Using a blog to think ‘professional’

Producing this is the task a small number of us belonging to the European Athena3 Network (the Advanced Thematic Network of Women’s Studies in Europe) have given ourselves.

For a number of years some of us have been discussing how the early 1980s and 1990s work on feminist pedagogy might provide different critical insights into elearning [If you are unfamiliar with the idea of feminist pedagogy see Penny Welch’s pages which are an excellent resource in this area]. But this is a debate that has not captured the imagination of those who teach women or gender studies. So we decided that we’d try to put our ideas together into a Manifesto: take the conversation  out of the polite arena of academic debate into that of practice and politics. So at the moment we are working on a wiki hosted at the University of Helsinki and will be presenting our first thoughts on ‘ A feminist manifesto for elearning’ at the 7^th Feminist Research Conference in Utrecht in June

 These thoughts are still in a state of evolution – we’re hoping they will have evolved enough to be coherent by June.

Around me the recession is having an impact on the jobs of friends and relatives, but in the education sector we remain cushioned from the worst effects. So far our jobs are being protected by restrictions on external recruitment, and savings on ‘peripheral’ spending. People I know have lost their jobs; others have taken a negotiated reduction in salary. Those who are self employed have seen a dramatic drop in business. Those with savings in private investments have seen these lose nearly 25% of their value. The resilient are selling things, and taking any job that is going, reducing their living costs and hoping to sit things out until the inevitable cyclical upturn. They phone me to talk about Genghis Khan type management implementing workplace ‘restructuring’. A proliferation of ‘humanistic’ management books hasn’t improved the actual behaviour of many senior managers. In my sector of higher education student numbers are up, but it still seems an unwise time put in a pay claim – as is happening in some areas.  At the school level the teachers present claim for a 10% pay rise, looks misjudged.  It seems an unwise time for this kind of action, or do I simply misunderstand the politics of pay bargaining? Most of us make a bargain in our careers – trading security for salary – if we are the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the economy many get neither good salary or job security. At the moment job security is holding the recession at bay for most of us in education. But we shouldn’t mistake a cushion for a Kevlar Vest.

On Wednesday I enjoyed a symposium at the University: ‘Cultural work and creative biographies’. The creation of identity through autobiographies ( especially diaries and blogs) fascinates me. Lisa Adkins opened  a discussion about the relationship between biographical narratives and time. We are all engaged in ‘do it yourself’ biographies which are important for understanding our present and for making our own futures rather than simply explaining our past. But, Adkins asked: how will our biographies change if they are experienced through event time rather than clock time.

Robert Lauer ( Temporal Man: the meaning and uses of social time, 1981) argued that modern cultures understood time as ‘clock time’ and developed concepts associated with it such as punctuality. Pre-industrial cultures ran on ‘event time’ – ie social events happened when groups felt they should and lasted some ‘natural’ length of time ie as long as people wanted them to. Adkin proposed that we were entering a new age of event time, made possible by forms of instant networked communication. Examples of this change is the move away from pre- arranging a meeting with friends at a certain time and place and instead, to opening a wider window of time in which people contact one another and meet at the time of contact. The possibility of downloading previous broadcast media on demand has also moved these highly scheduled events out of clock time into personalised event time.

It is challenging to think what this means culturally, but is isn’t such a surprise when you think about it biographically.  I suspect for most of us our biographies don’t naturally belong in clock-time line but are more like a string of pearls. Memories are the pearls: coherent (and incoherent) events strung to each other by the narratives we make at any moment, and  with no strong sense of the time/spaces between each pearl. Sometimes the string is knotted and the pearls are tumbled together in a confused time-line. Diaries and blogs provide string.

I suppose  it’s inevitable, because I’m an academic and aspire to being a scholar of sorts, that at some point I would write something for a peer reviewed journal on the impact – if any – of blogging on being an academic.  I am now trying to finish such a paper. Although I am interested in the role of blogging as a reflexive activity, I wonder whether my time would be better spent becoming a better blogger rather than reflecting on blogging and writing about it elsewhere.  [ This mirrors my feelings about our present obession with reflection in education - wouldn't some of the time spent reflecting on learning be better spent practicing skills, refining knowledge etc?] And so:  the ouroboros of blogging. At least the ouroboros is eating her own tail.  Drawn slightly differently there is a danger that we could be illustrating a complaint frequently made against academics that we often have our  heads up our  …… 

 Image from Wikimedia Commons

I have just come back from the 2009 Gender and ICT Conference in Bremen. There were some really thought provoking sessions on the gendering of design.  I was reminded a problem I, and many of my women colleagues have with one of our favourite machines – our Blackberries.  For months we have struggled with a ring tone that did not give us enought time to retrieve our Blackberry from the depths of our handbag fast enough to get to the caller before they were put onto voicemail.

