I have already implemented the tools and conceptual models I have learned in ONL191 quite extensively in my work. Looking back on the four topics, from the vantage point of this one (the lessons learned), I am quite surprised at just how much water has passed under the bridge since our first meeting.

In Topic One, my blog posts were mostly reacting to the ways in which the digital world seems to create a lot of “hot takes” that have a very limited shelf life. More measured and careful analysis of the online world (White, 2014a, 2014b) reveals that the gaps between the online and the offline world on not that huge after all, and that there are ways in which we can all work on developing our digital literacies in order to participate that are not threatening, or conceptually defined as being essentially out of reach based on our age or some other aspect of social location.

In Topic Two, the important thing for me was to think through the ways in which content is owned, and the extent to which I (1) respect other people’s ownership by giving them appropriate credit (such as under Creative Commons licensing, see Watch Now UK, 2012) and (2) want my own content to be reproduced and shared online, out of my control. Thinking through these issues made me significantly more comfortable with sharing and openness than I previously was.

In Topic Three, I worked through a lot of negative emotions regarding collaborating with other people. Group work has never been a particularly comfortable space for me to operate in, and is certainly associated with “negative emotions” (Brindley, Walti, & Blaschke, 2009). And yet talking through these issues with Group 8 colleagues revealed that we all shared these kinds of concerns, and that in fact reacting a bit negatively to collaboration was in fact a kind of bonding experience!

In Topic Four, we addressed a number of issues relevant to designing online networked learning courses. The concept of a community of inquiry (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes, & Garrison, 2013) which relies on intended tactics by the facilitator/teacher to create, will be a useful one for me to think through in my future course design work. Because we spent a lot of time in group exercises trying out new tools, I am now confident to go out and find even more. I will continue to experiment with platforms that can create that kind of community – imbued with the different kinds of presences – that can make being part of the classes I teach and learn in truly worthwhile.

Works referenced

Brindley, J. E., Walti, C., & Blaschke, L. M. (2009). Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, en-US. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Chapter 1: Conceptual Framework. Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry(pp. 7–18). Edmonton, AB: AU Press. Retrieved April 18, 2019, from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120229/ebook/01_Vaughan_et_al_2013-Teaching_in_Blended_Learning_Environments.pdf

Watch Now UK. (2012). Creative Commons & Copyright Info. Watch Now UK. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YkbeycRa2A

White, D. S. (2014a). Part 1: Visitors and Residents. jiscnetskills. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be

White, D. S. (2014b). Part 2: Credibility. jiscnetskills. Retrieved March 8, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U

The importance of proper design of courses is why I am sure many of took this course. Over the give topics and the various PBL topics we worked through, we all developed strong opinions on the correct way to design a course so that its participants are really engaged in the learning process in a way that is pedagogically rich.

A tool that I believe offers a useful structure for thinking through the issues surrounding design is Salmon’s give-step model (Figure 1; “Five Stage Model,” n.d.). Most fundamentally, we need to think through access, and the motivation firstly to learn, and secondly to come back, again and again, to a learning platform. Too often, designers assume that because they have included social and digital components these will be interesting in and of themselves. More often than not, this is a huge mistake.

Figure 1: Salmon’s Five Step Model

The next stage – online socialization – is also fraught with difficulty. Why would people who have come together for a course even want to socialize with each other? Surely they are only there to do what is required, and then leave? And yet, the profoundly social aspects of learning also play a big role, and we can’t ignore that even then most resistant people eventually get drawn in to some sense of group cohesion.

The other stages – information exchange, knowledge construction, and further developments of the learning outside the context of what is required on a specific course – are very much built on getting the first two steps right.

