Sue Watling – Page 2

Looking back looking forwards and some future dust

Sue Watling / August 28, 2015 / PhD, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

I’m not sure what’s worse. Taking annual leave for your research and not getting any done or spending your annual leave ill in bed. When is a fail not a fail? Maybe when a plan changes trajectory. More research interviews this week. Interviews mean transcription – on average half a day for each one – but I can’t think of a better way to get research re-engaged.

The challenge of digital competence has concerned me for some time. The sector wants to see technology enhancing student learning. Which is fine. I passionately believe in the affordances of VLE to widen participation and accessibility, but while the literature is full of accounts of elearning and student digital expectations, the eteaching aspect is all too often missing. Decisions around Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) rest on assumptions of digital capability – I call these the myths of digital competence – and like attracts like leaving few opportunities to expose the true diversity of digital practice. TELEDA brought together the sure and the less-sure when it came to learning technologies. It highlighted digital divides on campus where academics have traditionally viewed ICT as a burden and a barrier to practice or managerialist tools for the 3 e’s – economy, efficiency and effectiveness (Becher and Trowler, 2001:13) but TELEDA’s stress on reflective practice encouraged deeper approaches to what digital pedagogy and online collaboration really means in unchartered places where theory meets practice face on.

Transcribing the interviews I’m reminded of just how much digital attitudes and practices are as individual as we are. In the way handwriting and fingerprints are unique, so are the ways in which we approach and utilise online environments. This makes a one size fits all approach impossible and with so little common ground, the process of data analysis also gets complex – this is qualitative research in 50 shades of grey compared to the more quantitative black and white binary.

The research is progressing – albeit slowly – and there is a growing sense it is making a difference. The soapbox will soon be travelling again. I’m presenting on the digital university at this year’s SHRE Conference, at the Higher Education Stream at BETT in January and have been invited to give the Keynote at the Making Research Count Network for North West England. Meanwhile the summer draws to a close and a new academic year is in sight. All over the country digital devices are being purchased and prepared for learning, staff know Blackboard is ready and waiting for them to log on and the inevitable dust is waiting to gently settle on the PhD again.

#phdplan mega fail. Thank you Mr Buggy Flu

Sue Watling / August 7, 2015August 7, 2015 / #PhD Summer 2015, PhD

#Phdfail on massive scale! For four days the laptop stayed shut. I couldn’t face it never mind open a research book. Wot No Internet? Yes, that’s how bad it’s been.

Shivers and shakes with a throat like splintered glass. The only bonus is there’s considerably less of me than a week ago. I blame the flight home. I’m susceptible to flight flu. I catch it coming back and usually within a week of being home. Going out there’s the excitement of being on the move, new places and people ahead. On the return you’re tired and more likely to succumb to the bugs which thrive in pressurised cabin conditions. I landed on the Sunday and knew the Tef-Talks were in London on the Wednesday so kept going. Once back in ‘ull again, with the research calling loudly – to no avail – the descent was gradual at first – then it got faster – and faster – until the only thing submitted was me to my bed, in a haze of olbas oil and snotty tissue – so glamorous – so much fun – so not what I had planned for a week of annual leave.

I can’t remember when I last was as poorly as this.

I think it was 1997.

Today I’m back downstairs in another unhealthy pose, laptop on knee, feet on coffee table. All around me are the books and papers which have been there all year. Nothing much has changed. Including the research. It’s no further on. I’m another week older with nothing to show for it.

But it has to be done and I’m the only one who has to do it.

Image from Joe Heller at the Cable Post http://www.cagle.com/2013/01/the-flu/

#phdplan Day 5 tidying neural drawers and networks

Sue Watling / July 31, 2015 / #PhDPlan, blogging, PhD

Blogging is a bit like therapy. You bring it up and out and in theory leave it all behind. The synthesis of a problem’s component parts is a mix of catharsis and reflection. A mental tidying up of your neural drawers and networks. Drawing a line and moving on. I wish!

It’s day five of the #PhDPlan. Another fail. This is like naming and shaming. A verbal purge.

But stay with me. There is a happy ending.

