DARnet interview part two. June 15, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ultraversity, distributed research, edublog, Action Research, Wiki , 2commentsIn part one of the DARnet interview, Cormac Lawler asked me, Andy Roberts, about distributed action research, cycles, groups and background.
This second episode continues the interview, again with Cormac’s questions in red, followed by my reply.
* So, which online university did you attend? What were you studying?
The online university was a research project itself at the time,
called “Ultraversity” and run by the now defunct “Ultralab” centre
attached to Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford, Essex. I
registered an interest before it started up and was admitted to the
first cohort, who came to think of ourselves as guinea pigs for the
revolutionary new online degree with zero face to face element and no
content. That may sound a bit mad but you have to understand that the
BA Learning, Technology, Research degree is workplace based, so mainly
for adults in employment. The subject for the research and therefore
content for the degree then derives from individual circumstances. So
the Ultraversity research project was launched with high hopes of
becoming an independent force for transforming UK higher education,
but has ended up being absorbed into the Anglia Ruskin education
department, minus some of the ideals and as a shadow of the original
ambition. I hear that some of the original ex-staff are building
something elsewhere.
* Did your research there feed directly into what you do now, or are you referring to a grounding in research methods/practice?
In a way, yes I did manage to make my studies relevant to future work.
I set up the distributedresearch domain and the DAR wiki as a major part of it, for example, and one third of the subject (L,T,R) was a grounding in action research theory, methods and practice.
* Are you still affiliated with any formal study programme?
I really don’t have a taste for undertaking any post graduate studies,
but as one of the alumni, I still have access to the online community and I’m
a member of a small informal group where we try to help and sometimes
mentor individuals from subsequent cohorts.
* I’m still not sure if I understand the domain of your research. Is it fair to say that it’s all based on your own practice, and not that of a group?
At its best, action research is always participatory and I do work
with groups in terms of facilitating online communities, with a
particularl interest in communities of practice. But since I became
a full time work-at-home internet entrepreneur last year, I’ve needed
to concentrate at first on activities such as pro-blogging, hence the
need for a spot of first-person action research to get my own act in
order. My domain and primary interest is still very much the social web.
* What is/are that/those practice(s)? What is the relationship between your community/ies in/to your work?
Sometimes it’s a very indirect relationship. For example, one of my oldest communities of practice is the UK cider makers group “ukcider” which I convened and facilitated since 2001. There is no business model, and it’s sometime difficult to find a way to pay the web hosting fees, but I suppose I’ve learned stuff through the processes and development there which I then manage apply in other domains.
About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain
(Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of
making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an
alignment to known pedagogical forms. See Wikiversity_talk:Learning_resources#the_wiki_way and below for some discursive material on this topic.
Education is a political battlefield, and it often looks to me as if
the war was lost ages ago. The fundamental question is to ask “who is
this institution meant to serve?” which requires an understanding of
the nature of the state. Often the people who work in education start
out with idealistic notions of what the work is for, and imagine they
are helping to shape people’s minds in an empowering way, but end up
carrying out orders in the interests of the powers that be, who long
ago gave up believing that an educated general workforce is a
desirable thing as far as advanced capitalism is concerned. They need
people educated enough to be able to work the machines of an
information economy, and to be consumers in a digital age, but only a
small number are required to be independent, creative, critical
thinkers and problem solvers. So the prevailing model for education
is always content based, with the students viewed as empty vessels to
be filled. Even the UK Open University, which was born out of the pro
labour reforms in post war Britain, has been based largely on a pushed
content model, now with added forums.
I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break away from the idea of the “course”, the expert, and the content. If you have people transfering across from the Wikipedia culture then it’s going to cause problems, but you could always fork a minority project for the more revolutionary work if it seems to be getting defeated.
It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity. I’m not predicting the splitting into groups, as you say, but I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Indeed, I see the role of my own action research to explicitly throw into relief the sometimes conflicting viewpoints that people bring to the project - in order to reveal something deeper about what we’re doing, and how we can move forward with a simultaneously more critical and expansive mindset.
You’ve used a phrase from Wikimedia’s mission - “the sum of human
knowledge”. Do you think such an entity exists? How do you see it? How do
you have access to it? How do you participate in it?
I’ll rephrase that to “The full extent of human knowledge” because of
course knowledge doesn’t really have a sum, does it!