Another important aspect to think through in design is the so-called presences, which interact with the notion of the community of inquiry. In the previous topic, we considered in some detail how the three presences ought to work together in teaching practice (Figure 2; Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes, & Garrison, 2013): the teacher presence, cognitive presence, and social presence.:

Figure 2: The three presences

Thinking through the community of inquiry includes guidelines for creating and sustaining meaningful communities of inquiry, along the lines of the following seven principles:

1. Plan for the creation of open communication and trust. 
2. Plan for critical reflection and discourse. 
3. Establish community and cohesion. 
4. Establish inquiry dynamics (purposeful inquiry). 
5. Sustain respect and responsibility. 
6. Sustain inquiry that moves to resolution. 
7. Ensure assessment is congruent with intended processes and outcomes. (Vaughan et al., 2013, p. 17):

According to Cleveland-Innes (2019) the notion of the community of enquiry was developed in the 1990s to theorise the text-only learning environments that were emerging as part of the entry of the academic and pedagogical world on the world-wide web at that time. The original model did not exclude the concept of emotional presence entirely, but included emotional presence under the definition of social presence. This was probably, as professor Cleveland-Innes joked, probably mostly because the men developed the model were uncomfortable to claim that they understood emotions.

Emotion is however imbued in all of the other dimensions of the model. Emotional presence was modelling her emotional presence, even while sick, to let us know she was “thrilled to be teaching” the ONL191 webinar (Cleveland-Innes, 2019). 

Emotional presence is not just about eliciting specific emotions that good for learning… it is more about being aware of it, being aware of student emotions and acknowledging and directing them in order to temper emotions that may get in the way of the climate online. As the research team busy working on this has noticed, emotional presence in students won’t necessarily map within all of the the other three presences…  Emotional presence maps to a unique presence. This is an interesting area for further enquiry!

Works referenced

Cleveland-Innes, D. M. (2019). Designing Digital Learning. Retrieved from https://padlet.com/laruhs/onl191topic4

Five Stage Model. (n.d.). Gilly Salmon. Retrieved April 18, 2019, from https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Chapter 1: Conceptual Framework. Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry(pp. 7–18). Edmonton, AB: AU Press. Retrieved April 18, 2019, from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120229/ebook/01_Vaughan_et_al_2013-Teaching_in_Blended_Learning_Environments.pdf

The idea of collaborating with other people has always been quite scary to me. In general, if I have a particular goal, especially one to do with learning, I would far prefer doing my best to obtain it on my own, without bothering other people – or in fact without having them bother me.

Collaboration horror stories generally involve having to deal either with bossy group-leaders or unreliable members who make big promises and then never deliver. The profoundly negative emotions (Capdeferro & Romero, 2012)which are aroused by being forced into collaborative situations have been understood as having specific causes: the fact that some people always end up putting in more work than others (asymmetric collaboration); badly organized groups; the misalignment of team members in terms what we are here to achieve; unevenness in performance and understanding between members; the time it wastes to deal with problematic people and vague exercises; and blockages in communication, were all factors identified by Capdeferro and Romero (2012). I am sure I am not the only member of my group, nor indeed of ONL191, that has had first hand experience of this over the tiume we have spent on this course!

That being said, it would be false to claim that there were no benefits to working as a team, or in fact that my learning in general does not rely on some form of network. On reflection, I realized that I do greatly rely on discussing issues and learnings with family and friends, and feeding off other people’s learning on platforms such as Twitter. I am in fact quite profoundly reliant on a personal learning network for many of the things I know (Oddone, 2019a, 2019b).

Whereas the close kind of work required in ONL191 group work – what might be considered a community (we certainly missed people when they were not there) as opposed to a network – required the formation of some closer social bonds, my personal learning network includes both people I am very close to and some who are complete strangers to me. I would be to effectively “collaborate” with only a small subset of these people, though of course being placed in the pressurized situation of a further education course does change dynamics slightly.

Whether however any of the experiences we have referred to here constitute a community of inquiry is something I am not sure about. According to the discussions we had, any group learning experience depends on various presences those of the teacher, and our shared cognitive, social, and emotional presences. These in turn depend on what the facilitator can bvalance in terms of these various energies, to create the synergy required for an ideal learning environment.

