SocialTech

Being There

Photo credit: Invasion by Henryleelucas

Dave White's recent post, Not 'Natives' or 'Immigrants' but 'Visitors' & 'Resident' slipped by largely without comment, which is a huge shame. It's a must-read post because it does what a lot of people have been trying to do and not managing that well - move us beyond Prensky's seminal dichotomy of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.  Prensky's metaphors powerfully explain differences in approach and experience between users who have grown up with technologies (the natives) and older users who find difficulty in accessing new technological cultures and practices (the immigrants) as not just a cultural but a neurobiological one. Prensky's arguments are easy to knock down, particularly if you happen to subscribe to a more fluid account of development. What they haven't been however is easy to replace or move forward from. Dave's work probably succeeds in taking the argument forward precisely because it's user-centric, looking at how users engage with technologies. His research points up the importance of 'being there'; the distinction between users who inhabit a space or place online, and users who don't view themselves as having any kind of non-functional engagement with online environments and tools. Dave calls these visitors and residents (as you may have gathered from his academically typical unwieldy title), and if you haven't gone blind already head over to his post to see the initial sketching out of these roles. These are far more granular distinctions, robust enough to cut across socio-cultural differences, and agile enough to encompass a wide range of behaviors and belonging. my initial thoughts on seeing the post still stand:

"I think this is a big improvement on the native and immigrant dichotomy, I really look forward to seeing how it moves forward.  It seems very possible to be a resident on a specific social networking service or site, but a visitor to other services and in all aspects of web engagement. I think 'being there' is a useful concept to explore, & possibly some strait forward measures of engagement. I also think that peoples conceptions of privacy & being online are worthwhile exploring in terms of their immersion levels. The Pew data from the end of last year suggested that the majority (60%) of internet users aren't worried about how much information is available about them online - I'm suspicious that if true, this is because the people who are worried stay off line/confine themselves to visitor-type behaviour."

ALT-C 2008: Radio, edubloggers, edupunks & digital divides

So this is my round up of some of the highlights of my ALT-C2008, and links to some of the stuff we made & documented. Thanks to ALT for an excellent conference, and to everyone who I was lucky enough to get to hang out with this year. As Steve Wheeler's already noted, it was a excellent one.

A bunch of us delivered F-ALT this year - the first ALT-C fringe, designed to give delegates new spaces and new ways of collaborating and taking forward ideas and topics. The idea was to support activity that fell outside the typical conference format and structure, and allowed for a more creative and inclusive approach. It was a reckless and experimental approach to take, and by and large it worked out really well - it attracted a lot of delegates and demonstrated and started to explore ways in which participants could organise conference space for themselves. There were a variety of sessions - the Learning Objects session failed to attract enough interest to take off while others were very popular - I really enjoyed the EduPunk session, and the Microblogging session which took place during this years Edublogger meetup. I've added a bunch of stuff over at the wiki, I'm pretty much done for now. If you have F-ALT related goodness to share or link to, please do help make the site better. Also, you can check out some of the distributed action over at Twemes (welcome back Twemes! We really missed you!)

The 4th ALT-C Edublogger meetup went down a storm, we had a great time and managed to take over a substantial section of the pub. I've posted the list of attendees and blog links over at the F-ALT site - again, please do edit your entry/add yourself in if you were there.

I co-hosted a live radio show with Graham Attwell at the conference for Emerge - one of the series of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar shows. It was probably the most fun it's possible to have at a conference (for me anyway, Scott Wilson didn't seem to enjoy his surprise interview quite so much). Cristina Costa did a fantastic job facilitating the live chat room for our international audience and Joe Rosa an equally amazing job with the production. If you missed it, you can recapture the craziness over at Graham's blog.