Ten years ago you could find out just about anything by tracking down
the right bulletin board or newsgroup, asking a carefully explained
question, and coming back later to view responses or ask a
supplementary. Within a few days you’d have the best the net could
come up with. Now we have Google search, with all its limitations and
gaming, and google scholar for some of the hidden internet, but you
can still usually track down the author of particularly pertinent
idea, find out their online presence with a bit of luck and chance a
speculative email. So the backbone infrastructure of having
connections between devices all over the world will always find a way
to serve people who know a little bit about how to seek and connect,
no matter what infrastructure is built on top of it all, and I’m still
pretty optimistic about that regardless of whether we lose some
battles along the way such as net neutrality or the health of the
regime in charge of Wikipedia.
End of part two of the DARnet interview. To be continued.
TeachMeet08 at BETT January 12, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, web2.0, Wiki , 2commentsI never went to the BETT education exhibition at Olympia when I worked in institutionalised education but I went yesterday. The main reason was to attend TeachMeet08 where lots of interesting people would be gathering and presenting, including some old colleagues, people only known online through various networks, and Linda’s twitter friends from the scottish edubloggers. I was asked to video Drew’s presentation including the use of a Mobius strip so here it is.
There’s also a recording of the Flashmeeting which can be replayed
BETT itself was pretty dire, with all the usual vendors trying to flog their old technology, unlikely promises and crap content to the people who get to spend money in the education sector.
A useful wiki for sharing education resources October 27, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, Wiki , add a comment
Announcing Usefulwiki.com - a useful wiki site for sharing educational resources and exploring the use of internet communications for informal learning in educational settings. The site began life as a partnership effort between myself Andy Roberts and Linda Hartley earlier this year, and now it’s beginning to pick up a bit of attention, so we feel it’s the right time to gently launch it into the wider world. Of course there are already some sites providing educational resources of sorts, some by subscription, some pay per download and some for free. Some even ask for submissions but Usefulwiki is the only one which encourages the education sector to submit resources for immediate publication and peer review, without having to wait for some IT, sales or Town Hall person to get around to updating the website.
It’s a wiki, just like wikipedia but it’s not an encyclopedia. It’s for putting online and organising educational resources, links, plans, pictures, video, writing, pdfs - anything that might be useful to others in education. For teachers, teacher trainers, teaching assistants, learning mentors, parents, school students, ed psychs, sencos - anybody involved in the process of teaching and learning somewhere.
Why would anybody want to give away their hard gathered resources? Well we know there are some who prefer to hoard their knowledge and keep it to themselves, but there are also certainly many others who see nothing but benefits all round to putting digital materials together, available to everyone, for the betterment of education practice worldwide. Thousands of people collaborate to put important information as well as trivia onto the wikipedia, so why not spread the collaboration ethic to the world of learning as well. Those who share will also learn better how to collaborate online, which will stand them in good stead for the emerging world of e-learning which is where a lot of people think the future lies.
So what’s on the Usefulwiki so far?
- Better Reading Partners - A 10 week intervention programme to improve reading using real books.
- Project Based Learning - Articles, examples, resources and links for project based learning.
- Teaching Assistants - Resources, links and advice, also teaching materials for NCFE level 2
- Autism - advice re SEN policy plus external links
- Practical literacy ideas - A selection of practical ideas collected and evaluated.
- Primary ICT
- Recommended software for education
- Primary Modern Foreign Languages
It’s also the home of the award winning classroom displays blog and is definitely in it for the long term.
So if you are, or know somebody who is involved in schools, or cares about education then please point them at the usefulwiki.com, where they can make a good mark from the beginning, and don’t forget to bookmark the site, and maybe stumble, digg, del.icio.us, magnolia it etcetera along with this announcement if you think it’s worth it. Thankyou.
Rogue Education Conference September 11, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, politics , add a commentVia socialistpartyaustralia.org an intriguing flyer for Rogue Education Conference in Melbourne this weekend.
From Friday 14th - Sunday 16th September, a gathering will take place at Trades Hall in Melbourne where people can critically examine this profound shift and build networks to resist it. We want to share stories, build networks, learn, argue, and inspire. We want to create a space that breeds engagement and resistance outside of elite institutions known as “Universities”.
INSTITUTIONS - students’ experiences of education institutions that have been radically altered under a right wing political system
CAPITALISM - all they taught you at school was how to be a good worker/ boss
DISSENT - we can learn a lot from campus based struggles and alternative approaches to education, both nationally and internationally
Upon downloading the conference programme, a calendar of speakers and discussion sessions includes such as the following:
Friday
An amazing documentary account of the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation in the 60’s and 70’s. This story of a trade union whose social and political activities challenged the notion of what a union should be, is incredibly relevant to education activists and student unions today.
