Education Blogging

On deviantART I found a wonderful steampunk icon. I no longer recall what it was originally intended for, but I thought it would be perfect as the icon for “more info here.” The creator allowed free use and downloads. So I downloaded it and freely used it. It is the only image that repeats across my four iBooks for Major British Writers I, the Brit lit survey course for sophomores I teach.

One day soon the books will be in the iTunes store and you can download them and use them in your classes. But that is not what this post is about.

This post is about how glad I am for the amazing steampunk icon.

So I decided I should make some jings of the icon on the pages and send it to the artist. However, I don’t know how to email the artist. So I am going to put them up here and note that they are here.

Thank you very much!

From book 2, Middle English:

From book 1, Old English:

The artist on Pinterest

The artist on deviantART

I thought TCE had been down for weeks. Turns out my home IP address, from which I post to TCE, was banned by the host’s firewall.

It has been taken care of and I can now post.

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Now if I just have time to post!

The commercial:

29-seconds discussing the issue of How Fiction Shapes Us.

Analysing Blogs is Messy But That’s Ok:

In my opinion the research community does not talk about mess often enough, creating the perverse impression that research is effortless if only one has enough experience and talent.

Not true.

For that reason Pat and I are sharing our ‘warts and all’ experience of writing a paper together. Our paper is attempting to make a provisional taxonomy of blogging practices amongst academics. We don’t want to know everything about academic blogging; this analysis is a way for us to start asking some interesting research questions about it.
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I have my own views, but my decision about how to proceed with the analysis was not informed by my epistemological world view; it was informed by how much time I had on my hands. Time routinely shapes how research is done, but it’s a bit of a dirty secret.

Yes, that is true. Time does shape how research is done. And not just time either. Energy. Money. Folks willing to participate and/or respond.

I think it’s not just that time shapes how research is done, though. Time also shapes how teaching is done. As does energy, money, and participation.

Maybe teaching and research are far more closely aligned (at least for some of us) than I had previously thought.

Since I work within the scholarship of pedagogy primarily, I look at what happened when and what worked with in terms of teaching.

From the beginning of a very interesting (and accurate) article on “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web” by Kim Barbour and David Marshall:

One of the key influences in the study of online identity construction comes from Goffman’s (1959) Presentation of self in everyday life. The idea of online identity as a performance, utilizing Goffman’s dramaturgical analogy, holds a particular attraction for many theorists (Buckingham, 2008; Donath, 1998; Hogan, 2010; Kashima, et al., 2002; Pearson, 2009; Zhao, et al., 2008). Persona creation is a much more conscious process in online settings as opposed to off–line. Stearn (2002) commented that the “strategy and intentionality behind self–presentation is illuminated in online settings, because communicators must consciously re-present themselves online” [1]. It is this idea of intentional presentation of a specific identity from the ‘composite of multiple selves’ which exist in all of us [2] that forms the basis of persona studies.

Another important consideration within studies of online identity creation is that of authenticity, an issue discussed, for example, by Turkle (1995) on persona presented in anonymous MUDs (multi–user domains) and online bulletin boards. Donath (1998) discusses the problems with maintaining a ‘fraudulent’ identity online, by considering the relationship between Goffman’s discussion of ‘expressions given’ and ‘expressions given off’ (or more simply, intentional and unintentional messages), stating that “One can write ‘I am female’, but sustaining a voice and reactions that are convincingly a woman’s may prove quite difficult for a man” [3]. Although there are opportunities for identity play online, what we discuss below is the creation of authentic, intentional, constructed personas that extend the boundaries of an academic’s individual influence beyond institutional boundaries, and allows them to work more effectively in the radically changed worldwide academic environment.

Use of Twitter:

The role that Twitter plays in this dynamic is an interesting one to consider. On the one hand, it is a sharing platform designed to function easily on mobile devices, particularly mobile phones, wherever a user happens to be. In this sense, it works to break down some of the barriers between an academic and their students. On the other hand, it can be seen as a ‘safer’ form of social networking; because tweets are short and able to be accessed even by non–members, there is still a sense of a public forum rather than special treatment for those who engage with staff on this platform. The ability to point to new materials or interesting online materials by posting URLs, and to connect with students outside of class time, can be seen as a boon for instructors. Through the capacity to ‘follow’ other users without their explicit consent, both academics and students can engage informally with an international network of researchers and experts in related fields.

The thing I like most about this model is the teaching self is described as inter/intra/extra-institutional. Oh yeah. They nailed that.

It can be assumed that in the humanities, at the very least, the construction of a public persona online will become increasingly common for emerging academics. This type of persona allows an early career researcher to connect online with others either at the same stage in their careers, or with more established researchers, raising their research profile and potentially improving career prospects. The ability to engage in dialogue with leaders in a field of study, gaining insights, or even providing critique, not only allows researchers to improve their own work, but also locate their thinking more clearly within a wider academic community.