I’ve thought this week about keeping a work diary. It’s like I feel guilty; worried it might look like I’m taking annual leave for – well, annual leave. Where does it come from? The continual need to justify my time – prove I really am ensconced with laptop, chasing the consequences of email. When I do stand up, I have to take care to manoeuvre around the paper piles which have reappeared on the floor. I don’t want another accident but am painfully aware (in the literal sense) the last time I made any progress was when my ankle was broken. My ‘trip-slip-snap’ experience was the last opportunity to make progress – sad but true. I haven’t really got back to it since. That was February. This weekend is August. There has to be a way to fit more hours into the day.

smiley face image from http://s3.amazonaws.com/coolchaser.com/thumb-24428211.jpg

But a few more interviews and the data will all be safely gathered in. That’s progress and this is the breakthrough. I realise as I write how part of the problem is I’m looking forward rather than backwards. If you focus on how far there is to go you don’t see how far you’ve actually travelled.

Pat Cryer has good advice in the chapter ‘Keeping going when you feel like giving up’ in the excellent book The Research Student’s Guide to Success. Apart from the welcome empathy, the chapter helps put my problems into perspective. I’m not bored or disillusioned, I haven’t lost my way. I know good-enough is enough, no one has beaten me to it and – dare I say – there are no external emergency situations demanding my attention.

Best of all this is all in chapter 21 of 25 – that’s 20 chapters I’ve survived. The remaining ones are about thesis writing, the viva and afterwards (love the instruction to take a holiday – travel and disconnection always work well for me!)

So the process and practice of blogging works again. The alchemy of reflection in action. Using words to make the mental shift from where I am to where I need to be. This is do-able after all. I know I’m not on my own and there are others out there who are grappling with the challenge of part time postgraduate study. It will get better. You will survive. At the end of the day you’ll have your own little bulge on the circle of knowledge as Matt Might so wonderfully explains inhis pictorial representation and what’s more, it will have your name on it.

Matt Might diagram of PhD knowledge image from http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Monday is another week, so good luck to me, and good luck to you all too 🙂

Second edition (2000) of Pat Cryer’s book is avaialable online http://www.mheducation.co.uk/openup/chapters/0335206867.pdf

TEF-Talk; putting teaching excellence and teaching technology together

Sue Watling / July 30, 2015July 30, 2015 / digital literacies, TEF

What is the TEF? All we have so far is Jo Johnson’s Teaching at the Heart of the System speech and a mass of speculation – some of the best being the SEDA thread which Sally Brown has developed into a SWOT analysis.

Yesterday I attended a Building the Teaching Excellence Framework Seminar organised by the University Alliance in the Deans Yard precinct of Westminster Abbey. The event was an open TEF discussion. After four activities, three speeches and a contribution from Charlie Roper (politics student at UWE Bristol) we’d surfaced multiple issues but no firm conclusions other than highlighting the difficulty of defining what teaching excellence might look like.

The TEF idea isn’t new. There are references to a renewed focus on high-quality teaching in the 2011 Higher Education Students at the Heart of the System white paper. The issue is more about defining what ‘quality’ means and constructing any model which fits the eclecticness of the higher education experience. Is quality the same as inspirational? If they are linked then the paper by Katherine Jenson at the Learning and Teaching Institute, University of Huddersfield, might be a good place to start. What is Inspirational Teaching? Working Paper 3

In terms of focusing on teaching quality, I’m reminded of the days of the TQEF. Funding was provided to support learning and teaching which supported national areas of priority. These included widening participation, fair access, retention, employability and encouraging and disseminating good and innovative practice in support of high quality learning and teaching. The last point may be worth revisiting in these TEF-ful times. The TQEF at Lincoln was managed by the Teaching and Learning Development Unit and the legacies from the Teacher Fellow awards which emerged from these funds can still be seen today (link to follow).

I think appropriate choices of pedagogy lie at the heart of a ‘quality’ education. The gap between traditional transmissive modes of delivery and constructivist teaching and learning needs to be narrowed and crossed with appropriate bridges. Like digital scholarship. Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (image below from James Atherton’s Learning and Teaching site is worth consideration. It requires interaction and collaboration with content, teachers and peer groups and can be applied to both online and offline environments.

Put staff development, digital pedagogies, scholarship and the internet together and you have a way forward. Activities which encourage students to explore OER and MOOC, staff to transfer lecture content via free software like the new Xerte, and peer review practices across both staff and student experiences all offer ways and means of interaction.

