Visitor/resident – some further thoughts

I can’t make up my mind whether I’m a visitor or resident. As Dave White says in his presentation its not a dichotomy – but rather a duality (which is very much Wenger’s approach to communities of practice). In his presentation Dave makes some comments that I have been thinking about:

Visitors leave no trace – my feeling is that this is not possible. Maybe they hope to leave no trace. I can see that they could leave an absolutely minimal trace, but not no trace. It’s a bit like when someone briefly enters a meeting and leaves quickly – their leaving and absence still affects the meeting. In relation to this, I believe that ‘lurkers’ can affect what is going on through their absence.

Visitors worry about identity theft – I would say that visitors might worry about identity full stop, particularly if the visitors are novices. In fact isn’t it possible that visitors may be visitors not by choice but because they are novices in the online environment.

Residents try to keep visible by continually feeding the machine – have residents subjected themselves to the ‘tyranny of participation?’

Remaining visible is important for residents – Why? What is in it for them, particularly if a lot of what they post is banal? Isn’t being perceived of as banal counterproductive?

The word ‘nebulous’ can be used to describe residents – Dave didn’t talk about this and I’m not sure what this means.

A resident is less likely to have their own blog – this seems to contradict the research that John, Roy and I did where we equated residency (we called this a ‘home’) to a blog. This brings up the complexity of the way in which we use language and metaphors to describe the way in which people learn and interact online.

The visitor is no more or less technically adept than the resident – this depends on whether the visitor is a visitor by choice

Visitors take an individual approach to working online – I don’t see an individual approach or autonomy as the preserve of visitors. The question of autonomy is complex and not easy to understand or unpick.

Lots to think about. I’m looking forward to the session tonight – Elluminate Conference

Are you a visitor or a resident in the online environment?

I am posting this invitation on behalf of Roy Williams, Dave White, Sui Fai John Mak and Gus Goncalves.

Please join us

You are invited to join us in the Elluminate conference on Wednesday 4th November at 20:00 GMT to discuss the title question with Dave White from Oxford University.

The Link for the conference is: Elluminate Conference

You can also find it in the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK09) course.

We will be holding a conversation about Dave White’s vandr (visitors and residents) model. We are all trying to understand the new networked learning media, as users, but also as academics, teachers, trainers, and researchers. So we need frameworks to describe what’s going on, and that’s what this conference is all about: none of us has the final answers, and I guess most of us find networked learning is so interesting precisely because there are no final answers.

We have asked Dave to take us through an overview of some of the key points of his model. Then we will get some feedback on how you see yourself, in terms of his model. After that we will ask Dave to take us into more of the detail. Interruptions are welcome.

Networking

We have set up a twitter site (vandrcck09) where you can add additional comments, outside the chat channel in Elluminate. We are trying to make space for more substantial responses to the conversation in Elluminate, and it looks like the only way to do so is to write a longer comment in a forum post, or blog, and then post a tweet in ‘vandrcc09′, which includes a link to your blog or the forum. We’ll see if it works.

Models and Resources

Please feel free to use the vandr twitter site, from now on, to post ideas and links to aspects of the vandr model, or any other models and research, that you find useful to describe what goes on in networked learning.

Some great questions out there at the moment

I keep coming across great questions which really make me stop and think.

George Siemens  asked four really thought provoking questions in the Networked Learning Conference 2010 Hot Seat

1. What skills/attributes do learners need in order to learn effectively with networked technologies?
2. What role will educators need to fulfill in networked learning environments?
3. Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher?
4. Given the prominence of networked technologies and the growth of networked learning, what types of research questions does our field need to pursue?

In fact I think George must be in question posing mode as in this week’s CCK09 course he has asked another great question

• This week is an opportunity for you to reflect on what openness means to you, what benefits you get from being open, and concerns with transparent learning (as well as how you expect to overcome those concerns).

And in this post George has alerted us to D’Arcy Norman’s question:

• How do you connect to people online?

