George Veletsianos, PhD

As part of my research on digital scholarship and the experiences/practices of scholars in online networks, I am working with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the newly-established Visualization Lab at the College of Education to understand learner and scholar participation patterns on the social web. Below is our first visualization, which shows interactions between three types of users who are contributing to a hashtag (red, blue, green). It’s a directed graph, with nodes representing users, and edges representing interactions between users. The thickness of the edge represents # of interactions (thick = more interactions). When nodes of a different color interact with each other, the edges take the color of the two node (e.g., when a blue node interacts with a red node, the edge is purple). What does this visualization tell us?

We are still trying to make sense of this, and we are slowly learning from the tutorials that Tony Hirst has created. This is what (i think) this says: First of all, we know that the majority of the people contributing to this hashtag are not having a conversation with each other (#nodes making up the dataset are 3 times the group shown above – this is not shown on the graph). Second, it looks likes there’s a few “central” folk through which conversations occur. Finally, even though interactions happen between red and blue nodes, it looks like the majority of the interaction is happening within those two groups. And that’s important in this situation because one of our hypothesis was that the red group was joining this community to interact with the blue group (if that was the case, we would be seeing more purple in the image above). We definitely need additional ways to evaluate some of these statements, but that’s what it “looks like” from the image above. And here’s where I think data visualizations start becoming really valuable: You can quickly see patterns and ask questions, and continue from there. We have some ideas and hypotheses, but we also want to let the data bring up phenomena that we haven’t thought about. I don’t yet feel confident that I fully understand what I am seeing here, but I am quickly learning a lot! So my question to you is: how would you interpret this? What questions do you have of what you are seeing here?

Kickstarting educational innovations (or, the case of #ds106)

By George Veletsianos

On March 30, 2012

In my research, NPS, online learning, open, scholarship

If you are trying to explain to colleagues why networks are important, why an understanding of participatory cultures is important, and why education should concern itself with social media and network literacies, then look no further than the success that the good people over at #ds106 had in raising funds through Kickstarter to support their project. Within a day they reached their goal and raised more than $4,500. Huge congratulations to everyone involved!

At the same time this is an opportunity to discuss notions of power and social capital. Can everyone do this? How many projects don’t reach their goal every day? This is not a shot at #ds106 or the people involved: #ds106 is an amazing project with a creative and passionate team of people and they deserve all the accolades they can get! Put in other words, will people read and comment on your blog just because you have one? Will people support your kickstarter project, just because you have one? What do educators, researchers, scholars and students need to know about social media and networks so that their tweets, facebook updates, and linkein profiles are not lost in a desert of digital sand?

Digital scholarship practices: Students and researchers working around the system

By George Veletsianos

On March 19, 2012

In emerging technologies, NPS, open, scholarship

Imagine being a student at a small university whose library does not have the funds to subscribe to a journal that you need for your final paper. What do you do?

Imagine being a faculty member and you come across a very promising paper relevant to your work, but you can’t access it because there’s a 6-month lag between the time a paper is published and the time it becomes available at your library. What do you do?

A standard approach is to search Google or Google Scholar for the article, as a number of us self-archive our publications as soon as they become available. Another option is to email an author directly and ask for a copy of the paper. I find that most are not only willing, but excited to share their work and talk about it. I love sharing my research and I truly enjoy talking about it, so I’d be delighted to share it with anyone who lacked access but needed it. I believe this falls under fair use licensing.

Through my research on the practices of digital scholars (i.e. individuals who use emerging technologies for purposes relating to networked participatory scholarship) I have discovered another way that individuals use to access scholarship that they need. If you take a look at the image above, you will see that individuals employ digital tools that we use in our day-to-day lives (a forum) to circumvent obstacles that prevent them from doing their work. In particular, individuals request articles that they do not have access to, and those who have access respond with a copy of the article. What you see here is the creative use of networked technologies to enable practice and success. And it does not just happen in open forums like the one above, but I’ve also seen it occur on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly enough, in one situation, the author was requesting access to an article s/he wrote because the publisher (!) did not provide him/her with a final copy of the paper. We can debate the moral and ethical dimensions of this activity, but to me this practice highlights ideas relating to empowerment, networked skills, digital participation, reciprocity, and participatory cultures as they pertain to scholars’ digital practices. [Update 11/26/2012: In addition to the platform above, other spaces where exchanges happen are: The pirate university http://www.pirateuniversity.org/ and #IcanHazPDF on Twitter. Andy Coverdale has also discussed this topic.]

Such practices aren’t foreign to teachers, as they are akin to using proxies or usb keys to bypass school filters. For example, here’s a video by Alec Couros that demonstrates this activity:

The expanding scope of Educational Technology

By George Veletsianos

On March 13, 2012

In sharing

With SITE 2012, SXSWedu 2012, and SXSW 2012 all happening within the span of two weeks, we’ve been keeping quite busy around here. Though these conferences provide lots of opportunities for discussion with colleagues, they also allow us the chance to introduce our students to the burgeoning nature of our field.

