Educational Researcher / PhD Student (Lancaster University, UK) in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning / Adjunct Instructor (NYU & Pace U) / Project Manager (Clinical Education) in New York City.
Interests in educational research influenced by interdisciplinarity, focused on digital identity, doctorateness and the postgraduate experience, threshold concepts and transformative learning in higher education, Internet research, networked learning, technology enhanced learning, distance education, adult and organizational learning, narrative inquiry, and actor-network theory.
I had a really interesting comment from Allison Littlejohn in reaction to the Week 4 #change11 MOOC discussion on Collective Learning we are having this week. In her examples about collective learning in organizations or the workplace (or even academia), they all involve crowdsourcing or wisdom of crowds or greater learning by the collective than individually. That is wonderful for the development of large ideas or to solve seemingly inflexible problems, but what happens in the process to the individual?
Sure, the individual can relish in the personal learning, the sense of being part of something much larger, and the experience. However, who owns the product, or the solution? Whose value increases as a result of all that individual work? Yes, the organization or the corporation or the government. Perhaps the shareholders or owners or leadership? Ultimately, the collective benefits those who control it, while the individual components to the collective get swept up into the final product with the individual having little to tangibly show for the efforts. Without a vested interest on the individual level, the collective could probably not be effective.
Now, I have worked in nonprofits and academic institutions for years, and believe in the mission and vision of those organizations where I spend much of my time. I know that when I contribute to the collective, some aspect of society (and not shareholders) get the value of those efforts. However, can’t collective learning be leveraged to exploit the individual members by not giving them credit, or reward, or acknowledgment for their contributions? Can “doing thing for the common good” be said for the benefit of the few, and not necessarily of the many? Thinking in the context of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?), what is my WIIFM for participating in any formal or organized collective learning experience, if I will not in some way benefit from all my efforts?
Outside of my personal and informal reasons for engaging in collective learning, what is my WIIFM for doing it when others will leverage (exploit?) the results? I am not asking this in a greedy or selfish way, but there is only so much time and energy, and I have to wonder how easily (cf. hegemony) it is to work together, with only a few reaping the significant benefits. Are individuals exploited under the guise of corporate or organizational collective learning?
Goodness, I am now wondering about a potential connection between collective learning and critical management studies!
I really like how Allison Littlejohn began her Week 4 #change11 MOOC week on Collective Learning. I especially like how we are having 2 live calls this week to discuss all of this, and she gave us a task to help get us started in her Task 1 introductory blog post. In some ways her extremely clean organization is a welcome change from the diverse (isolated?) ways of learning and communicating in a MOOC, though in other ways it is task-oriented in a way that may potentially be at odds with the personalized objectives and freedom to set (or not) learning goals. Then again, as all the tasks and things to focus upon in this open course, I believe the tasks help to focus those of us who need help focusing on something, especially if we want to engage with Allison as this week’s speaker.
In reading Allison’s Position Paper, I was struck by her her ”grand challenge,” namely for people to have to learn differently. I did not see the evidence in the initial paragraph, in that technology requires a demand for new knowledge. I am not sure if technology in itself demands new knowledge, or even that any societal development or global issues, such as energy consumption or healthcare needs, requires ongoing knowledge creation on a large scale. This does not necessarily involve an increase in technology or expansive knowledge on behalf of a growing population per se. Whether solar cells or wind technologies expand, I as a consumer do not need to know the particulars–I just need to buy the product and leave the rest to the scientists. Do I really have to learn differently, or is it more that I find learning by navigating the collective helps me expand in ways beyond my own cognitive, affective, psychomotor, reflective, collaborative learning processes?
However, I do think that with the increases in social media and the opportunities for new forms of research that may be possible as a result (cf. my doctoral research, considerations of networked learning, or even considerations for digital scholarship), reframing how we see learning that involves a collective (involving the intersection of the learner and the larger group) does have merit. Participating in this MOOC itself allows for a flexibility in how and what we learn in ways that potentially connects us, and while it is not possible to follow all elements of this learning (cf. How to Participate in this MOOC), I do think that better understanding how people navigate and make sense of this process is a rich area for study.
I do wonder, as we are invited to do in Task 1, to what extent this collective learning (to sole real-world problems) can be organized. How can creativity and idea development leveraged from the collective be organized in a way to solve problems? Wouldn’t the problem-solving techniques establish objectives that would begin to funnel learning into how we currently solve problems, namely through brainstorming, writing, discussing, and the like?
Perhaps my meandering question here is really about the Task itself — is there such as thing as collective learning, or is it really individual learning via the collective?
Hard to believe that our week in thinking and processing and learning and discussing digital scholarship has come to a close. In many ways, I feel I have just scratched the surface of this area, and am beginning to appreciate how the facilitators of the #change11 MOOC scheduled this in such a rapid manner to give sufficient taste of different topics, with individual freedom to stop and spend more or less time with a topic as we are moved to.
With enough of a taste of digital scholarship, I fully think I will revisit this area and new verbiage I am acquiring.
