Literacy in the Digital University seminar, 16 October 09

I’m looking forward to giving a short talk at the first seminar in the ESRC funded Literacy in the Digital University series – http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/2009/09/seminar-1-programme.html . The title of my talk is “Personal, professional and academic voices in online reflection: new literacies for new media practices”. I’ll post up slides or something as soon as they’re available!

University of Edinburgh reports for the National Museums Online Learning Project available online

I wanted to share links to the PDFs of the National Museums Online Learning Project ( http://www.vam.ac.uk/about_va/online_learning/index.html ) research reports, produced by the research team at the University of Edinburgh.

The final report coincided with the end of the project in Spring 2009. The NMOLP resources - WebQuests and Creative Spaces - continue to be developed, however, and the final report takes this into account.

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2009) National Museums Online Learning Project final report. University of Edinburgh. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/finalreport.pdf

Here are the earlier reports:

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2007) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage one report. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage1.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 1, Creative journeying: portraits of our users. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2creativespaces.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 2, Watching, gaming, learning: webquest contexts of use. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2webquests.pdf

We would welcome any comments!

[Update 20 July] - Should have put links to the resources in the first time! There is an entry point for each resource from each of the nine partner sites, but these will get you started:

Creative Spaces: http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/creative_spaces/index.html

Webquests: http://www.vam.ac.uk/school_stdnts/schools/pupils/webquests/index.html

Paper about digital natives

Here’s a paper that Siân Bayne and I wrote for the 2007 Society for Research in Higher Education conference – we are working on revising it in light of all the new literature about digital natives/immigrants/net generation since then, but I think the core arguments are still current, so thought I’d post it up here.

The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: a dangerous opposition

new project about feedback and student writing online

A small group of colleagues and I have been successful in getting funding for a two year project looking at innovative online strategies for assessment of and feedback on student writing. We’ll be looking in depth at digital writing practices on the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in E-learning programme, including:

• tutor-student communication and formative feedback through reflective weblogs
• assessing collaborative writing in wikis
• assessing multimodal and hypertextual work
• student-nominated assessment criteria
• co-creating courses through discussion

The project officially started yesterday, and I’ll be heading it up. I’m really excited about it, especially because one of the things we’ll be doing is inviting students on the programme to work with us as co-researchers, conducting a series of ethnographies of particular courses and helping to develop an “assessment and feedback stories” wiki. We’ll also draw on archived data from the programme since it launched in 2006.

I’d really like to hear about other projects people have done which have used similar methodologies or explored similar themes. Please get in touch if you know of any!

Paper about qualitative research transcription as translation

I wrote this paper to coincide with a seminar I gave at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in February 2009. It looks at the process of transcription of qualitative research interviews as an act of translation.

“Like any translation, transcription is an act of negotiation. Errors, interpretations and decisions made in transcribing form part of the data to be analysed. The paper explores some current issues in translation studies, and applies them to qualitative research transcribing, touching on concerns relevant to both social scientists and translators: power, situatedness, and the non-transparency of language. I argue that in drawing on important theoretical work being done in translation studies, social scientists can make more conscious decisions about how they interpret and represent their data, and ultimately can conduct better research.”

I would welcome your comments on this draft.

Was that infinity or affinity?: qualitative research transcription as translation , Jen Ross, January 2009

Paper about teaching online: jesters, tricksters and fools

My colleague and supervisor Hamish Macleod and I first presented this paper at the 3rd Ideas in Cyberspace Education symposium at Loch Lomond in Scotland in March 2007. It draws in part on our experiences with the MSc in E-learning at Edinburgh. We’ve since revised it and it’s currently being considered for publication in an ICE3 book.

The paper takes a jester’s, trickster’s and fool’s look at teaching in online spaces. We argue that teaching in digital environments is different and requires different attitudes and strategies than its offline counterpart. We use archetypal, literary and historical characters of the fool, jester and trickster as metaphors to explore issues of authority, risk, innocence, fun, complexity, liminality and absurdity.

The paper was great fun to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well! Comments are very welcome.

Structure, authority and other noncepts: teaching in fool-ish spaces (PDF)

Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative doctoral award: the internet and the archive

This is a call for applications for a PhD studentship at the University of Edinburgh: co-supervised by Sian Bayne, the principal investigator on the National Museums Online Learning Project research strand.


