Category: sharing Page 20 of 40

Publication: The Structure and Characteristics of #PhDChat

On May 12, 2014

In my research, online learning, open, papers, scholarship, sharing

One of the highlights of academia is working closely with students and seeing them grow, take on challenges, struggle, and create meaningful change in the world. This happens in classrooms, on the web, in design/development projects, in research endeavors, and so on. Kasey Ford, who was one of my advisees, recently completed her MA thesis examining #PhDChat, an online social network, and we have published a study out of that work in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education. I’m excited to share the abstract below:

#PhDChat is an online network of individuals that has its roots to a group of UK doctoral students who began using Twitter in 2010 to hold discussions. Since then, the network around #PhDchat has evolved and grown. In this study, we examine this network using a mixed methods analysis of the tweets that were labeled with the hashtag over a one-month period. Our goal is to understand the structure and characteristics of this network, to draw conclusions about who belongs to this network, and to explore what the network achieves for the users and as an entity of its own. We find that #PhDchat is a legitimate organizational structure situated around a core group of users that share resources, offer advice, and provide social and emotional support to each other. Core users are involved in other online networks related to higher education that use similar hashtags to congregate. #PhDchat demonstrates that (a) the network is in a continuous state of emergence and change, and (b) disparate users can come together with little central authority in order to create their own communal space.

Ford, K., Veletsianos, G., & Resta, P. (2014). The Structure and Characteristics of #PhDChat, an Emergent Online Social Network. Journal Of Interactive Media In Education, 18(1). Retrieved April 16, 2014, from http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2014-08

Below is a visualization of users mentioning #PhDChat, with users grouped into clusters. Users with frequent or exclusive ties, represented in this study as replies and mentions, are clustered together. Thus, each cluster represents users that are most closely associated to one another based on their frequency of interactions.

Scholarly networks of care and vulnerability

By George Veletsianos

On April 14, 2014

In emerging technologies, my research, NPS, online learning, scholarship, sharing

I gave a presentation at the annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning conference last week focusing on aspects of networked participatory scholarship. I kept track of other sessions of interest here.

The concept of networked scholarship is expressed in different ways in the literature, ranging from digital scholarship to social scholarship to open scholarship. In my presentation, I discussed two themes that have arisen from my 3+ years of qualitative and ethnographic studies into the practices of higher education scholars.

Both of these themes help us make better sense of scholars’ digital participation and networked scholarship. They also help us better describe online scholarly networks and the lives and practices of digital scholars.

The first theme refers to the notion of scholars using networks to enact digital/open scholarship and circumvent restrictions to the sharing of knowledge. I have a recent publication on this that you can read here.

The second theme is one that I am still developing. Specifically, in my research I found that social media and online social networks function as places where some academics express and experience care. While debates about the use of digital scholarship and social media use in education have so far largely focused on the professional experiences of scholars, with frequent suggestions to limit personal sharing, professional and personal identity are difficult to separate, and academics frequently collapse the boundaries between personal and professional sharing. Academics demonstrate vulnerability and express care online in many forms. In my presentation, I showed and discussed examples of what these very personal and intimate instances of sharing look like. A version of my slides appear below:

Scholarly Networks of Care and Conflict from George Veletsianos

Notes on #AERA14 Rigor and Realism: Doing Educational Science in the Real World

By George Veletsianos

On April 4, 2014

In emerging technologies, NPS, open, scholarship, sharing

Below are my notes from the AERA 2014 session Rigor and Realism: Doing Educational Science in the Real World. The ideas are significant for learning technologies researchers focused on impacting practice and developing real-world innovations/interventions. While I share many of these values and discussed a number of them in past work (e.g, here and here), what appears below are Catherine Snow’s ideas.

