baebell18

Blog the Last: Exit, pursued by a (fake) bear...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:12:47 GMT

When is a death not a death? And what is Invisible Theatre? Let’s start with the second bit first.

Invisible Theatre is a technique much used by radical theatre groups some years ago, usually to raise issues and prompt social change in some way. In essence, the ‘audience’ should never know that it was seeing a performance – the heavily pregnant woman in the crowded tube train arguing with the young man refusing to give up his seat, the couple discussing putting their parent in a home and how they are to afford it, the man suffering a heart-attack in a crowded shopping centre, apparently expiring before an ambulance arrives – all are high pressure situations and with a deal of risk for the performers, lest an onlooker intervene and violently.

There are some theatre practitioners who have questioned the whole basis of the work as unethical. As a young lecturer, auditing a class, I saw a theatre group explode in anger on discovering that something they’d taken as a real crisis was a piece of Invisible Theatre. They had been told the ‘truth’ because it was one example of a range of structures they needed to experience, whereas the ‘real’ audience, according to the process, should never know. On discovering that the sick friend they’d just rescued ‘unconcious’ from inside a toilet cubicle by dismantling the structure with their bare hands, was performing, there had been outrage, hurt, a sense of betrayal and all of it fuelled by shock and adrenalin.

At one level it was only possible to convey to students the potential power and danger of the technique they had in their hands by making them experience its raw emotion, and at another it became something almost too charged for use. At a later date, whilst exploring some of Mike Leigh’s techniques for character building, I sent a couple of students out to ‘live’ one day as their characters. They were not performing ‘for’ any particular audience and had strict instructions not to lose sight of their own and others’ safety, but a couple of guys still got thrown out of a pub in Bolton, whilst quietly drinking and chatting, after being taken for a rent-boy and client.

Why am I raising old ghosts now? A few days ago I attended a piece of performance and a death, operating simultaneously in RL and SL which raised some similar questions about the performance of character and self online and the responsibility of the performer/leader to others. It was a troubling, unsettling, experience – which might mean that it was a successful piece of work – and yet…

I will use this visceral experience to take up the first thread of the more reflective patchwork discussion. The thread may lead somewhere…

Blog the Sixth: Hip to be Square

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:26:59 GMT

Blog the Sixth: Hip to be Square….

There was a deal about the Elluminate session that seemed satisfactory, although I’ll know more after I get some feedback. I felt able to explain the rationale behind the UHI work as well as hopefully giving something of the practical work day-to-day – at least how it is planned to go.

The group were lively and there were some kind comments, about a graphic that had worked well and also another colleague thought they might try something similar with a course they were working on. I have offered to answer any additional questions and keep folks up-to-date with how the programme works through Advisory Group and Validation and will be happy to do so, insofar as it involves the e-learning.

Slightly less satisfactory was my handling of the session. This is the first session I’ve done in a while and I felt out of practice for a number of reasons.

· I had prepared a ppoint, which was fine, but wanted to do one screen with some questions on it and I found myself struggling to put text onto it. This wasn’t helped by some ‘guests’ I did not know logging in half an hour in advance, so that I felt exposed and undermined before I’d started. Note to self: do the screens the day before – better still – practice.

· I didn’t script this – possibly should have done with the opening/introduction.

· The Elluminate system has been ‘updated’ and the controls are in subtly different places.

· This is the first Elluminate session since I bought a new screen, which is rectangular, rather than square and at the moment I have it set to full width.

· I’ve got new glasses – very expensive ones for screen work and they blur out towards the edges. Not happy with this at all.

I wasn’t satisfied with my peripheral vision and therefore with my ability to keep track of the chat room in the bottom left quadrant. I’ll try re-setting the monitor for ‘square’ next time. Wonder if I can customise where the chat room sits?

Simon appears to like the Elluminate planner and I’ll investigate it, but since UHI won’t be taking Elluminate up any time soon, I should probably not spend too long right now working up my skills, when I’ve not done a Blackboard module yet.

I was struck by the comment of one student to the effect that he’d previously found doing an online module to be ‘impersonal’ and thought this might be a type of learning very foreign to drama students, which was my own initial feeling. I may get complaints from the VC Masters about the quantity of VC time I’m going to use, but I still think I’m right not to try out a fully online module in Drama before the end of Level 8/Year 2.

Onwards and upwards.

Blog the Fifth: Just look at MIT...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:31:02 GMT

Blog the Fifth: Just look at MIT….

