Transcript Social media for learning: a virtual ethnography

Social media for learning:
a virtual ethnography
Siân Bayne
School of Education
University of Edinburgh
What forms of ‘technoliteracy’ do we need to
work in these spaces?
How can assessment regimes be re-crafted
for these volatile spaces?
What digital pedagogies work in these
environments?
How do these texts and technologies change
the way academic knowledge is produced
and distributed?
– new types of text
– a virtual ethnography
– some themes:
– new literacies
– appropriation
– the uncanny
The house was quiet and the
world was calm.
The reader became the
book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being
of the book.
…
The words were spoken as if
there was no book,
Except that the reader
leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted
much to be
The scholar to whom his
book is true…
Wallace Stevens 1923
“These sections of the web break away from the page
metaphor. Rather than following the notion of the web as
book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are
about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of
conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation.”
Alexander, 2006
This study
A Higher Education Academy funded oneyear study of 3 programmes using social
media in formal teaching and learning:
BSc in Design Engineering
MSc in E-learning
The ‘Jew’ in the Text MA (Hons) Religious Studies
A virtual ethnography
“an approach to ethnography which is almost
but not quite like the real thing”
Hine, 2000
the sustained presence of the researcher
questioning the concept of the ‘field’ – “flow
and connectivity” rather than “location and
boundary”
Hine, 2000
exploring the making of boundaries – between
the virtual and the real
Key themes
– new literacies
– writing the wiki: formality, coolness, authorship and
netiquette
– appropriation and ‘taming’
– making ‘web 2.0’ safe
– the uncanny
– ‘strange’ views of Second Life
Writing the wiki:
formality and discipline
“Is it just me or is the wiki a more formal way of
conducting discussions?
I feel very much that I need to keep my postings
less rambling, conjecture and formulating of ideas
in the wiki than I do on the discussion boards
(probably not a bad thing I hear you say). I find
this way of working restrictive, but somehow can't
get past this particular (self-imposed) barrier.
Is it just me? Are wikis more 'formal'?”
Discussion board contribution from Y
“I have enjoyed the wiki as a different, cooler, less
frenetic learning space.”
weblog posting from N
“I agree that the Wiki feels more formal. …. I feel
that I have been working very much in isolation
over the last few weeks and wanted to join in the
discussions (when I found them) but they were
wrapped up some time ago. It's been my first wiki
experience and it’s been interesting but a bit
lonely.”
Discussion board contribution from G
Writing the wiki:
authorship
“The wiki has been a very engaging totally new
experience as contributor/author. At first, it was
daunting. The idea of contributing content/s and
with personalised examples to a web page that so
many people can read, well, it’s just something that
I thought only writers would want to get into.
I loved the possibility of organising and editing your
new /old contents with immediate hyperlinks to
references, translations, images, other pages in the
wiki or web with certain ease of use.”
Discussion board contribution from U
“In making a couple of entries and rephrasing some
of the headers it occurred to me that my ‘marks’ in
the text are probably ephemeral. They will endure
for as long as the interval between editing (minor
or major). So a wiki is a dynamic text – it really
doesn’t have a form but (changing) content. When
is it considered completed? Is it just a provisional
evolving set of microcontent, juxtaposed texts? Is
it pure luck that the ‘authors’ who endure manage
to leave a lasting trace are those who happen to
arrive at the end – when the ‘uberauthor’ (the
course tutor?) halts the process?”
Weblog posting from H
Writing the wiki:
netiquette
“In thinking about editing the text produced by
someone else – I felt a considerable reluctance. It
somehow seemed unacceptable to mess around
with someone’s work. … Certainly this is an
interesting collaborative exercise. Good fun if only I
can allow myself more latitude to alter what is
there without feeling I’ll give offence! I’m really
intrigued by it – wicked.”
Weblog posting by I
“I think we have to not be afraid to delete each
other's text in the wiki, which is a different way of
thinking than the discussion board, and a more
sensitive one.”
Discussion board posting by C
“There is always a temptation to read through
someone's work and edit it a bit to your liking, and
I think that you have got to watch out with that
sometimes because you can probably annoy people,
so I tried not to edit people’s work too much. If
they were saying something then I tended to just
try and agree with it, yeah, rather than cause any
sort of conflicts.”