Rigor and Realism: Doing Educational Science in the Real World
The Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture: Catherine Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, Harvard University
Some educational researchers are adopting new models for doing educational research, models that start from problems of practice, prioritize the challenge of utility to educators, and presuppose partnership relationships between researchers and practitioners. In attempting to implement such approaches, we often find that attention to the conditions of real-world practice may compete with attention to the constraints of rigorous design. That familiar problem can be exacerbated by the conflicting epistemologies of real-world decision-making vs. rigorous scientific knowledge-building. This conflict, in its multiple forms only some of which will be discussed, is a dilemma rather than a problem; it demands careful consideration of approaches to balancing the desirable features of rigor and of realism when they conflict.

Notes from the presentation and twitter feed

A conflict exists between rigorous research and the demands of educational systems. Educators and researcher must work together as partners.

Researchers have to acknowledge the realities of practice.

Researchers should start with urgent problems of practice – not simply gaps that exist in the literature

Education research/science can be highly rigorous, but it needs to be relevant. If it’s not impacting students in schools, it doesn’t matter. Focus of ed research is often quality, but we have to make the case for utility. It should be about utility and relevance.

Education research should move from questions of “whether” to questions of “how” ( GV side note: especially relevant to learning technologies, as noted by past research – e.g., don’t ask whether online learning works, but ask how does it work, how do we make it better, under what conditions, for whom, etc).

Recruiting the next generation of scholars into this work may endanger their potential to publish and get grants

We need to modify practitioner preparation to provide guidance about the challenges of collaboration with researchers (e.g., teach value/limitations of research)

Numerous colleagues are invested in this model (e.g., WT Grant, iterative design work, design-based implementation)

Progress is slow. Are there really exciting initiatives that would make a huge difference that might change both edu research and practice?

Build the partnership model into the preparation of doctoral students by institutionalizing and acknowledging relationships and acknowledging relationships. Schools of education need to embrace this approach and faculty members need to be supported even if it doesn’t have immediate payoff in journal articles. A way for schools of education to become relevant and keeping us from the constant danger of becoming second rate departments of Arts and Sciences rather than 1st grade institutions of social change
Promote accountability by developing reliable and feasible measures of classroom practice that might eventually take the place of student outcome measures
Take the wisdom of practice seriously and develop a mechanism for systematizing and curating it. Journal review process is elegant and effective in maintaining standards for a certain kind of knowledge, but why do we dismiss anecdotes that teachers tell us? Because there is no epistemological structure for evaluating and curating that knowledge. What does that structure look like? Even though practitioners generate knowledge, it disappears. Developing a mechanism to capture and curate knowledge would be a hugely powerful mechanism. We acknowledge wisdom of practice but don’t take it seriously. We need to raise the level of the wisdom of practice to a more respectable level, by making it indeed more respectable. Urgent agenda because of internet sharing of uncurated practices. There currently isn’t a way to curate teacher knowledge ( GV side note: Curation of internet resources is prevalent, and a number of individuals are arguing for a system of publish then filter – lots of connections to openness, digital participation, and digital/media literacies re: curation)

As a field we need an exciting agenda of research that is cumulative, rigorous and realistic

http://www.serpinstitute.org/

SXSWedu 2014 events

By George Veletsianos

On February 28, 2014

In sharing

I’ll be at SXSWedu 2014, and I’m hoping that the event has matured a bit since last year’s “learning outcomes come second” suggestion. Austin is probably the best US city to host this event as the city itself is undergoing massive change.

I’ll be on two panels this year, and I’m really excited to participate in both. The first panel is one organized with my colleagues Tanya Joosten, Amy Collier, and Audrey Watters:

Startups Should Talk with Researchers and Educators
George Veletsianos (Royal Roads University)
Amy Collier (Stanford University)
Audrey Watters (Hack Education)
Tanya Joosten (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee)

Educational technology startups seem to ignore the knowledge that educators and researchers have amassed that can help startups succeed. Last year’s SXSWedu event felt more like a vendor gathering than a space for “meaningful conversation.” If we want to change how we do education, these groups must converse. In this panel, we will discuss how educators/researchers can help startups improve products and answer questions pertaining to education research, how people learn, and classroom practice.