The Guardian has an article at the moment about some of the benefits and pitfalls behind universities making their teaching materials freely available online.[1] My work for UHI is giving me a front row seat, if not for the large scale activities of MIT, on the arguments for and against some of the issues involved in such a venture.

One of the major developments going on within UHI at the moment as a result of TDAP is the introduction of a new curriculum framework. This links in with one of UHI’s over-arching aims, which is to broaden the educational opportunities available to folk within the region and beyond. We aim to do this in part by making best use of our existing work/catalogue of modules in the planning of new work and actively networking programmes wherever possible.

The new curriculum framework says that no module can be closed to students from other degrees, except where pre-requisites or other issues dictate that they need to be. All programmes should offer students the opportunities to take up two elective modules and all should endeavour to utilise existing modules, if they are appropriate, rather than duplicate provision, e.g. Research Methods. The geographic and administrative structures of UHI have, in the past, tended to generate, if not actively encourage, duplication precisely because new programmes are initially ‘owned’ as academic/economic projects by individual academic partner colleges rather than by subject groupings working across the region.[2]

Alongside the curriculum and QA developments arising out of TDAP, particularly the drive to network programmes, UHI has been enhancing its remote delivery and e-learning/online provision. In the process, colleagues working on a current e-learning project (LEARN) have been challenging UHI staff to consider the example of MIT and its practice of putting teaching materials freely available online.

There are obvious questions about intellectual ownership, data protection, possible boosts and also potential damage done to reputation/RAE profile, through releasing work, particularly if it is linked to research; however, there are other, perhaps more fundamental, questions about how a laudable aim works in practice, rather than in theory.

Of course, there is a distinct difference between the idea of blending or putting wholly online course materials that constitute part of a ‘real’ learning experience, where a student is engaging with the material in the knowledge of a tutor, whether sat before them or on the other side of the world, and the idea of those same materials being accessed by unknown individuals without any kind of input from the tutor into their engagement with those materials.

It is easy under those circumstances for a tutor to ask, what the point is of the exercise? Viewing this material will not ‘teach’ anything very profound, or enable the viewer to ‘learn’ much of substance precisely because, taken on its own, it’s a prompt to surface learning and shallow analysis. This material is only the jumping-off point for the ‘real’ learning that happens in the ‘real’ course where my presence is a key element of the learning and teaching experience – otherwise I would not have constructed it in this way. This translates as – I didn’t write a self-help manual, I created one part of a two-way learning and teaching process. It won’t work as a self-help manual because it’s not designed to do that...so it could ‘fail’ the viewer, in terms of not delivering what they imagine it might deliver…and ultimately damages my reputation as a good teacher or curriculum designer.

It is unfortunate, but likely, that media articles will conflate the various types of blended/remote delivery/online/distance learning for simplicity; however, there is a real challenge here in terms of what MIT’s policy can do and for whom. There is also a real issue as to whether such a blanket release policy will yield the same type of impact in different subject areas.

The recent YouTube EDU channel is formalising one of the most interesting arenas to emerge in recent times, whereby it is possible to find very effective short lectures or demonstrations, made very simply, on a variety of topics, delivered by skilled professionals and insightful amateurs alike. Generally, it is in the sciences, or where there is some solid-ish information to be put over that this comes across best and it is noticeable that the ‘most popular’ courses listed on the MIT website are largely scientific and/or maths based. It is possible that such blanket publication will be less successful where the subject is characterised by nuance or shifting opinion, particularly if a learning experience is centred around discussion amongst students and/or tutor.

Drama is a creative art-form, blessed with layers of opinion and shifting impact moment by moment, and an arena that often requires so much background to make the present not only decipherable, but also engaging, that it does not seem well-placed to go down the general release route for artistic, technical and pedagogical reasons.

There is drama-based material currently available online, but it is limited in type and scope. Some departments post the written work surrounding live projects and individual students/groups may post the results of text-based project work. Others use the online tools to provide students with access to course materials. There are a very small number of distance-learning degree programmes that operate through what is effectively a basic read/respond mode, where students access all the materials in solitude, on DVD or webpages, and then feed back to their tutors with their response to the materials. And then there’s the OU, more of them later.

It is clear, from subject-based discussions, that more is going on in the way of exchange/collaboration than might be imagined; however, it is inevitable that data protection regulations and student confidentiality will limit what is made freely available online.

However, there’s always MIT.

