Learning, teaching and research

Looks like JISC have copied the title of two workshops I am developing for next semester – ‘Researching in Web 2.0 World’ and ‘Learning in a Web 2.0 World’. Never mind. I probably pinched these titles from someone else. The full summary of findings and download of full report can be found at Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World Pretty in Pink hd . Highlights that caught my attention are:

Prior experience of students

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire full Using Web 2.0 technologies leads to development of a new sense of communities of interest and networks, and also of a clear notion of boundaries in web space – for example personal space (messages), group space (social networking sites such as Facebook) and publishing space (blogs and social media sites such as YouTube)

There is an area within the boundaries of the so-called group space that could be developed to support learning and teaching

The processes of engaging with Web 2.0 technologies develop a skill set that matches both to views on 21st-century learning skills and to those on 21st-century employability skills – communication, collaboration, creativity, leadership and technology proficiency

Information literacies, including searching, retrieving, critically evaluating information from a range of appropriate sources and also attributing it – represent a significant and growing deficit area

Learner expectation

Imagining technology used for social purposes in a study context presents conceptual difficulties to learners as well as a challenge to their notions of space. They need demonstration, persuasion and room to experiment in this context.

Web 2.0 use in HE

Street Warrior psp

Deployment is in no way systematic and the drive is principally bottom up, coming from the professional interest and enthusiasm of individual members of staff

Key fundamental issue -  the role of the tutor

Bad Boys II full Tutors are central to development of approaches to learning and teaching in higher education. They have much to keep up with, their subject for example, and developments in their craft – learning and teaching or pedagogy. To practise effectively, they have also to stay attuned to the disposition of their students. This is being changed demonstrably by the nature of the experience of growing up in a digital world. The time would seem to be right seriously and systematically to begin the process of renegotiating the relationship between tutor and student to bring about a situation where each recognises and values the other’s expertise and capability and works together to capitalise on it. This implies drawing students into the development of approaches to teaching and learning. [my emphasis]

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This says it all – each slide could be expanded into a dozen more.

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When Google first introduced Google Waves to the world it was claimed that the design had been to start from scratch and imagine what it would be like to reinvent email. This strategy is no doubt the reason that the gwave screen looks rather like an early prototype of Google Mail with its areas for contacts, and inbox and a viewing panel. So far at least it is difficult to see how gwave could be used as an email client, even if it were to be made available to all comers, in its current state of development. It needs for better functions for organising wave and for controlling access for a start.  I have been using waves so far mainly for collaboration and discussion and I must say it looks pretty promising. At the moment I am limited to working with other gwave account holders and these tend to be in the developer and edtech community. I am finding this to be extremely interesting and useful, even fun at times! But the acid test will be when academic colleagues and students can have accounts and we can put together projects and activities focused on everyday learning and teaching needs and scenarios.

The closest I have come to email like activity in gwave is pinging gwave contacts. All your personal gwave contacts are listed in the Contact panel. When a wave is open in the viewing panel of full screen, all the wave members’ icons are displayed in the wave’s header bar. If you click on a wave member’s icon in a wave header or if you click on a contact’s icon in your contact panel, a box will open giving you some details of the person and some options. If you have clicked a contact icon in the contacts panel the options are:

New wave
Ping [contact's name]
Recent waves

Clicking on ‘New wave’ starts a new private wave in which you and your contact are the only members. This appears in both your and your contact’s in box. As far as I can see, clicking on ‘Ping..’  does exactly the same thing with the possible exception that the new wave opens for you and your contact (if they are on-line) in a pop-up window. Either way it still ends up in both inboxes. So this is a one-to-one private message appearing in both individuals’ inboxes. However, it is a wave so discussion can take place within the message and other contacts added to it (by either of you at the moment!). Clicking on ‘Recent waves’ lists any waves that the contact has been active in recently that your are also a member of so it is essentially a filter of your inbox. I have no idea the time scale of ‘recently’ but it fails to list some waves I would expect to see.

If you click on a wave member’s icon in the header of an open wave you get a slightly different set of options:

New wave
Ping [member's name]
Remove [member's name] – this is greyed out and doesn’t work at the moment

If the wave member is not one of your contacts you are also offered an option to ‘Add to contacts’ which will add the individual to your contacts panel. This makes them available to be added to your waves(or any other waves  you are a member of) if you wish. You can only add contacts to waves.

If you choose the ‘New wave’ option it works as described above – a new private wave is created and appears in your and the wave member’s inboxes. However, if you choose the Ping option a new private wave appears embedded in the wave at your insertion position. It is a ‘child’ private wave embedded in ‘parent wave but only visible to  you and the person you pinged. But like any other wave, you (and the person you pinged to create it) can add other members from your contacts panel. This ‘child’ wave is not listed separately in your and your contact’s  inboxes.

Now I know what you are wondering! What happens if you add a contact to a child private wave that is not a member of the containing parent wave? The answer is that it appears in their inbox just like any other wave. It will open just like any other wave and they can use it just like any other wave. For them it is just another wave in their inbox. However, if you subsequently add them to the parent wave, this will appear in their inbox in the place of the child wave and their access to the child wave will be as an item in the main parent wave.

How all this will work in the final release version of Google wave remains to be seen, but the ability to embedded waves with restricted visibility and access could be useful.