The second panel is a meetup organized by Coursetalk:

Global Development: Is Online Learning the Answer?

Karen Francis, Chairman and CEO of AcademixDirect, parent company to CourseTalk

Dr. Anant Agarwal, President, edX
Jason Palmer, Deputy Director, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Dr. George Veletsianos, Canada Research Chair/Associate Professor, Royal Roads University
Stephanie Banchero, National Education Writer, The Wall Street Journal
Jane Swift, CEO, Middlebury Interactive Languages

Education, Training, and Professional Development technology innovations have disrupted the way we learn across the globe. Some are calling online education and MOOCs the pathway to solve the skills and knowledge gaps of today’s global workforce. Others are predicting these technology innovations are the road map to an influx of loss of jobs as more things become automated. Many are collaborating and developing models to improve student outcomes and to connect students with the resources needed to grow and succeed in a global and competitive job market.

ELI 2014, learner experiences, MOOC research, and the MOOC phenomenon

By George Veletsianos

On February 10, 2014

In emerging technologies, learner experience, moocs, my research, NPS, online learning, open, scholarship, sharing

I was at the Educause Learning Initiative conference last week (#ELI2014), where I had some interesting conversations and discussions around online learning, MOOCs, research methods, and the future of higher education.

Amy Collier and I presented early results from our qualitative studies looking at learners’ MOOC experiences (if you have not yet responded to our call to share your lived experiences with us, please consider this invitation). Our talk was entitled “Messy Realities: Investigating Learners’ Experiences in MOOCs.” Our thinking is guided by the notion that even though surveys and big data yield insights into general behavioral patterns, these methods are detached and can distance us rather than help us understand the human condition. As a result, the phenomenon of “learning in a MOOC” is understudied and undiscovered. During the session, we shared what we have been finding in our studies, highlighting the messiness of learning and teaching in the open.

Karen Vignare and Amy Collier were also very kind to extend an invitation to a number of us to share our work with individuals participating in the leadership seminar they organized. It was fantastic to hear Katie Vale (Harvard), Matt Meyer (The Pennsylvania State University), Rebecca Petersen (edX, MIT), and D. Christopher Brooks (EDUCAUSE) discuss their work, and once again, I felt grateful that we are having these conversations more openly, more frequently, and with greater intent.

Below are my rough notes from my 5-7 minute presentation. I appreciate parsimony (who doesn’t?), and in the words of D. Christopher Brooks, this is the litany of things I think:

I am a designer and researcher of education and learning. I study emerging technologies and emerging learning environments. I’m also a faculty member , and I have been teaching in higher education settings both face-to-face and online since 2005.

To contextualize my comments on MOOCs, first I want to describe my experiences with them:

– I have facilitated one week of the #change11 MOOC was organized by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2011. This MOOC had a distinctively connectivist flavor with each week being facilitated by 1 person.
– I have enrolled in a number of MOOCs, and have even completed a small number of them.
– I have repurposed MOOCs in my own courses. For example, I have asked students to enroll in MOOCs and write about them.
– I have published an e-book with my students, sharing stories of student experiences with MOOCs.
– Finally, I am actively involved in studying learners’ experiences in MOOCs in order to understand the human element in these emerging learning environments.

I have recently come to the realization that I have an ambivalent relationship with MOOCs. My relationship with MOOCs is one of the most ambivalent relationships I have had with anyone or anything. This relationship is more ambivalent than the love-ignore-hate relationship that my cat has with me!

On the one hand, I appreciate the opportunities for open learning that MOOCs provide. I also appreciate how MOOCs have brought us together to discuss issues around technology, teaching, and learning. At the same time, I cringe at the narratives around big data, I cringe at the hype, at the ignorance around what education is and should be about.