I was looking forward to having a look at the MIT modules, if only because I’d never seen Drama creative and teaching content, as opposed to administrative content, put online. What did I want to find at MIT? What did I find?

I wanted lectures/demonstrations I could use and add to students’ reading list. I found session outlines, image banks, skeletons for module delivery, assignment specifications, but little or no actual teaching ‘content’. I was not surprised and in some respects was rather relieved.

I have found, on the OpenCourseWare Consortium website, a ‘full’ text-based theatre history course from Utah State University, which contains what in essence is an entire text-book written by the tutor and presented one ‘chapter’ at a time. I will direct students to one or two of the chapters, but the UHI degree structure does not currently allow for dropping in extant modules from other institutions. The same thing applies to the excellent materials made available by the OU, which are designed either to prepare students working ‘alone’ for subsequent work within a more structured OU environment, or as a taster.

There was within the MIT postings stuff that was undeniably useful, in terms of suggesting ways of working or refreshing old bibliographies. Some of it was downright intriguing, so that if I get the chance I’d like to read up on topic X, but this doesn’t make the materials fit either for me to ‘poach’/utilise under an appropriate Creative Commons© license, or for a newcomer to really get to grips with the topic. What it can do is enable curriculum developers to take a look at what others within the subject area are doing, for example, in terms of assessment design.

There is a challenge closer to home, which is how to put onto Blackboard© what I plan to do with the students, regardless of whether the materials will be made available or not. The idea of needing to set down in advance what it is that will happen each week, beyond a detailed outline, feels odd, when so much of what I do is in response to what is happening in front of me.

In terms of practical exercises/etudes I am wary of setting out the pathway in advance (this is the pattern of exercises and this is what you’ll get out of it) for students to see, if to do so short-circuits their journey. The knowledge and understanding at a deep intellectual and emotional level comes through personal experience and realisation of that emerging new knowledge in the moment. One of the primary transferable skills is that of learning to put oneself through the journey, learning how to shape the experiment that becomes the journey and to assess, value, reject and refine, experience into something intellectual and/or creative. I do not know, cannot know, what their creativity will produce in the future. I can only give them experience/knowledge to shape experimentation, provide the tools to sculpt creative work out of an amorphous mass of experience, so that they can do it for themselves.

One of the things I know that I will have to do, in order to make the whole cohort seminars work, is to be very precise, particularly in the first year, about how and what the students are taught so. Quite apart from any practical desire to ensure lively, informed, discussion, I have an institutional obligation to equivalency wherever possible between students on different sites. This will entail a lot of forward planning, e.g., I will give exact dimensions for working spaces for individual exercises, require that they be marked out and the exercises done precisely and in order before the tutors are able to explore more individually what is happening in front of them. When students in Thurso speak with students in Elgin about space and their experience of exploring how proxemics impact on stage picturisation, they will have an unspoken shared physical experience of working within the same space underpinning their arguments. This will be a challenge to the face-to-face tutors too, many of whom, like me, will be more familiar with a very individual approach to drama teaching; however, it might usefully be thought of as teaching the same choreography to each group, but allowing some space for individual and group improvisation arising out of it.

This blog has wandered a ways from the initial prompt, that article about OpenSource course materials, but there is a unifying thread in the idea of equivalency and the ‘threat’ of an emerging single curriculum, whether imposed from above or as a result of ‘economies of scale’ being realised through the use of work done by others. This was one of the things that exercised the subject area in the period around the first subject benchmarking exercise, when colleagues in very different institutions worried that the strength of the UK’s varied drama/theatre education, which lies partly in its variety, might be diluted. In the eventuality, the benchmarking team then and those who have revised the document since worked hard to try to convey the importance of flexibility and the ability of individual courses to take their particular slant on the subject area.

Drama at UHI will be working with its own variation.

[1] Swain, Harriet. “Any student, any subject, anywhere : Web technologies are driving a revolution in higher education, where many degrees may soon be studied online.” The Guardian. 10 November 2009. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/10/web-technology-degree-future-online accessed on 10/11/09.

[2] As an example of this, North Highland College (NHC) had been trying for several years to develop drama provision in close consultation with HITN, the Highlands & Islands Theatre Network, an employers’ organisation covering the whole region. It had become clear that in order to create something viable in the first instance and then sustainable, it had to be a networked programme, offered across more locations than those maintained by NHC, although these stretch from Alness, just north of Inverness, to Wick. Accordingly, an economic and academic case was made for development funding from the EU and NHC employed me to develop and then run the programme as part of UHI’s provision. We are beginning with three academic partners and expect to acquire more.

