E-flections

Thanks to anyone who attended my talk in the Wimba distinguished lecture series on wed 24th sept, there were over 60 people online from australia to the USA pretty much spanning the time zones. Here are the references for the talk:

Boud D, Cohen R and Walker D (1985) Reflection: turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page

Brockbank, A., & McGill, I. (2007). Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education. Maidenhead: OU Press.Cowan, John, (2006), On Becoming an Innovative University Teacher, 2^nd Ed, Maidenhead: OU Press.Eskow, S, and Trevitte, C. (2007) Reschooling Society and the Promise of ee-Learning: An Interview with Steve Eskow. Innovate 3(6) http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=502. Retrieved June 9, 2008.Higher Education Academy UK Centre for Legal Education (2008) Introduction to Developing Reflective Practice. http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/reflection/introduction.html Retrieved 14 June 2008
Moon, J. (2004). A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning,  London: Routledge.Moon, J. (2006). Learning Journals: A handbook for reflective practice and professional development. London: Routledge.Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J. (2001). Why lurkers lurk. AMCIS Conference, Boston, June. http://snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/whylurk.pdf . Retrieved May 21 2008

Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice:Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, J B and Jacobs, J (2004) Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 20(2) p232-245, http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html. Retrieved June 15th 2008.

I’m giving a Distinguished Speaker lecture at Wimba online tomorrow wed sept 24th at 16.00 BST/11.00ET about blogs in postgraduate education as an aid to reflective practice.

you can register here 

the abstract is here

Blogs form a vital part of the collaborative space in which postgraduates interact with each other and with tutors and industry professionals; operating as the core of the learning circle, connecting and interlinking its stages and transforming practical assignments into an Schonian repertoire of experience that prepares the student for professional practice. Their real time nature and the seamless mashing up of ideas, reflections, images, links and emotions of the blogging format create the foundations for a future generation of E-flective Practitioners.

This presentation discusses how the School of Media at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, uses blogs alongside synchronous interactions using the Wimba classroom to map the participants learning journey on the course in both full time face-to-face and fully online part time modes, and to build a collaborative community of practice on the course.

Blogs act as a conduit of connected knowledge between the teaching staff and the cohort, offering an unparralled insight into the working methodologies, influences, problems and successes of the group in real time in a way traditional tutorial forms cannot replicate.

The Media School targets mature students who are mid-career professionals looking to deepen and extend their practice, or who are looking to gain the skills and methodological toolbox to operate as professionals in the media and related areas.

Through student feedback and analysis of the role of blogs on the course, the course team identified several key features of blogs, identifying both the strengths and potential problem areas; and how they map onto Schon’s concepts of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action:

A story about blogging, journalism and education this week that reflects the grey boundaries of professionalism in the digital age. 

Alana Taylor,

a journalism student at NYU,  blogged about one of her classes on new media “Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers)” for Mediashift, a pbs andKnight foundation backed blog on digital media hosted by Mark Glaser.

The original post is hereand the follow up post on Mediashift is here

Alana’s original post was a description of her first day of class, and what has caused the controversy is that she posted it to media shift without asking her tutor if she could do so – she had been asked by Glaser to act as an ‘embed’ and write a blog about her studies at NYU. The post offers a critique of the class and the professor as being essentially out of touch with social and new media, although it has positive things to say about the professor too. What turned it into a controversy was that after the mediashift blog the professor banned the class from blogging about the class anymore – despite the fact that having a bog was a requirement of taking the class itself. 

This has generated a debate about the ethics of undercover reporting, and of privacy issues, as well as academic freedoms , rights of free speech etc etc. What emerges from Glaser’s followup report is the NYU didn’t have any established practice relating to blogs in the classroom and what is and is not acceptable. Interstingly, the comments on Alana’s original post (of which there are many) mostly focus on the discussion of what should j-schools be teaching about social media and whether blogs etc are journalism or not. a few question the ethics of Alana’s writing about her class, but the trust is elasewhere. The ethical debates really surfaced after her censure by the professor, both in private and then, apparently, in class. 

To me the main issue here relates to what territory can and should blogs cover in education?

I think the point is that anyone using blogs in an educational context should lay out the ground rules for the project in advance of starting it, making clear what territory the blogs are to cover and in what way. Simply asking students to blog without any context is not enough; if you dont set out guidelines you are opening pandoras box and you cant ask students to set up a blog and then object to what they write on it if you dont give them some direction in advance.
As blogs are publically viewable and searchable, this blog could well have surfaced to anyone interested in journalism education at nyu or mediashift for example anyway.


We have lots of potential applicants to our course for example who apply because they have read the blogs of current students that they find by looking for search terms relevant to the subject area we cover- and someone like Michael Wesch‘s auto searching of blogs would have picked it up if it as relevant to his area of interest I’m sure…..

We use blogs on our course as a central part of the student’s reflective practice, deploying them to act as learning journals and to assist in building a community of practice collaboratively. As part of this, we have found that the blogs, because of their more informal nature, are a great vehicle for healthy critiques of the course itself, in both positive and negative ways, and we actively encourage this kind of feedback as it is far more valuable that the kind usually obtained from anonymous student feedback questionnaires and the like, as it is precisely focused on the course itself, not abstract concepts about student satisfaction etc.
getting this kind of real time feedback about the course means that we can quickly respond when students feel that they are not getting what the need, and also celebrate with them when the feedback is more positive. This keeps us on our toes and prevents us from falling into complacency and stagnation, and is especially useful on newer, innovative courses as we acknowledge that we are unlikely to get it right every time, especially in the beginning.