I want to talk about two topics today: MOOC research and the MOOC phenomenon.

On MOOC Research

– We don’t know much about MOOCs
– The things that we know about MOOCs are mostly the result of surveys, learning analytics, and big data research
– The existing research and the existing methods that we use are informative, BUT they simply paint an incomplete picture of MOOCs. We should be asking more in-depth questions about learner and instructor experiences in MOOCs
– Qualitative and interpretive research methods can and will help us better understand MOOCs, open learning, and open scholarship
– Descriptions of learner behaviors are helpful, but these descriptions only provide a glimpse and superficial summary of what students experience and what they do in digital learning environments. To give you an example, emerging research suggests that students may be “sampling” courses; a behavior that we don’t frequently see in traditional online courses or traditional face-to-face courses. Nonetheless, “sampling” is not how participants would describe their experiences or the ways they participate MOOCs. To illustrate, consider family-style Mediterranean meals that consist of numerous dishes, where participants sample a wide array of food. If you ask a person to describe this meal, to explain it to someone else, or to simply tell you about the meal, they will likely describe the meal as a feast, they might describe the tahini as lemony, the variety of flavors as intriguing, the whole meal as satisfying. Different people will also describe the meal differently: Tourists might describe the meal as fulfilling, heavy, or even extravagant; locals might describe the same meal as appropriate, or better than or worst than meals that they have had at other restaurants. “Sampling” may be an appropriate descriptor of the act of eating a family-style meal, or exploring a MOOC, but the descriptor does not fully capture the experience of sampling.

On the MOOC as a Phenomenon

MOOCs. The acronym stands for massive, open, online courses. That is not what MOOCs are though. MOOCs are a phenomenon. They represent something larger than a course and should be seen in conjunction to the rebirth and revival of educational technology. They represent symptoms, responses, and failures facing Higher Education. For instance, MOOCs are a response to the increasing costs of Higher Education; represent the belief that the purpose of education is to prepare students for the workforce; represent the belief that technology is the solution to the problems that education is facing; are indicative of scholarly failures; seem to represent the belief that education is a product that can be packaged, automated, and delivered; and, are a response to failures by researchers, designers, administrators, and institutions to develop effective and inspiring solutions to the problems of education (alternatively, they might also represent the failure of existing systems to support creative individuals in enacting change)*.

The MOOC is an acronym that elicits strong feelings: excitement, fear, defiance, uncertainty, hope, contempt…. To address these feelings we have to address the failures of higher education and the underlying causes that have given rise to MOOCs. For this reason, instead of talking about MOOCs at my own institution, I discuss innovations and approaches that I value, including networked scholarship, openness, flexibility, social learning, and the design and development of new technologies.

* NOTE: Rolin Moe and I are working on a paper refining and delineating these. If you have thoughts, concerns, or input on any of these issues, we’d love to hear form you!

The Fragmented Educator

By George Veletsianos

On January 13, 2014

In my research, NPS, open, papers, scholarship, sharing, work

We have a new paper available that continues our research on networked participation/learning and networked participatory scholarship. This one arises out of Royce Kimmons’ dissertation, which I had the joy, honor, and good fortune of chairing.

The media is filled with stories pertaining to educators’ and researchers’ participation in online social networks. For example, a debate erupted in Kansas in December 2013 regarding faculty members’ use of social media and teachers have found themselves in trouble for their social media updates. Yet, little research has been done to understand the relationship between educator identity and participation in Social Networking Sites (SNS) or to examine the implications that institutional regulation of such media may have upon educator identity.

In our latest research study, we developed a framework to understand how a group of teacher education students viewed their developing identities within social networking sites as they began the life transition to becoming educators. We found that educator identity consists of a constellation of interconnected acceptable identity fragments (AIF)*. These acceptable identity fragments are intentional, authentic, transitional, necessarily incomplete, and socially-constructed and socially-responsive.

Fragments by Maria McMahon. Unchanged. CC -BY 2.0 license.