Tell me, teach me, involve me proverbs froom http://www.slideshare.net/jgigante/projectbased-learning

The EDEU Sharing Practice videos have ideas for engagement in particular Valeria Carroll on student led assessment. Rather than treat VLE in isolation we should use them to take a fresh look at how teaching excellence might appear. Make or break: the UK’s digital future report notes that the higher education sector “has not responded to the urgent need for reskilling” and calls for institutions to develop courses to give the students the skills they need. This won’t happen unless staff receive appropriate support to get digital in the first place. Digital graduate attributes need digitally competent teachers. SoTL needs an ‘e’ in the way that e-learning already has one and e-teaching should have one!

My suggestion is teaching excellence can’t happen in isolation from the adoption of appropriate and meaningful teaching technologies.

Woodcut image from http://oldweb.cecm.sfu.ca/personal/tstanway/MKM/thesis.intro3.html
Tell Me, Show Me, Involve me image from http://www.slideshare.net/jgigante/projectbased-learning

#PhDPlan Day 2 – fail!

Sue Watling / July 28, 2015July 28, 2015 / #PhDPlan

On Day 1 of the PhD plan I wrote a blog and made myself a Don’t Panic poster. It was a start.

Today full panic mode kicked in.

How do people prioritise a part-time Phd when the non-Phd workload is also high?

I tweeted this question to the #PhD community on twitter where there are numerous phd hashtags #phdlife #phdadvice #phd #phdconnect #phdchat

Thank you to everyone who responded to my tweet of despair. This is the power of social media – the linking of strangers through empathy. It’s the realisation of the dreams of early WWW pioneers like Tim Berners Lee who wrote about the potential power and universality of digital connections. I’m not sure about the suggestion I turn off the internet though.

Part of my #PhdPlan was to review how I use social media. A part-time doctorate is tough. It gets lonely too. You need all the support you can get. I’d thought if I reached out to other postgrads spending their summer with their laptops, I might build up some digital motivation and support. What I hadn’t planned was the panic attack when I realised – in the midst of my post conference blues – the amount of non-phd work I’d come back to.

Prioritising research is not easy. I’ve spent the day trying to create some space, ticked a few tasks off the ToDo list and accepted an invitation to talk at the Learn Live for Higher Education event at Bett in January ’16. Opportunities to disseminate represent incentives so this was a positive – and the closest I’ve got to my research all day – apart from visiting PhD Comics – for inspiration not procrastination you understand.

Tomorrow is Day 3 of #PhDPlan and I’m in London.

Here’s hoping Day 4 is when it all starts to happen.

#BbWorld15 final reflections, the virtual versus the real

Sue Watling / July 27, 2015 / #Bbworld15, conference, PhD, social impact of the Internet

Our internet enabled lives brings everything to us via the screen. This makes it easy to forget the delight of an original experience. Delight was a BBWorld word. Not an adjective I’d have associated with VLE but Jay Bhatt used it a number of times in the opening keynote. Does Blackboard delight me? Probably not. Frustrating and at times upsetting maybe – but not delight. I tell myself affordances matter more than appearance.

However the association does reinforce how we’re all in relationships with our technology. If in doubt, go to work without your phone. Analyse what this feels like. The relationship between you may be more deeply complex than you realised. Today, free public wifi is increasingly available and we take connection for granted but in the convention centre I couldn’t log on (frustrate, upset etc!) so decided to go solo, aware that wherever I was, at least 75% of people were head down in active engagement with the internet, dividing their attention and multiple tasking. I describe myself as having analogue roots, realising as I get older, this is something unique. Soon no one will be able to tell it like it was at the beginning – in the pre internet days. I find this more alarming than delightful.

Conferences are only ever a brief visit to a different place. Your experience of any cultural difference is limited but often there’s a gap between registration and the opening session plus a night flight home gives the best part of a day to get out and about. BBWorld seemed a long distance from Washington DC although maybe through US eyes it was next door. I met people from mid and western states who’d hopped on a plane to be there like we’d catch a bus. The hotel ran a shuttle to Union Station so I did my homework and bought a map.

