Rebecca's Research Blog

John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html

‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function is an instrument of torture”. In civilian life, I increasingly ntice that people don’t actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past.’

Lots of interesting things came out of the OU Research Day. I liked the speaker who pointed out that the RAE is an end not a means. Interesting to view it as a tool, not a task.

My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.

Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.

I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.

I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.

And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.

No sooner do I vent in my blog about my interrupted epistolary interviews than both interviewees get back to me with answers.

🙂 🙂 🙂

My pilot interviews are throwing up lots of things that didn’t happen last year. I guess, as I’m adding about 25% to my knowledge of this technique, that that is only to be expected.

Gill sent me web links and attachments – thus demonstrating that you can use these interviews in that way if you want. She also replied to my questions from a laptop in Canada, thus demonstrating clearly that the interviews are neither time- nor place-dependent. (The photo shows where she emailed me from. I downloaded it from her Flickr site, and it’s copyright Gill.)

So that’s the good stuff. On the other hand, I filed one of Sali’s answers in the wrong place, and then thought she hadn’t answered so sent her another copy of the question and then found she had answered so sent her another question. Then the OU server went down. So now I’m not clear whether she got fed up with me messing things up and decided to stop participating, or whether she did get back to me – but Outlook didn’t pick it up. So that’s annoying. Specially bad timing because now it’s awkward to email her without looking as if I’m nagging her. And I don’t want to nag her – if she wants to stop being interviewed that’s fine. On the other hand, if she thinks I’ve just stopped then that’s no good either 🙁

 And I’ve been back to look at my Outlook archive of my interviews. It’s lost Martin’s responses to two questions, and a couple of my emails. I can access them via Google Desktop, but otherwise they’re not there. So, again, Martin may have responded and his reply may just be lost in the ether. Luckily, I’ve only sent him that question once, so I’ve just emailed him again to explain what’s happening. Hope he gets back to me, cos we’re up to question seven and it would be good to have a complete interview.

Inspired by Anesa’s recent blog posts, I have started to write up my thesis!

Karen did suggest a couple of months ago that I could bank some sections of my PhD which I was feeling confident about. Accordingly, I’ve written 1000 words on the ethics of online research, which wasn’t too complicated, as I drew heavily on last year’s U500 presentation. Then I dragged out my mini-viva presentation to use the section of units of analysis. That needs to be added to – I’ve got a couple of articles that I need to reference. Oh, and I’ve done a piece on episolary interviewing. It needs to be tidied up but most of it is in place.

That’s 3000 words or so – hey, I’ve written 5% of my thesis. How cool is that?

Interviewing Gill via email reminded me, indirectly, that I ought to blog about the DZX222 tutor day at the beginning of the month.

Some of the points raised included: the virtual sumer school is not a break from everyday life for students like a residential school. Students may feel isolated and vulnerable to both doubt and distraction.

A week online equates to a day at residential school. Tutors need to get students to summarise their progress regularly. They shuld encourage discussion of ideas and suggestions. They should avoid providing instant solutions.

Tutors also need to remember several things. One student can tend to take over a  group – there is a need to be on the alert for this. It’s easy to think you are replying to one student but others will read replies and may be daunted by a complex answer – even if that answer is appropriate for the student you are addressing. On the other hand, students may not read replies to other students, so important information needs to be put in bold with a changed header.

There are three major causes of argument amongst students: (1) students have the perception that they are carrying others (2) the chosen project is too complicated (3) an unofficial grup leader emerges.

There is also a danger of bullying. If postings make students feel daunted or overwhelmed that is a form of bullying. There is a need to investigate student silences. Are the students unhappy? Do they understand what is happening?

Martin LeVoi referred to ‘critical mass’ – the size that an online group needs to be in order to be effective. Thought I’d go and check this out. ‘Critical mass’ doesn’t appear to be a technical term in regular use in the literature, but there is some discussion of group size.

