD??

There seemed to be two main approaches to our potential open online course emerging:

* Set the context: Where a group of us gather together to design and devise a course with quite formal and defined Aims and Outcomes. Different elements of the course might be 'owned', developed and delivered online by different people.


* What might be called the 'bring your own context' approach: a group gathers together and sets up a course that may or may not have formal aims and learning outcomes - but that can be experienced differently by participants depending on their own contexts, wants and needs. In this model, some participants may want to explore the philosophy, pedagogy and epistemology surrounding elements of the course - whilst others may just want a 'pick up and teach’ set of strategies...  Different elements might be delivered online by different people, with participants bringing as much to the table as the person 'running' the course that week/fortnight/month. I think that this community can manage that! 

To me this latter more of a #rhizo14: the community is the curriculum approach; and in actual fact, I do not think that these two approaches are incompatible if framed in a participative way.


Watch the www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen list for developments - and if people are interested in taking part – could they email Andrew Doig: Andrew.Doig@solent.ac.uk ?



End Notes: There was more, so much more to ALDinHE – but I reckon that this is enough for a blogpost. So if anybody else has blogged – can you put the link in the Comments below – and perhaps we can have a conversation of sorts to keep the LD flag flying?

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Policy documents are said to be rational drivers of accountable, publicly funded processes.  Policy shapes and re-shapes the educational landscape in the UK. Government and Institutional Policy informs and shapes practice within HE institutions – even when practitioners do not consciously know what the policies are. All educationalists should be able to locate and critique policies with respect to the Learning, Teaching and Assessment (LTA) practices with which they have to engage.

Policy players in UKHE: Government, HEFCE, JISC, HEA, QAA, Institution


The Digital Now

Teaching and learning is undeniably set in a landscape shaped by the ubiquity of ICT. As practitioners, most of us will want to embrace aspects of the digital to be current and relevant. At the same time, the what, when, where and how of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) is also formally inscribed in – and shaped by - Government and Institution Policy documents. This article explores both Government and Institutional e-learning policy through the prism of policy critique and e-learning practice. The Appendices constitute two papers previously written on E-learning Policy and Practice.


“The Strategic Management of Pedagogy

… [G]overnmental policies that were intended to enhance the quality of Higher Education have added to the process of top down management … In particular, pedagogy, once purely the concern of the academics directly involved in course delivery, has now become an issue for strategy. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has linked elements of University funding to the creation and implementation of Teaching and Learning Strategies. The consequence of this is that, in many institutions, pedagogy has been placed in the hands of strategic management for the first time.


Moreover, with the choice of pedagogic approach a matter of strategy rather than tactics, the lecturers’ primary tool (pedagogic approaches) for coping with the current push for Mass HE and Widening Participation, and the consequent increasing student diversity and numbers, is being taken out of their control. Although some degree of latitude does remain, the choice of teaching techniques is becoming constrained by the decisions of senior management. In line with other trends towards centralisation, the establishment of such strategies seems likely to promote further conformity in order to establish common standards.” (Sinfield, Burns and Holley 2004 in Satterthwaite, Atkinson and Martin (eds) 2004; 141)


It could be argued that knowing policy allows us to better meet our obligations as public servants; understanding policy in the University context allows us to demonstrate that we are meeting our targets; critiquing policy allows us to act with agency in our own practice.


What is policy anyway?

Policy is not one easily definable thing:

  • Policy as strategy…

    • ‘Our policy for investment in future growth is…’

  • Policy as position…

    • ‘Our policy on migration is….’

  • Policy as procedure…

    • ‘The grievance policy says….’


‘Public policy focuses on what Dewey (1927) once expressed as “the public and its problems”. It is concerned with how issues and problems come to be defined and constructed and how they are placed on the political and policy agenda.  But it is also the study of “how, why and to what effect governments pursue particular courses of action and inaction”’ (Heidenheimer et al cited in Parsons 1995: XV).


It is assumed that policy is rational – and that it emerges from a process that could be summarised as:

  • Problem formulation: Solution formulation = PolicyA.

  • PolicyA trialled; evaluated; and refined = PolicyB.

  • PolicyB formally implemented. 

However, ‘It is a common experience to find that little attention has been given to problem formulation in policy making’ (Pratt 2006:14). More commonly Government Policy seems to start with solutions– and evaluation focuses on whether the policy has been implemented – and not on whether it solves the problem for which it was supposedly designed (Schwabenland, LondonMet MBA programme 2012).


Government E-learning Policy


My starting point for engaging with E-learning Policy was an analysis of Government Policy as encompassed in its 2005 (revised 2008) policy document, ‘Harnessing Technology’. I analysed this document to see what it was ‘really’ saying about ICT and University learning, teaching and assessment. For full text, see Appendix 1: Sinfield, Burns and Holley (2009) ‘A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic Governmental Policy Document in the UK’ In: Social Responsibility Journal, Vol. 5 No. 4, 2009 pp 566-574.


Critique of Policy

Whilst E-learning, ICT and the Digital offer the potential for enhancing the education landscape, ushering in a more multimodal LTA age; the Government ‘Harnessing Technology’ document offers no vision of education or aspiration for e-learning other than to service the needs of business.


‘Harnessing Technology’ seems only to celebrate that ICT will offer choice of when and where we learn – without mention of the ‘what, the why and the multiplicity of hows’ that we learn. The student stakeholder is not addressed in the document except in terms of deficit. Where students are ‘hard to reach’, they are diagnosed as cognitively impaired or as having Special Education Needs. No mention is made of community or classed positions of exclusion. The suggestion is that deficit students can be plugged into ICT packages to be ‘fixed’.


The document speaks repeatedly of ‘training’, where arguably any expression of the self might be considered subversive, as opposed to ‘education’, where deep learning involves integrating new knowledge with the self in deep, critical and constructivist ways. Of technology itself, the document only argues that there need to be ‘safe’ purchasing decisions. The policy focus is not on meeting the needs of society as a whole nor on ICT fulfilling the wants of the individual learner – but on meeting the ICT needs of business.


Typically early innovators and champions of e-learning are (happily) unaware of this policy and these reductive visions of e-learning; but this reductive vision exists. If we want more from e-learning, we will have to re-define and re-colonise this landscape for ourselves.