Saturday
Margaret Thornton: ‘The Impact of Commodification on the Student Experience’
Geoff Boucher: ‘Crisis Tendencies in Higher Education—Market Failures, Neoconservative Moralism and Technocratic Solutions’
Damien Cahill: ‘Neoliberalism and the War on Terror: The RealRoad to Serfdom’
Sunday
Engagemedia: the state of online independent media and how to use it as a campaign tool
Dave Eden: Treasonous Minds: Capital and Universities, the Ideology of the Intellectual and the Desire for Mutiny
Anja Kanngieser: It’s our Academy: Autonomous and Free Universities as a Strategy for Reclaiming Knowledge
Carol Peterson: Sick of the job networks compulsory bullshit training? Ways to resist for those people who haven’t given up on the social wage
Community launch from an event September 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, theory, Community, online facilitation, COP, edublog, web2.0 , 5commentsThinking about a community birth process which I’ve just witnessed during August, it seems appropriate to try and generalise and seek further applications. A month long training course, open and free to attend, generates a momentum of interest, good will, and community indicators.
“what are we going to do when it’s all over?”
“I’m really going to miss the daily podcasts”
“I’m a few days behind, will the content still be available?”
“this forum is the best I’ve ever been in”
So then one of the convenors makes the announcement that the thirty day challenge goes on forever, and an ongoing community of practice is born. Of course the momentum built up during an occasional time-delimited event cannot be sustained at the same level, which is just as well, but the chances of enough residual activity continuing to get a self-sustaining community off the ground are probably a lot greater through this method, whether pre-planned or not, compared with the precarious method of trying to build up a critical mass through recruiting ones and twos, adding member by member, month after lonely month.
And yet, often the last days of a temporary online gathering are used to acheive closure, to sum up, and say ‘thanks a lot, and goodbye’. I began to wonder what would happen if…..
What if the conference on Web2.0 in January 2006 had been encouraged to continue onwards in situ?
What if a hotseat event, where people gather to ask questions to an invited guest, were to be left open and made public to generate further discussion amongst the participants and others. Maybe each and every hotseat or conference has a potential to spawn a practice community, to provide a growing public space. Many will dwindle and peter out after a while but maybe some will flourish instead of being shut down and put away.
I’m sure there are a few other examples where an online learning event has spawned a persisitent community, but nowhere near as many as have been conveniently wrapped up and dispersed. It’s not as if anybody would be forced to hang around against their will, or that any measurable resources would be consumed to allow event based learning communities to live on.
Or to put it the other way around, if you are hoping to launch a distributed community of practice then consider starting off by organising a month long conference at a specific time and space, build up a sense of occasion and then take it from there.
Convert Animoto to youTube August 27, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : animoto, Music, video, edublog , 2commentsIs it possible to convert an Animoto video for uploading to youTube?
At first it would appear not, through conventional means. But I found a way to do it. Saving directly from the browser doesn’t work, not even with the Firefox video download extension so I came up a lateral way of getting there. Here’s a 30 second Animoto video which I made using my own digital photographs and an MP3 of my own performance of a song to which I own full copyright because it’s mine.
Once the Animoto production process was complete, I then cued the video to play and booted up my screencast software, which in this case is Snapz Pro but it could be any screencasting package. At this point I could have added a narrative voice over, using a microphone connected to my computer as in normal educational screencasting, but since this is a music video I didn’t. I saved the resulting quicktime movie in format mpeg4 and uploaded that file to youTube. Thats all there is to it, here’s the embedded youTube:
Blog Challenge: Your Blog Story July 9, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community, edublog , add a commentLorelle on Wordpress issues occasional challenges to inspire readers to blog.
This week’s blog challenge is to blog your blog’s story.
What is the story behind your blog?
I want to know the story behind why you decided to blog. What made you believe you had something to blog about? How did you pick your first blog and why did you settle on the blog you have now? What inspires you, motivates you to keep blogging? What’s your blog about and why did you choose the topic?
Greg Balanko-Dickson took up the challenge, and I’ve decided to follow the example. So here is
My Blog Story
Community, research, art, technology, self publishing and significant learning.
Learning Journal
When I signed up for my degree in 2003 I was told to start up a Learning Journal. This could be in a notebook, a diary, a looseleaf binder or a word-processing document. The adventurous, I was told, could include photographs, sound recordings or even video, but this was not required.
I had already heard about blogs. My son had already started one, but I hadn’t yet seen the point in it.