We arrived at the term “acceptable identity fragment,” because study participants:

shaped their participation in social networking sites in a manner that they believed to be “acceptable” to their audiences,
viewed this participation to be a direct expression of “identity” or their sense of self, and
felt this expression to only represent a small “fragment” of their complete identities.

The AIF suggests that participants in a given social context may limit their participation or expression of identity in a way that is appropriate to that specific context or is acceptable to the specific relationships they have with others in that context. The existence of the AIF means that educator identities within SNS are contextual and intentionally limited and structured. Participants believe that, when participating in SNS, they are expressing their identities in a limited, though authentic, manner. In their view, such expression represents a genuine fragment of their identities.

This view of educator identity contrasts sharply with previous views of identity by highlighting the complicated, negotiated, and recursive relationship that exists between educator participation in SNS and educator identity.

First, existing literature assumes that individuals have an authentic identity and suggests that they attempt to express these identities in varying degrees via social media. Our research finds that human beings may not ever find themselves in social contexts wherein they will choose to (or are even able to) express their full authentic identities and, instead, express a different AIF depending upon the situation.

Second, in Goffman’s view (1959), identity is adaptable and constantly emergent as we “act” in contexts. In the AIF view, there is no “acting” occurring, but rather we see a guarded revelation of fragments of the self. Thus, identity was not an emergent phenomenon of the scene; it was controlled and revealed partially.

Finally, Turkle (1995) suggests that the online self lacks coherence and is fluid. However, participants in our study were operating from what they believed to be a coherent sense of self and judged their SNS participation based upon alignment with that sense. Participation did not lack coherence – it was merely a partial manifestation.

What does this mean for educators, educational administrators, and educational researchers?

First, if the AIF is intentional and authentic, then it seems important for educators to retain control of their SNS participation. If institutions seek to prescribe appropriate and inappropriate uses of the medium, then it seems that this will prevent educators from being able to make meaningful choices regarding authentic self-expression and self-representation

Second, if the AIF is transitional, social media technologies must accommodate individuals’ transition into new life phases. At present, social media spaces do not support this (e.g., Facebook’s Timeline and the difficulty of deleting participation history en masse). If technologies doe not support the transition into new life phases, they risk being abandoned.

Third, educators should seek to recognize the assumptions that SNS platform developers are making about human nature, meaningful social participation, relationships, and so forth and consider the impact that such assumptions may have on their participation and identity.

Fourth, judgments made about educators based upon their participation in SNS should consider life transitions, time-based contexts (e.g., behavior as a college freshman vs. behavior as a student teacher), and the embedded values of the media.

Finally, if the AIF is a necessarily incomplete component of a larger identity constellation, any judgments of educators based on SNS participation must recognize that the relationship of the AIF to overall identity is subject to interpretation and may not reflect an individual’s perception of how the AIF represents authentic identity. Fragmentation of identity, then, should be seen as a valuable response to complex social situations. SNS platforms should account for this, and as we make judgments about others based upon their fragmented identities, we should be cognizant of the complex relationship existing between the AIF and one’s larger identity and dispel the myth of a simple authentic vs. inauthentic binary.

You can download a pre-print copy of the study from the link below:

Kimmons, R., & Veletsianos, G. (2014). The Fragmented Educator 2.0: Social Networking Sites. Acceptable Identity Fragments, and the Identity Constellation. Computers & Education, 72, 292-301. Journal link.

* The usual grounded theory and interpretive research caveats apply.

Category: sharing Page 20 of 40

Publication: The Structure and Characteristics of #PhDChat

We are hiring: Faculty position in the School of Education and Technology

Scholarly networks of care and vulnerability

Notes on #AERA14 Rigor and Realism: Doing Educational Science in the Real World

SXSWedu 2014 events

ELI 2014, learner experiences, MOOC research, and the MOOC phenomenon

The Fragmented Educator