It doesn’t have to be like that: re-defining Policy – re-claiming the vision

We did not accept that our blended learning adventures had to be narrowly defined by reductive Government Policy and set out to explore and re-define this landscape for ourselves. See Appendix 2: Burns, Sinfield and Holley (2012) ‘The Shipwrecked Shore – and other metaphors: what we can learn from occupation of – and representations in – virtual worlds’ In Investigations of University Teaching and Learning 2012.


Our Adventure

In our practical application of embedded study and academic skills and digital development, we worked with Computing tutors to deliver a module to first year programmers, computer scientists and animators.  F2F tuition included delivering positive and empowering academic practice (we had these first year students critically analysing tough academic papers together and producing collective notes); there was also collective activity in SecondLife, (www.secondlife.com),an immersive 3D world:

“As staff, we represented a fluid and participative knowledge-landscape not in a realist, mimetic representation of a classroom or a lecture theatre, but in the seashore, the deckchairs and the puzzles. When delivering new ‘supplies’ to our students, we shipwrecked a seventeenth century galleon on our twenty-first century beach. Arguably form and content are matched and merged conveying a message about education appropriate for the 21st Century – and for our digital worlds. In this scene, epistemology and pedagogy are disrupted: ‘grounded’ to be de-centred, disembowelled - in a postmodern playground redolent of leisure activity - deckchairs and bonfire on the beach; transected by space and time – the galleon and its bounty. This narrative tableau has potential to transform production and ‘consumption’ of education: students explore the shipwreck; they ‘salvage’ the goods; they sit around the campfire, solve puzzles and discuss their learning; they stake claims in the landscape and build their own spaces and their own objects. They become both producers and consumers of knowledge in an unbounded/bounded meaning making process.”


Our conclusions were that constructing different learning spaces is not necessarily safe, it can indeed ‘disrupt’ the traditional learning landscape, and in very powerful ways: student learning can be enhanced in ways that transcend the scope of Government Policy to date.


Not everybody wants a SecondLife

Admittedly SL is a niche space for most lecturers, for ideas on developing successful experiences in your VLE, see also Sarah Ramsden’s HEAcademy article on using VLE to build student relationships and meaningful learning encounters:


Institutional Policy

CELT Guidelines:


The Londonmet institutional e-learning policy document sets a Minimum Standard for VLE presence and use. Every module must have an active WebLearn presence and staff are expected to routinely use ICT where they are necessary and appropriate to extend and enhance student learning.


Digital Literacy (DL) for students is defined – instrumental, informational and strategic – and is to be addressed by staff within and outwith the curriculum – from induction onwards. The minimum guidelines state that staff will be adequately resourced and supported in their own digital development – including via CELT (though in actual fact it mentions many elements of the new CELT that have been heavily cut – for example the LDU and the Writing Specialists) – and with timetabled time for Professional Development.


Safety is again addressed such that access to external resources and links should be accessed from the WebLearn shell – and tutors are exhorted to consider issues of induction, communication, assessment and feedback from within WebLearn itself.


Risks to the University include issues of Data Protection and require compliance with HEA, HEFCE, JISC and QAA Policies and Practices:


‘It’s my own messy chaos’

As an academic who entered University to embrace the freedom it seemed to offer with respect to the development of both curriculum and pedagogic approach, I feel liberated when institutional policy documents are not over-directive in the way that I implement TEL in my own practice. At the same time, Government ICT policy exists and de facto and de jure sets the scene in which I operate – and, I would argue, is reductive both in terminology and direction. ‘Harnessing Technology’ demonstrates no understanding of the ‘widening participation’ student with whom I choose to work; neither does it appear to capture the dynamic potential of the digital. Yet this (and all policy documents) can be harnessed to ‘terrorise’ the individual lecturer who navigates terrain with which they feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar and perhaps under-prepared. When it comes to TEL, no matter how great our discipline knowledge, our engagement with our students and our contribution to our Departments, we may feel constantly that we are ‘not good enough’. This might be a salutary reminder of how our students feel much of the time (!); but it does little to create a positive and experimental learning and teaching culture. Foucault of course would say that if tutor terror is the outcome of the policy, then that is the ‘point’ of the policy, and there is much mileage in that for me. At the same time, practitioners, technology champions, TEL teams in universities everywhere, want to engage with the digital reality we inhabit; we want to positively and richly colonise this space. We just do!  Perhaps the point of understanding policy is to outpace it, to smooth out the negative and unhelpful striations of reductive policy and re-territorialise this space as pedagogic and curriculum nomads (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 2005).


The way forward

University lecturers are assessed in Peer and Performance Review with respect to innovative TEL; practitioners wishing to excel might consider joining or setting up Communities of Practice within the University to set their own agendae and goals. If you are interested in being part of such a group, please email: s.sinfield@londonmet.ac.uk .

 

If you want to join a larger conversation about successful learning and teaching practice, do join www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen the Learning Development discussion group which is exceedingly supportive in all areas of LD work including TEL.


Useful Resources

Peter Bryant’s blog post: http://peterbryant.smegradio.com/?p=432

Individual Guides indicated below:

Staff Guide to Embedding Academic Literacies and Learning Development: Staff Guide to Academic Literacies and Embedding Learning Development-1.doc



Appendix 1 Full text

Sinfield, Burns and Holley (2009) ‘A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic Governmental Policy Document in the UK’In: Social Responsibility Journal, Vol. 5 No. 4, 2009 pp 566-574

Keywords: Analytical tool, E-learning, stakeholders, students, government e-learning strategy

Abstract

Within the context of the BritishUniversitysystem, electronic learning (e-learning) strategies within the UK will be analysed via a single policy text. This process provides insights into the interests of dominant stakeholders, namely Government and Business, with respect to the education agenda. Our analysis includes reference to a speech made by David Blunkett, when Secretary of State for Education at Greenwich University in 2000, where he firmly positions e-learning and the needs of the ‘UK PLC’ within a globalised economy.  Critical analysis of the Government e-learning strategy (2005) will draw upon the work of Macherey (1990) and others to expose the continued silencing of the student as stakeholder, where the voices that are not repressed are those with economic and institutional power. Our analysis will show the student is constructed as either silent or deficit and our conclusions suggest that rather than a discourse of transformation, ‘regulation not education’ (Lillis 2001), is the real goal of the dominant educational stakeholders. This critical approach to policy analysis can be adapted by others seeking to critique policy in a variety of different contexts.