The problem seems to be that Blackberry designers never imagined the device being at the bottom of a handbag among other objects.  instead they envisaged the device begin attached to the body of the user. This became clear when the IT guy talked to us in the language of Blackberries. The little leather wallet the Blackberry is kept in is called a ‘holster’, and when in the holster the normal response to a call is two sets of vibrations vibrations and two audible call patterns.  The Blackberry’s designers imagined that owner would be carrying the Blackberry on a belt or in a jacket pocket, so the vibration would be against a body. But when used as a handback device and ‘holser’ is understood only as a protective ‘purse’ or container, and the vibrations go undetected. The owner has one audible ring to draw attention to the device and locate it in her handback, and the length of another tone to extract if from the bag and then from the ‘holster’, by then voice mail has cut in.

Was this pattern of use ever tested for?  Please can I have a re-imagined Blackberry ring tone – and no I don’t want a pink ‘holster’.

 When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail,

hen blood is nipt and ways be foul

Then nightly sings the staring owl

Tuwhoo tuwhit tuwhoo. A merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all around the wind doth blow

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And Marion’s nose looks red and raw.

And roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl

Tuwhoo, tuwhit tuwhoo

And greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The sight of heavy snow brought back this bit of Shakespeare I learned in primary school. Why?  Some things you remember and some you don’t. I wish I could remember all my online passwords so easily. They pile up and don’t stand a chance of being remembered. Being snowbound at home sent me back to Second Life – but I can’t now remember either the password or the answer to the prompt question to change the password for my first avatar. So I have made another.

Last week I spent a day badged as ‘Expert – Blogs’ at the annual ‘Learn About Fair’ that the University runs as part of internal staff development.  A colleague and I had our small stand with factual posters and a lap-top to demonstrate blogging.  Some people called in just for the free sandwiches – some things never change. But we still had a constant flow of people with questions. It was interesting that no one wanted to talk about how to incorporate blogging into learning  activities for their students; they all wanted to talk about how to get one going for themselves: secretaries, academics, research students. Most queries were about personal rather than professional blogs: how to set one up, and to take it down if you didn’t want to do it anymore; whether if one was hosted by the institution someone would censor it?   

Not everyone is a convert. One colleague remains convinced that blogging (twittering and all social networking type activities)  is really ego-tripping, self-promotional activity that produces the wrong mindset for learning. Most of us keeping blogs wonder about that ourselves sometimes too.

picture source: http://www.followupmktg.com/

So far I have not had any real issues with spam – until recently. Now I am getting about 100 spam email comments daily to this blog. ( Some of you might be saying ‘only 100! -’ . I presume that this is just the tip of a pontential iceberg. ) Most originate from the same IP address but have multiple email addresses ( mainly AOL addresses). I trust my Spam filter to block them. But they are an irritant because I need to eyeball them because the filter sometimes catches genuine comments and I have to allow them through. 

I am used to email spam, but its is still an irritant and I seem to be getting more of this too, and some of it  looks quite genuine.  Last week I had an email puporting to come from an overseas colleage who had lost her handbage and needed money – but the amount she needed and other things about the email suggested that someone was using her name fraudulently. I have tried to contact her about this but without success. My email spam filters don’t seem to be catching all the sites they used to catch.

Googling ’spam blog’ links to lots of detailed and technical sites – a lot of stuff outside my technical scope- but I have added Terry Zink’s anti-spam blog to my blogroll, just to remind me to keep up with the issues.

Over the holiday I had my first experience of ‘Guitar Hero’, after a family dinner. 