Blot the Fourth: The Dancing Tutor

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:06:41 GMT

Blog the Fourth: The Dancing Tutor

There was a time before e-learning.

I’m walking into a lecture carrying too many things and the pile is tipping. Just inside the door a student sees the disaster looming and bounds forward to offer a helping hand. He shakes his head at me, tut-tutting and grins, knowing that my attachment to the departmental photocopier, providing them with articles, scenes from plays, reviews, facsimile documents and departmental memos, is legendary. It’s part of my academic persona, like my collection of sweaters (this I did not know about until told) and it humanises me away from simply being the gatekeeper/expert knowledge provider.

The room is a medium-sized classroom, flat-floored, which makes maintaining eye contact with the whole group more difficult than in a raked lecture hall and I need to keep a strong hold on this group today: we’re doing Brecht and they think they know Brecht from school. I’m about to dismantle some of that, to inject some greys into their black-and-white and that’s going to require effort on their part.

I am ‘performing’ insofar as I use the same techniques to hold their attention, to direct it towards salient points, as I would use to ‘work’ an audience. As another character my movement is dictated by that character and by where the director wants the audience to be looking at any given moment – as me, I’m a natural pacer, a gesturer, hands shaping in the air the energy behind the ideas, reflecting back the energy I’m getting from them, but I also know the value of absolute stillness for those moments when I want the students to think very carefully about what I’m saying. However, in both cases, character and lecturer, I’m submerging the technique in the moment so that the spectator, hopefully, concentrates only on that character and their predicament, that argument and how to take it forward.

This learning environment forms a contrast in many ways to the rest of the student week, the practical work done in studios being very largely group-work and forms of problem-based learning, with the tutors, often same ones as in the lecture hall, side-coaching. Side-coaching is subtle, sometimes a silent presence, sometimes encouragement, exhortation, warning as a response to what they’re doing – a jazz counterpoint to the student-generated action. Physically, you almost blend into the walls, hoping that they are able to tune your physical presence out and simply pick up on what you’re saying – until that moment when you have to become physical in the space. It’s a mix of teaching styles that seems to work for us and for the students.

This is now.

The process should surely be similar? I’m planning something that mixes face-to-face practical work and remote deliver/online learning. The practical side-coaching in the studio should remain basically the same, but the classroom-based work will be handed over to a form of teaching that is characterised as side-coaching, in the celebrated e-learning shift, from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side, an image that openly acknowledges the performative aspects of the traditional work ‘on the stage’.

Now the tutors may be different for the different environments. Does that not allow more specialism, thereby intensifying the students’ experience?

Possibly, probably, but it’s not as simple as I had imagined because the remote delivery/online space is turning out to be a performance space like none other and being the ‘guide on the side’ demands far more conscious performance than would normally be the case for someone side-coaching.

It is an uncanny space and the academics surveyed recently by researchers at Bournemouth University[1] who expressed concerns about online work diminishing their academic ‘identities’ and carefully nurtured relationships with their students, were speaking, obliquely, about how they had developed and now traded on their personas, in which their physical presence and sense of self at one in the space with the student, seemed to loom so large as to make a different order of shared being look very unappealing indeed.

There is an extent to which they are right, in that generating the same type of relationship with students in terms of trust earned, entails an unexpected level of personal engagement, in which it could be argued that those communication and relationship-building tools invested in the physical presence of the tutor have to be replaced by other ‘gestures’ that similarly reach out to the student.

If f2f communication is facilitated by the tutor’s teaching persona X, consisting of P(physical presence), A(actions), C(context) and R(reputation) to varying degrees, which is the human default in understanding those who stand before us, then an environment in which P is missing leaves a hole into which either A, C and R must expand to fulfil the requirements for a student’s creating/understanding their relationship with the tutor, or P has to be reframed.

If A, C and R are expanded, not necessarily by any additional action but simply as occupying the space left by P, the additional weight and importance can be potentially risky – the smallest actions or omissions come to carry more importance, come to be ‘read’ as P even if that was not their original function.

Is P, for the tutor, the same thing as Social Presence – that ability to project oneself into a group space? Possibly, but that entails rather more conscious decision-making than we’re used to making P visible. In the f2f world, picking out an outfit of a morning is often the most conscious decision we make, whereas in the online environment, a performance arena, handing down judgement like any other, we regularly make choices about online tools and how we’ll use them that create a mosaic picture of us that stands for P.