Introduction

‘The powerhouses of the new global economy are innovation and ideas, skills and knowledge. These are now the tools for success and prosperity as much as natural resources and physical labour power were in the past century. Higher education is at the centre of these developments. Across the world, its shape, structure and purposes are undergoing transformation because of globalisation. At the same time, it provides research and innovation, scholarship and teaching which equip individuals and businesses to respond to global change. World class higher education ensures that countries can grow and sustain high-skill businesses, and attract and retain the most highly-skilled people. It endows people with creative and moral capacities, thinking skills and depth knowledge that underpin our economic competitiveness and our wider quality of life. It is therefore at the heart of the productive capacity of the new economy and the prosperity of our democracy.’ David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education, Speech at GreenwichUniversity, 15th February 2000 (http://cms1.gre.ac.uk).

In the United Kingdom (UK), Higher Education (HE) is being positioned as the new global business, and the power relations between its various stakeholders – society, the business community, management, staff or students – makes this not only uncharted but contested ground. This paper maps the new terrain with a focus on, and analysis of, one key government policy document that locates Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at the heart of provision for children and families in the UKfrom birth through to further, higher and lifelong learning. The ‘Harnessing Technology’ (2005) document is explored particularly in relation to its impact on prime stakeholders within the new context of HE today. Government policy, and e-learning policy, has a pervasive impact on all levels of education and it is therefore an issue of concern that so little attention is paid to what is arguably the main stakeholder group – the student – that will be the first to navigate and negotiate the new e-Environment.

The UK approach to ‘encouraging’ alternatives to traditional classroom teaching can best be located within an international context. The increasing political intervention into higher education is justified from governmental perspectives as meeting the needs of a “knowledge economy” (Hodge, 2002) enabling the UK to compete within the international trading environment. Writers such as White & Davis (2002) set the context of technology as breaking down international barriers to education. At their best, computer–mediated learning environments make possible whole new ways of learning. They can create global learning communities of student and professor practitioners. They “connect people across cultures, learning styles, and industries, and they enable global conversations about issues and ideas that matter. They have extraordinary power to stitch together practical experience, academic theory, personal reflection and deep emotion” (White & Davis 2002, p.233).

However, in the UK, the use of central funding to promote a competitive and expansionist market in Further and Higher Education has already radically altered the culture in many institutions where governmental policies that were intended to enhance the quality of Higher Education have rather added to a process of centralisation initiated by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 (see Sinfield et al 2004, Burns & Sinfield 2004):

‘During the 1980s the dominant ideology, especially in Reagan’s USA and Thatcher’s UK, became free market economics, also referred to as laissez-faire or neo-liberalism. The main thrust was towards ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. State intervention was to be reduced, nationalised industries were to be sold off to the private sector, private industry was to be given a free reign with the economy. As private industry and its capitalist owners became richer, the rest of us would also benefit, as wealth gained at the top ‘trickled down’ through the system to the rest of us’http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/eu.html

In particular, pedagogy, once purely the concern of the academics directly involved in course delivery, has now become an issue for strategy, directed by Government policy. Indeed, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has linked elements of University funding to the creation and implementation of teaching and learning strategies– and e-learning strategies, whereby universities in the public sector must comply if they seek to receive Government funding.

It is in this context that this paper raises questions about power and the role of stakeholders in the formulation and implementation of a wide ranging policy that arguably seeks to focus Higher Education towards the needs of industry. By doing so, it attempts to unpick Government attitudes towards education, e-learning, the student (learner) and ultimately towards education and society itself.

Analytical tools

‘Post-structuralists treat regimes of truth as real, material, cultural artefacts, which are sustained in discourse and as such can be explored’ (Crowther & Mraovic 2005; 80).

Crowther and Mraovic (op cit) offer a paradigmatic model with respect to the application of the critical and analytical tools of literary theory to organisational documents with a special focus on accounting documentation. The authors provide an informed overview of the theoretical field alongside a discussion of the ‘myths’, ‘truth’ and ideological signs of organisational documentation. Citing Levi-Strauss (1980) and Leach (1982, 1983) they argue that ‘to decode the message embodied in the myth as a whole [one] must search for the structural pattern underlying the entire series of metaphors’ (Crowther op cit; 77) where language is the ideological sign … [offering] concrete not abstract views of the world … inseparable from the social praxis and class struggle’ (Ibid; 93). This model offers an explanation at organisational level, and we have developed this work further to explore societal issues via the critical analysis of a government document. The framework for our analysis suggests that the government text in question offers a series of metaphors that construct myths around education.

Macherey’s essay ‘The text says what it does not say’ (in Walder 1990) where he argues that it is ‘useful and legitimate to ask of every production what it tacitly implies, what it does not say … for in order to say anything there are things which must not be said (Ibid; 217) (his italics), is a starting point for our analysis. All works have their ‘margins’  – the incompleteness that reveals their birth and production… What is important in the work is what it does not say… what the work cannot say  … because there the elaboration of the utterances is acted out, in a sort of journey to silence’ (Ibid; 218). Macherey himself posits the use of Nietzsche’s key questions when exploring any text – and indeed these are questions that can be applied most tellingly to the document we investigate: What is it meant to conceal? What is it meant to draw our attention from? What prejudice does it seek to raise? (Ibid – and drawn from Nietzsche The Dawn of the Day, section 523).

For Nietzsche shows that texts cannot do anything but lie. Therefore to judge the truthfulness of a text it has to be treated as a lie.  Our government document both conforms to and extends the Nietzschian doctrine – dictating imperially from on high and embodying the rationale that if all statements offer fragments and lie, then this will constitute a big lie, atomised into as many parts as possible: the citizenry can only pay homage to that which would exclude them.  The aesthetics of the text can further illuminate this (Eagleton1986) and expose the flawed and failed ideology of the project, what Noble (2002) describes as fragments that cannot constitute a whole. However, as Macherey points out, all texts are incomplete, but they can offer a sense of the whole. ‘Harnessing Technology’, as with any corporate document, sets forth a future that is going to improve, where the shortcomings of the past are superseded by technological and management utopianism: where ‘things can only get better.

Case study – analysis of policy document

To open our analysis of ‘Harnessing Technology’ we begin with the first paragraph of that Executive Summary, entitled, ‘the technology context.’

Digital technology is already changing how we do business and live our lives. Most schools – and every university and college – now have broadband access. Teachers increasingly use information and communications technology (ICT) to improve their own skills and knowledge – and bring their lessons to life. People working with children, families, young people, and adults are testing out new and better ways to deliver services, with common processes supported by technology. The technology is making many administrative and assessment tasks easier (p.4).

