Terry’s Blog

One reason I started blogging nearly 4 years ago was to keep a sort of scratch pad of ideas, quotes, etc. that are useful and thought provoking. On the whole I haven’t done this but its never too late!

Interesting article on how MIT have discovered that small group collaborative work by students has improved learning of basic physics http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?_r=2&em.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.” I suppose you can demonstrate the thought processes in a lecture but this is not the same as the students going through it themselves and applying them to other similar problems. And many lectures do not demonstrate the thought processes - they report on the finished products.

The other thing I was pondering on today was how to get across the idea to research methods students that ’social constructionism’ was unavoidable regardless of what methodological approach taken. This comes up in any debate about the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods and their respective strengths and weaknesses. Qualitative methods are accused of producing subjective  ’just so’ accounts of behaviour and motivations; qualitative research is accused of shaping the outcomes by imposing meanings on questionnaire respondents that force data collected into preconceived theoretical structures - the so-called ‘imposition of meaning’ charge usually made against quantitative investigators. What is often missing from these debates is the fact that any account regardless of the research method used is a social construction. This is no more or less a problem (if it is a problem) for quantitative and qualitative research methods. Social constructionism, properly understood, is not optional. To say ‘I am not a social constructionist and I don’t believe in it’  makes as little sense as saying ‘I don’t use language  and I don’t believe in it’ and no doubt offer to argue the case for as long as you like.

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I went to 2 meetings today and learnt something from both. The LUDOS project (Leeds University Digital Objects) was very interesting. I am particularly interested in repositories of this kind as a trend is emerging for writing modules around publically available learning objects and resources of various kinds. Module design will provide a rationale for study, a structure, learning outcomes and objectives, support and assessement but increasingly the bits an academic will write will be scaffolding and wrap-around materials that integrate and exploit learning resources available elsewhere. There has been an increasing emphasis in various Govt. documents and reports relating to education calling for the provision of open learning content (OLC).

This raises the question of metadata, a subject I found unexpectedly interesting! As Libby Bishop said in her very impressive presentation about the Timescapes project that is using the LUDOS repository, “metadata is just data about data”. The whole point about learning and research objects in repositories is that they should be discoverable and used, again and again. This means discoverable by the right people across a range of different disciplines and research areas. An image of a human rib cage will be of interest in a medical context and could easily be described with metadata that would be found by medical reseachers and teachers. But it may also be a very good example of a cantilever system (it may not; not my area, but you get the point) that would be of interest to engineers. However, it would be unrealistic to expect the image to have engineering metadata formally attached to it by its originators. It would perhaps only be seen as as interesting and useful object for engineering students or researchers by an engineer who had nothing to do with the original contex of the creation of the object. This is where user generated metadata comes in - social tagging. A particular engineer may have an interest in looking for examples of engineering principles in Nature and would perhaps, thinking out of the box, look for images of human anatomical bits and pieces as examples, structural, hydraulic perhaps, who knows. She may well find stuff and tag it (add metadata) with her and her students’ interests and objectives in mind. This is where truly ‘open’ content with a user tagging facility comes into its own. And why not go a step further and add a commenting and discussion layer to the repository too. The objects come alive via the animation of the dicussion. Perhaps.

This whole business of metadata is so vital for the whole archive/repository and open content movement and far more important and interesting than I thought. The issue is epistemological in its scope. In fact ontological! What more could a professional procrastinator with an intellectual bent ask for?

The second thing I discovered today at a VLE Project meeting is that 75% of ‘visits’ by students to the VLE are from off campus - 25% from Halls and 50% from who knows where. We now need data on peaks of activity to supplement this picture. Hundreds of students logged in on Christmas day and 1 member of staff was logged in at the stroke of midnight 31st December 2008. That doesn’t sound like much of a party!