Switching Hosts
So I registered at blogger.com and started to write about my course. There were two or three other students who had set up blogs too, and in due course we found each other. Then the institution itself became aware when Tom Smith returned on sabbatical, evangelistic about blogging. Tom explained the importance of RSS reading for cultivating the blogging habit. But blogger didn’t output RSS at the time, so we recommended blogdrive for students. I had already registered on the multi user Movable Type installation so I kept that one.
This meant I could upload photographs and video, and it was in the days before Flickr or youTube so my blog became a multimendia showcase for a while, in which I indulged myself with blogging as ART.
By the final year I was getting frustrated at being hosted by the University so I set up my own domain with an installed Wordpress blog and a Mediawiki. The old Movable Type blog was eventually killed off by the ultralab, but I had already exported all of the posts and comments, though sadly missed some of the files. That’s now hosted here, for reference.
Research Project
The new blog was to be an integral part of my undergraduate research project, as well as an online CV and tool for developing my own network. I used the Wordpress ‘page’ format with comments to prepare and host my online exhibitions and collect feedback, which worked well for me.
After I graduated, I wanted to keep up the blog in order to build my reputation and increase my network of friends and contacts. It takes a fair amount of work, and sometimes feels thankless but I carry on. One week it feels like I’m making steady small steps of progress, another like bumping along the bottom.
Music
I found some time to return to my interest in songwriting and performance, discovered the delights of garageband (The MAC app, not the website) and used another WP page as my base for putting some of my songs online. Gernika got its own subpage.
UK
Since becoming Country Manager UK for pajamanation, I made a concious effort to orientate some posts more towards the UK, since that’s a target audience. I thought about setting up a new blog specifically for pajamanation writings, but decided to keep it here and promote my own blog at the same time. Just in case. I do have some others though, the ukcider blog, usefulwiki blog and a new one about turning freelance. There may be problems defining the boundaries for that but I’ve thought it through and it does make sense to me.
plugins
Recently I finally got around to upgrading from the legacy WP1.5 - by exporting all posts and comments, installing a brand new WP2.2 and re-importing. I’d tried the straight upgrade path before without sucess. Since then I’ve become obsessed with trying out all the plugins and themes which have become available, fiddling with the settings and watching what they do. I love it! So from now on if I do manage to write some compelling content, at least the funtionality and format of the blog won’t be an obstacle to people finding it and interacting.
On the other hand, I note that Hugh thinks blogging is less useful these days, and anybody starting out would be better off building their network in Facebook groups and twitter. Hmm, I’ll use those tools as well but I can’t see myself being prised away from my Wordpress blogs any year soon.
What’s your blog story?
Well that’s my blog story. It felt a bit self indulgent and I’ll have to reflect a little on what I may have learned through the telling of it at this stage. (Perhaps as the subject for a Gibbs reflective cycle.)
So what’s your blog’s story?
Flux article on Dopplr shift June 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentOnce again I’m getting the impression that there are some people at Futurelab who get it, or at least espouse the theory.
Flux » Articles » Dopplr shift
So what can designers of educational software learn from Dopplr? Simply that tools exist within a wider system: that it is better to create something to do a single job well than it is to build something which does many things badly. Creating a small piece that can be loosely joined with others is truer to the spirit of the internet than building the monolithic “virtual learning environments” and closed communities that currently fill our schools and universities. That’s the true Dopplr shift: away from tools that deny their users’ previous online existence, and towards tools that fit into the way people actually live.
Tom Morris - The university is over June 13, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, London , add a commentTom Morris: Tuesday, June 12, 2007
I have access to the Reading Room at the British Library and a borrowing pass at the University of London library. I have Google at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day.
Illich’s “learning webs” are just a click away, as is Socratic dialogue, as is the largest encyclopedia ever created.
The university experience is going to become like the movie-going experience. It’ll be something that people do for the experience rather than for the substance, because, as with Hollywood, the substance has gone.
Educational institutions that don’t realise they are becoming Napsterised are deluding themselves. When Facebook launches a ‘learning’ application, you guys will be dead.
More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments June 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, politics , add a commentTony Karrer has usefully kept track of a list of 16 out of the outburst of blog posts continuing the discussion around PLEs and work:
More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments : eLearning Technology
Then he wonders…
.. if people will adopt these tools and approaches over time, then as a corporation, if you want to be able to keep the content after an employee leaves, especially blog content … then shouldn’t you make sure you provide these tools now rather than having tools adopted that are outside the firewall and personally owned where you will lose the content if the employee leaves?
which kind of confirms the point being contradicted in Jay Cross’s comments:
Pitting individuals against corporations is not productive. Nor is the implication that businesses are out to steal workers’ intellectual property.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