I find that hopeful. …

from the Guardian UK:

5. Attribution is key: Be clear in your tweets about who is saying what. If you don’t attribute and/or use quotation marks when reporting what has been said, people can (and rightly will) assume it’s you saying it. If the speaker is on Twitter, find out what they are called on Twitter in advance, as their ‘handle’ will often be shorter than their name.

6. If you are quoting directly, use quotation marks. Think direct and indirect reported speech. Never assume anything you read online is from the public demain. Attribute other people’s ideas or anything else you quote. It’s not just good manners, it’s professional ethics.

I think this is what sparked Twittergate, not following these two.

I don’t use pics on Twitter, so I don’t care about those rules.

9. Link liberally. Search for references as speakers present. Share with your followers the resources the presenters are showing in the room – unless you are not meant to and one should expect speakers and/or organisers to indicate this in advance.

Most trouble I got in for posting was for this. I showed the resources he showed and discussed them–which, by the way, he did not.

Will link to this post for our CCTE presentations.

Heap, Tania and Shailey Minocha (2012). “An Empirically Grounded Framework to Guide Blogging for Digital Scholarship.” Research in Learning Technology, 20(Supp.): 176–188.

Boyer (1990) developed a conceptual framework which defines ‘‘scholarship’’ as a combination of teaching and research activities. In particular, he suggests four dimensions to define scholarship: discovery, integration, application and teaching.

Okay. Those seem like a reasonable place to start. I actually like them.

What they came up with.

We have found that blogs seem to occupy an intermediate space among established writing forms such as peer-reviewed academic papers, newspaper articles, diaries, blurring the private􏰀public and formal/informal divide (Heap and Minocha 2011).

There is a growing awareness of blogging as a writing or communicative genre in academia and research and as a new form of scholarship (e.g. Halavais 2007). Whilst it is important to ensure validity of work through established forms of publishing, integrating blogs may help research findings to be known to more readers, specialist and non-specialist, for whom the findings may be relevant to their practice. Blogs also enable sharing information without time lags involved in formal publications.

They give some information, but their research questions don’t appear to me to be all that valid. Who cares why I started blogging? What does that have to do with my academic blog as it is now? Should it be seen as having something to do with it? (I hope not.)

The next steps in our research are to validate the effectiveness of the framework as a thinking tool about digital scholarship, and for guiding the practice of blogging in academia and research. This involves evaluating the framework with colleagues who already blog as a part of their practice, or who are considering adopting blogging for digital scholarship. The feedback will help us improve the framework. We have also developed empirically grounded guidelines on blogging, which we will share with colleagues in other publications in the near future.

I look at their “guidelines” and I”m like, what? It discusses motivations for beginning a blog, the benefits of blogging, and the challenges of blogging.

This is not what I would expect from an empirically grounded guideline for blogging in digital scholarship.

Maybe I’m on the wrong track or they’re up a rabbit trail.

Recognising and rewarding digital scholarship has a significance beyond the promotion of individuals. For universities, as they seek to manage change to a digital, networked society, it acts as a strong indicator and vehicle for change.

Discussion of new article from Martin Weller’s blog Ed Techie.

From the abstract:

The use of new technologies by academics to perform research, construct knowledge, disseminate ideas, engage students in learning and conduct a wide range of scholarly activities generates a number of issues for established reward and tenure systems, which can be seen as a representative microcosm of the issues facing universities more generally.

Ah, yes. This is an issue that is coming to my university because of our forward-thinking in technology. We’re getting there.

From the article itself:

Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core.
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there does seem to be a move in many universities to recognise digital scholarship to some extent.
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Download / visitor counts – downloads of articles or visits to an academic site can be seen as
equivalent to citations.
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a representation of scholarly activity could be established by analysing data from a number of sites, such as the individual’s blog, Twitter, Slideshare and YouTube accounts, and then also using the webometrics approach to analyse the references to these outputs from elsewhere.

For T&P can I argue that professors linking to blog posts for students’ instruction is teaching? Or is that research?

I’ve started putting my conference presentations into iBooks Author for the “big black folder of doom” presentation digitally. We’ll see if they’re there yet, by the time my tenure experience surfaces. (They have just moved to WordPress blogs for T&P portfolios.)

But one thing for which I am really grateful, and which I frankly find surprising, is that nobody in the class has yet to express any kind of longing for the good old days when professors lectured and students sat there and listened. In fact most students who express anything at all say that having the lectures on video, in addition to having a well-written textbook for reference, is hugely beneficial for their work in the class.

I can see why this would be helpful in a math class. Will the students find an English lecture as worthwhile?

I’m taking the approach of showing students how to find examples and how to evaluate their own work, and giving them opportunities to study worked examples and compare their writing to existing writing, rather than “going over” things and simply lecturing more. And I want to make sure that I am explaining to students why I’m not simply going up to the board to lecture. They’re definitely smart enough to get that.

I like the ideas… I am still not sure how they would work for a literature course.

However, you can read more about his sixth week at Casting Out Nines.