I also helped run an official conference workshop session, Learning About the Digital Divide, along with Frances Bell, Helen Keegan and Cristina Costa. Our session built the experience of our first slam workshop the year before, which encouraged participants to create and perform what we are calling slams (after the style of Poetry Slams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_slam), that time around their experience of engaging with web 2.0. Our slam are really shorthand for a rapid, creative approach to creating a performance and/or object which engages with, and encourages others to engage with, an aspect or description of a topic. In this way we're seeking to do a few things. The approach is designed to support innovative, conversational and light weight content creation, acting as a counterpoint and compliment to traditional academic processes and methods.

You can go view the amazing contributions people created and delivered during the session over at the wiki, and also (until tomorrow night) vote on which is your favorite. My slam - I <3 Public Libraries is included in the vote list, but please don't vote for it! It's only there because I was really rubbish at getting it up in time and into it's proper place in the sample slam lists. The text I've included with the slides includes my workshop methodology, so do go and browse if you are interested in exploring this kind of format yourself.

Finally, I'm still really happy about winning the Learning Technologist of the Year award. I brought a hard copy of the announcement back for my mum, and she's very pleased too :) If you'd like a flavor of the gala dinner and a peek at the presentation check out James Clay's excellent (& very) short film of the evening. I eat chocolate in it.

Looking forward to next year already. You can see my pictures here and Sam (who always takes the best ones!)'s pictures here.

Learning Technologist of the Year 2008

I'm delighted & honoured to have won the Individual Award for 2008 Learning Technologist of the Year (pfd) at last nights ALT-C 2008 Gala dinner. The Award aims to celebrate and reward "excellent practice & outstanding achievement in the learning technology field", and was presented at the ALT conference in Leeds last night by David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for OLPC (One Laptop per Child).

Other teams and individuals honored last night:

The Learning Technology Group - Aditya Vadali, Dan Jackson, Georgia Georgiou, Mark Bryson, Mike Cowie, Rich Ranker, Steve Powell, and Tim Ellis from Lancaster University won the team award for "successful provision of an integrated service that has benefited staff and learners across the whole university".

Stuart Hepplestone from Sheffield Hallam University carried off the commendation in the individual category. The Learning Technology Team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, along with the Technology Directorate from Ufi learndirect both snagged team commendations.   

The judges were kind enough to say that I am "responsible for ground-
breaking work in the learning technology domain", including my work with Will Gardner for Childnet International producing cyberbullying guidance on behalf of the DCSF as part of the UK's Safe to Learn suite of guidance; leading Childnet's work on Young People and Social Networking Services funded by Becta; for my work running the Edublog Awards for the last three years; and for my role in the JISC funded Emerge project, supporting and developing a sustainable community of practice around the educational use of new emergent technologies.

As fantastic as it is to be recognised for the award, there are a bunch of people that I need to thank who have worked with me and really deserve some credit for the success of these projects. At the risk of upsetting all the other people I'm also really grateful to, I'd just like to extra-thank some really important people who have made carrying out some tough projects possible, and being a learning technologist a real pleasure:

Stephen Carrick-Davis and Will Gardner of Childnet International; James Farmer, Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow and Jo Kay - the current Edublog Awards team; and George Roberts, Marion Samler, Graham Attwell, Joe Rosa and Stephen Warburton from the Emerge Team. You are all stars, and if I don't owe you several beers each its only because some of you already own me them.

There are many many other people I'm thankful to and have been lucky enough to work with over the last several years, so a big cheers to you all too - I hope you won't mind me not making this post into a massive list of names. Be aware most people won't bother reading this far anyway :)

4th ALT-C Edubloggers meetup

UPDATE - venue changed to the OLD BAR - still in the same SU building :)

Really looking forward to our fourth ALT-C Edublogger meetup next week, taking place at Leeds Student Union Old Bar, Tuesday 9th September, 19.30 onwards. The Alt-C evening meal (for those who are attending the conference & have signed up for it) is served in the adjacent Refectory building, and as usual will provide a handy initial meeting point for some of you. Otherwise, head over to the Mine Bar. We may be moving on somewhere else but we'll stay at the Mine Bar until at least 20.30.