I tend to believe the real is an improvement on the virtual copies we’re becoming accustomed to in particular with art, for example any painting by da Vinci or Botticelli has a quality which gets flattened out in the digital or paper versions. During a brief sprint around Washington’s National Gallery of Art I looked at Wind from the Sea by Andrew Wyeth and realised the digital copies I was used to seeing had the opposite effect. The painting looked better online than face to face. I’ve been trying to analyse this ever since.

It’s an image of net curtains blowing in the breeze. Being net they’re translucent making it easy to see the countryside beyond. In the virtual versions I’d been struck by both the simplicity and photographic quality of the image. Seeing it in the real was like gestalt in reverse. The whole was less than the individual parts, in particular the fine, thin brush strokes of the net curtains foregrounded in black lines. As a photograph can focus on what is closest to the lens and blur what lies beyond, so this had the same effect. The virtual gave you the overall the image while in the the real, this foregrounded layer stood out and prevented me from taking in the whole picture; an effect which is completely invisible in the copy.

Virtual environments widen opportunities for educational participation, student centred choice and life long learning, but making the most of internet enabled education requires sophisticated digital literacies. Not only do we need the skills to authenticate what we find online, we also need to know the difference between the real and the virtual. Both my analogue roots and digital inclusion soapbox keep me grounded with continual reminders of the socially constructed nature of digital connections. The impact of the internet is a subject we’re all involved in with regard to education but the extent to which we reflect on it is less well documented. Digital capability frameworks are bringing in issues of digital identity and the permanence of digital footprints, but the attention we give to cultural change is still minimal. Few curriculums include critical reflection on the social impact of the internet on their subject discipline or how individual digital practices exclude rather than include participation.

The value of conferences like #BBWorld15 is the time and space they give individuals to engage with their own areas of expertise. What they could do more of is give time and space to the wider implications of teaching and learning with regard to the implications of working with the virtual versus the real. At the National Gallery of Art there was an exhibition by impressionist painter Caillebotte which included The Floor Scrapers, a painting which first showed me how art could substitute photography. This was an unexpected surprise and – to use Jay Bhatt’s word – a total delight – an experience very much improved in the real over its copy in the virtual world.

Washington DC landmarks are iconic to a degree you feel familiar with them. It must be similar for people visiting London for the first time. Using the virtual/real duality I’m reassured that for me (with the exception of the scaffolded dome of the US Capitol) the instances of the real had a more powerful effect than the virtual. The challenge for us all is to ensure virtual learning experiences are equally powerful – with affordances which at times exceed – the experience of learning in traditional environments which are face to face.

#BbWorld15 part five; personal reflections at the end of the show

Sue Watling / July 25, 2015July 27, 2015 / #Bbworld15, conference, PhD, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

This is the end of BbWorld15. My home has been the largest hotel, resort and convention centre I’ve ever seen. It’s a glass and steel bubble. For days I didn’t step outside. Apart from being too hot – in the mid thirties – you didn’t need to. Everything was on the inside including the trees and gardens although the glass lifts were not for the faint hearted! Also outside there wasn’t a great deal to see or do.

But on the inside it was was busy. Over 3000 delegates and dozens of parallel sessions, even going full pace you only scratch the surface. Already the conference is starting to blur but I have the key points loaded into these blog posts. They’re a bit rushed. Some of the pictures aren’t too good and not all of have alt text but they will be my reminder of the privilege of being here. Blackboard is one of the few conferences which crosses the boundaries and brings together this peculiar hybrid breed of academic developer, learning technologist and researcher. What unites us is the value we place on technology to make a difference to the student experience. What separates us is the work we do supporting the late adopters and digitally shy academics whilst promoting the need for inclusive practice so ensure no one gets shut out or left behind.

Adoption was a core feature of many presentations. There was a distinct shift in emphasis from what could be done to how to encourage and support engagement through sequential stepping.

I’ve got some new ideas. Maybe developing a rubric for universal design; capturing the core content of the four TELEDA learning blocks – learning design, open education, social media, working with audio and video – and releasing them as OER; continuing to find ways to apply the essential criteria of higher education – communication, critical thinking, deeper approaches to reflective practice – and applying them to technology training.

