Changing Conditions for Networked Learning? A Critical View on Social Technologies as a Springboard to Unfold the Opportunities and Potentials

Thomas Ryberg (ryberg@hum.aau.dk)

Associate Professor

E-Learning Lab – center for user driven innovation, learning and design

Dept. Of communication and Psychology

Aalborg University

Outline

• Beyond the web 2.0 educational hype – as a springboard to singling out the novel

• Problematising and nuancing the Digtial Natives discourse

• What might be somewhat novel?

• How can conceptualise this?– Knotworking– Trajectories– Patchworking

• This is work and thinking in progress – more an invitation to dialogue than presenting fixed ideas or results!

Why social media or web 2.0 in education• Some of the keywords from the tech-ed buzz-o-sphere:

• Realised through use of: Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking etc.• But many of these ideals are not new!

Web 2.0 ’Progressive’ education (since 19XX)

User-driven Learner-centred

Collaboration Collaborative learning

Participation Active students vs passive recipients

2 -way communication Dialogues and interaction

Creating and sharing Knowledge construction vs acquistion

Bottom-up Ahierarchical, flat – students as co-producers

Web 2.0 in educational context (e-learning 2.0) – general buzz

• From hierarchical structures based on courses and topics towards more student centred networks

• From distribution to more horizontal patterns of exchange – peer-learning

• From Learning Management Systems (LMS) Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

• Encouraging exchange, sharing of knowledge and students’ production of knowledge and artefacts

• Encouraging the production of personal portfolios – personal repositories

THE DIGITAL NATIVES DEBATE

Quick overview

• Increasing numbers of studies are problematising the digital natives or net generation as hyperbole (Jones & Czerniewicz, 2010)

• But also pointing out that changes are happening– Complex digital ecologies and social networking

• However, use of web 2.0 tools among students less advanced than ‘imagined’ or ‘hypothesised’ in the tech-ed sphere

• Gap between ‘what could be’ and ‘what is in fact’• Just a brief intro to a study we did

Methodology

• Data collection across different levels of scale - multi-method study combining qualitative and quantitative studies

• Questionnaire (cross-campus to 3000 students – 253 completed):– Background– Mobile life style (where do students work)– Project collaboration – Familiarity with Web 2.0 tools (state of diffusion)

• Narrative analysis of blog post (133 student narratives from 51 M and 82 F)– 1.semester students within a programme (humanistic informatics) asked to write

blogs about technology use during 1.sem (analysing diffusion of various technologies)

• Oberservational studies– Following a 2.semester group (interview and observation) – their use of

technology

Findings from blog posts and observational studies• How they support problem and project based collaboration• Facebook & Dropbox rather pervasive• Skype used among many groups• Some groups utilised Google services (e.g. Calendar, Docs)• Live next to formal systems (e.g. Moodle) but are not intertwined

– formal system for course activities• Cautious about bringing in new tools in their problem and

project based group work• Some of the more ‘advanced’ tools for academia 2.0 purposes

(tech-ed-buzz) and problem based project work were not very pervasive– Google Docs– Social bookmarking (delicious, diigo)– Social referencing systems / bibliography (zotero, refworks)

SO WHAT MIGHT BE NEW?

Sharing across different social constellations

Homebase(s) – profile PLE

Strength of tie

Own content

Friends’ content

Groups’ content

Collectives’ content – aggregated other

Shared fields of interest – imagined communities

Glued together by RSS, Widgets, ‘open standards’, open APIs – Streams of continuously evolving ‘data’ and ‘information’ that can be somewhat easily manipulated

We all become entrance points into complex (overlapping) networks

Ideas about “new” social constellations or aggregations

• Networks between people working collaboratively

• Networks between people sharing a context

• Networks between people sharing a field of interest

• (Dalsgaard, 2006):http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htm

Picture taken from: (Andersson, 2008) http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/networks-versus-groups-in-higher-education/

Learner in the centre

Let’s briefly explore some examples of this – there are however many other sites and mixes

Flash activities

• Cloudworks – clouds where anyone can add content, , tags, references, discuss etc.

• Twitter-streams e.g. #Occupy – stream where content and conversations are pulled together

• MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses

KNOTWORKING, TRAJECTORIES, PATCHWORKING

How can we conceptualise this?

How can we conceptualise and utilise:

• Content is easily shareable and can move fast through multiple networks

• Flash-like activities (maybe run-away objects) – fast-paced (or slower) stitching together - or creating - temporary stabilisations content and conversations

• Pulsations and complex moves between individual and collective/collaborative networks

• How can we make sense of this in relation to learning and educational theory and practice?

• Maybe viewing what enters and leaves ’the class, course and programme’?

How can we conceptualise and utilise:• How is knowledge distributed, but more importantly – how

is it sustained and made ’productable’ – becoming part of deeper processes of meaning making and knowledge production

• Does it or how does it become more than ’streams of content’

• Understanding the movements between:– Individualised traversing of personalised social networks to

collaborative meaning making– From serendipitous encounters to sustained interactions

• How do we make sense of both individual and collaborative engagements?

• Pulsations between foraging of information and digesting this?

Knotworking

• Increased focus on / interest in less stable types of activities and organisations – what happens when activity systems come together and collaborate on-the-spot?