Glass and Smith looked at 80 studies of F2F classes which concluded that smaller clases were better with respect to student achievement, classrom processes and teacher and student attitudes. Hayes suggested that distance learners need small groups so they can share and critique project work. He felt that a group of five would allow students to enjoy a rich exchange and feel part of a learning comunity without wasting time sifting through umpteen postings.

A virtual community must have enough participants to allow a significant level of interaction. Gilly Salmon suggests that an ideal size is up to nine.

Four is often considered the ideal in F2F situations because the group is large enough to hold diverse opinions, to draw on different experiences and to approach the subject in different ways. It is not so big that someone can hide and not pull their weight.

Rice suggests a critical mass of 8-10 – generating sufficient volume of interactions without being overwhelming.

Back in the Eighties, when you thought yourself lucky if you had a 16K Spectrum instead of a 1K ZX80 or a ZX81 with a 16K RAM pack which fell off at the slightest touch, I used to edit Sinclair Programs magazine. Kids wrote programs and sent them in on cassettes, I played them all and the best ones were printed off and listed in the magazine. The kids made £25, the publishers got the editorial content of an entire magazine for about £800 (actually twice that, cos we had an illustration drawn for each picture).

You can still find Sinclair Programs games listed on the Internet if you’re keen on shoot-em-up games written in elementary Basic.

Why am I blogging this? Well, I lust found an interview  with Peter Brown, executive editor of the Free Software Foundation http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,39263218,00.htm

Must be one of the best things anyone has ever said about my work:

“When I was a kid, I had a Sinclair ZX-81, with 1KB of memory. At the time — back in 1984 or 85 — if you wanted to play a game you couldn’t buy a CD, so you had to buy one of the listing magazines, like Sinclair Programs.  You had to look at the listing of computer code and type it into your machine. The keyboard was terrible — it was simply a flat piece of plastic. At the end you would try to run the program, and if it didn’t run you would have to correct any syntax errors.
“Over time, I slowly worked out why errors occurred and started to learn how to program in Basic. At one point, I sent a game I had written to Sinclair Programs, and they accepted it for publication and sent me a cheque for £25. As soon as I sent off the first game, I started writing the next one.

“So, the magazine arrived and my game was inside and they’d drawn a nice big cartoon for it. Unfortunately, when I flicked to the editorial for magazine it said, ‘this is the last ever edition of the magazine.’ It was basically saying that in the future people will not share source code and won’t type code into computers — they’ll buy games on physical media instead.

“What was funny was that this was the September 1985 edition of the magazine, which was a month before the Free Software Foundation was created, in response to the fact that people were taking [open] computer code and turning it into proprietary code.

“Looking back at it now, overnight my world was destroyed, because the listing magazine was destroyed. It just became about playing code, rather than writing code. That was the last time I ever did any programming.”

 At the DZX222 weekend, Martin LeVoi gave a very interesting talk on how the virtual res school had originated (1994: 12 students, 14 staff, all the students had to have computers and mobile phones shipped to them). Now that it’s been running annually since 2002 and is attracting 700 students in one year, Martin is still thinking of ways to be at the cutting edge. One is obviously Moodle – everything at the OU is going to have to adjust to the VLE in the next few years. 

Martin also raised the issue of Second Life http://secondlife.com/ which is a virtual world where you go and live a second life in avatar form. I’m torn between thinking this is pointless and thinking it might be good fun. It’s obviously very lucrative – the onscreen currency can be converted into hard cash and there are people who make their living in this virtual environment. I read in the New Scientist about one who earns his living as a hitman. Anyway, that’s off the point. Universities are starting to appear there. The OU could construct a virtual campus and students could meet and discuss in avatar form. At the moment it’s rather clunky, partly because there’s no lip-synching on the avatars, but this could be where the Jennie Lee building goes next time it is demolished and reconstructed.

Oh, and they like you to note that their pics are copyright: