Goldsmiths, Learning, Teaching and Web 2.0

With the arrival of the social, participative web often referred to as Web 2.0 came talk of Learning 2.0. Learning 2.0 can be summarised as collaborative, project-based, self-directed, boundary-busting and above all connected. We discuss some national horizon scanning, and the ways Goldsmiths learners and teachers are using what the Web has to offer. We then discuss some of the challenges this poses for learners and academic teachers across higher education institutions, including issues of authority, credit, assessment, facilitation, intellectual property, data protection and support.

1. Goldsmiths, Learning,
Teaching & Web 2.0
A sketch
~~~
Mira Vogel and John Phelps
Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit

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Overview
•Change
•Learners
•Learners in institutions
•Academics and learners experimenting at
Goldsmiths
•Institutional responses
•Questions and discussion points

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John is with his family today

4. Change is here!

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Change
•Web 2.0 – the social, interactive, participatory web
–The US election campaigning 2008-9
–Twitter and the Trafigura gagging injunction (2009)
–Commercial interests
•Civil society moving online - government’s ‘Twitter Czar’
•Openness; cultural commons (Boyle 2009)
•Democratisation of authoring
–Wikipedia; YouTube; Lulu (micro-publishing); Guardian’s CiF
•Established media disrupted
– explosion of choice, individualisation, fragmentation
•Implications for education

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Andrew Stott, £160,000 Twitter Czar

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Change
•Web 2.0 – the social, interactive, participatory web
–The US election campaigning 2008-9
–Twitter and the Trafigura gagging injunction (2009)
–Commercial interests
•Civil society moving online - government’s ‘Twitter Czar’
•Openness; cultural commons (Boyle 2009)
•Democratisation of authoring
–Wikipedia; YouTube; Lulu (micro-publishing); Guardian’s CiF
•Established media disrupted
– explosion of choice, individualisation, fragmentation
•Implications for education

8. Learners

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Learners and technology today
(Melville, 2009)
•Own laptop and phone
•Digital divide (e.g. bandwidth, skills, access, vision, mobility)
•9/10 students use social networking sites
–‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘see’ spaces for private interaction, group interaction,
and performances
–But collaboration is haphazard
•Information literacies - a deficit area
–Question-finding (formulating effective searches)
–Critically analysing the results
–Making sense of; synthesising
–Working together

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A vision of students of today
•Michael Wesch is a digital
ethnographer from Kansas State
University:
–a cultural anthropologist exploring
new media, society and culture
–Wired mag calls him “the explainer”
•Watch Wesch, M (2007) A vision
of students today. Available from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

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Rumbles
“Only the Catholic Church has been around longer
and, like the Catholic Church, universities today bear
a striking structural resemblance to what they were
in medieval times.”
(Davidson & Goldberg 2009).
“In the years to come, we will say that it was a quiet
decade, with the existing system having remained
largely unchanged, almost unsuspecting, even, of
the major changes that were to follow.”
(Downes 2008)

12. Learners in
institutions

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Strategies!
•“The Strategy will, therefore, outline the ways in which we
intend to support students to become self-motivated
learners, enabled to take responsibility for, and control
of, their learning whilst at Goldsmiths and beyond.”
•“We will explore the development of more informal social
spaces and other tools including social software,
communication (e.g. wikis and blogs) and conferencing
tools, video streaming and assessment tools to enhance
learning, facilitate widening participation and improve
opportunities for student feedback.”
(Goldsmiths, 2007)

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A local strategy
•“Encourage our students’ reflective abilities through
innovative learning, teaching and assessment
supported by a developing infrastructure of
information and communication technologies”
(Goldsmiths Sociology Department, 2007)

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Universities are also concerned with
continuity

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The HE system is largely self-
sustaining

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Plus ça change
“Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th
century environment that still characterizes the
educational establishment where information is
scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented,
classified patterns subjects, and schedules.”
(McLuhan, 1967)

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Great Expectations (JISC Ipsos
MORI, 2008)
Familiar
Unfamiliar
ComfortableNot comfortable
Instant messaging
Text message
admin updates
Administrative
materials online
Using existing online social
networks to discuss coursework
Emailing tutors
Course-specific
materials online
Posting questions
Online to tutors
Web CT
Using social networks
such as Facebook as
a formal part of the
course
Submitting
assignments
online
Using podcasts
Making podcasts
Making wikis

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Great Expectations (JISC Ipsos
MORI, 2008)
Use Second Life
Contact tutor
Submit essays
Social Networking
Scholarly
websites
Non-digital
resourcesOnline library
resources
Discuss coursework
Online course info
University portal
Course specific
materials
% Students using approach regularly
Usefulness (Scale 1-4)
0 20 40 60 80 100
1
2
3
4

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Learners adapt to gain their
qualification
“The world they encounter in higher education has
been constructed on a wholly different set of
norms. …
Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and
the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any
established system. It is, however, unlikely to be
sustainable in the long term. The next generation is
unlikely to be so accommodating and some
rapprochement will be necessary”.
(Melville, 2009)

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Little demand for Web 2.0 from learner or
teacher roles – some resistance
"By the standards of e-university marketing
consultants, I had done everything wrong … I had
conducted all the lectures and tutorials, working way
over workload ... I did not record my lectures in any
form. I did not even use PowerPoint. If students
missed a session, there was no way for them to
'catch up'. I was inflexible, disciplined and
demanding ... I transgressed all the dogmatic
rules for flexibility established by educational
managers…”

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…
…Yet the students stood and
cheered at the end.”