Emotional presence needs to be acknowledged by the educator and by peers. If the group is not coping, and not in balance, the learning is impeded. The facilitator or teacher presence takes care of design, facilitation, and direct instruction (Garrison, 2019). They support emotional wellbeing of online learners. Social presence is about creating a climate that will create a community of inquiry, sustain community through expression of group cohesion. Cognitive presence means critical reflection, and encouraging the progression of inquiry through to resolution. 

Collaboration in small groups has been shown in the literature to work better if a sense of community is enabled (Brindley, Walti, & Blaschke, 2009). Community is associated with the achievement of learning outcomes, and the acquisitions of skills.

Works referenced

Brindley, J. E., Walti, C., & Blaschke, L. M. (2009). Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, en-US. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271

Capdeferro, N., & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1127/2129

Garrison, D. R. (2019). Online collaboration principles. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks,10(1). Retrieved April 4, 2019, from https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/article/view/1768

Oddone, K. (2019a). PLNs Theory and Practice: Part 1. Personal Network Learning: Theory and Practice. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8mJX5n3IEg&feature=youtu.be

Oddone, K. (2019b). PLNs Theory and Practice: Part 2. Personal Network Learning: Theory and Practice. Retrieved April 4, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqSBTr9DPH8&feature=youtu.be

The issues of open learning for me seem to revolve around ownership – but also about accountability, and about the kind of communities we want to build. One of the things that seems very useful to me is opening up my practice to comment by other educators, and the potential use by educators and students from other contexts around the world… The kind of feedback we get in a university environment is unfortunately not always perfectly suited to developing our practice to become better: students rate fun/easy lectures high even if they don’t learn that much, and other educators rarely have the time or the social skills to give each other open, honest, and useful feedback.

Learning practice may also include sharing. Many of us have the kinds of learning styles that accord well with David Wiley’s maxim that “if there is no sharing, there is no learning” (Open Education and the Future, 2010). But from a teaching perspective, putting one’s practice online seems to be to open up the possibilities for benchmarking between educators, and for breaking out of the closed atmosphere of particular classrooms. And of course the tools that we use for open learning have themselves impacted on the learning: learning through remixing, through commenting, etc., are also just as important.

There are of course risks involved. The strong normative drive from universities and other education providers to get teachers online, what kinds of problems might you be causing that are not anticipated? Is this just another step in the neo-liberalisation of education systems, which aims to reduce the costs of education while extracting more ‘value’ from academic staff? Will tenure and other aspects of promotion eventually be tied to online savvy, and open education be used as a way to separate progressive from reactionary teachers?

These risks notwithstanding, there are also reasons to be hopeful about opening up teaching and learning. People will be able to collaborate from all over the world. Education will become more ‘open’: but, as we discussed, ‘open’ can be many things to many people (Weller, 2014). We all have different definitions, but it is hard to have one conversation or one debate when this is the case. Openness in education can be conceptualized under at least four headings:

1. Creative Commons
2. Open Educational Resources (freely accessible)
3. Open Educational Practices (shared, public, generated across different groups)
4. Massive Online Open Courses – area constantly changing, even what acronym stands for is changing

Each of these conceptual areas has different dynamics, different pros and cons, and even its own literature.

The ‘open’ movement is part worldwide phenomenon. It claims to increase sharing, interoperability, and transparency. Implicit in this idea is the notion that the opportunity to access learning is supposedly open to all.

Some definitions that thus need to be cleared up include:

Sharing:no longer does only the teacher hold the information, learners share with each other, students might share their work with each other, increasing feedback and communication.

Transparency:publicly sharing your practice and your thinking. Recognises that learners are co-learners and co-constructors of knowledge. Just as one can have an open and honest personality so can one have an open practice.

Interoperability:a term that comes from open source software development, where source code is freely shared. Making knowledge inoperable, remixing and sharing knowledge between universities and individuals.

There must be some kind of framework for how to share with people while respecting their rights, which is where the Creative Commons sets of licenses come into play. These various licenses usefully combine together to allow attribution to respect the holders of the original copyright, while not preventing reuse, remixing, or other forms of fair use, based on the license condition (Watch Now UK, 2012).