In terms of the details of this particular case, it seems that asking students to keep a blog as part of their studies and then denying them the possibility of writing about their studies in it seems counterintuitive, we make it clear from the very beginning that the blogs should offer a ‘warts and all’ description of the students learning journey.

Blogs are a fantastic tool for reflective learning, but they cannot be deployed without thinking through the implications of the relationship between private and public spheres, especially in terms of professional practice – in fact they offer a perfect opportunity for students to explore these boundaries in a relatively safe environment, a kind of sandbox to explore what we characterise as professional not confessional.

But they do have a public face and students need to be aware of the implications of this – one student of ours had their blog read by a client who was not too impressed with their descriptions of the PR company that had set up a story they had been assigned to cover.

So we have established up a clear set of rules of netiquette that cover how to post about others work , the course etc that serve to act as guidelines for how the bloggers can navigate these treacherous waters.

It also raises issues about what technology can students use in the classroom? I regularly use my laptop at conferences etc to take notes and to follow up on the speaker if they mention a name I don’t know, I google it and check out the reference immediately, which often helps to make sense of what the speaker is discussing. And i’ll happily admit to checking my email at the same time – not writing it though, generally. And half the audience at conferences these days seems to be twittering live. So if this is acceptable behaviour at academic conferences, which it seems to be, why not in class??

To me, having the resources of the world at my fingertips during a lecture is a fantastic resource, and i encourage it in my classes – often the students will look up urls in real time on our online course and post them into the webconferencing software we use when i mention a new photographer or issue, acting almost like teaching assistants or on the spot researchers for me – i’ll even ask them to do this too if we come across a relevant issue in discussion.

I’m currently working on a paper for the designs on e learning conference 2008 at Penn State university in September on blogs in post grad education in art and design. As part of this I’ve been thinking about what blogs can offer that other forms of reflective learning journals cannot. So I’ve been playng around with the idea of a learning cloud as being more appropriate to e learning rather than a learning cycle. Comments welcome on the following:

Kolb’s learning cycle has been expanded on and developed by many authors, with Cowan’s learning spiral and Boud and Webb’s learning patterns developments of the concept. However, even though they develop beyond the Kolbian analogy, most of these still suggest a relatively linear progression through the various stages. However, the relationship between experiential learning, reflection, the practitioner’s established repertoire and knowledge and the development of new levels of understanding is more fluid and cross-referencing that these models suggest. In many ways, the analogy is with the experience of the web, with hyperlinks connecting different levels of shallow and deep knowledge and information, some of which is very ‘hard ‘ and academic, and some of which is ‘softer’ and more anecdotal or personal. To continue this analogy then, I therefore suggest the metaphor of a cloud of learning, where at various points all these different elements are more or less relevant to the progress of understanding, depending on the exact circumstances of each learning experience. Thinking of this in a more three dimensional way, the linkages, connections and cross references that occur are much more complex and interdependent than traditional two-dimensional models, and the ‘eureka moment’, generated by Schon’s concept of ‘back talk’, (Schon 1987) when apparently unconnected concepts inform each other is more easily explained. This complex process of articulating experience into learning is typical of the ‘real world’ of work based learning, where problems have to be solved using a wide range of skills, abilities, knowledge and analysis that draws on practical understanding, ethical awareness, emotion, technical ability and intuition.

This is where the blog, I believe, has a vital role to play in sitting inside the learning cloud, acting as the fulcrum and catalyst for the learning experience, serving as a place to simultaneously record, reflect, plan, discuss, review and explore ones ideas, testing them out both on oneself and on an invited audience of peers and mentors. The fluid, flexible nature of the blog, with its relatively unstructured hierarchy combined with the ability to search the archive using tags and categories, allows a ‘stream of consciousness’ style of writing whilst retaining the ability to rapidly and easily cross reference individual posts, reslicing the thoughts of the writer in countless ways depending on the search terms used. This is analogous to the ‘double entry’ format of journal that Moon suggests, where entries can be retuned to and revisited in the light of future experiences. Finally, their open-ended and inherently ‘unfinished’ nature echoes Schon’s insight into ‘the value of incompleteness’ (Schon, 1987, p 272), with the implication that learning is a developmental process, where the journey is as important as the destination.

As a media practitioner and educator I’m interested particularly in the ways that new media are transforming the landscape of how we source our information, knowledge and beliefs about the world. We are shifting from a passive stance of absorbing from fixed media like books and newspapers, and from the relatively traditional teaching methods of the lecturer and didactic instruction; to an active model where we seek out the material we are interested in form a variety of sources, with the web increasingly predominant as the first port of call. Knowledge, especially social knowledge, is therefore a construction in which we are engaged at both a private and personal level.

This paradigm shift I think has implications too in terms of how it opens up our understanding that knowledge is an artificial construct, the sheer weight of information and volume of opinion on the web cannot but lead to the realisation that nothing can be ‘objectively true’ and that everything is socially constructed.

We have to therefore constantly engage with the web in an ongoing dialogue of assessment and evaluation of the sources, trusting some and abandoning others according to out personal perceptions of what we believe in, and what others that we believe in, believe in.

This constant process of sifting in a conscious way maps closely onto Douglas Schon’s theories of the Reflective Practitioner, an approach to understanding how professionals navigate the ever changing problems they encounter by testing them against their existing set of practices, or repertoire, and then adapting and developing that repertoire in response to the solving of the new situation.

The potential for the web, especially in blogs and the other forms of social media that entice us to evaluate our positions e.g. linkedin, means that we are potentially able to seamlessly upgrade our reflective practice in a way that becomes embedded in our daily rituals of gathering information about the world and then disseminating and explaining it to others

In this blog I will try to map out my (and others) thoughts on this ever changing landscape, and highlight innovations and new perspectives, as well as think through some of the issues myself