These are all questions that I have been thinking about for some time but haven’t been able to articulate so clearly. They are all relevant to my life and work. So where to start in answering them?

Visitors and residents

David White’s description of the way in which people use the internet as being like the behaviours of visitors or residents has captured my interest this week. A link to his blog and his video were posted in a CCK09 forum this week.  Roy in his post – Thursday, 22 October 2009, 05:29 AM – has suggested that there might also be a ‘traveller/gypsy’ mode. I probably have not understood this correctly – but I’m not sure that this is necessary. David White views visitors and residents at either end of a spectrum along which people can position themselves differently at different times and in different contexts.

The ‘resident’ description makes perfect sense to me;  it’s so easy to identify ‘residents’ amongst the people I know. I wonder what proportion of any given population you would expect to be residents. Would this be about 10% – a figure quoted by Nancy White as the percentage of people you might expect to be very active in an online course or community.

‘Visitor’ is also an interesting idea – but I’m not sure that I’ve got my head round exactly what visitor behaviour incorporates. In terms of online teaching and learning the ‘resident’ is probably easier to work with, because we can get a very good sense of the ‘resident’s’ personal learning environment. The visitor’s work is less transparent. I think we probably need to know more about how ‘visitors’ learn.

On Dave White’s blog a number of commenters have recalled Prensky’s ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ description. I see Prensky’s and White’s descriptions as being on different issues. Prensky’s is more to do with technology and how technological skills affect behaviour and learning online, whereas White’s is more about attitudes and approaches to learning – personal learning organisation. In the latter the learner is more in control. For me this is interesting as I think it reflects the increasing shift away from focussing on technology towards online learner behaviours, attitudes and preferences.

Research and dissemination

In another meeting this week there was discussion about whether it was worth the time trying to publish in academic journals. A project I am working with at the moment has to meet a requirement to disseminate their work and developments. For academics, publication in an academic journal is not only important for personal advancement and career development, but is also important for the University’s research rating. But does this help dissemination?

I think many people would agree that most journal papers are very rarely read. Not only that but they take so long to be published that if you are working in the area of technology-enhanced learning, then by the time the paper is published its out of date.

So what are the alternatives? The web offers many alternatives. There are open e-journals, blogs, newsletters, press releases etc. But do these offer the peer/expert review offered by respected journals and colleagues? 

So what do you go for -  to have your paper accepted by a recognised/high status  journal, despite the fact that it might not be read by many people, or have your work widely disseminated on the web or elsewhere?

John, Roy and I – with our papers on researching the CCKO8 experience have tried to find the middle way – a respected conference in which to publish, but a conference that publishes papers online – for wider dissemination.

What is the future of research papers I wonder?

140 characters

This week I was in a meeting where a colleague said ‘If a post can’t be written in 140 characters it’s not worth writing’  or words to that effect. It might have been ‘not worth reading’. Shock horror! Where does this leave a slow, slow blogger, a person who always has to pause before thinking, a person who simply cannot say what she needs to say in 140 characters and so has not yet ‘twittered’ despite having an account, i.e. me!

Following the comment I did think carefully about the length of my emails. I do have experience of receiving hundreds of emails each week and of deleting emails beyond a screen view in length, because I simply don’t have the energy to answer them. I am now trying to keep a check on the length of my own emails. But only for people that I am not really connected to. If I feel really connected to someone, I really couldn’t care how long their email or post is, I just want to hear from them / ’connect’ with them. Do they feel the same, I wonder? I think they do, if they have the time – and I can empathise with not having enough time.

140 characters might be enough for a short in-the-moment  information exchange – but I don’t think it’s for me. Not at the moment anyhow!

Group think

My online PGCert group (for which I am a facilitator)  is currently studying a module on the emotional intelligence of teams. Had I not worked on the connectivism course in 2008, I might not have even thought to question whether working in teams/groups is a good idea and also whether working in teams/groups leads to group think and stifles creativity.

As a result of CCK08 I have been able to play devil’s advocate with my teaching group and question these assumptions that they might carry with them into the workplace – i.e. that working in teams is  the way to go!

One thing I have learned from Stephen and George (and others such as Stephen Brookfield)  is that it’s worth surfacing  assumptions, even if it means challenging the assumptions of CCK08/09 – rightly or wrongly. Who’s to say?

CCK08 Research Papers

We – Sui Fai John Mak, Roy Williams and I - have finally completed work on 2 research papers following our participation in CCK08.

• Blogs and Forums as Communication and Learning Tools in a MOOC
• The ideals and Reality of Participating in a MOOC

On November 13th we will submit these papers to the Networked Learning Conference Steering Committee and hope that they will accept them for their 2010 conference in Denmark. The last time I went to Denmark I was 22 years old, quite a few decades ago. It would be great to go again!

Although we have not yet submitted our papers, we have been in touch with a member of the Conference Steering Committee who has encouraged us to share our papers with CCK09 before we submit them for the conference. So we have posted them (having first asked George and Stephen if that would be OK) in a variety of places including:

CCK09 Moodle site in Week 4 and General Discussion forums

Nellie’s CCK09 Ning site

John’s CCK08 Ning site

Roy has also invited discussion in his Google Groups Research site and John has invited discussion on his blog.

There is already some discussion about the papers. We will welcome feedback and are ready to amend the papers if necessary before we submit them.  There is still so much to learn!

F2F and online teaching

Mike Bogle’s reflection on his presentation skills – http://techticker.net/2009/08/27/self-assessment-of-my-presentation-skills/ – strikes a chord with me. I always unpick my ‘performance’ in detail after a presentation or a course, either online or offline – but I tend not to do it in public as Mike has done. Through a long career which has involved being interviewed, seeking promotion etc., I am still very cautious about who I reveal my weaknesses to. I think they are probably evident enough without having to point them out to people and I’m not as brave as Mike!

But Mike’s post has reminded me that since I have been working almost entirely online for about 5 years now, I find face-to-face work increasingly difficult. I spent many years teaching face-to-face and have done loads of presentations in the past. I used to do them so frequently that I never thought twice about them. These days I scarcely ever do face-to-face presentations, so it could be that I have simply forgotten how to do them – but I don’t think it is that. I think it’s much more that through working online, my whole approach to teaching and learning has changed. Like Mike, I don’t want to be the ‘sage on the stage’. I strongly believe that learners can learn as much from each other as they can from a ‘teacher’ and that part of a teacher’s role is to ‘set the scene’, so that this is possible.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to run a short face-to-face course and decided to try out taking my online approach into the face-to-face environment; it wasn’t 100% successful. I didn’t use any powerpoint, or a whiteboard (i.e. any form of presentation), but structured the session around a series of questions which I used as starting points for discussion. This is how I work online. Whilst the course participants engaged with the discussion that the questions stimulated, it was not the approach they expected and I could see that they weren’t completely comfortable with it. They were expecting something more from me, rather than being expected to create knowledge between us according to the needs of that group at that time.

This might sound as if all I did to prepare for that session was list a few questions. That is not so. I probably did more preparation for the course than I would normally, because I was not sure which direction it would take. But what I found really interesting and a bit unnerving was that it takes more than a short course to change people’s attitudes to what might be expected of a teacher or a course, and that what can work wonderfully well online, might not transfer into the face-to-face situation.

I realise that there are people who seem to be equally effective on and offline, but I wonder if a good face-to-face ‘presenter’ also ‘presents’ when working online, and if a good online ‘facilitator’ is also a ‘facilitator’ rather than a ‘presenter’ when working face-to-face. Of course it won’t be as cut and dried as this, but I do wonder whether there is a tension between these two ways of working.

Digital Habitats

Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith’s book has finally been published.

Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009). ISBN: 9780982503607vhttp://technologyforcommunities.com/

I’m looking forward to reading this.