January 2017 – howsheilaseesIT

#BYOD4L reflections, adding another "c" to the mix – custodian v (re) designer

A large part of my last week was taken up with the Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L). Along with my co-organisers Alex Spiers and Neil Withnell, and our lovely team of mentors (couldn’t have done it without you guys). I was connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating all over “t’interweb”. Well, to be more accurate I was actually active on twitter with a wee splash of periscope. I glanced a bit a google+ but it’s only really today that I have been able to make some time to reflect on the week.

One area we wanted to try and engage our community with this year was reflection, the notion of developing their own (digital) stories of their experiences. You can see some stories here, and this blog post which explains our thinking in a bit more detail.

We really hoped that this approach might help share some of the conversations and practice sharing that take particularly in the tweet chats. Also from a more pragmatic point of view, due to my departmental restructuring, I have had to articulate the value of my participation in the event and the value of running f2f drop in sessions during the week. Being able to describe how this informal learning experience can be valuable for formal CPD has been slightly higher on my agenda than on previous years.

It’s probably too early to say if/how this approach has worked, but both online and in our f2f session colleagues were talking about how they were going to try new their own contexts. I’m certainly going to try mentimeter for feedback.

Looking at the google+ community I was taken by this post from Józefa Fawcett. Apart from really liking the format of the post. It really got me thinking about my role in the event and some of the opportunities and challenges of taking over the running of an established open course.

BYOD4L was created by Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Buckingham. They have published widely and openly about the underpinning pedagogical model they developed and used to design the course.

BYOD4L has always embraced a number of online spaces – the main site (which is a wordpress blog), twitter, google +, Facebook (though that community has kind of naturally come to an end). This can be overwhelming and confusing for many, but for people like me ( a bit of a digital flibbertigibbet ) it’s not a problem, from the beginning I embraced the ~~chaos~~ challenges of communicating across multiple platforms.

This is the second year that Neil, Alex and I have been in charge of the event. And it strikes me now that we haven’t really ever had a big discussion about changing the design. It’s not that we’ve not talked about it, we just haven’t haven’t had a big chat around the design and any potential re-design. We all, I think, take comfort from the “if it ain’t broke . . .” adage. We are all also limited by amount of time we can spare to actually make any substantial changes.

Today I’m wondering have we been subconsciously acting more like custodians of the event, the original learning design and web design. Not wanting to change the original design in case we offended Chrissi or Sue by changing their design. Which is odd really as it is an open resource, we all claim to be open practitioners, and both Chrissi and Sue I’m sure would be delighted if we did. Any changes, like adding daily periscope broadcasts, the idea of personal stories have maybe been more like tinkering round the edges.

One of the perennial challenges of getting people to use OERs is that of context. Early studies such as the Good Intentions report highlighted that. People can feel it’s almost easier to create their own resource than to edit an existing one. For me, with BYBO4L it has almost been the opposite. The overall design works (despite some of the confusion that some people feel) so why change it?

Perhaps we should have made the time to really edit and update, in particular, the blog. But part of me feels like that is the history of the event which should be shared and I don’t actually have the right to significantly change it or archive it. Or is that just an excuse for bad resource and archiving management on my part (aka laziness)? I thought writing this post my help me with this conundrum, but I think I need a bit more time. If you have any suggestions or thoughts then I’d love to hear them.

Is it really all about the deal?

We are now truly in the post-truth era. With Brexit becoming a reality and today’s inauguration of “the Donald”, we are also firmly in the age of ‘’the deal’.

Life, democracy, world peace, nuclear weapons, courgettes – everything we know is about doing deals. Just how these deals will pan out remains to be seen. Britain may be “open for business” and ready to do deals; the new US Presidency may be headed by a self proclaimed King of the deal. But from where I’m sitting I am very skeptical about both.

Deals are about about negotiation. Call me crazy, but I’m just not convinced the business aka bullying tactics of the boardroom are really appropriate for nuclear arms negotiations for example. Similarly vacuous soundbites from Mrs May do not really convince me of any strong negotiation position for the UK with the EU and the rest of the world.

But she needs to walk the deal maker walk. The image of the deal maker is all to often associated with stereotypical (male ) power and imho bullying tactics. More than ever the deals will spun to suit to political ends and egos. Winning, or the perception of winning, will be all important.

So where does this leave us in education? Will we need to embrace ‘the deal’ in new ways? What negotiation tactics can we employ to ensure our future? Consolation which is all were are really offered by governments around any major change in our provision, structure and funding is not negotiation.

Negotiated Learning is not new, it quite rightly permeates many of our university level programmes. Education should always be a negotiated process. Education is not about telling people what to do or what to think. Equally it can’t all be customer driven. Part of the joy of being a student is actually not knowing what you need to know. But you don’t realise that until well after you finished particularly any formal education.

Education is about providing learning environments that support engagement and foster confidence, understanding, knowledge sharing, extension and growth. But that’s really hard to measure. It’s hard to broker a deal based on fuzzy stuff (hello TEF). Easier to tell universities, schools what they need to measure, produce some league tables, give out some medals and let the politicians do their deals.

It’s really hard to know what do write, or say today of all days, maybe this is the start of the end of days. But I do think what we can and should do as educators is to help empower everyone in our society to articulate and understand the process of negotiation. To question bland, meaningless statements made by politicians, to demand evidence not “gut instinct”. Most of all we can’t be silent we need to be able to bring the deal makers to task and make sure that the are constantly engaged in meaningful negotiations with us, the electorate.

I still don’t understand what the Brexit deal is for the UK – a direct result of the failure from both sides during the referendum to engage effectively and meaningfully with the electorate. Just now all I can see is a few people wanting more of something from the past, but leaving the rest of us with less than we had for the future.

Pre #bydo4l reflections on twitter, Trump and why I'm not leaving social media

I’m getting ready for the week long social media frenzy that is #BYOD4L (bring your own device for learning). This is the 5th iteration of the open, online course and as it’s evolved, it’s becoming less about devices and more about general effective use of technology within in education. As I’ve blogged about before, I really enjoy #byod4l and the effective way it brings people together to share practice. As Chris Jobling has done it’s a great way to reflect on how your own use of technology has evolved.

Sunday is one of the few days that I buy an actual newspaper. I tend to consume most of my news online now. Today I saw a couple of articles about digital detoxes, and people leaving social media. These were alongside articles about the President Elect of the USA, and of course you can’t talk about him without at least a passing reference to twitter.

I doubt that when Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass were developing twitter, they never, in their wildest dreams, imagined that there would come a point where their fledgling idea would become the main communication channel for a President of the United States.

The at times, bizarre and incoherent stream of consciousness from the President elect illustrates (imho) the antithesis of everything I use twitter for. It’s Broadcast Mode (with deliberate capitalisation), uncensored, offensive . . . So whilst I’m not wanting in anyway to compare myself to or with “The Donald”, his use of twitter does illustrate why many people are turning off the service.

A few years ago, when twitter was new and shiny and free from advertising and obvious megalomania, when I was explaining its use to people I often used to say “you can’t really understand it or see the point of it until you use it”. Making and sustaining connections – and yes, I’ll admit in the beginning there was a bit of thrill (or as the wonderful @ambrouk called in “vanalytics “) watching how many followers I seemed to be amassing.

BYOD4L is a clear illustration of the power of twitter as an an educational tool/technology. It’s free and easy to use, (in the beginning) community driven by for example #hashtags, the conventions of RTs, @ messages, acknowledgements etc.

It allowed us to use SNA to understand our community engagement in ways we hadn’t been able to before (take a bow @mhawksey for inventing the wonderful Tags Explorer visualisation tool). It allows us to save and share all kinds of “stuff”. I am still amazed at how articulate (some) people can be in 140 characters. It allows use to connect and sustain networks, which to me has been and still is the most powerful aspect of twitter for me.

Having been one of the early adopters, my use of twitter has settled from the first thrills of always checking, always sharing to the realisation that twitter was for me mainly a work tool so I should step away from it after work, at the weekends etc.

I guess I’ve been quite lucky in that my use of twitter has always had a clear professional purpose. Once I started using it I easily started making connections and found a clear rationale for using it. The personal benefits ( for example the Eurovision Song Contest is lifted to a whole other level via the twitter backchannel), have always been a bit of an add on.

I’ve never gone on twitter just to broadcast (though i do confess to a certain level of “shameless self promotion” through sharing links to my blog posts, presentations etc), I don’t go on to fight with people or deliberately be offensive/aggressive/obtuse . I’ve had some great conversations. I’ve also been very fortunate in that I haven’t been trolled. I’ve only had a couple of abusive messages. I am very aware of the bubble I exist in, and I am thankful for it.

So whilst I can see that many people now find the adverts, the aggression, the trolling, the broadcast (as opposed to engaged mode that I prefer) mode of delivery, it still works for me. Today I had a lovely exchange of twitter with some colleagues (@carolak @sharonflynn, @catherinecronin) I would never have known, or benefited from the sharing of their work without twitter.

I’m not giving that up just because “the Donald” is around. I won’t let him take that away from me.

#BYOD4L – a story of personal and professional needs and wants

It’s only 10 days ’til the next iteration of Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#byod4l). Once again, along with Alex Spiers and Neil Withnell I’m facilitating the week long open event ably assisted with a team of volunteer mentors.

Now I have to confess, I love BYOD4L. I love the madness of the nightly tweet chats, the sharing of practice and ideas in people’s blogs, google+, in fact all over the interweb. But harking back to my last blog post about needs and want, although BYOD4L gives me an opportunity to do many things I want to do, is it really something I need to do?

I would say the answer is categorically yes. Although this is an open, social, informal, collaborative (with a sprinkling of badges) experience it also has provided me, my department, my colleagues, my institution with an space to allow people to experiment and experience a short blast of online collaboration and learning. In terms of staff development, BYOD4L has allowed us to augment the 5c model with informal drop in sessions where we can have more contextualised discussions about practice and experiences. In addition to the 5c model that BYOD4L uses, I think there is another C that this engenders – confidence. If you haven’t tweeted before, haven’t used Google+, have no idea how or what a tweet chat is, it’s a great (and safe) place to start. You don’t have to say anything – just experience the structure, pace and interactions. I know a number of my colleagues have done this and it has given them the confidence to start to use twitter in their teaching practice.

It is really hard to unpack what the impact of the tweet chats are. We do curate every one via storify, but it there are pretty big. However, as I facilitator I can see that there are many really interesting conversations happening. This year we are encouraging people to try and do a bit of their own more reflective curation and creating by way of telling their own byod4l story. That could be in any form – a smaller storify with a bit more context or what happened next, a blog post, an image, a video, a periscope.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly it will hopefully help to unpack the experience. We hope that more smaller digital stories, swill be really valuable in terms of open collaboration and sharing. Secondly, we hope that these vignettes of experience and practice will help people in terms of more formal CPD opportunities. I have very much tried to document and reflect on my BYOD4L experiences (mainly through my blog) and this has been invaluable in terms of having evidence for both my HEA Fellow and CMALT applications.

So to get the ball rolling so to speak, here is my #BYOD4l story so far (created with Sutori). Just click on the image to see the full version.