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I watched a fascinating programme on BBC TV tonight called Six Degrees of Separation.  I decided to watch it again on the BBC iPlayer and make notes in order to post on it in some detail later. Unfortunately it looks as if it will not be available to play again. So I thought I would jot some notes here anyway before I forget and try to follow the ideas up later via other sources. It seems that ’small worlds’ connect to big worlds via a small number of connections. Only a comparatively small number of links between small worlds has the effect of shrinking the whole network significantly. This seems to be a universal feature of all real world networks. These fairly few interconnections through which most traffic passes are called ‘hubs’. Apparently there is a mathematical formula that tells us how many hubs in a given network are likely to exist. A network can survive any amount of nodes/connections being destroyed but not if hubs are destroyed.  Using the WWW and page linking as an example, the scientist in the programme said you would assume that the distribution of pages and the number of links they have made to them would be a normal distribution, a few with no links to them perhaps, a few with a 10s of thousands or more links to them but the majority clustering symmetrically round a mean number of links. I don’t know why we should assume that, but he said we should. However, on inspection it seems the distribution is highly skewed with a very small number of sites with massive number of links to them (i.e. Google, Amazon, etc.) and a rapid fall off and very long tail of millions of pages with very few links to them, down to zero. This is what I would have expected, but then I’m obviously a bit weird. The point is that if one of these hubs goes down very many small word connections go down with them.

The 6 degrees of seperation refers to the notion that, pick any living individual in the world, you will only be a chain of 6 people who know people who know him or her.  This was tested in the programme by identifying a Prof in Boston USA and giving 40 packages to random people all over the globe. They had to pass the package on to someone who they felt might have some chance of knowing the Prof or at least knowing someone that might know someone (and so on) that might know the Prof. For a woman in a village in Uganda it turned out to be a relative who knew someone in the US. The programme followed this package and sure enough it was eventually handed to the Prof by someone who was known to someone known to someone (and so on) who new the original woman in the Ugandan village.  All dramatic stuff until at the very end of the programme they quietly mentioned that only 3 of the 40 packages got through! This was the result of  a similar experiment reported by the BBC on August 2008 - Study revives six degrees theory.  However, what are the implications of this for learning and research networks? Well the good news is that I am  probably only 6 steps away in a  potential communication chain with the best brains on any subject you care to mention. The bad news is I have no idea how to tap into that brain via this chain. I may as well just email the expert in question directly and ask a question. I think the notion  of hubs may be more interesting in practical terms. Who or what site in an expert’s small world makes the expert’s knowledge available. I think this is common sense really. If you want to know what current thinking is on, say, network theory, or connectionism (George Seimens) then who’s doing the research, who is reporting on it, summarising it, discussing it? There’s your hub. There is your link into the smaller experts’ network of expertise.  It is obvious, I think, how important are digital presence and reputation in these matters. It is these plus exposure, a willingness to do business in public, that creates the hubs of learning and research networks. Thank goodness for these people. Without them my personal learning/research network would be in serious trouble. One question might be, why do they do it? Some for PR and marketing perhaps, some because they explicitly want to build a digital presence and reputation perhaps. For many I am sure it is because their followers are part of their learning/research networks from whome they feedback, comments, discussion, sharing ideas and resources. It also allows a powerful mixture of formal, informal, serendipitous (!) and vicarious learning.

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My last post was about the claim that blogging is in decline or at least morphing into something else. There has also been speculation that political and media blogs feed off mainstream media and if this declines becasue of the bloggers, the bloggers will decline too as the symbiotic relationship falls apart. However, many blogs do not rely directly on mainstream media, for instance those that relate to personal experience and observations. For the first time the Orwell Prize has included a category for blogs as well as books and traditional journalism. The winner is Night Jack, the anonymous blog of a serving police officer. I’d never heard of it before but, having had a quick read of some posts and the comments, have found it a bit of an eye opener. As someone who used to teach the sociology of crime covering policing issues, ‘cop’ culture, prisons etc. I  can see this sort of blog as a useful source of controversy and discussion.

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It is rumoured that blogging running out of steam. Several colleagues in the educational bloggersphere have reported that they are not blogging as much as usual and are tending to be more active in Twitter. I am also aware of a few bloggers who have stopped blogging as they feel pressurised by the reputation and expectations they have built up with their readers. One or two have since returned having established more realistic ‘rules of engagement’. The article in today’s Guardian in the New Media section, a cut down version of a blog post by Andrew Keen, touches on this - Blogs are dead. Long live the blog. It seems blogging is transforming itself and in the process becoming more like the hub of a personal learning/research environment rather in the way some envisiged from the start.

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