In addition to dealing with issues of attribution course designers must also consider how to structure open education. For a long time there was the hope that “Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOCs) were going to revolutionise education, and contribute to the growth of higher education around the world (Cormier, 2010). But much of this potential remains untapped. The potential of MOOCs to revolutionise, and even decolonize, the higher education space is something that needs to more carefully considered as part of a more thoroughgoing critical digital pedagogy  (Stommel, 2014). 

Works referenced

Cormier, D. (2010). What is a MOOC?Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc

Open Education and the Future. (2010). . New York, NY. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M

Stommel, J. (2014, November 18). Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Definition. Hybrid Pedagogy. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from http://hybridpedagogy.org/critical-digital-pedagogy-definition/

Watch Now UK. (2012). Creative Commons & Copyright Info. Watch Now UK. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YkbeycRa2A

Weller, M. (2014). The Battle for Open. London: Ubiquity Press. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/10.5334/bam/

In my previous post I argued that Prensky’s (2001) dividing of digital literacies into ”native” and ”immigrant” was reductive and colonial. In this post I will discuss Doug some more recent contributions to understanding digital literacies.

White and Le Cornu’s (2011) distinction between ”visitor” and ”resident” seems already more promising than Prensky’s between ”native” and ”immigrant” — largely because the former are by definition more ephemeral categories. Where we are resident can change, and there is no problematic appeal to the ”in-born” ability gestured to with the word ”native”. While one could argue that Prensky’s observation of the very serious difficulties that those who have grown up with different technologies, before or after the ”disjuncture” or ”singularity” of Internet age, it certainly is not far from wrong to say that we all encounter difficulties when trying to take up residence in a new ”place” — and these difficulties could be understood as caused by language, culture, or other differences, depending on our level of familiarity or prior knowledge of the place we are ”moving” to. It certainly is a more flexible metaphor.

White further complicates this with his second axis: that of institutional versus personal spaces. It is clear now that we are dealing with a different paradigm, in that a certain compartmentalisation of our social practices is being taken into account: we are not just comfortable or uncomfortable in different technological spaces because of our level of familiarity with the ”language” of that space: We are also relating to other users in spaces differently depending on whether we regard them as personal or institutional. The mapping of different platforms onto the space can provide some useful insights into understanding how to conceptualise the digital literacies of diverse groups of people coming together in order to achieve some shared aim using these technologies. These context dependencies — as he says, ”not opposing forces but a sliding scale” — are also the spur for Doug Belshaw’s 2012 TEDTalk presentation, where he argues for moving beyond ”Digital Literacy” as a concept to a complex notion of ”Digital Literacies” – which he breaks down into their ”eight essential elements”.

These eight elements, against Whites axes, clearly form a more solid grounding for theorising the various types of digital literacies we are likely to encounter in the real world, in a way that escapes the caricatures of ”natives” and ”immigrants”.

If I map out five of the platforms that I use fairly regularly, I would be able to arrive at a fair description of my literacies and their contexts within various contexts, while at the same time making sense of my reaction (resistance/excitement) to using these platforms for different purposes. For example, I am really enjoying using Zoom for the purposes of participating in the ONL191 course. I am now trying to convince more people to use Zoom instead of Skype — but I continue to use Skype to chat with family, friends, and professional contacts who are uncomfortable with Zoom. The process of recruiting people to Zoom — selling the more stable connection and easier interface — is complicated by the fact that I am not yet 100% sure of how to run Zoom meetings, the extent to which my experience of Zoom has been shaped by my institutional environment, and the ease of use for others outside of that environment. I need to deepen my understanding of this platform before I get other people using it.

I am quite resistant to the inclusion of Twitter as a platform in this course, at least as a participant, largely because my followers on Twitter are not going to be interested in our internal discussions on ONL191 and I would therefore only be able to observe the tweet sessions, and not participate (without losing followers). The idea of setting up a new Twitter account solely for the purposes of this course is a little exhausting (the e-mails, the passwords, etc.) and so I have resisted that aspect of this course.

Works referenced

Belshaw, Doug. The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies: Doug Belshaw at TEDxWarwick. TEDx Talks, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78.