(Brabazon, 2007, p217)

23. Academic teachers and
learners are exploring
technologies …
… independently, in their own
ways

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Opening up – learning commons
•Understanding that
courses are more
than their lectures
and notes
•Learning reconceived:
–Social
–Facilitated, not
transmitted
–Mostly informal
–Experiences

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Participatory learning
“… virtual communities where
they share ideas, comment on
one another’s projects, and
plan, design, implement,
advance, or simply discuss
their practices, goals, and
ideas together.”
(Davidson & Goldberg 2009)
Goldsmiths Design students
independently raised money
for their end-of-year show
with a line of accessories and
a vast community on
Facebook.

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Mobile or ‘untethered’ learning
•Independence of time
and place; “a meshing of
schedules” (Downes
2008)
•“…instead of delivering
content to the student,
they can require the
student to go out and
get it – or even better, to
go out and create it.”
(Downes 2008)

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Liquid course reader
•A proposed project in Art, Design and Media
•To involve students in negotiating and curating
their own course reader
–Open access
–Web-based
–Innovatively designed
–Negotiated face-to-face and also online
–Guided by academic teachers
•Example
–http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader

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Goldsmiths Library on our VLE

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Winkball – made in Goldsmiths
http://www.winkball.com/walls/Press_Officer/Goldsmiths_Open_Day

30. Challenges
(i.e. headaches)
for institutions

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Universities and Colleges Information
Systems Association (2008-9)
•Balancing / integrating Web 2.0 and institutional
VLE
–Managing risks
•Should tutors be on Facebook?
•Online collaboration
•Involving non-academic service (e.g. Libraries)
•Electronic portfolios
•Accommodating personal devices

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Assessment and standards
“as more and more of a person’s life becomes
available online, the need for certification will
diminish, as people acquire reputations of their own
… Where certification is granted, people presenting
certification without having acquired a reputation for
work in the community will be viewed with suspicion.”
(Downes, 2008)
Google’s PageRank technology as mass peer review
(Boyle 2009)

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Internet sites as learning
institutions
“To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the
importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making
impulse in humans who are willing to contribute,
correct, and collect information without remuneration:
by definition, this is education. To miss how much
such collaborative, participatory learning underscores
the foundations of learning is defeatist,
unimaginative, even self-destructive.”
(Davidson and Goldberg 2009)

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Learners cannot replace teachers
•The Web is no Oracle; students still find it hard to
–Construct effective searches
–Critically analyse - make sense of - the results
–Create, synthesise
•Rowlands et al (2008) debunked the idea of a
fundamentally different ‘Google Generation’
–Learners don’t tend to understand how the Web ‘works’
•The main difference is today’s proliferation of
information sources
–Universities don’t have to transmit information any more,
we can help students make sense of what is out there.

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Scaffolding learning today
"The aim of this process is to give students - and
citizens - the ability to move text into diverse
contexts, and observe how meanings change …
Critical literacy remains an intervention, signaling
more than a decoding of text or a compliant reading
of an ideologue’s rantings. The aim is to create
cycles of reflection. Operational literacy – encoding
and decoding – is a cultural practice of reproduction.
Critical literacy requires the production of argument,
interpretation, critique and analysis.”
(Brabazon, 2007, pp29-30)

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Questions
•Is it appropriate for institutions to expect to insert
learning into social environments?
•What do higher education institutions have to offer
which isn’t readily available on the Web?
•How do we envisage teachers evolving their roles?

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References
•Boyle, J., 2008. The public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, Available at:
http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf.
•Brabazon, T., 2007. The university of Google. Education in a post-information age. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
•Davidson, C. & Goldberg, D., 2009. The future of learning institutions in a digital age. Available at:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf.
•Downes, S., 2008. The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On. Available at:
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html [Accessed May 15, 2009].
•Glenaffric Ltd, 2008. HEFCE : Publications : Research and evaluation reports : 2008 : Review of the 2005 HEFCE
Strategy for e-Learning. Available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2008/rd20_08/ [Accessed September 16,
2009].
•Goldsmiths Sociology Department, 2007. Goldsmiths Sociology Department Learning, Teaching and Assessment
Strategy and Action Plan 2008/9 - 2011/12. Available at: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/learning-teaching/deptstrategy-
sociology.pdf.
•Goldsmiths, University of London, 2007. Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy for Goldsmiths, University of
London. Available at: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/learning-teaching/LTAcontext1.php [Accessed September 16, 2009].
•Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2009. HEFCE : Publications : 2009 : 2009/12 : Enhancing learning and
teaching through the use of technology - A revised approach to HEFCE's strategy for e-learning. Available at:
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_12/ [Accessed September 14, 2009].
•Johnson, L., Levine, A. and Smith R., 2009. Horizon Report. Available from: http://www.nmc.org/horizon
•JISC Ipsos MORI (2008) Great expectations of ICT: How Higher Education institutions are measuring up. Available
from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/greatexpectations.aspx.
•Melville, D., 2009. Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World : JISC. Available at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/heweb2.aspx#downloads [Accessed September 18, 2009].
•Rowlands, I. et al., 2008. The Google generation: the information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Available at:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf.
•Wesch, M (2007) A vision of students today. Video. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o