Face to face interview with J
“A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from
many cultures and entering into mutual relations of
dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one
place where this multiplicity is focused and that
place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the
author… a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination.”
Barthes, 1977
Appropriation and ‘taming’
‘Web 2.0’ containment strategies:
authorship and netiquette
assessment
authentication
individuation
embedding within traditional models of
course design
“I am not sure that what we are doing in the
weblog is a Web 2.0 type use of blogs because
they are not community blogs in the way that
they might be. … In the context of this course,
which is an introductory course, part of the idea
of using private blogs was to give students a
place where their tutor could give them
reassuring and personal feedback, so it is a
support mechanism, in a way.”
Face to face interview with C
“There are a number of problems, and if you talk
about paradox in a sense, we want the blog
experience, I think, that we would encourage the
students into, to be as real as possible, and that is
an up-front, outside world, all comers sort of
phenomenon. But we want the students also to
have a secure working environment. … I think the
general anarchic nature of some of these Web 2.0
applications opportunities again is something we
would want to expose the students to. If
something went wrong, it would not be the end of
the world, it might be vaguely embarrassing for
them and us but they would learn something. And
they would learn something important.”
Face to face interview with C
“I haven't noticed that they would write in a way
that is different from either their essays or their
exam work. I think a lot of them are very similar in
how they do that.”
Face to face interview with A
“I think it’s really good in terms of it kind of forces
you to do the reading in advance of the tutorial …
Also it’s helpful that if somebody else is doing a
blog it kind of gives you a summary as well and
helps to clarify things, the reading in your mind,
before you go to the tutorial.”
Face to face interview with N
containment of ‘risk’ –
strategies applied by
teachers, students and
institutions
ways of learning with social
media not determined but
situated
The uncanny: ‘strange’
views of Second Life
“The notion of ‘the uncanny’ speaks to the sudden
unfamiliarity of the literacy practices and texts of
young people around digital technologies, both in
terms of the anxiety caused by the unexpectedly
unfamiliar and for the increasing fuzziness of the
concepts of text and literacy.”
Carrington, 2005
Freud’s unheimlich:
the ‘unhomely’
eerie
uncanny
undead
haunted
ghostly
mysterious
weird
uncomfortably strange…
“an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary
between fantasy and reality is blurred.”
Freud 1899/2003
“it disturbs any straightforward sense of what is inside
and what is outside…it is a peculiar commingling of the
familiar and the unfamiliar… something both strange and
compelling.”
Royle 2003
Dark Roly: Its really wierd
You: Second Life?
Dark Roly: Yes. Its fun but sort of wierd,
I can see why it becomes addictive
You: In what way d'you find it weird?
Dark Roly: Communicating via an avatar,
sort of real and not real all at the same
time
in-world conversation with a student
“The wind sounds in the background tend to make
it feel like this is a dream or at least all happening
in your head. When someone makes a sound then it
really stands out like a banshee wailing in the
night.”
post-course interview with Q
“Avatars are nothing but corpses. So, somebody
comes along and will fill those dead corpses with
something that is believed to be identity or feelings?
It's like dressing a Barbie doll … An avatar is a dead
mass that has been built up into a convenient,
average identity, an object for an average user.”
student weblog posting from F
“Sometimes trees block my view and I can't see
where I am. It almost felt like a blind person
moving around in an unknown territory without the
white stick. Since our meeting place was so close to
the sea I was really worried of drowning because of
the time delay. That is another experience that I
could not even begin to describe. It truly gives you
an out of the body experience with unshakable
feelings of getting lost, drowning and even dying.”
student weblog from O
The troublesome and ontological
states of ‘strangeness’
Barnett 2005
“learning must be a way of being –
an ongoing set of attitudes and
actions by individuals and groups that
they employ to try to keep abreast of
the surprising, novel, messy,
obtrusive, recurring events…”
Vail, 1996
crossing thresholds, entering states
of liminality
Land and Meyer
troublesomeness
Perkins
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