Jisc. “Developing Digital Literacies.” Education. Jisc, no date. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/developing-digital-literacies.

Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” On the Horizon9, no. 5 (October 2001): 6.

White, David. Part 1: Visitors and Residents. Jiscnetskills, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be.

White, David. Part 2: Credibility. Jiscnetskills, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U.

White, David S., and Alison Le Cornu. “Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement.” First Monday16, no. 9 (August 23, 2011). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171.

The American academy in a number of fields seems to prize above all else the scholar who can reduce a complex phenomenon to a catch-phrase, or analogise the unfamiliar to the familiar, convincing colleagues and the public that there is a clear and compelling answer to their questions. Marc Prensky’s ”Digital Natives” versus ”Digital Immigrants” offers just such an answer. With compelling clarity, we are invited to import from our understanding of nation states and national languages (and the easy equation between the two) the notion that ”immigrants” (i.e. those in the analogy who did not grow up with digital technologies) will always have an accent. The metaphor is thus colonial from the outset: we are living in English-American-speaking America and your native language (whether it is Cherokee, or Spanish, or Farsi) makes you a permanent foreigner. That this is Prensky’s point of departure might seem unimportant: after all, he is merely drawing an analogy. He is not attempting to make a new language ideological point, merely reproducing an old and problematic one. Should we look past this?

I would argue that Prensky’s colonial narrative saturates his theorisation of digital learning, and thereby undermines it. Though I have become familiar with the Digital Native/Immigrant distinction over the past decade, I was surprised to see that this particular article was published in 2001, when I was 22 years old and in my fourth year of university. Though I had grown up with computers in the home — my father is what marketers refer to as an ”early adopter” who bought a Sinclair QL in the mid-80s that we both learned to programme, and I was later given an Apple II which I also learned to programme — I had always thought of the ”immigrant” label as attaching to me. These ”natives” — in the way they were described by the media at least, seemed to be the generation growing up with smartphones and Facebook accounts. When Prensky was writing, however, he was writing about people like me, a 4th-year university student with a slow but highly valued dial-up internet connection. The gap I perceived between myself and the teenagers I was designing educational programmes for in the mid-2010s was in my thinking just as profound as that Prensky was articulating as existing between college professors and their students in 2001.

If Prensky’s distinction was being used to construct immigrant-status and nativeness between successive generations of computer users, what analytical purpose could it still be serving, except for the obvious fun to be had making fun of ”immigrants” still printing out their e-mails? In my home country context, South Africa, we focus a lot on the extent to which mobile phone technology has ”leapfrogged” both fixed line and desktop computing. Many marginalised young people living in poverty own or have access to cell-phones, and the extent of the features of these phones is often the main deciding factor in thinking through how to communicate with them. So-called ”feature” phones were until recently very common, but have been displaced by the successive waves of up-selling to richer markets that have seen previously desirable smartphones become very cheap and accessible second-hand and even new commodities. Money for ”airtime” and data are the main questions that hang over the heads of many young South Africans. Their digital ”literacy” is advanced — but in languages that would be unintelligible to many American college students. In South Africa we work with USSD codes, with ”Please Call Me” texts, with selected zero-rated services — but of course, this too changes all the time, and as I have been out of the country for nearly two years I am probably already out-of-date.

What use is the distinction between the ”immigrant” and the ”native” when comparing successive generations of computer users, across different country settings, with diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and economic backgrounds? In the simple sense that most of us feel comfortable in one language, and, if we can speak another language, are likely to speak it in ways that mark us as having learned that language later in life, Prensky’s analogy can work when applied to the digital world. But in the sense of a ”dividing practice” that separates the world into halves, it is a hopeless enterprise. To take Prensky seriously would be to reduce our conceptualization of digital literacy to a simple binary, when in fact what the world shows is is that literacies are fractal — they nest within each other, evolve from each other, multiply, compete, and vary considerably between people. Any serious approach to digital education would need to take this full complexity into account, and abandon the reduction of learners to ”natives” and ”immigrants”.