School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), UK

This studentship, fully funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, with additional funding from the collaborating partner, will support three years of full-time study. The student will investigate how the internet is changing the way users engage with, and learn from, the collections of cultural institutions, with supervision provided by Dr Sian Bayne (University of Edinburgh) and Ms Rebecca Bailey (RCAHMS).

Basing the study on the online education and outreach activities of RCAHMS, the broad remit of the project is to explore how new online media environments change and challenge the curatorial and outreach responsibilities of museums, galleries and archives.

The studentship covers all UK fees, and includes an allowance of £12,940 per academic year, plus an additional annual £1,500 maintenance payment provided by the AHRC and RCAHMS. Students may also be eligible for UK study visits and one overseas study visit as well as one overseas conference for the duration of the award. For eligibility criteria, see the AHRC web site at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/postgrad/postgrad_details_d/eligibility.asp

For fuller details of the proposed project, and the application procedure, please see: http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/ahrc.pdf.

To discuss the project informally, please contact Mrs Pam Holgate, University of Edinburgh (0131 651 6120, pam.holgate@ed.ac.uk) or Ms Rebecca Bailey, RCAHMS (0131 662 1456, rebecca.bailey@rcahms.gov.uk).

Applications should be submitted by 13 June 2008, and we anticipate that interviews will be held during the week of 7th July.

University of Edinburgh: http://www.ed.ac.uk
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland: http://www.rcahms.gov.uk

Inclusive Museum conference, Leiden

I'm working on a paper for the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden in June. The paper will focus on inclusive online museum learning, and the National Museums Online Learning Project in particular. It's structured around four key concepts: reach, relevance, relationship and recontextualisation, and touches on themes of the digital vs physical museum, the shift in museum learning from a focus on objects to a focus on users, what 'quality' means in online learning, tensions in schools between creativity and performativity, and social media and its relationship with institutional authority - all themes which have emerged so far in our research with the NMOLP.

Our experiences with this project have highlighted a number of creative tensions around openness and authority, insiders and outsiders, and control (who has it, who wants it...). It's interesting to think about how these issues might evolve as social media and user-generated content make their way from the margins to the centres of cultural institutions.

I really enjoyed Ross Parry's semantic web session at Museums and the Web in Montreal - the idea of the machine-readable web (web 3.0?) is pretty compelling and exciting. But even more interesting (to me! and sad, perhaps), is thinking about how institutions (museums, universities, schools) might use/co-opt/learn from/change/be changed by the digital environments they venture into. I often find that conversations about the digital/social/user-generated content in institutions - even those which start off innocently enough - end up being about the nature and purpose of those institutions. That's why I find e-learning such an exciting field to be involved in, I think.

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 3

I had to miss Wednesday, the last day of the conference, but had an action-packed final day myself on Tuesday.

The first presentation I saw was on museum learning and virtual worlds. I felt the presenter (Lea Kuznik, from the University of Ljubljana) could have taken time to link her theoretical framework (Gogola's experiential pedagogy and 'peak experiences') to her overview of virtual worlds. I think it could have been a fascinating paper about what a 'peak experience' might be in such a digital environment. I hope she carries on with this research - I'd like to hear about it again when it's a bit further down the road.

I was tremendously impressed by Edith Doron's paper (she is doing her doctoral research at the University of Aberdeen) on "building a Sukkah for the museum". It was about how a children's museum can engage in a responsibility to the other - a responsibility she described by quoting Edmond Jabès:

"On this side of responsibility there is solidarity. On the other, hospitality."

Her talk was largely about hospitality, and what it might mean for the museum to be a stranger among strangers, rather than a facilitator of discussion "between us about them". A Sukkah (I learned) is a booth or hut (purposefully rickety) which Jewish families build after Yom Kippur - a temporary ritualised dwelling space. The Sukkah celebrates harvest and commemorates the exodus of Hebrew slaves, and it architecturally stages the act of hospitality. It has to be an exposed space where there is an inevitability of encounter with strangers. Families have to leave the solidity of home and dwell in uncertain space. The other is not invited in by the 'potis' (master), but is invited in by an exile: the "turn toward outside is from the outside". She argued that such a metaphorical (or real, in the case of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, where Edith worked, or the Jewish Museum in Berlin) space can help museums to rethink belonging and otherness, and their place in the communities they serve.