Or to re-emphasise:

Technology changes how we do business; teachers use this to increase their skills, others to deliver services and the technology is making many administrative and assessment tasks...

Once we re-emphasise, this becomes a fundamentally accurate opening statement – ICT is indeed about servicing business; everybody must increase their skills (whither knowledge, transformation, transcendence?); and rather than rounded subjects (Crowther op cit) we are instead reduced to recipients of services: learners are constructed here – and throughout the text – as needy and in need of support VIA ANY MECHANISM BAR A TUTOR. Finally, strategic approaches – as generated by government and business – have increased administration and assessment exponentially – without increasing resources, time or e-administration.

‘Freedom’ is mentioned in the third paragraph, not in reference to academic freedom or freedom to research or the freedom to discover meaningful curricula with which to engage the disenfranchised (rather than the individually needy), but in terms of the haphazard way that incompatible systems have been purchased by institutions because they had the ‘freedom to buy [their] own system and support services’ (p.4). Hence the need for ‘A strategic approach to ICT’ which entitles the fourth paragraph wherein are laid out the goals for e-learning which are to:

  • Transform teaching, learning and help to improve outcomes for children and young people, through shared ideas, more exciting lessons and online help for professionals

  • Engage ’hard to reach’ learners, with special needs support, more motivating ways of learning, and more choice about how and where to learn

  • Build an open and accessible system, with more information and services online for parents and carers…and more cross-organisation collaboration to improvepersonalised support and choice

  • Achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness, with online research, access to shared ideas and lesson plans, improved systems and processes … shared procurement and easier administration (p.4)’ (our emphases).

 Where the individual learner is constructed only in the deficit, having individual needs requiring individual support, hiding/denying that whole groups and classes of people are typically excluded from education because of their class or group position – not because of individual flaws or lack of aspiration.

Special needs stakeholders

Again we can see the emphasis on ‘help’, ‘support’, ‘information and services’ – but interestingly we also get the elision of hard to reach learners (surely an oxymoron then?) with special education needs. This particular elision or cathexis runs throughout the document and serves to mask the real alienation of those who do not consider themselves to be stakeholders in Blair’s new model labour Britain. See also p.19’: …but those that need the services most … least likely to use them… [must] make them accessible to all including people with disabilities’. For with ICT it is possible to (p.20) ‘customise … especially valuable for people with motor, visual or hearing difficulties’ and p.27: ‘New technology can transform the experience of learning for all, but has particular impact for those who might otherwise be excluded or even unwilling to access learning. Learners with special cognitive disabilities…’ and p28: ‘for learners with special needs, these aids can take them from total disengagement to eager participation’ and p44: ‘games technology could help motivate many pupils, including those with special needs who are turned off traditional lessons’.

However, there is little evidence that these are effective, nor that those groups familiar with IT games show more inclination to engage with ICT for educational purposes than previously experienced pedagogical devices.

Not only does this language of neediness and support set up a Foucauldian medical model discourse of education with the ‘learner’ as the special needs patient, it also fundamentally inscribes the ‘learner’ as an object, the passive recipient of courses and support that have been devised by the un-named and the unidentified, superior ‘other’. ICT is bruited because it is ‘engaging’, by this the document means interactive – where we have the sense that the physical interactivity of the computer-game-like skills package is offered instead or in place of intellectual engagement, of engagement with academics, of engagement with other students – or even the engagement in haptic or kinaesthetic activities relevant to one’s subject – the dissection required by the student doctor or the laboratory experiment by the engineer.

Learning, it is flagged up here, is to be opened up through e- and distance learning packages so that we can choose how and where to learn, and even when we learn, but nowhere is there to be choice or discussion about what and why we learn.  The sole solution to all our skills – not education – problems is pedagogical innovation, the development of ‘new kinds of pedagogy … to succeed in innovating and transforming teaching and learning’ (p.28). Indeed, the document records an intent to (p.5): ‘transform the experience of learning’, through p.6 ‘flexible learning packages … [that meet] learners’ needs’ with ‘richer curriculum materials’ – rather than a richer curriculum. Flexibility is reified as a good in and of itself. Flexibility means that courses can be wholly or partly online (pp 6, 26, 27) – such that students will not need to queue to register (p.9) – as institutions re-think their boundaries  (p.10) and the government expects ‘the technology to transform the way we engage and involve children, parents, learners, and the wider community’ (p.18) – engage in what or for what purpose is unclear, for the goal seems not to be expressed till page 27 where the document avows that: ‘Learners and employers want us to help improve their skills … making it easier for them to solve problems, manage information across networks, and understand how to use and apply ICT to their circumstances’. If a definition of education is to be inferred here it must be that education equals technology – and that e-learning is the problem free solution to all our skills’ ills, especially when ‘education and industry working together, through shared e-learning resources and support, will contribute to the aims of our Skills Strategy to improve basic and higher level skills, across the workforce, throughout life (p.6)’.

A semblance of an heteroglossic approach is contained in the document, one that has not only been corralled but one that completely misses the point of language and the dialogic.  Instead of using language as the touchstone of knowledge, a social construct that contains rich diverse voices and the sum total of all knowledge, with language being the mechanism of its transmission, a few case studies are rounded up, with voices that are de-contextualised and disembodied. With respect to the e-Delivery of courses, no evidence base is drawn upon other than the example of an English GCSE that moved on-line with the assurance that enrolment and pass rates improved. No mention is made of the resources that must go into designing an on-line course – nor those that are required to run and maintain such a course – especially where detailed formative feedback is required by students. This silencing is necessary to further deny the role that e-learning plays in enabling the marketisation of education as a global commodity (Noble op cit) and the de-professionalising of the academic in the new university reality where for (non-traditional) students, already dismembered by the discourses of derision prevalent in the wider community – and the deficit discourse about learners, e-learning and education set up in the ‘Harnessing Technology’ document – university is no longer a place to dally after a lecture or seminar, to visit the library, to discuss big ideas in the canteen or to join extra-curricular societies for present interest and long-term networking and career opportunities.

And what does e-learning offer (our) university students? Well of course it can ‘support learners’ (p.56) with ‘appropriate business models for sharing resources’ (ibid). Indeed ‘Schools, colleges, universities can work more closely together to meet the needs of individual students who want something other than the traditional campus-only experience (ibid)’. Thus the mass are to be offered resources and e-learning opportunities rather than what the policy writers would recognise as an educational or a higher educational experience. Proof if more proof were needed that silencing the student stakeholder and denying their dreams does indeed impede the function of the educational organisation. How would the members of the UKelite universities relate to this as defining the goals of their institutions (p.57): ‘Partnerships between universities and industry will help develop courses that better equip graduates with the skills appropriate for a wide range of IT careers’?