• “Distributed and partially improvized orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems” (Engeström, 2000)

• “A movement of tying, untying and retying together seemingly separate threads of activity characterizes knotworking. The tying and dissolution of a knot of collaborative work is not reducible to any specific individual or fixed organizational entity as the centre of control. The centre does not hold.” (Engeström, 2000)

• “Groups of people, tasks, and tools are mustered for a relatively short period of time to get some task accomplished.” (retrieved from: http://kplab.evtek.fi:8080/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Knotworking)

Knotworking

• Based in CHAT – consciousness of both the fleeting interactions – but equally how these are affected by and affects historically shaped and sustained activity systems

• How knotworking functions at the intersections of multiple interacting activity systems

Knotworking and Mycorrhizae• Smart mobs and mycorrhizae (rhizome-like) – Linux communities, birding,

skateboarding• “Mycorrhizae are difficult if not impossible to bound and close […]. They

may lie dormant for lengthy periods of drought or cold, then generate again vibrant visible mushrooms when the conditions are right” (Engeström, 2007)

• “A mycorrhizae formation is simultaneously a living, expanding process (or bundle of developing connections) and a relatively durable, stabilized structure; both a mental landscape and a material infrastructure.” (Ibid)

• But where is the individual located in this? Identity and individual development over time?

Trajectories – or Itineraries

• Development and learning happens through multimembership in overlapping, conflicting CoPs over time

• Pulsations between individualised foraging and meaning making in CoPs

“This simultaneous focus on constellations of communities of practice and individual trajectories will place emphasis on aspects of the theory that have not received as much attention as communities of practice per se: boundary structures, multimembership, cross-community trajectories, various modes of belonging, and large-scale properties of composite systems” (Wenger, 2005 – Learning for a Small Planet)

Picture from Wenger, 2005

Interpretative communities of practice• An interpretative community can be seen as a more loosely bounded

CoP

• CoPs are usually thought of as networks with strong collaborative ties and interdependencies

• In my view – we might point to a more loosely bounded structure – like ” Networks between people sharing a context” or an ”interpretative CoP”

• This could be e.g. a research centre, a semester / class / subject

• An entity where ties are pulsating between strong and weak, but where there is an overall potential for collaborative sense or meaning making

• One place where resources might be digested

Patchworking

• Patchworking as a metaphor for learning (Ryberg, 2007)

• Looking at how various knowledge artefacts (conceptual or (semi)material) are actively stitched together by drawing on existing or creating new resources

• How (or do) such artefacts “travel” between context, become remixed, re-purposed – and is it critical knowledge construction

• An example of young people’s construction of a presentation

An example

Copy-catting and plagiarism or creative reappropriation?

We need to pay close analytic attention to how and why patches and pieces are woven into the patchworks

Rich multimodal presentation incorporating e.g. graphs from a lecture

A glimpse into • Patchwork of many different sources, means and media

that were assembled to convey their conceptualisation of poverty and how to address this issue– Some graphs came from a presentation of an expert, which had even

ripped some from an UN webpage– Facts and information came from various web pages and books– Ideas came from interviews, a bus conversation and other sources– They made four different interviews which were video-taped, edited

(some subtitled) and made part of the presentation.– Music was carried on the computer from home– Poor people’s pictures through Google image search– Pictures in animation were hand-drawn and animated in PowerPoint – Their stage show was choreographed and practised the night before

Foraging and gathering – no no – we want it NOW! – E-mail won’t do!!!

’Cycle of stabilisation work and production’ – re-ordering and

selecting slides

Cycle of ’patchworking and remixing’ – negotiating the use of the slide – constructing the

’conceptual blueprint’ Process of re-weaving….negotiating the meaning of the slide – Success

or Problem

Cycle of stabilisation work and production – Working it into the final slideshow

Summing up

• Fast paced interactions and flow of materials – but how do we go beyond this – collecting content is not enough!

• Study how (or if) these contribute to more collective or collaboratíve processes of digesting and making sense

• How are the movements between individual engagement and collaborative sense making? (Brokering?)

• Study partcular incidents of: – Foraging, gathering, aggregating – Vivid patchworking and knotworking – Information stabilisation points (hub, plazas, cafe -

metaphorically)

• Wonder if the following model can be a help

• From study of informal knowledge sharing in social network/community site (Computer problems) – (Ryberg & Christiansen, 2007)

• Studying the movements between these

References

• Engeström, Y. (2000). Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and redesigning work. Ergonomics, 43(7), 960-974.

• Engeström, Y. (2007). From communities of practice to mycorrhizae. In J. Hughes, N. Jewson & L. Unwin (Eds.), Communities of practice: Critical perspectives. London: Routledge.

• Jones, C., & Czerniewicz, L. (2010). Describing or debunking? The net generation and digital natives. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 317-320. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00379.x

• Ryberg, T. (2007). Patchworking as a Metaphor for Learning – Understanding youth, learning and technology (PhD-thesis). Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University. Retrieved from http://vbn.aau.dk/files/18154524/eLL_Publication_Series_-_No_10.pdf

• Ryberg, T., & Christiansen, E. (2008). Community and social network sites as Technology Enhanced Learning Environments. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 17(3), 207-219. doi:10.1080/14759390802383801

• Wenger, E. (2006). Learning for a small planet - a research agenda. Retrieved from http://www.ewenger.com/research/index.htm