For me the link here to the online museum is strong: the online museum itself could be a Sukkah. Rather than attempting to regulate or dominate digital space, museums could allow themselves to be in exile along with their online communities. Perhaps to treat the web as a distinctively strange and different space, rather than a bolted on, lesser version of the material museum, would be to engage with old (new) notions of hospitality in something of the way that Edith described.

I also had a number of good conversations with various interesting people on Tuesday, which is why I don't have many papers to report on! That and the repeated cancellations of things I was going to. I haven't written about everything, though, and I may find time to write more over the next few days.

Emerging into the sunshine I discovered something new had sprung up during the day.

I bought a copy of Jane Eyre, had a lovely meal and a walk with a new friend, and left Leiden with a head full of new thoughts, a pocket full of business cards, and a major appreciation for the creativity, diversity and thoughtfulness of the material inspired by the theme of the inclusive museum.

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 2

I think today was about the personal for me. It started with a really nice chat over breakfast about people's personal attachment to museums and museum spaces - I shared a story from one of our recent NMOLP research reports with the president of ICOM - eep! - which probably got me thinking along these lines to begin with.

Then I went to Marcus Wood's keynote. He gave a moving and complex talk about museum narratives of the mass trauma of slavery, and their focus on the wounded slave body and instruments of torture, followed by the heroic story of emancipation and abolition. He contrasted this with the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, with its extremely explicit, intimate and creative depictions of mass trauma. He focussed in particular on an installation about lynching, and drew some interesting parallels between strategies the curators used in their exhibit and other artistic and cultural moves both past and present. He then linked this to Brazilian museums' approaches to the display of memory of slavery and their syncretic use of religious iconography and images of slavery, and the transformation of everyday objects (Barbie as Yemanja was particularly cool). I went afterwards to his "garden session" (held in a 2nd floor lobby...), where the conversation about the Martins, who created the NGBiWM, and their passion and commitment to telling this story and to their 'family of ancestors', got me thinking about how powerful the urge to collect, interpret and narrate is for some people. The web may make it easier for some to do this, but the impulse is not new. I already knew that, but sometimes it takes a concrete example before I Know it.

I got three more examples before long, in a talk by Donald Lawrence from UBC called "vernacular practice in the personal museum". His main examples were two personal museums in the Netherlands (both fascinating stories!), but he started off by talking about Sir John Soane's museum in London, which is one of the partners in the NMOLP and a place I really loved when I visited it. Of course Soane had buckets of money with which to indulge his passion for collecting, but the other personal museum creators I heard about today definitely didn't. This is real DIY stuff - uncomfortably chaotic, messy, and 'ugly' (as Lina Bo Bardi would have it, I learned today!).

Also today Elizabeth Mix talking about Fred Wilson's interventions in museum spaces - bringing pieces from collections together in new ways, and offering critiques of museum practice in the form of jarring juxtapositions, retitling, addition of artefacts and changes of staging. Her talk was full of great examples and interesting connections. However, a curator in the audience asked what lessons should be taken from Wilson, and Elizabeth's answer (that labels and barriers should be rethought, objects grouped differently) seemed to me to miss a point I took from what I saw of his work: that there is always an intervention, a reorganisation to be done, gaps and silences to fill in - not that there is a 'right' way to stage an exhibition, or that we should all follow Wilson's example... anyone else have a view about this?

I'm going to go out and find something nice to eat, now. Hopefully I'll fancy something besides pancakes...

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 1

At Lynda's suggestion, I thought I'd make a few notes here for those unlucky enough not to be in glorious Leiden at the first International Conference on the Inclusive Museum.

First, let me say that if it were possible to subsist entirely on Dutch pancakes, I would do it.

The introductory material in the conference programme touches on many themes and concerns of interest to me:

the diversity of visitors
particularity vs universality
the role of the reader, viewer, audience, funder
multi-modality and the 'born digital' museum
intellectual property
intangible heritage

and the first day's sessions didn't disappoint.

First we learned from Steven Englesman, Director of the National Museum of Ethnology (where the conference is being held) that a grateful William of Orange offered the citizens of Leiden a choice of two gifts in 1575: tax free beer forever, or a university. They chose the university!

Tomur Atagok, professor and founder of the museology department at Yildiz University, Turkey, gave the first keynote, stressing that inclusive museums do more than invite everyone in: they break down barriers. She focussed on children and young people, and the benefits in terms of trust and a sense of belonging that come from their active involvement and contribution in museum spaces.