Discussion

The ‘Harnessing Technology’ (2005) document is brief constituting just 73 pages including Secretary of State’s foreword (she is very excited) and glossary. Most disturbing are the lack of any vision of education, the emphasis on skills and on the continued reference to learners rather than students. This use of the language of student-centeredness (see Rogers 1902-1987) gives us an experience of what Lash (Giddens, Beck and Lash 1996) calls hermeneutics and its double.   Thehermeneutic allocated to the student is not one that engages thinking, reflecting and then acting; that embraces the modern and that acknowledges contingency and risk via expert systems (Ibid).  Instead we are given a perverted hermeneutic and its double, not one of education but skills and its double, training.  Not ‘education, education, education’, but training and skills.   This constant hermeneutic and its double undermines the achievement of those (Widening Participation) students that have grasped the HE challenge and echoes hollowly around the global modernisation project: further marginalising those already marginalised, further dismembering the subject student.

For in this policy document training and skills replaces Gidden’s reflexive agent and reduces the student to automaton (Noble op cit).  Skills’ training becomes the expert system, and the text means the opposite of what it says. Where previously the term ‘learner’ has been used to indicate that learning was an interactive, social and constructivist process – here the term is used to atomise the individual away from its community and the strength that that might confer. Further, in using the term ‘learner’, the student is excised from the debate – or reduced to a lack; again we see the paradox of the document: on the one hand it mystifies its ideological project but in the process it reduces itself to hysteria; citing that for which there is no evidence.  The project the document offers could be one that embraces the reflexive modern, instead it is reduced to a Freudian construct, hysterical, bipolar, unable to let go, to move on. This failure to let go is not a healthy mourning of the past (Atkinson 2006) but a blindness that damns us to endlessly repeat it again and again.

To compound this reductionist view of the learner (as needy, deficit and atomised – classless – dislocated and dismembered), we also have a reductionist view of education per se, for, as indicated, what is strikingly absent from this document is any aspirational definition of the term education. This is apparent from an analysis of both the condensed text of the Executive Summary (pp 4-7) and of the expanded text of the Report proper and accords with Noble’s (op cit) assertion that e-learning is inextricably bound up with the denaturing and de-professionalizing of higher education. Noble argues that whilst e-learning is akin to training, which is purely for the benefit of others and where any assertion of the self would become a subversive activity, ‘education’ involves the integration of knowledge with the self – where knowledge is defined by and helps to define the self. He stresses that whilst typically the push for e-learning is predicated upon a belief in cost cutting, staff reduction and so forth; education relies on the quality of interpersonal relationships offered – and that to date educational research has at least demonstrated that good education requires a labour intensive, personal relationship between students and quality academics. In the ‘Harnessing Technology’ document, as there is no mention of education research – neither is there reference to previous research or projects bound up with promoting e-learning; instead there is a relentless percussive reiteration of the ‘skills’ refrain, where ICT skills are to service the needs not of the individual – but of industry. This documentation is indeed Noble’s vision manifest in government text – silencing, disassembling and de-skilling the academic professional alongside the new ‘learner’.

Pedagogic choice becomes a matter of strategy, rather than tactics, and e-learning facilitates what Noble (2002:3) argues is the increasing commodification of education; offering educational experience that has been disintegrated and distilled into ‘discrete, reified, and ultimately saleable things or packages of things’. The first step in this process is the assemblance of the course into packages: learning outcomes, syllabi, lessons, and exams. These commodities are subsequently removed from their producers, the teachers, so they are given an independent existence apart from the creator. This constitutes the alienation of ownership as control of the course material is surrendered. The final step is the assembled course sale, in the market place, for a profit, thus teachers become producers, students become consumers and their relationship takes on not ‘education, but a shadow of education, an assemblance of pieces without a whole’ (Noble 2002:4).

ICT, e-learning, has moved from being associated with peripheral innovations and developments to affecting all aspects of learning and teaching. Disempowering strategies such as those outlined in ‘Harnessing Technology’ represent for Conole, Smith & White (2006; 12)  ‘knee-jerk policy which does not take account of evidence emerging from research’ but which have a huge impact on students, especially those who already come into University with low self-efficacy, and can add to the struggles identified by writers such as Anie (2001) and Leathwood (2003) faced by widening participation students in ‘this new cold climate’ (Sinfield, Burns & Holley 2004:143). Conole et al (op cit) suggest that the implementation of ICT within education requires ‘measured and reflective’ approaches that include the human aspects of implementing e-learning; they critique the government document as ‘naïve’; however, our analysis of that document would argue for a more sinister reading. E-learning is inscribed in this text in such a way as to silence students, to de-professionalize the academic and to reduce education to skills. The human, rather than needy, learner and his/her learning wishes, do not enter the debate at Governmental level. No wonder ‘that resistance regularly occurs …’ Akerland & Trevitt (1999:97).

Conclusions

The dismembered student and a dismembered practice emerge from dismembered discourse via this documentation.  The student is moved to the periphery or centred to be damned.  The policy and the practice it is designed to engender are stilted and afraid, halted by a double hermeneutic that will not embrace risk or dynamic (curriculum and student): an aesthetic that crumples and can not hold its own project together.  The report breaks down into banal sentimentality and relies on dismembered voices that mask and neutralise not only those in the text, but all those stakeholders whose voices need to be heard.

The government strategy document can be seen as a script determining the interactions between participants and an instrument to diagnose their power relations (Crowther op cit; 93). The authors position themselves implicitly and explicitly as decision makers and, utilising the masks of heteroglossia, their monologic document reinforces the position that their ‘knowledge enable[d] them to make decisions on behalf of other stakeholders’ (Ibid; 84).  The culminating statement of the text in its mindless vacuity attempts to prove that ‘the past has no place in determining the future … instead, the future is all that matters’ (Ibid; 89); whilst being condemned to repeating that very, mechanical past.

If we return to Nietzsche’s questions: What is it meant to conceal? What is it meant to draw our attention from? What prejudice does it seek to raise? We can see that whilst Blunkett did at least state that:

‘World class higher education ensures that countries can grow and sustain high-skill businesses, and attract and retain the most highly-skilled people. It endows people with creative and moral capacities, thinking skills and depth knowledge that underpin our economic competitiveness and our wider quality of life’ (Blunkett op cit).