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Today sees the launch of a new politics e-journal – Roundhouse: A Journal of Critical Theory and Practice -  at Leeds University. A team of 3rd year undergraduate students have led the editorial process and the first edition showcases nine articles from recent graduates examining the ‘applied turn’ in Critical Theory along with an editorial statement of principles. The journal has been discursively edited, peer reviewed and developed by Critical Theory students from the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Leeds. According to their launch announcement:

“Roundhouse’s main directives are student inherited research and horizontal learning. It aims to spread communicative practices in higher education, create a more flexible style of learning and directly challenge the image of undergraduate students as ‘passive consumers’”.

If you visit the e-journal (and we hope you will!) you will see that the publishing platform we have used is a Wordpress installation used as a web content management system. The underlying functionality is pretty standard but we have created our own Leeds University institutional theme. The articles are available as either pdf downloads or viewable on line as web pages. There is a facility for public (moderated) commenting at the bottom of each article so please feel free to make observations and ask questions. The authors will be very happy to engage in discussion about and around their work and Critical Theory generally.

I have been involved with the development of this journal over the last 6 months or so in an advisory capacity and helping set up the Wordpress installation for its publication but the editorial process was undertaken by a small group of very enthusiastic students. If anyone is interested in the process, the issues, difficulties etc. then please feel free to contact me, here as a comment or email.

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Like most early comments on Twitter re: Google Waves (henceforth gwave), I have not been finding gwaves particularly intuitive and was not at all clear quite what it might be used for. However, as I am using it more I am getting to like it. My two first waves developed into a mixture introductions and trying things out. I think between us we began to get the hang of it.  The next step was to start a wave for a real collaborative project to see how useful (rather than just mystifying , amusing, frustrating)  it could be. The topic chosen was to develop some ideas on digital identity and digital identity ‘managment’ under the leadership of Pat Parslow and Shirley Williams. More on this later perhaps but suffice to say at the moment it has gone very well and some of my initial scepticism has already slipped away. One reason I think it is proving successful so far is a) it has a more-or-less agreed focus, b) we have all playedwith gwave for a while now and are reasonably comfortable with the logistics, and c) there are only a few of us so the structure is not becoming too complicated, so far at least. On the whole we are sticking to the topic and our interventions are on topic. There are a few gwave ‘process’ comments but this is perfectly natural and OK since we are working out how to use the tool and its functions as we go along. This post is about the practicalities of how the wage is developing rather than its content. There are clearly some limits to what we can do as gwave is still pretty clunky and it seems quite a lot of functionality is missing. In some cases it is there but has not been activated. For instance, it looks as if you can enter text in a draft mode but this is a tease and the option is greyed out. Likewise the option that appears to allow you to remove contacts from a wave is ghosted.

The structure of a wave (waves, wavelets and blips)

A wave is the whole document in its entirety. It comes into being by entering the first piece of text in a blank wave. This first paragraph of text  is automatically made bold and becomes the wave’s title. For this reason it is best to make the first paragraph just one short sentence. This initial text, including the title sentence, can be edited by anyone who has access to the wave (different acess rights will hopefull be possible in the full product). Other users can either edit the text, reply to the text or insert comments within the text. Replies are referred to as wavelets and comments within the text are called blips. Blips can be inserted in blips so nested blips are possible. Blips can be collapsed (hidden) or expanded (exposed) by any reader so the text of the wave and its wavelets can be read in a clearly structured form if required. A blip with reply blips is a bit like a little message board inserted into the text where needed for discussing a particular point, asking a question, making a suggestion or a reference, etc.

So replies appended to a wave are wavelets. Replies to replies are also wavelets. The structure of replies and replies to replies is rather complicated but seems to work well in practice. The following image gives an idea of how things work.

If you can make any sense of this you’re a better man than I! What seems to happen is that the first reply follows the replied to text immediatelyafter with no indentation. But subsequent replies to that piece of are inserted above the first reply and indented. All other replies to the text (the 3rd, 4th andso on) are inserted in chronological order at the same level of indent as the second reply. (I think). In other words, if you constantly reply to the last reply everything is listed chronologically with out indentation. Once something is replied to more than once an indented thread is started from that reply onwards. See? Simple.

Despite the apparent confusion above, in practice our wave is working OK. Pat started by adding a number of pieces of text, each one a reply to the previous piece. Others have added replies to these which (as 2nd and subsequent replies) have indented nicely, and all is reasonablyclear. In addition to this we are using blips to annotate specific sentences or locations within the text. This is achieved by clicking once on the text box to get the focus on it (puts a green box round the text) and then double clicking within the text where you want to make a comment (i.e. a blip). Double clicking brings up a 2 option menu – reply or edit. If you select reply you can type in a comment. Clicking on Done will insert your comment in a box within the text at the point you selected. However, it will be accompanied with a little graphic of a minus sign which will hide the blip if clicked at which point it becomes a plus sign which can be clicked on to make the blip visible again. This is illustrated below:

If the little plus sign graphics are clicked the blip (or blip thread) will be displayed, as illustrated:

Replies can be made to blips and become part of a blip set or thread that collectively is hidden or exposed. And blips can be inserted in blips and can be exposed or hidden independently although you can only read blips inserted in blips if they are exposed first.

I hope this makes some sort of sense! I would say it is well worth persevering with Google Wave if you have the time and patience. At the very least I will be using it in place of Google Docs for some of my collaborative projects as it has functions for adding discussion to a document that are very clumsy to try and replicate in docs.

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