There was supposed to be a 'talking circle', but something strange happened to the schedule so this only ended up being about 10 minutes long, and I don't think it even approached being what it was supposed to be (giving shape to a broad conference, interacting around key ideas, differences and points of difficulty). Too bad, because the idea seemed good. Maybe the second talking circle session will be given more time to compensate.

For the first parallel session I went to "Indiginous Cultural Heritage and the Virtual Museum" by Saskia Vermeylen and Jeremy Pilcher from Lancaster University. Saskia's research around the San people of South Africa and their relationship to the hoodia plant brought her to thinking more broadly about the repatriation of cultural property, and how talk of ownership and rights gives rise to a broader discourse of ownership.

The dominant narrative of tribal experience is of loss and cultural genocide - repatriation emphasises the return of the object to its original status, its decommodification. But the value and meaning of the object cannot be reduced to the last transaction. Simply returning the object will not erase its history of commodification. Indeed, erasing the commodity phase reduces native people to passive recipients.

The significance or 'enchantment' of an object is not in aesthetics but in social relations surrounding it. Online, she argues, content shifts away from meaning towards interaction, and therefore opens up more possibilities for multiple narratives and contexts.

Jeremy then took over to discuss the problems of databases as new media objects, with the work of Lev Manovich as a jumping off point. Manovich argues (as I understand it! - need to read up on this) that the database only appears to present the world as an unordered list, but that in fact it has narratives built into it in the form of assumptions, language, and ideas about what is or is not interconnected. The best thing to do about this, Jeremy suggested, is to acknowledge this and explictly try to weave other, alternative narratives in to the mix. They are hoping to get funding to do just this. I loved their paper, and because the subsequent speaker didn't turn up, we got a full half hour of conversation afterwards: bliss.

In the afternoon I saw Marijke van Eeckhaut, from the University of Ghent, talk about spectator-driven visual art presentations (her stuff on integration to inclusion was good, I thought), and Chloe Paver from Exeter's really interesting paper about the representation of women in historical images from Germany and Austria - how male qualities of restraint and order are juxtaposed against women's ecstasy and hysteria in being 'seduced' by Hitler, and the difficulty in unpicking the extent to which these images are chosen/preferred by curators and exhibition designers.

Then I gave my paper - which went quite well!

Then the lovely Kate Pahl spoke about her project/exhibition talking to Pakistani/Kashmiri families in Rotherham, and how stories and objects intertwine.

I learned a lot today about things I previously knew nothing about. My favourite kind of conferences are like that.

Amareswar Galla explained as he opened the conference how difficult it had been to get funding to make this event happen. I guess it's focussing on a topic (inclusivity) which is (perhaps?) considered both general and marginal. But I gather than in partnership with Common Ground they will be hosting another one next year, in Brisbane. Well worth checking out for those down under (or with funding to make the trip!).

paper for AoIR conference – traces of self

Here is my PhD-related paper for the AoIR conference in Copenhagen in October.

Abstract:

This paper explores some conceptual issues emerging from my research into the question of how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in high-stakes online reflection in higher education.

The traces produced by online reflection are traces of a cultural moment and a political imperative, as much as traces of individuals. This paper critically examines how a humanist discourse of a ‘true self’, which can be understood or revealed through reflection, masks the increasingly invasive character of educational practices which demand confession and self-surveillance as evidence of progress and learning, and asks: in what ways might working online complicate, corroborate or undermine notions of the ‘true self’ in these contexts?

Download Traces of self: online reflective practices and performances in higher education as a PDF file.

more about masks

 I have been exploring the mask as a metaphor for high-stakes reflection. Having begun with two categories of mask – disguise and performance – I have now identified six (overlapping) genres:

Protection:
Protective masks are worn while doing dangerous work (fighting or welding for example). Armour is an interesting sub-genre because it is both protective and a display of strength designed to intimidate the enemy. Different cultures had different traditions of armour design – European armour tended to be anonymous, while Japanese armour was designed to look vicious and frightening.

Disguise:
The idea of a person’s ‘true self’ or, in some cases, their deformity, being hidden behind a mask is an extremely common metaphor in art, literature, popular culture and in everyday life. Power is also often described as being ‘masked’: “Modern ‘power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms’ (HS 86)” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 134). The image here is called “The Treacherous Patriot Unmask’d”, from the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Performance:
Theatrical traditions around the world involve performers donning masks to portray different characters. The distinction between performance and disguise is extremely blurry, but we might say that disguise is primarily intended to hide something, while performance is primarily intended to show something.
Trace:
The death mask (Mary Queen of Scots’ is pictured here) constitutes a physical trace or archive of the person who has died. It is obviously not for the person it represents, and nor does that person have any say or control over the matter – making it an interesting route to exploring agency and archive in online reflective practices.