‘Harnessing Technology’ conceals any iteration that education might work towards developing ‘creative and moral capacities’ or ‘depth knowledge’. By appearing to be learner-centred our attention is drawn away from the fact that that learner is dismembered, dislocated, atomised and silenced. Whilst the prejudice raised is that such a fractured and pathologised object deserves no voice and is fortunate to access on-line training in the Skills necessary to service Business.

To conclude, this paper has explored how the rhetoric, structure and aesthetic of this government policy document have rendered the student peripheral, absent, passive, problematised and silent; with ICT being offered as a panacea, thereby further dismembering the student. The skills process offers a Utopian future where ‘learners’ can be handed piecemeal to various agencies to be fixed.  These agencies, also dismembered entities, will run the gauntlet of quality assurance and, of course, their services will be available and traded on-line, further rendering the on-lookers neutralised, passive and, instead of the second coming, waiting for a Pop Up or special offer to inform pedagogic practice.

‘Harnessing Technology’ has an aesthetic that suits its purpose – to fracture the ‘learner’ (student) such that the fragmented and decontextualised ‘education’ facilitated by a de-natured and safe ICT can be accepted. The monologic document offers only a semblance of heteroglossic voices, voices that have themselves been dismembered, rather than drawing on voices containing the characteristics of human discourse present in the 21st century: voices that embrace risk and contingency, that are fighting passionately to embrace agency.   These are the students that are contributing to the government’s 50% target for HE participation, it is they who carry the greater risk, it is they who embrace modernity, it is they that should be supported – and it is they that are silenced. Where silencing the student as stakeholder in HE works to de-nature HE itself.

References

Anie, A. (2001). ‘Widening Participation – Graduate Employability Project’, Universityof North London (now LondonMetropolitanUniversity).

Akerlind, G. S. Trevitt., C (1999). ‘Enhancing Self-Directed Learning through Educational Technology: When students resist the change.’ Innovations in Education and Teaching International 36:2.

Atkinson D (2006) ‘School art education: mourning the past and opening a future’ IN JADE 25.1 (2006)

Blunkett, D. (2000) Secretary of State for Education speech given at the University of Greenwich, 15th February. http:cms1.ger.ac.uk/dfee#speech (accessed 8/12/2005)

Burns T & Sinfield S (2004) Teaching, Learning and Study Skills: a guide for tutors London; Sage

Conole, G (ed) two chapters – Chapter 3 Political context Grainne Conole, Su White, Helen Beetham, chapter 5 Understanding organisational cultures, roles and identities in Grainne Conole, Francis Deepwell, Su White, Martin Oliver (in press 2006)

Crowther D & Maraovic B ‘Network semiology: a vehicle to explore organizational culture’ IN Crowther & Jatana (2005) International Dimensions of CSR Vol 11 Hyderabad; ICFAI University Press

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Giddens, Beck and Lash (1996).  Reflexive Modernisation Pollity Press

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Leathwood, C.& O. Conner, P (2003). ‘” It’s a struggle”: the construction of the ‘new student’ in Higher Education.’ Journal of Education Policy pp 597-615 in 18(6)(2).

Macherey, P., ‘The Text Says What it Does Not Say’. In Walder, D., Literature in the Modern World. Critical Essays and Documents, Oxford; OxfordUniversityPress, 1990, pp. 215-23.

Nietzsche F (1974) The Dawn of the Day New York; Gordon Press

Noble, D (2002)  Digital Diploma Mills: The automation of Higher Education New York Monthly Review Press

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Sinfield S, Burns T & Holley D (2004) ‘Outsiders looking in or insiders looking out? Widening Participation in a post-1992 University’ In Satterthwaite et al (eds)(2004)The disciplining of education: new languages of power and resistance Stoke on Trent; Trentham Books

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White, S. and Davis, H. (2002). ‘Harnessing information technology for learning.’ In  S. M. Ketteridge and H. Fry (eds.) The Effective Academic: a handbook for enhanced academic practice.London: Kogan Page

Appendix 2

Burns, Sinfield and Holley (2012) ‘The Shipwrecked Shore – and other metaphors: what we can learn from occupation of – and representations in – virtual worlds’ In Investigations of University Teaching and Learning 2012

Abstract

In cyberspace, it is well known, one’s body can be represented by one’s own textual description: ‘the obese can be slender, the beautiful plain’, (Turkle1999: 643).Our case study (cf Stake 1995) sought to explore the opportunities offered to students when they come to class in a virtual world and a differently created learning space. We consider Bullinghurst and Dünsers(2012) work on augmenting reality for learners to combine the ‘real and the virtual’ to enable students to deal with the abstract. This paper explores student representations in Second Life, a 3D immersive world (www.secondlife.com), and as we engage, we see that the virtual not only enhances both curriculum and practice, but an emergent scope for visual hermeneutics as both a digital literacy and analytical research tool. The focus of the case is a first year FoLSC group of students, based in Computing, and a first year module with embedded study and academic skills. Our conclusions suggest that offering learning opportunities in different spaces, can, indeed, disrupt – but in a powerful and positive way

Keywords: Digital Literacy, Identity, Second Life, Study and Academic Skills, Virtual World

Introduction

“Cyberspace opens the possibility of identity play, but it is very serious play.”(Turkle, 1999:648)

Billinghurst and Dünser (2012) state that augmented reality supports the understanding of complex phenomena by providing unique visual and interactive experiences that combine real and virtual information and help communicate abstract problems to learners. With educational paradigms shifting to include ‘online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative learning ‘(NMC2012:5); the NMC report points out that institutions that support their learners by offering affordances other than physical campuses leverage the online skills that learners bring with them to academia. Second Life is a ‘virtual world’, an electronic environment that visually mimics complex physical spaces, where people can interact with each other and with virtual objects, and where people are represented by animated characters called avatars (Bainbridge, 2007). We wanted to use these emerging technologies to solve pedagogical problems in learning and teaching; and to do so, we wanted to integrate them with the

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Here are pictures from our event. Thank you to the 280 students who shared their work! Join students from English as we celebrate the papers, films, websites, poems, Ignite talks, research, and other scholarly projects they have created this semester. Our flyer with more information can be found HERE. Tuesday, …

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There has been much reflection of late within the #rhizo community about the connection between rhizomatic learning and connectivism. So, to that end this post was inspired by Keith Hamon’s post – not that I actually read his post before writing this, just that his opening sentence caused me to reflection on the connection between…

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Thanks to Dirk for reminding me to start posting some of the details on the Couch-Stone Symposium, held on March 27-29, 2014 at Texas State University. “Symbolic Interactionist Takes on Music” was a big hit. There were 41 presenters on the program, and approximately 195 attendees for the 7 sessions. The Thursday evening BBQ and …

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If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice to the Young on Kindness, Computers, Community, and the Power of Great Teachers | Brain Pickings:




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I've collected five posts on Alan Liu into a single PDF. You can download it from my SSRN page: Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities, A Working Paper. Abstract and introduction below.


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Abstract: Alan Liu has been organizing and conceptualizing digital humanities (DH) for two decades. I consider a major essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” two interviews, one with Katherine Hayles and the other with Scott Pound, and a major blog post in which Liu engages Stephen Ramsay. Other investigators included: Willard McCarty and Franco Moretti. Some of Liu’s themes: DH as symbolic of the future of the humanities, the need for theory as well as practical projects, the role of DH in enlarging the scope of the “thinkable,” the importance of an engineering mindset, and the need for a long-term effort in revivifying the humanities.

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Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit.

–Franco Moretti

I first heard about Alan Liu back in the late 1990s, when he was working on Voice of the Shuttle. I may or may not have submitted some links, I don’t really remember, but if so, that would have been it. Since then I gather that he’s been acting as a Johnny Appleseed for what has come to be called digital humanities, an ambassador, or in the corporate jargon of Apple Inc., an evangelist.

But it wasn’t until early in 2012 that I started to focus on the so-called digital humanities (aka DH). To be sure, Matt Kirschenbaum showed up at The Valve (alas, now dormant) for the Moretti book event (Graphs, Maps, Trees) and, for that matter, Moretti himself put in a few appearances. I snagged a promising book reference from Kirschenbaum (Dominic Widdows, Geometry and Meaning), but for me that event was about Moretti, not DH. It took Stanley Fish to get me thinking about DH. He’d gone to the MLA convention, attended some DH sessions, and blogged about it in January, 2012: Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation. Of my posts tagged “digital humanities”, only a bit less than a quarter of them were written before Fish. The rest come after.

Sometime in the wake of Fish I came across anxiety within the DH community about the lack of Theory, with Alan Liu prominent among the worriers. Now I was irritated. On the one hand, it seems to me that Theory has lost most of its energy – for what it's worth, it was an examination of that morbidity that had attracted me to The Valve (the discussions of Theory’s Empire) in the summer of 2005. On the other hand, there’s a rich body of theory around computation, language, the mind, and evolutionary process (read: history) which is relevant, it seemed to me, to DH and yet which has been for the most part neglected. There is more to theorizing humanity than is dreamt of in Theory.

Finally, in March of this year I saw a video of Liu’s Meaning of the Humanities talk at NYU. I watched it, liked it, and contacted Alan. He responded by sending me a PDF of his PMLA article of the same title (“The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). That prompted me to write the first of the blog posts I’ve collected here: Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu.

Liu begins and ends his PMLA article with the figure of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism was “a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system” (p. 418). If understanding world as system is included in the remit of DH, then I’m on board. In between his invocations of Lévi-Strauss Liu manages to argue against the notion that “there are immaculately separate human and machinic orders” (p. 416). I’m down with that too.

And so it went. When I posted the piece I figured that one post would be it. I was wrong. I nosed about in some other Liu materials and decided to blog some more.

In my next post, The Thinkable and the Interesting: Katherine Hayles Interviews Alan Liu, I latch onto Liu’s belief that DH should be fostering new modes of though by making the invisible and the obscure thinkable in new ways.

I’ve got two things on my mind in Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities. The first is a sense of building, prompted by Liu’s remark that he’s the son of an engineer. Building is very important, not only in the sense of technical infrastructure that digital humanists are building, but also in the sense of poesis: literary works, works of art in general, are constructed, built, composed (to borrow a term from Latour). If we are to understand them more deeply, we need to describe and examine the relevant principles of construction. Second, Liu understands that revivifying the humanities is not simply a matter of coming up with new rhetorical moves we can stuff into new defenses of the humanities that we crank out by the 100s. It’s going to be a long-term process in which we reconstruct our institutions.

The next post–Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”–is something different. Rather than interrogate Liu’s ideas I examine his rhetoric, not to unmask anything, not to show any sneaky hidden agenda, but simply to display how that essay works. Normally I do that sort of thing with literary texts and movies, but Liu’s deployment of Lévi-Strauss fore and aft got me wondering: Is this a ring-form text? It turns out that it is. At the structural center Liu has placed the concept of a tabula rasa interpretation, where the interpreter is a machine, not a human. That is enclosed before and after by Liu’s discussion of a particular example of digital criticism and that triplet is, in turn, enclosed by general discussions of DH, each marked by a reference to Lévi-Strauss.

The next post returns us to the examination of ideas, and in a form that I particularly like, the open letter: Shades of the tabula rasa, something’s happening here… I now take the idea of a tabula rasa interpretation and place it in the context of some of Stanley Fish’s early displeasure with “machine” reading, though the machines in Fish’s case aren’t necessarily computers. At least one of them, Michael Halliday, is a human who happens to go about his business in a (superficially) mechanistic way (he’s a linguist).

That brings us to my last post, To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism, which I stage as a colloquy among four digital humanists, Liu, Willard McCarty, Stephen Ramsay, and Franco Moretti. Each is speaking for the need to go beyond building digital infrastructure for humanists and providing digitally enhanced record keeping and number crunching. All argue that DH needs some kind of sui generis theoretical enterprise if it is to flourish.

I cannot but agree and, as I indicated above, I have some thoughts about that.

And that brings me to my theme. I agree with Moretti, computing has theoretical consequences, and they make digital criticism the hottest game in town. Right now it’s the only approach that’s turning up something new. Some of the newness is infrastructural, necessary, but not itself a source of intellectual innovation and renewal. But those diagrams that investigators are creating, they betoken new ways of thinking. Those diagrams are ways of capturing heretofore-invisible phenomena within the humanistic field. As far as I can tell, no one else is doing that. No one else is going into the territories where dragons dwell.