I’m learning slowly how to do this. A couple of modules back I found myself in a group project, once again the only woman in a group of men, being steered towards a role, that of nurturer, that I’d done before many times over the years. There was a part of me that wanted to stand up and say, No gentlemen, this time I want to take on a different role, but agreeing was the line of least resistance and there were too many reasons why this was the most ‘efficient’ way for the group to work, not least that I was the odd one out in not being in a location where group members could meet in person.

I wanted to create a framework for the group within which members would feel secure and cared for, that someone would always be looking out for the group even if they, personally, had to be away for a day or so. We set up a group diary so that absences didn’t come as a surprise. I chose to structure the discussion list around a daily posting, under which all other postings by members that particular day would then fall. This made it easier for folk to keep up with what was happening and became an easy habit to check in once a day. For most of the time period, I made the daily posting, sometimes with something substantive about the project, sometimes with something social/light. On rare days I was away, others took it on without being asked, and if someone needed to post early, before I’d managed to make the post, they usually followed the established pattern. I took on running meetings, drafting minutes and editing documentation and tried to ensure that materials were accurate and up there promptly, so that the rest of the team could do the more creative work. Sometimes I coaxed, cajoled and sometimes I chivvied. There was security in process, for me too and it was an enjoyable project to work on, but it was the regular contact within a comparatively simple framework that made it so.

Some e-learning tools are better suited to enabling presence than others. Technical complexities worry novice educators and students alike, with the result that in comparison to the f2f session, the soft metatext that sets the tone for the work that day (what mood is she in/what sweater is she wearing?) is pared down in the online exchange because the demands and uncertainties of the technical interface takes up the space around the learning and teaching activities that we normally use to create the working environment/tone of the session.

Elluminate© is a friendly tool, precisely because it has a ‘face’ a combination of sources of communication that it’s possible to read continuously and simultaneously with practice, some of them about data input, some of them emotional shorthand. At the moment I can cope readily with most elements working simultaneously, but sometimes lose focus on the bottom left quadrant of my screen and therefore have to be extra vigilant about text messages appearing there and not being picked up quick enough. At full stretch, working an Elluminate group session is actually quite exciting, somewhat like juggling, because it involves both guiding the overall discussion and responding timeously to multiple sources of information and all need commenting on “I’ve seen you Sally” “Alex we’ll deal with that next” “Are you agreeing Dot?” Whereas in a f2f room, you can catch an eye and nod, acknowledging presence, here you have to put it in writing or speak out or they will worry that they haven’t been seen. Copy typing is a boon.

In the end, I see e-learning as being just as challenging a performance arena for the skilled educator as the f2f environment, but with this added complication, that we have to re-think all we take for granted about how we create and maintain our teaching identities and we have to do it at the same time as learning to navigate the technical world.

[1] Attwood, Rebecca. “Why offline? It’s very personal: Desire to protect status and student contact fuels resistance to e-learning.” The Higher: Times Higher Education 22-28 October 2009 No.1,919 p.13.

Blog the Third: So what happened in Australia?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:10:04 GMT

This week, whilst away, I’ve been starting to work on the review of and possible revisions to the ADSA09 workshop, looking at what happened and where, if at all, this might fit into the overall course development planning.

In some respects this workshop sits alone since I doubt that there’s any chance at the moment of my being able to persuade UHI to let me take on Second Life©; however, there may be alternative immersive environments that will serve a similar purpose of enabling students to ‘meet’ and work in a shared space whilst hundreds of miles apart.

What did I want to demonstrate to the ADSA delegates? That it was possible for newcomers to SL to engage creatively from the first, by recognising that this IS a new world, we are as small children within it most of us, and if we want to convey meaning, sophisticated/adult meaning, then we have to strip away expectations, for example, of being able to ‘do Shakespeare’ in a recreation of the Globe utilising the same skills/tools as we would employ in the ‘real’ world, and drive past the newness of the environment.

This was the notecard instruction to be issued to the groups for the final piece of work in the session.

You have 15 mins to create a piece of up to 2 minutes duration. There are parameters to this:

You must begin with one figure and end with all working simultaneously OR you may do the reverse.
You may use 2 lines of text in the chat box.
Please stick to stuff that everyone can do i.e. walk, run, turn, jump, sit, crouch, fly - no extra scripts.
You will perform in this space, but you can ask for your audience to be end on, traverse, in-the-round, etc.
Prompts are ‘Stranger’, ‘Web’, ‘Moving Through’ or your choice.