Transformation:
“Demon masks are still used in healing rituals in Sri Lanka… One of the most powerful cures… is a masked performance in which the demon associated with the ailment, and others who may also have played a role in causing it, are made to appear” (British Museum, online). Formal, ritual performances involving masks are transformative in the moment, but may also have a lasting impact on communities and individuals.
Punishment:
The scold’s bridle (pictured here) was used in Scotland from at least the mid-sixteenth century to punish women for talking too much, nagging, or inappropriate speech – it worked by restraining and sometimes injuring the tongue . Other forms of punishment involved masks which simultaneously restrained or injured the wearer and publicly humiliated them .

The extent to which online reflective practices can be understood as masks is an issue I want to explore more, and I hope to use these metaphors as structuring elements in my research.

References

British Museum. Changing Face: masks from the British Museum. retrieved 16 December 2007. <http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/museum_and_exhibition/
changing_face_masks/changing_face_masks.aspx>.

Dreyfus, H., & Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Padstow: T.J. Press Ltd.

high-stakes reflection (mirrors, maps and masks)

Preamble: ever since I started my part-time doctoral research just over a year ago I’ve known that I really want to blog about it eventually. Other researchers’ blogs (Chris Sessums, danah boyd, Lilia Efimova – to name a few I admire) have become really important to me not only in terms of their content but also in giving me ideas about what kinds of researcher it’s possible to be, and how to communicate well in this medium. I think it’s time for me to start practicing.

I became interested in online reflective practices when I worked as e-portfolio co-ordinator in the School of Education at the University of Edinburgh. These practices are well-established in many programmes in my School, and part of my role was supporting lecturers and tutors to envision how they could move their existing offline activities online (into electronic portfolios).

One of the things I found really fascinating in the e-portfolio literature was Barrett and Carney’s idea of ‘conflicting’ or ‘competing’ paradigms: ‘positivist’ (product-driven, performative, externally assessed, based on externally defined outcomes), vs ‘constructivist’ (process-driven, reflective, learner constructed outcomes) (2005, p7-8). These are also sometimes described as ‘map’ and ‘mirror’ portfolios. This helped me understand what I was seeing in discussions I had with colleagues about what the purpose of the (e)portfolio was. (I don’t think this is unique to e-portfolios, but I do think that the move towards database-driven storage of portfolios exposes these tensions, since it lends itself much more to assessment-driven and administrative uses than do local portfolios (paper-based or electronic, but not stored in a central database) (Kimball 2005). Also, any time we talk about doing things differently the question of what we’re actually trying to achieve seems to come up.)

Then I became interested in the extent to which the tension between these ‘conflicting’ paradigms might in fact be an intrinsic part of professional reflective practices. Reflective practice is a key focus in teacher education, for example, and informs many of the professional development activities undertaken as part of programmes and placements. The professional community values self-regulation (General Teaching Council Scotland, “Transition from Student to Teacher.” http://www.gtcs.org.uk/Probation/GainingFullRegistration/Trans): aspiring teachers have to show that they understand and can use the language of reflection, critical thinking and practice development, and that they are willing and able to embrace the ethos of continual self-assessment and improvement. In other words, reflection and self-regulation form part of the basis on which candidates are judged to be competent professionals. So, it seems there is complex relationship between reflection and performance. When what is being assessed or judged is the learner’s ability to be reflective, then reflection itself is performative.

To describe this, along with ‘map’ and ‘mirror’, I have added a third category: portfolio as ‘mask’. I’ve been working on this metaphor a bit over the past few months and am delighted by its richness – so far I’ve identified at least 6 (overlapping) genres of mask: protection, disguise, performance, memory, transformation, punishment. I’ll post more about that another day.

Over the past year, as well as continuing to write and think about e-portfolios, I have been exploring literature around narrative, performativity, identity, professional development and authenticity, and am theorising from a broadly post-structuralist perspective about identity performances. I’m now at the stage of thinking about data generation and I realise that, although I started out by thinking quite specifically about e-portfolios and professional practices (see my PhD proposal), the landscape in higher education includes a lot of online reflective practices around blogging as well. However, since what I am really interested in is the relationship between performance, performativity and reflection, some blogging contexts are more relevant than others. In particular, blogging which is summatively assessed seems to me to carry the same kind of tensions I’ve been talking about with regard to e-portfolios and professional education.

