vogmae interactive networked video practice

Abstract

A commonplace observation in education is that students ought to learn how they learn because understanding the processes of learning facilitates the development of deep learning. Undertaking and documenting this reflective practice in humanities disciplines has been unclear, to date, for the student and the evaluator because the ideology of writing has always presumed an idea of interiority and reflection. Weblogs combine writing as introspection and networked literacy as 'extraspection' to provide a model for a reflective writing practice that encourages the development of discursive 'networked knowledge objects'. As networked knowledge objects weblogs provide an outstanding methodology for reflective practice, and document this for the learner and evaluator.

1. Deep Learning

We could start this essay through any of several well rehearsed rhetorical strategies that detail the affordances of computers and computing to education and learning. All of these may have merit, but let’s face it, those of us who are interested in reading essays such as this are well versed in the broad recent history of ICTs and higher education. [indicate a couple of survey texts] So I’d like to begin by sketching, anecdotally, what my students should and need to learn, and why.

I teach in a Media Studies program in Australia. Our incoming students throughout their secondary schooling are traditionally academic high achievers and have some desire to work in what is now, certainly in England and Australia, defined as the ‘creative industries’. This is a sector that is marked by a high degree of professional (as opposed to artistic) creativity, a great deal of independence within employment, an expectation of collaborative research and production skills and the ability to rapidly adopt, appropriate and exploit new technologies, processes and systems. [4]

As Florida has documented, students entering this professional culture will not find themselves in the now old fashioned organisational culture of a top down institution, but will work in small dynamic organisations where success is dependent on the ability to creatively respond to change and to initiate change themselves. In this context the old pedagogical maxim (a maxim we could all nod towards but didn’t really have to heed) that students should learn how to learn needs to be demystified as knowing why to learn, and knowing how I learn to learn. In other words, deep learning is now not only the ability to recontextualise what has been learnt into novel contexts but includes the more abstract meta–activity of recontextualising learning as a process. This suggests that education needs to equip students, and staff, with a set of viable and appropriate strategies for a world where knowledge is produced by the discovery, identification and appropriation of vectors or flows of information [11] into novel formations. These activities are expressed as skills, competencies and literacies, but are most marked in the ability to translate such information flows into knowledge states or objects.

2. Disciplined Essays

My career is, as far as I’ve been able to determine, much like most other academics. I excelled as an undergraduate, undertook postgraduate study and then found myself willingly recruited to undertake ‘sessional’ teaching at several universities in the hope that I would eventually succeed in securing a contracted position. What is missing from this career path is that while my postgraduate study was, using very much an apprenticeship model, intended to train me in the rigours of a particular concept of independent research and writing, there was no equivalent for pedagogy. Like the majority of my peers teaching is something we are expected to do but unlike our academic specialisations, not something we know very much about. This is why, I suspect, our teaching practices are intrinsically conservative and this extends from how we ‘deliver’ teaching to the assessment of learning.

Historically, essays have been the privileged vehicle for the expression of learning in the disciplines that I teach within — the only other major device which has been popular has been the tutorial presentation by students. It should be no surprise that these two forms are also the genres most commonly used and recognised by the academy in the form of published essays and conference presentations, so while it could be argued that these genres are best suited to the expression of learning, it is probably more accurate to say that these dominate in the evaluation of learning because they best express the ideology of the academy. [expand. Perhaps worked in 19th century for good reason but not appropriate now? How does it express ideology of the academy, this needs to develop something about the assumptions and values of print literacy]

We use these forms of assessment because they’re the only ones we know, and they’re how we get assessed, so of course it ought to work for our students, almost a pedagogy of osmosis. This could be correct, however it is largely only academics who have jobs that require them to work in this manner, so if our students are not intending to be academics it would be useful to revisit the problem of how knowledge ought to be expressed and assessed, particularly where students are entering professions where the essay and public paper are not be expected forms of communication, professional conduct, or knowledge production.

I’d like to briefly concentrate on the idea of the contemporary academic essay in a theoretically pragmatic manner. Essays have evolved into a dominant pedagogical genre in the humanities on the understanding that they require research, documentation, the explication of an argument and the externalisation of a specific causal logic. It ought to go without saying that this is only one possible form of argument and that while historically significant it is far from certain that it remains central to knowledge production or dissemination in contemporary knowledge ecologies. Essays, in the age of the networked vector, suffer in our pedagogical contexts because they are teleological in their intent and certainly for undergraduates discourage serendipity, experimentation, intellectual risk taking, while encouraging students to eschew that which will threaten their central argument or thesis.

[insert illustration of essay as teleological]

This is a genre, and here I’m deliberately provoking my argument by caricaturing the essay as a form, that is in many respects antithetical to those very qualities of creativity, flexibility, collaboration and risk taking that graduates in the creative industries require. As a genre it is also poorly suited to describing or allowing the assessment of how students arrive at their ideas, what activities and processes they have undertaken as research, and what ideas may have been tested and rejected while developing their essay. It is a form of writing that epitomises closure as the imperative of print where the completed (whole) essay remains a black box for those that don’t understand the deep intersection of theory and practice that good writing requires, and indeed is largely a black box for those that do ‘get’ it! Ideally, you need to know where you are going when you write an essay, which is why, after all, our preferred model is an essay that is derived from and grounded by an essay question, that is then produced from the well structured plan. What these forms externalise is a specific form of learning that is closed to its own processes and externalities, and does not facilitate a reflective, critical practice that engages with research, writing, and learning as an ongoing, open and exploratory practice.

3. Blogs

Blogs are no longer a genre (if they ever were) and are more usefully considered a medium, In the context of this essay I intend to concentrate on what are loosely known as research blogs in educational contexts. I am pragmatically defining a research blog as a public Web based site that utilises a Content Management System (CMS) to publish a provisional front or index page and a series of temporal and thematically defined archives. They are orientated externally towards the network which is recognised as a distributed field consisting of content nodes available for connection, and internally by their documentation and exploration of the theoretical and experiential qualities of networked and discursive place. Research blogs, loosely speaking, are orientated towards the research problems that their author is engaged with, but generally maintain the informality in voice common to blogs and journals, as well as the hypertextual qualities that blogs have adopted. These qualities include the use of design to personalise and individuate content, chunked nodes or posts, and the use of links to establish and state relations between parts — indeed the relation between design and writing in blogs is integral and suggests that blogs are a designerly writing. [blog and doco paper?]

While it is easy to misjudge blogs in relation to education and information technology as a simple solution to blended or flexible learning (as a sort of off the shelf Learning Management System in a box), it is important to recognise that as a medium they share a long history with the diary and the journal [9, 13]. Like journals, blogs emphasise a writing practice that looks towards writing and documention as an activity in and for itself, and in the case of research blogs this includes reflecting on research as an activity. In these contexts blogs document the specifities of an individual’s research as an epistemological practice — what is being learnt, possible theories and ideas, and so on — while also encouraging a higher level or metacommentary on research as an activity in or of itself. [more on role of reflective practice? Downton?]

Where blogs depart from the model of the journal is in their participation in what is variously characterised as knowledge ecologies, the blogosphere, and other emergent network structures. Blogs generate knowledge communities through their standard generic activities of external linking to cognate posts and blogs (the ubiquitous blogroll, RSS, and so on), and their documentation of research as an ongoing event. As bloggers read, annotate and link to each others entries ‘bottom up ‘epistemological coalitions form that, like emergent behaviour in general, have their own form of strange attractors and bifurcations. These structures do not predate their appearance, are in constant change, and leverage the network as a distributed writing space into collections of common or cognate conjunctions and disjunctions. In the context of learning and research it is probably reasonable to argue that the connections that blogs form between their constituent parts (remembering that these parts are relations between posts in an individual blog and relations distributed between posts in external blogs) is analogous and part of the activity of research in general. [perhaps design research and this useful method here.] Certainly, it bears an isomorphic relation to the forms of knowledge production that are fundamental to our current media ecology where, in the popular but nonetheless elegant phrase of David Weinberger, it is “small pieces loosely joined”. While a truism, not made any less legitimate by its advertorial appropriation, that students must learn not only how to navigate the slew of information available, but how to construct knowledge from this information through the creative and constructive connections they build among its myriad parts. Blogs model this.

4. Networked Knowledge Objects

Entwistle [2], following Entwistle and Marton [3], defines a knowledge object in the following manner:

The term ‘knowledge object’ is used to describe an experience. It is not intended to suggest that knowledge is a commodity which can be transferred from teacher to student. Quite the opposite. The whole essence of the knowledge object is that it is a personal construction which provides a mnemonic structure to summarize complex interconnections that have developed in the process of developing conceptual understanding.

I’d like to extend this definition, or at least appropriate it towards the networked, reflective literacies I’m exploring, so that knowledge objects become those networked artefacts made by students that recontextualise learning as a translation of information into knowledge. Such networked knowledge objects are contextually rich, diverse, and recognise or express knowledge as open, ongoing, dynamic and constructive. In digital networked environments these objects are constructed through the combining and commenting upon a range of materials, including text, image, moving image, and sound, and these artefacts are hypertextual in character. This means that they link various objects as information into new conglomerations where their status as networked knowledge objects is constituted as much by these architectures – the connections literal, thematic, figurative, and architectonic that tie these parts into a whole of parts — as by the specific content nodes of the ‘whole’ object. In other words, such networked knowledge objects are eventful patterns or series of relations of part to wholes, and wholes to parts.

Such networked knowledge objects are written by students in the process of learning. The connections made between parts that are expressed by these links are an act of learning and the action of making these connections is, without wishing to overstate this, the very activity of transforming information into knowledge. This is why it is important to recognise such networked knowledge objects as written objects in the traditional sense of the word, students make them, whether as individual authors or in groups doesn’t matter, but they are individuated objects constituted through acts of authoring. (It is this quality that separates out these objects from database driven teaching technologies as such systems predominantly subsume the activity of connecting to the system. In networked knowledge objects the activity of connecting is fundamental and is an act literally performed by the student.)

Such knowledge objects are not the same as learning objects, which have gained significant attention and interest in online learning. Learning objects, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, are artefacts within a learning environment that are able to be repurposed for different contexts. A learning object might be an animation illustrating a process, for example tornado formation in thunderstorm clouds. This object could then be used in learning about meteorology, it could also serve as an example in a physics, mathematics, and geography class. In each instance the learning object is the same artefact, but the context of use changes and the learning object is rich enough to support these multiple pedagogical contexts. EXPAND

Networked knowledge objects on the other hand are written by students, rather than objects or artefacts presented to students to be read, analysed or interpreted. This has been, certainly in my own practice, the key import of new technologies in pedagogy — the paradigmatic shift afforded by information technology is not in delivery or reading but in the manners in which new and novel genres provide affordances that become possible expressions of new knowledges. In this conception networked knowledge objects are the product of alternative conceptions of writing, that is a writing in, with and across media (text, image, sound, video) and genres (book, journal, database, film, painting), where writing includes the acts of discovery and of connection making. Such a generalised approach to writing has an emphasis on process so writing becomes analogous to authoring in the senses understood in the media arts, where all links are temporary ‘inscriptions’ documenting and discovering ‘what is being learnt’ rather than the later distillations required of the closed genres that is the contemporary academic essay — the ‘what has been learnt’.

5. Blogs as Networked Knowledge Objects

The looking outwards of a research blog is realised through formal features such as links to other blog posts, a blogroll listing regular blogs read, and the manner in which these blogs externalise research ideas through the formal qualities of writing. As these blogs are public what is written needs to be intelligible to others and so must be sufficiently explicit and informed about its content to engage with the ideas or problems that it is documenting or noting. Even where an individual blog entry may only note a specific piece of work (essay, Web page, or book) in passing it still operates as an indexical and quotidian research connection that the author is indicating. Such documenting of the research practice of the author is to explicitly locate their activities in broader contexts of a learning practice, and certainly goes some way to the production of a research community and culture, each of which help students to recognise that their learning exists in contexts broader than the immediate classroom or the grade they seek at the end of the semester.

However, it is simply the demand of writing within a clearly public space that is perhaps the most disruptive and productive aspect of blogging in relation to pedagogy. Certainly in the contexts within which I teach most students regard the audience of their work as being their immediate teacher, and possibly themselves. By locating their work in the public sphere this extremely narrow conception of the role of writing as an explication of an idea must be expanded, and with the immanent logic of writing and its privilege of linear cause and effect a student must externalise and make visible their thinking. While extremely simple, this discipline becomes not only a documenting of activities but also a testing of what they may ordinarily take to be clear or plain. In other words the public and writerly nature of the blog requires the student to concretise what they think they know into what they do —or don’t — actually know. Writing out achieves this, and this writing out is reinforced because the writing is now in the public sphere.

Blogs are reflective as they document the quotidian experience of the student. They are specifically grounded in the lifeworld of the learner, and grant each student considerable autonomy over what is written, how, and why. They become experimental and experiential writing places that encourage students to develop a writerly voice. This voice can be critical, supportive, interrogative, questioning, and explorative. Indeed, in many ways such blogs probably meet the criteria of what Michael Joyce defined quite a few years ago as constructive hypertext [6].

However, the use of blogs in this manner has a clear pedagogical context, and the affordances of the blog, what it enables and supports, in conjunction with the

6. Blogs and Disruptive Pedagogy

All that has been described and credited to blogs in this paper risks appearing as a return to an uniformed and naïve technological determinism. Blogs are not a panacea to the problems of online learning or the integration of technology into teaching and learning, neither are they a replacement or substitute for good teaching. Blogs, of themselves, do not and in my experience, have not, realised the sorts of qualities that I have described. However, where teaching methods are process based and specifically orientated towards reflective practice blogs have been exemplary in the support they offer students and they also offer a methodology for the assessment of these learning activities. In this context blogs are clearly seen by students to be relevant, appropriate and meaningful. This is because the use of the blog is firmly grounded in the broad contexts of learning and reflection that a subject employs, and pragmatically because they are given an appropriate assessment value.

In practice, this means that it is common in my teaching for a blog to be worth up to fifty percent of the final mark for a subject. Frankly, if I’m serious when I say to students that I expect them to use their blogs consistently I need to demonstrate this seriousness by weighting their assessment value accordingly. If I’m serious about students writing with diligence and regularity, then it must be worth their time to do so.

In this paradigm learning is doing (a key aspect of design research [1], and the distance between the activities of learning and its outcome is diminished. Blogs participate in knowledge production and dissemination as an event, foregrounding the role of discovery, connection and composite construction. This is the context and ecology of the contemporary network and the appropriate use of blogs facilitates an understanding of, and participation in these networks. There is a necessary literacy of the network that graduates must understand and this is enacted within those research blogs that combine reflective practice with networked flows. Such activities participate in the speed of these new knowledge formations, but also, as Torill Mortenson suggestively titles [7], enables a slow conversation to unfold. Blogs lie on a negotiable and fractured axis between networks as flux and change — where knowledge is produced and disseminated with an unprecedented rapidity, range and review — and a writing out which is to say a slow thinking. Blogs allow the enlargement of the intervals between discovery, connection and understanding that deep learning aspires to, and this interval becomes the opportunity to visualise, explore, and understand, to mythologise on behalf of the student, what these activities are.

My students are acculturated by educational institutions into a paradigm where they experience themselves as users or consumers of learning. However, their insertion into networked knowledges via their use of blogs encourages them to recognise their place as knowledge makers, they move from being observers to participants, consumers to producers. The ability to insert yourself into these flows, to become an active vector within this system, is that which disrupts our conceptions about what sorts of knowledge objects students may construct, and which are relevant today. Reflective practice, the ability to self contextualise learning and knowledge as an ongoing activity that faces a future that is open in all senses of the term is affirming, productive, and necessary.

1. Downton, P. Design Research. RMIT Publishing, Melbourne, 2004.

2. Entwistle, N. The Use of Research on Student Learning in Quality Assessment. in Gibbs, G. ed. Improving Student Learning Through Assessment and Evaluation, Oxford Centre for Staff Development, Oxford, 1995.

3. Entwistle, N. and Marton, F. Knowledge Objects: Understandings Constituted Through Intensive Academic Study. EQARD Occasional Paper, 93 (4).

4. Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class: and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Pluto Press, 2003.

5. Herring, S.C., Scheidt, L.A., Wright, E. and Bonus, S. Weblogs as a Bridging Genre. Information Technology and People, 18 (2). 142-171.

6. Joyce, M. Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts. in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, 38–59.

7. Mortensen, T. Torill Elvira Mortensen BlogTalk 2.0, June 24, 2004, June 28, 2004.

8. Ong, W.J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, London, 1982.

9. Sorapure, M. Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web. Biography, 26 (1). 1-23.

10. Ulmer, G.L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. Longman, New York, 2003.

11. Wark, M. Tactical Media and the Tectical intellectual 3/4 Nettime-L, 2002.

12. Weinberger, D. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Perseus Books, New York, 2002.

13. Zuern, J. Online Lives: Introduction. Biography, 26 (1). v-xiv.