We've been lucky enough to have had some great special guests at previous meetups - including James Farmer, Stephen Downes, Barbara Dieu, Christopher D. Sessums and Barbara Ganley. This year's meeting promises to be as jam packed with world-class edubloggers as ever, including Scott Wilson and Graham Attwell. George Siemens will also be in town - he's speaking at ALT-C early Wednesday - and I'm looking forward to meeting up with him for the first time in 3D.

As ever - this is an informal, fun get together. You don't have to dress up and you don't have to be an old school edublogger to come along. Everyone who has an interest in edublogging is welcome. To co-inside with F-ALT, the first ever grass roots fringe event at ALT, which will be tackling a range of cutting edge topics in a fast, dynamic debate framework, we'll be holding the microblogging session on the night. Su White will be facilitating speakers Helen Whitehead, James Clay, Jay Cousins, Andy Powell & maybe me in a kung-fu style roundtable. Good quality heckling and any imaginative audience participation will be entirely welcome.

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Digital Divide slam invite

I'm off to ALT-C next week, along with most of the UKs edtechs and learning technologists. I'll be pretty busy, supporting the 4th annual ALT-C Edublogger meetup, helping host the Emerge reception & live radio broadcast, and contributing to the F-ALT fringe activities.

I'm really excited to be teaming up again with with Frances Bell, Helen Keegan and new girl Christina Costa to be delivering our second ALT-C slam workshop. Last years session explored what web 2.0 meant to participants, and went down really well. This year we're trying to be even more reckless ambitious and inviting old and new friends from all over the world to pitch in to this years slam topic/competition, which is, in keeping with ALT-C's over-arching theme, The Digital Divide.

What we hope to get out of the session is a wide ranging exploration of dimensions of the digital divide: To produce and collect short real-world and digital pieces on what the digital divide means to people, how it can be interpreted, and what it's impacts are. In other words, what does the digital divide mean to you?

Obviously whole we're hoping for a reasonably diverse bunch of participants on the day, there are going to be limits on the heterogeneity of a group of people at an ed tech conference in Leeds on any particular afternoon. So we'd really like to encourage other people to join in. We are looking for participants from all over the world to contribute to building a resource which is interesting, innovative, and engaging topics. We'd like to build a cross cultural snapshot mosaic of what the digital divide can mean and how it's experienced.

The workshop will be running next Wednesday, 10 September 2008 at the University of Leeds, and participants will be creating and performing 'slams' around the digital divide theme - performance pieces which tackle issues in multiple ways. Checkout last years slams for some ideas of this experimental format, and this years wiki for more of an explanation.
   

We'll be capturing and uploading content until midnight GMT on the 10th of September, and then giving everyone a chance to vote for their favorite slam, from those created and performed on the day and those contributed by educators across the globe.

We're producing some sample slams for you to explore, and you can find information about how to upload your own contribution here.

So, interested in experimental, collaborative and distributed research processes? Thinking our session sounds like fun and might end up being a useful resource? Then join in!

1. Come along to our session! This time it's scheduled at a reasonable hour :)

2. Create something for the wiki. You slam could be a picture, a slideshow, a podcast, a 90 second Flickr video - anything. Tell us one thing the digital divide means to you.

3. Already been working on the digital divide? Great! Repurpose something already up or just send us the link if it's already in a fast, accessible format.

4. Checkout the entries once they're up and vote for your favorite.

5. Keep your fingers crossed for us! 

"If you, as an individual or small group, have got something to say about the Digital Divide between now and midnight Wednesday 10 September 2008 check converter, then you can create a slam, publish it here, comment on slam pages.
Then you can vote for your favourite between 11 and 14 September (deadline midnight GMT). We will announce the winners here and by message to members on Monday 15 September. That means that people from around the world can join in, not just those coming to our workshop. You can run your own workshop, or create your own slam, maybe with your friends. More details on how you can participate, just stick to our few simple guidelines."

There will be prizes! Probably not very good ones, but prizes nevertheless.

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