My current thinking is that these practices, grouped together, might usefully be described as ‘high-stakes reflection’, and that this is what I want to explore in my research.

What else might fit into this category? Could scholarly blogging constitute a third strand of high-stakes reflection in higher education, in the sense that it is intimately connected with the academic’s reputation and identity?

“why do I blog under my own name? …I feel that part of my ‘authority’ here on the blog when I’m writing more serious posts depends on you the readers knowing exactly who I am and how and why I’m qualified to do this.” (Howard 2005, http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/09/so-why-w )

An element of choice could set this type of high-stakes reflection apart. Students are not allowed, for the most part, to choose whether to participate in the reflective assessments or professional development activities their lecturers assign to them. Academic bloggers, on the other hand, appear to be free to choose whether and what to blog. However, it may increasingly be the case that in some fields (like e-learning, to name one I know well), academics are expected to blog in much the same way that they are expected to publish in more traditional settings. Anyway, that’s more thinking I need to do, and also I need to decide if this third strand is too ‘out there’ to fit in to my current research project, focussing as it would on academics (or perhaps research students – making it maybe too ‘in here’!) rather than taught students in higher education.

I also need to do more digging to discover if ‘high-stakes reflection’ is a term I should be attributing to someone, or whether I made it up. If anyone’s heard it before, please let me know!

References

Barrett, H. and J. Carney. (2005). “Conflicting Paradigms and Competing Purposes in Electronic Portfolio Development.” Retrieved 12 July, 2006 from http://electronicportfolios.com/portfolios/LEAJournal-BarrettCarney.pdf

Kimball, M. (2005). “Database e-portfolio systems: a critical appraisal.” Computers and Composition 22: 434-458.

Importing a blog into Facebook

I’ve just figured out how to import blog posts into my Facebook profile as ‘notes’ (use the “import a blog” setting in the Notes, enter the RSS feed for your blog, then Facebook will add a new note whenever you write a new post). In fact, I’ve only just realised today how many RSS feeds there are in Facebook. I’ve just subscribed to my friends’ status updates, and posted items, via my RSS reader (NetNewsWire).

newest project

A quick note about the research project I’m currently involved in – the National Museums Online Learning Project. This involves a consortium of English national museums:

• British Museum
• Imperial War Museum
• Natural History Museum
• National Portrait Gallery
• Royal Amouries Museum
• Sir John Soane’s Museum
• Tate
• Victoria & Albert Museum
• Wallace Collection

working together to develop new ways of getting their digital collections used in schools, and by adult learners. My role is as part of the University of Edinburgh’s research team, evaluating the project (formatively and summatively).

There’s more about the project here: http://www.vam.ac.uk/about_va/online_learning/index.html

ICE3

ICE3 is next week, and Hamish and I are putting the finishing touches on our paper. http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/ice3/papers/macleodross.html

It’s been a really exciting process.

Eifel e-portfolio 2006

My eportfolio 2006 blog is at http://ep2006.elggspaces.com/jross/weblog , including my presentation and paper.

ALT-Conference, Edinburgh

The ALT-C (Association for Learning Technology Conference) starts for me tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it - I wasn’t very well in Manchester last year, so couldn’t do as much networking as I would have wanted to.

Already this year I’ve had a chance to meet some people whose work and writing I admire - at the Curverider conference at the University of Edinburgh today.

My ALT-C presentation is tomorrow afternoon. It’s called “Next Generation Learners: do they speak the language? Non-traditional students and their engagement with e-portfolios”, and it was written with my colleagues Hamish Macleod and John Davis, with some very valuable advice from Steve Farrier at the University of Northumbria. I’ll be arguing a few things: that non-traditional, part-time, mature students constitute an important next generation of learners in Higher Education; that the notion of ‘digital immigrants’ often applied to these learners can obscure both a range of attitudes to technology and legitimate dissent and criticism of our ICT implementations; and that embracing the level of flexibilty that the diversity of this group of students requires may force us into taking more radical positions than our institutions can easily accommodate.

I hope I’ll be able to make my case adequately in the short time available, but in any case a longer paper is due to be written, so I’m going to try to be reasonably relaxed and just enjoy the experience.