I read some chunks of the session facilitator Martin Weller’s new text The Digital Scholar (available for free online), though think the content is such that I need to see the book in a more holistic manner (and thus pre-ordered it on Amazon). During the session, I asked Martin a question at the end of his presentation:
Can you clarify how “digital scholarship” fits with or is different from Internet Research and TEL? In other words, to what extent is this term becoming more widely known/ how does it fit into a traditional disciplines?
To give some background to this question, I am working on a PhD in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning at Lancaster University, and have been searching for some term to capture many of the keywords I selected for my public profile at Lancaster University, where I study in the Graduate School Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. That, in light of my blog by-line “Educational Research + (Virtual) Identity in Postmodernity,” makes me wonder if digital scholarship as a term may be something that I incorporate into my own developing research identity?
Perhaps it may come into my professional and academic work once I finish my formal studies? Only time will tell.
The Hot Seats, an informal and free series of online discussions by international researchers in the area of networked learning, are about to begin next Monday, October 10.
This is a lead-in to the 8th International Conference on Networked Learning, scheduled for Maastricht in April 2012. Participation in these online discussions, based around the research of a number of very interesting scholars and led by the authors themselves, is open to anybody; conference registration is not required.
Hope to see some of my colleagues discussing these topics online.
This week in the free online course #change MOOC, the focus was around Digital Scholarship. Based around the work of Martin Weller (who facilitated the session) and his book The Digital Scholar (which is currently available open-source on the publisher’s website), the focus was around some of the changes technology is bringing to higher education and scholarship. As my research has been in the area of networked learning and online identity development in higher education and doctoral studies, this is a fitting place for me to delve into this online course content.
In this context, Chap 5 of the text makes an interesting claim that is somewhat applicable for my own doctoral research:
There is a general suspicion around using social networks to share findings, although many researchers use them for personal and professional networking (James 2009; Carpenter 2010). Carpenter et al. describe researchers as ‘risk averse’ and ‘behind the curve in using digital technology’. Similarly Harley et al. (2010) state that ‘we found no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors are bucking traditional publishing practices’.
I use social networks for both personal and professional networking (though I still do not like the term networking, as I often consider it rather one-sided–people network to get, and not to give or share or collaborate), and I also find such networks fundamental to identifying and accessing research participants themselves. On top of that, I even use these technologies (especially through my Twitter account) to help myself think through and initiate research projects. The most valuable of these online communities I have found for my doctoral research is the Twitter-based #phdchat, what has become the hub of my online presence for personal and digital scholarship, support, and friendship.
Despite many ECRs being interested in trying out new technologies, 72% of early career researchers reported that they did not even use Web 2.0 or social media to share their research. This may reflect the many and varied constraints which limit ICT take-up amongst early career researchers, perhaps including norms of secrecy in research practice; this study found social, confidence, skills, institutional and participatory constraints on technology use by ECRs.
This gets me thinking–I use these technologies to think through and clarify my research direction, along with access partipants and then get feedback on the process and my research design. I do not ordinarily share results online. I wonder if this is due to the great gap in time between those first steps and the findings, or perhaps because, here in my doctoral work, I do not yet have findings to share? Only time (and more discussion, perhaps) will tell.
Hey, Tweets can be a challenge to find later, so I want to archive (so to speak) my own little burst of creativity (or what passes for me as creativity)–Twitterburst.
#twitterburst, for those of you purists who must have the hash!
OK, so here we are into Week 3 of the of the #Change11 MOOC, and I am finally ready to articulate my own personal goals and expectations for the course. Unlike most courses, there are no stated objectives or expectations for a MOOC. As I quoted from the MOOC Model document in my post Clarification on the question,“What is a MOOC?”, “MOOCs build on the engagement of learners who self-organize their participation according to learning goals,prior knowledge and skills,and common interests.” In other words, I need to set my own objectives and expectations for this year-long course.
While I work professionally as an Instructional Design Project Manager, clarifying learning needs and then building objectives to meet them is something I frequently engage with. However, this is flipped on its head when we establish our own goals for our learning.
Perhaps, however, this is really not that unusual. Consider this–even when we attend traditional courses that have clearly defined learning objectives, we have to remember that those are the goals of the teacher, facilitator, or program–they are not necessarily the goals of the learners themselves. Course goals are not always agreed with or understood in the same way by learners as they are by those facilitating the course. Without dialogue and agreement about this at the very beginning, it is challenging indeed for all participants to move toward the same goals (as nobody has the same goals). Let me state this even more strongly–without discussion and individual agreement–all learners in a course work toward different, and often unstated, goals for the course.
This is one of the refreshing things that this MOOC has done–it has empowered attendees (learners) to articulate and state their own goals for the course. With this stated, these are my #change11 goals and expectations. By the end of the #change11 MOOC, I will be able to:
Assess the impact and influence of this global, unstructured learning on my PhD Research
Practice an openness to diverse perspectives on learning
Revise my network to be wider and more inclusive
Now that I have stated these three objectives, I feel I am actually starting to expand my learning and practice. What better way to do so than by formulating, and then publicly sharing, these goals for the course?
Time to start writing! I committed to having something to my supervisors for review, and decided there is no better place to begin than the beginning. I therefore plan to have a draft version of Chapter 1: Introduction, Background, & Theoretical Framework (tentative title) sent to them both by February 16, in 13 days.