Last week, I had the great pleasure of hosting Audrey Watters in my class. Audrey is an education technology journalist and open education advocate that was described by Stephen Downes as “one of the best things to come along in education technology in 2011.” She spoke to my class about educational technology start-ups, educational technology entrepreneurship, and the business world’s recent fascination with our field. These are topics that are at the forefront of our field at present, but are largely missing from our field’s curricula. Thus, Audrey’s visit was of great interest. Our discussion continued beyond the end of the class, and if you haven’t met Audrey yet, you should! She’s knowledgeable, passionate, and says it how it is. Our field needs more Audreys, more people who aren’t distracted by the shiny technologies and their promises, and who are good at analyzing trends and the changes facing education. Audrey’s talk focused on “How Hating Blackboard Hurts Ed-Tech Entrepreneurship”:

Description: The “I hate Blackboard” Facebook group has tens of thousands of members, reflecting no doubt a fairly common sentiment among students and teachers alike regarding the learning management system giant. It’s not surprising then to see a string of competitors arise to challenge it. But how does the focus on Blackboard — on its failures to make its customers happy — skew the way entrepreneurs (and just as importantly, perhaps, investors) think about ed-tech? By focusing on improving the LMS, are we trying to “fix” the wrong problem? What are some of the opportunities for ed-tech startups that aren’t getting enough attention because we focus so much on this one particular company and on the LMS industry?

Localizing Adventure Learning at SITE 2012

By George Veletsianos

On March 12, 2012

In my research, scholarship

Austin hosted SITE 2012 last week, which, in addition to providing a great opportunity to see friends and colleagues, it allowed us to share our most recent work on Adventure Learning. In this recent reformulation of the approach, we discuss what learned from five small-scale projects, and how those lessons have helped us refine the approach for small projects in which the students are tasked with being the explorers:

Title: Localizing Adventure Learning: Teachers and Students as Expedition Leaders and Members (.doc)

George Veletsianos, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Brant Miller, University of Idaho, USA
Karla Bradley Eitel, University of Idaho, USA
Jan U.H. Eitel, University of Idaho, USA
R. Justin Hougham, University of Idaho, USA

Abstract: Adventure Learning (AL) is an approach to education that aims to engage learners in hybrid learning experiences that bring content alive through meaningful connections to place and personal lives. In this paper, we present and discuss five small-scale AL projects enacted at Texas and Idaho that have informed our understanding of how the AL approach can be conceptualized and used within a variety of formal and informal learning contexts. Through the diverse and varied AL projects described in this paper, we have learned invaluable lessons that will inform future work and inspire possibilities for using AL in additional venues.

EdTech Startups: Exceptional Courses or Exceptional Students?

By George Veletsianos

On February 29, 2012

In emerging technologies, learner experience, my research, online learning, scholarship

This blog entry was supposed to go out next week, but I am sharing it today because it is relevant to the entry that George Siemens wrote today.

I gave a talk to Curt Bonk’s class a couple of weeks ago and the central premise of that talk was that we should be designing experiences, not products. This is not a new idea. It goes back to the beginning of my career and it’s a passion that I share with a lot of folks, most notably Aaron Doering and Charles Miller at the University of Minnesota (who incidentally just landed in Sydney for their most recent Adventure Learning project). For example, see Raising the bar for instructional outcomes: Towards transformative learning experiences (2008) and Designing Opportunities for Transformation with Emerging Technologies (2011). A central tenet of the 2008 paper is the following:

There exist “strong pressures to produce mediocre instructional products based on templates and preexisting content.”

That was in 2008. Now consider 2011/2012: Interest in open courses and in large online classes has exploded. The edtech entrepreneur is eager to leverage online education and capitalize on efficiency, by focusing on the delivery of pre-packaged content. Scale and efficiency are key in that if one is able to efficiently deliver content (read: low cost) to large numbers of people, s/he can charge a small fee that will yield high profit. This isn’t a new idea either. David Noble talks about the commodification of education, the attempt to market and sell education as a commodity.

Sebastian Thrun, who was one of the faculty members teaching the Stanford AI class last Fall recently “showed emails from a student who took the AI class, when he could get Internet access, amidst mortar and rocket attacks in Afganistan; and another, a single working mother, who refused to quit the class because it gave her a sense of accomplishment.” Are these statements describing exceptional courses? Are they describing experiences that pull students and engage them to their core? Or are they describing exceptional people? When you provide access to exceptional people (like the two individuals above), they will amaze you, because, well, they are exceptional! How do you design courses that are exceptional, that adapt to all learners, and provide support structures for individuals who are not exceptional? You provide opportunities for personally relevant and meaningful transformation. How do you do that, you ask? Here’s my (free) advice to any hopeful edtech startup: Designing Opportunities for Transformation with Emerging Technologies (pdf).

Academics, Crowdsourcing, and Collectives

By George Veletsianos

On February 28, 2012

In sharing

When we wrote about Networked Participatory Scholarship we discussed how as a culture we have found great value in online collaborative projects, ranging from Wikipedia, to Firefox, to Apache, Python, etc. We argued that such collective ways of thinking are scarce in academia though innovators are currently toying with such approaches. One example includes the cadre of mentors who helped Alec Couros teach one of his open courses in 2010 (see other examples pertaining to crowdsourcing in education).

The value of the Web as a platform for collectives to organize around issues of interest is now being demonstrated again with a call to boycott Elsevier that appears to have been successful. This is an example that demonstrates the value, implications, and insights of digital/network skills and literacies for academics. For instance, the social web supported Timothy Gowers in organizing the boycott. Of course not everyone has such a great following as Gowers to be able to enact change, but the possibility is there – after all the Star Wars kid didn’t have any sort of following prior to his video being released online, but following that he quickly became an Internet sensation. The lesson here is that as academics we need to understand the culture of the Web and its participatory nature because it can help us forge a scholarly future with values that we deem to be important.