The literary cognitivists ought to be venturing there, but they’re not. The so-called cognitive revolution is what happened when the idea of computation rippled through psychology, linguistics, and philosophy in the 1950s, 60s’ and on into the 70’s. Not only was the computer used to perform infrastructure tasks, but it was also adopted as a model for the mind. Though some took the model more literally than others, however it was employed, it made mind and mental processes thinkable in new ways.

Once the first generation of cognitivists had rehabilitated the concept of mind–the behaviorists had banned it–later researchers were able to think about the mind without employing the any of the concepts of computation. And that’s where the literary cognitivists have set up camp. The upshot is that much of their work is old wine in new bottles.

The same is true for their cousins the literary Darwinists. Evolutionary psychology was made possible through the application of game theory to animal behavior. Game theory was invented by John von Neumann, the mathematician who was also one of the seminal theorists of computation. But the literary Darwinists are no more interested in computation than the cognitivists. Same story: old wine, new bottles.

Will digital criticism rise to Moretti’s provocation and follow out the implications of computation? I don’t know. There is, however, a critical difference between DH and both literary cognitivism and literary Darwinism. While the cognitivists and the Darwinists know, in the way that active investigators know such things, that there is more to be done, they seem pretty content with their current tool set. Not only do digital humanists know that there is more to be done, in the way that scholars know such things; they also sense that something vital is missing. That sense of lack bodes well for the future.

We shall see.

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Image source logopearl.com
Since 4 years now, a revolution has been taking place in software development when 1st Ipad by Apple was relased on 3 april 2010 and since then this mobile device evolve and now are more than 1 Milion apps in Apple store, most of them are free and for this reason every day this mounth I will share in my blog  Top 10 ipad apps in all of kind of categories  . With iPad in Education , your classroom materials go way beyond the classroom. Discover over 65,000 apps just for education, interactive books on every subject, and speeches, virtual tours, and videos from experts and institutions around the world. Extending of mobile devices in Europe presents an opportunity for those concerned with education to explore their potential for mobile learning – learning facilitated by mobile technologies ( Learning in hand )– to enhance education. This highlights a missed opportunity for educators and policymakers, as mobile telephones – especially windows phones, iphones, ipads, smartphones, – can be equally powerful learning tools that are significantly less expensive than other devices like laptops and tablets, promoting BYOD ( bring your own device ). According to a September 2013 report from Gartner, over 102 billion apps were downloaded worldwide in 2013; 90% of those apps  free. Simple but useful apps have found their way into almost every form of human endeavour, and a popular app can see millions of downloads in a very short time. The huge market for apps has spawned a flood of creativity that is instantly apparent in the extensive collections available in the app stores.  Online app marketplaces provide an easy and highly efficient way to deliver software that reduces distribution and marketing costs significantly. Mobile apps are particularly useful for learning as they enable people to learn and experience new concepts wherever they are, often across multiple devices. People everywhere, but especially in Europe, increasingly expect to be constantly connected to the Internet and the rich tapestry of knowledge it contains wherever they go. According to the 2013 “ICT Facts and Figures” report, Europe enjoys the highest Internet penetration rate in the world (75%). The mobile penetration rate in Europe is at 1.26, meaning most Europeans carry more than one mobile device — 30% higher than the global rate, and multiple studies document that when people access the Internet they are most likely to do so with their personal device. London-based research firm CONTEXT reported that in the first half of 2013, tablet sales increased by 137% across Europe, with the Central and East European region one of the strongest growing markets worldwide. The unprecedented evolution of these devices and the apps that run on them has opened the door to myriad uses for education. Learning institutions all over the world are adopting apps into their curricula and modifying websites, educational materials, resources, and tools so they are optimised for mobile devices. The significance for teaching and learning is that these devices have the potential to facilitate almost any educational experience, allowing learners to organise virtual video meetings with peers all over the world, use specialised software and tools, and collaborate on shared documents or projects in the cloud, among many other things. In contrast to how mobile devices are used for learning, traditional ICT-based learning seems oddly place-bound. 

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Image source logopearl.com
Since 4 years now, a revolution has been taking place in software development when 1st Ipad by Apple was relased on 3 april 2010 and since then this mobile device evolve and now are more than 1 Milion apps in Apple store, most of them are free and for this reason every day this mounth I will share in my blog  Top 10 ipad apps in all of kind of categories  . With iPad in Education , your classroom materials go way beyond the classroom. Discover over 65,000 apps just for education, interactive books on every subject, and speeches, virtual tours, and videos from experts and institutions around the world. Extending of mobile devices in Europe presents an opportunity for those concerned with education to explore their potential for mobile learning – learning facilitated by mobile technologies ( Learning in hand )– to enhance education. This highlights a missed opportunity for educators and policymakers, as mobile telephones – especially windows phones, iphones, ipads, smartphones, – can be equally powerful learning tools that are significantly less expensive than other devices like laptops and tablets, promoting BYOD ( bring your own device ). According to a September 2013 report from Gartner, over 102 billion apps were downloaded worldwide in 2013; 90% of those apps  free. Simple but useful apps have found their way into almost every form of human endeavour, and a popular app can see millions of downloads in a very short time. The huge market for apps has spawned a flood of creativity that is instantly apparent in the extensive collections available in the app stores.  Online app marketplaces provide an easy and highly efficient way to deliver software that reduces distribution and marketing costs significantly. Mobile apps are particularly useful for learning as they enable people to learn and experience new concepts wherever they are, often across multiple devices. People everywhere, but especially in Europe, increasingly expect to be constantly connected to the Internet and the rich tapestry of knowledge it contains wherever they go. According to the 2013 “ICT Facts and Figures” report, Europe enjoys the highest Internet penetration rate in the world (75%). The mobile penetration rate in Europe is at 1.26, meaning most Europeans carry more than one mobile device — 30% higher than the global rate, and multiple studies document that when people access the Internet they are most likely to do so with their personal device. London-based research firm CONTEXT reported that in the first half of 2013, tablet sales increased by 137% across Europe, with the Central and East European region one of the strongest growing markets worldwide. The unprecedented evolution of these devices and the apps that run on them has opened the door to myriad uses for education. Learning institutions all over the world are adopting apps into their curricula and modifying websites, educational materials, resources, and tools so they are optimised for mobile devices. The significance for teaching and learning is that these devices have the potential to facilitate almost any educational experience, allowing learners to organise virtual video meetings with peers all over the world, use specialised software and tools, and collaborate on shared documents or projects in the cloud, among many other things. In contrast to how mobile devices are used for learning, traditional ICT-based learning seems oddly place-bound. 

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