( image taken from http://ps2.gamespy.com/playstation-2/guitar-hero/661972p1.html 

I have mentioned before that I am not – by inclination – a computer games player. Although other RL games of all sorts are part of what makes life fun for me.  Most of my friends are not computer games players either so I am part of that majority for whom computer games remain an invisible social activity. I know that in reality this minority is very large and economically powerful. John Lanchester (LRB, 1.1.08) quotes a figure of £4.64  billion as the 2008 income from video games in the UK, overtaking both music and video ( £4.46 billion) and book publishing ( £4.1 billion).  

One of my sons is a game player and he got us playing ‘Guitar Hero- Legends of Rock’ after a very good dinner (that he’d also coooked). Apart from the very impressive video imagery which was a pleasure to look at, I wondered after 20 minutes whether my time would be better spent learning a few real guitar cords, instead of chasing the notes on the screen while my ‘game guitar’ made ‘clonking’ noises as I strummed the plastic lever.

I had presumed like most educators that we can use computer gaming to engage people in educational activities- that for example is why we are spending so much time trying to get into Second Life. That playing games is ‘fun’,  easy, pleasurable. But after my Guitar Hero experience I am not so sure. A Guitar Hero player spends hours if not days and weeks mastering the game, competing with his/her friends for high scores and learning to follow all the scores of all the songs in the game. Like me they spend time failing badly and being ‘booed’ off the stage by their virtual audience.  When they have mastered most of the tracks in the game, they will be no nearer playing a guitar that they were before they ever played the game. I am not sure what a player will have learned - mostly things that are to do with the Guiter Hero game itself than anything transferrable- except perhaps to other computer games.

John Lanchester’s reflections on gaming are very insightful when transferred to education. For example he notes, what gamers want, and are willing to pay for, are difficult and complex games. This is not what we think students want when they enter education. A gamer accepts that they are pitting themselves against a complex programme and if they ‘lose/fail’  they suffer virtual humiliation ( at least in Guitar Hero nothing eats or shoots you) and they are spurred to try again, getting pleasure from the challenge of more advanced ‘levels’.  In education we worry that students will be de-motivated by failure, and as  institutions, universities  take some responsibility for student failure, and try to help students avoid it.  In computer games, intial failure is expected of a good challenging game. Players would be most dissapointed if Guitar Hero gave them easy routes to the advanced levels when it found them struggling to keep up at the lower levels.

Can we get students to relate to us as they relate to games like Guitar Hero?  To see us as devilishly devious programmers who deliberately create difficult challenges for them, that early failure is par for the course, and usually very visible.  Would students then happily take on the challenges we set them, until they have passed all the tests and reached ‘mastery’-  and do this in an environment of competition against their friends. Would this be radical  games-based education?

Yesterday I attended a symposium called the Future of Creative Technologies Conference, at De Montfort University. The attraction mainly was Howard Rheingold speaking just up the motorway from my home.  I read Tools for Thought and The Virtual Community some years ago and although I am not a techno-optimist like Rheingold ( I don’t think I am a pessimist either – I like to think I’m a pragmatist), the ideas in the books stayed with me.  In the flesh Rheingold seemed more like a pragmatist. He impressed many of us when he talked about getting his students (and he actually has real students) to close their laptops when they are in his lectures and seminars. Doing that he argued helped focus attention, and students liked it. They told him they found keeping a laptop open and multi-tasking was a distraction. What he wanted from students was ‘mindfulness’. I think I’m a late Rheingold fan. 

Some of the participants in the symposium had their laptops open and were ‘twittering’, with their laptops poised on their laps.  I didn’t – not even to take notes. And I know why. It’s not a question in this case of mindfulness; its question of the fit between lap and laptop. When I sit on a chair and put my feet on the ground my lap slopes downwards – because my legs are short ( well shortish!). I am really frustrated when people suggest how nice it will be if we all come out from behind our tables and sit in a friendly circle for our meeting, because I know that I will spend part of the meeting rescuing papers and pens as they slide down my lap onto the floor. Laptops would do the same if I didn’t grasp them white-knuckle tightly. And I still prefer using a mouse- not much room on a lap for that too. So in my case a laptop isn’t, its simply a portable computer.  I can only think that the people who came up with the original epithet had long legs or sat on the floor. So I now look back at my books of scribbled notes and transfer some to my (desk supported) computer and explore Social Media Classroom. How different will this be from the OU Social Learn Project I wonder?

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