Underpinning it all is the affirmation I’ve received this week how core to all adoption just might be the shift from training to teaching – seeing e-teaching as the corollary to e-learning. While one of the messages of BbWorld is to put the student first, it’s increasingly clear how some people are starting to consider the changing attitudes towards digitally shy academics. Overall, attitudes to ‘faculty’ were not hugely sympathetic and this is part of the problem. If ever I needed evidence of the digital divides on campus between technologists and teachers there was plenty to choose from. Looking back over the years it’s difficult to find many attempts to rethink how digital support is provided and now we’re in a time where everyone is stretched and squeezed, the suggestion to invest more resources into digital staff development will not be popular. It needs more people to recognise and accept the adoption of digital technology is problematic. What troubles me is how those who promote, support and maintain it are often those who find it easy to use. They forget or have never experienced what it feels like to be digitally lost and confused.

The phone on the hotel room has a button called Consider it Done.

It’s linked to your room so you are greeted with your name and what comes across as a genuinely meaningful-sounding question ‘What can I assist you with today?’ Once I’d experienced this response I actually felt ok about using the service again. It made a difference to how I experienced not knowing something or not understanding how things worked. This is the effect we need to generate and make happen.

#BbWord15 part four; the three C triangle of institutional adoption of technology

Sue Watling / July 25, 2015July 25, 2015 / #Bbworld15, conference, PhD, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

At #BbWorld I presented and took part in a panel on Institutional adoption of technology; a double opportunity to disseminate early research findings. Last year on the west coast for BbWorld14, an 8.00 a.m. slot was considered an advantage but not on the east coast, as I was told afterwards. Here people take time to get going first thing so we suffered a bit from numbers. Having said that, it was a large room and there were lots of questions, plus what has been really rewarding this week is the general interest from everyone I spoke to about the subject of institutional adoption. In the panel session I talked about TELEDA, how its multiple layers offer opportunities to experience Blackboard from the student perspective, while the stress on critical reflection – transferring the experience to individual teaching practice – appears to be developing an evidence based shift in the way academics view Blackboard as a technology for enhancing the student experience.

I recorded the presentation the night before using Camtasia Relay on my laptop. This is available to everyone on the University of Lincoln network. Download it from the Software Centre and it’s a quick way to record a narrative over PowerPoint slides. I opted for providing captions because apart from being inclusive, I appreciate their value. I find it hard to learn by sound or image and prefer words instead. There lots of reasons why alternative formats benefit the learner experience but creating captions take time – there ‘s no way around this. It demands a shift in attitude and practice. In the same way you wouldn’t upload a textual learning resource with half of it missing, audio and video transcripts are an integral part of the whole resource. Relay provides automatic captioning but you only have to switch on YouTube captions to see the nonsense voice recognition generates and Relay is the same.

This is the first slide of my presentation. I tell people this is me because as anyone who works with me will confirm, if the technology can go wrong its me it goes wrong with.

Right now I’m experiencing familiar frustration. The video is stuck in Relay. I can’t find a way to embed it into WordPress. Maybe I can’t? I don’t know. There’s no one to ask for help and I’m feeling pressured. I know what I want to do. I know it should be achievable but I can’t see how to do it and I’m running out of time. Does this sound familiar? If you are a digital education developer then you’d probably be ok. If you are an academic who views technology with a mix of awe for its capabilities but fear and dread with regard to your own confidence then you’ll identify with this. It’s part of the massive shift needed to adopt VLE. Without empathy then support is useless.

So back to the presentation. This is what I did with the how and the why of it.

I’m three years into the data collection, on the final set of interviews. Digital adoption is complex and involves at least three criteria; capabilities, competence and confidence.

Underpinning these three C’s are other findings which the data analysis appears to support. These are listed in the image below. It’s the final bullet point which I think lies at the heart of on-campus digital divides between those with the three digital C’s and those without. The literature shows how e-learning and the student experience has been privileged over the staff experience. While some say e-teaching is implicit in e-learning, I would argue than unless it is made explicit there is a risk of making assumptions about baselines and starting points, which in turn will lead to initiative failure.
PS Finally worked out the connection between Relay and WordPress and embedded the code below – which gives me the message ‘Security Error’! If the technology can go wrong then it’s me it goes wrong with….

#BbWorld15 part three; presentations

Sue Watling / July 25, 2015July 25, 2015 / #Bbworld15, conference, digital inclusion, equality and diversity, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

The focus on reimagining education to fit broader cohorts – reshaping itself for students rather than students reshaping themselves to fit traditional offerings – is making tangible differences to approaches to virtual learning and a number of presentations at BbWorld15 included digital accessibility. The sessions were well attended and offered pragmatic frameworks where the rationale for changing practice was a given. Sessions had less emphasis on the ‘why’ and more about the ‘how’. It’s like the reality of widening participation to an eclectic student base, including people with varying disabilities and impairments, is accepted almost without question. Of particular note was the high profile given to veterans returning to education. Diversity was not openly questioned. Instead I found a genuine interest in how to ensure inclusive practice with online learning resources.

Henrietta Spiegel offered steps to make Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF formats accessible and included useful examples of the rubbish generated by YouTube’s automatic captioning system. Come on Blackboard. Invest in voice recognition software and you’ll be onto a winner. Marlene Zentz, from the University of Montana, had student Aaron Page demonstrating Jaws screen reading software. Thanks Aaron. For anyone not understanding the value of technology for visual impairment, you may have taken them over the learning threshold with your real life examples of what happens if Heading Styles and meaningful text links are not used. It isn’t technically difficult. It just means use Heading Style 1,2,3 etc in MS Word and avoid the words ‘click here’ in a URL. No pictures unfortunately. I’m hoping all the presentation slides will soon be available online.

David Rathburn from the University of Cincinnati was a allocated a 5.15 slot but it was still well attended. This was the only session I saw which provided a handout – a useful reminder of how helpful this when information and experience overload in developing! I nearly cheered out loud (but I’m British) to see the quote from Tim Berners Lee on how the ambitions of the early internet pioneers was to create a digital democracy. Sad therefore that nearly 30 years on, digital divides are wider and more invisible than ever before. However, if digital educators can ‘get it’ then the future is is potentially a more inclusive one.

For me, accessibility sessions like these are inspiring. Digital inclusion is not difficult, it just needs a shift in alignment from assuming everyone operates in digital environments in the same ways you and your immediate colleagues do and a more critical ‘think before you link’ approach when uploading content to VLEs.

Closely associated to the subject of inclusive practice is multimedia. Many of these sessions were standing room only which emphasises the value being placed on audio and video learning resources. I liked the idea of using a video in site announcements and discussion threads. Blackboard have recently acquired VoiceThread so it would be useful if some of VT’a simplicity was incorporated into Bb. My TELEDA courses have raised a number of multimedia type issues. Many academic staff don’t have access to a webcam or a microphone or even a quiet place to make recordings; something reaffirmed by others here this week. (One session I missed was about developers carrying their tools in backpacks – not ideal but maybe a potential solution.)

A Poll carried out within one session – image on the right below – also reaffirmed the on campus digital divides I’m looking to narrow and bridge with my research showing an almost nil representation at the conference from academics/faculty.

A multimedia explosion has been created from the affordances of user generated content, the shift of media production from professional to amateur and from fixed studio to mobile (and personal) devices. Blended delivery and flipped learning are all creating pressure for more interactive resources. A starting point is to raise awareness of OER content and efficient ways of embedding multimedia into Blackboard sites. The next step is to look at creating our own. You don’t need to be a professional – content can be ‘good enough’ to still be effective. It’s the learning design rather than technical expertise which makes the difference.

Part of the problem is the need to rethink the traditional boundaries between ‘technology training’ and ‘teacher education’. This was the subject of my presentation and there is more information on this in #Bbworld15 Part Four.

Image from Joe Heller at the Cable Post http://www.cagle.com/2013/01/the-flu/

Second edition (2000) of Pat Cryer’s book is avaialable online http://www.mheducation.co.uk/openup/chapters/0335206867.pdf

Woodcut image from http://oldweb.cecm.sfu.ca/personal/tstanway/MKM/thesis.intro3.html Tell Me, Show Me, Involve me image from http://www.slideshare.net/jgigante/projectbased-learning

Woodcut image from http://oldweb.cecm.sfu.ca/personal/tstanway/MKM/thesis.intro3.html
Tell Me, Show Me, Involve me image from http://www.slideshare.net/jgigante/projectbased-learning