Don’t become hung up right now on movements/things you cannot do – find the meaning in what you’ve got.

We didn’t reach it. I’m confident from what I saw and experienced that the exercise itself would have worked successfully, but that’s small help if we don’t get to it – so what happened and does what happened in this instance have any wider bearing on what I’m doing at UHI?

There are similarities in the basic situation in that I’m planning the UHI degree in terms of a blend of students being taught face-to-face and through online/remote delivery.

What was I working with at ADSA09?

· Students doing the workshop in Second Life who could hear me, through speakers, but not see me.

· Onlookers/lurkers in the workshop space who could see what was on Julie’s screen because it was on a large screen and could hear me

· I could see a view into the room through the Skype link to Julie’s computer, but this was limited to whatever was in front of the screen

· I could see the Second Life site

I needed to control a number of different things.

The work of the participants within Second Life.
I had a certain amount of control over the ‘helpers’ in the room
The experience for the ‘lurkers’.
The Second Life participation of Julie, who was the ‘lurkers’ eyes in the world. This is how I explained it.

The folk who’re watching us work via the big screen, Hello Lurkers, I’ll take specific questions from you when we’re a bit further in and the players are off working. Your view of what’s happening comes courtesy of Julie and her avatar. This means Julie’s going to have a tricky job today, because sometimes I’ll be asking her to join in with the exercises and sometimes I’ll ask her to stand on the banking and give you an overview of the scene.

I know that this is how I explained it because this is part of the ‘script’. The whole session was scripted.

What did the script do?

1. It allowed me to concentrate on what was happening before me, knowing that I’d built in communication opportunities for Julie’s group of ‘lurkers’. The workshop was about ‘being’ in SL, so I had her orchestrated to sometimes be working in third person and sometimes in mouselook.

2. It supported my own Second Life work, since I’m not experienced enough to swap between modes of communication and ways of moving automatically, by mapping out precisely where I needed to make adjustments, both for myself and for the students.[1] My own hardcopy of the script was marked up with additional cues for me.

Did this fit with the blended Community of Inquiry model created to articulate the drama degree’s teaching model?

There was a physical/immediate element in Perth, Australia
There was a mediated element online
There was tutor involvement, both immediate and mediated

So now all I need to do is, on the one hand pick apart the workshop itself and refine its workings for another time, and on the other consider what, if any, wider implications there might be arising out of this experience.

[1] One of the most useful things was discovering that it was possible to set scripts to half-speed, thereby slowing the default walk to something more beginner-friendly.

Opening a channel...

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:50:04 GMT

Opening a channel…

Reviewing the learning contract after discussions between the tutors, they’re absolutely right – there’s too much there, close to half a module in fact – so now the work will comprise an Elluminate session with the Module 3 students, using the work on the UHI drama degree as a case study on blending an arts degree for a dispersed cohort, and a review and revision of the ADSA09 Second Life workshop in the light of its first running.

Keith is going to try to find an example of this ‘patchwork’ format as I’ve never encountered one before. I’ve located an interesting paper, available free as a Powerpoint from Lydia Arnold’s blog site[1], from which patchworks sound rather like a media-friendly version of the journal/logbook/portfolio approach that drama and other fine/lively arts have been using for a while.

The media last week picked up a story about social networking tools, i.e. Facebook©, being used successfully to improve retention[2]. I was hugely impressed with a conference demonstration given by the Wolverhampton dance department on how they used a Facebook clone as an integral part of a scheme to introduce Level 1 students to academic writing on dance.[3]

Why do we use structures and communication environment that come from another sphere, e.g. social networking? The first and easy answer is that they offer readymade tools and processes, but more than that we want students to find them familiar, to feel more at home than if they were facing something totally new – we’re taking advantage of work done elsewhere. But with ease borne of practice comes familiarity, comes expectation.

Academics - perhaps there’s an extent to which we see these tools/processes as arising out of academic/scholarly research; today’s social networking is the commercial application of research that the academy ‘owns’?

For students, particularly those coming from school/colleges, this happens in reverse, i.e., the social networking tools are the ‘property’ of the worldwide community of net-users – a community with different social mores, different understandings, for example, of ownership. What academe does with these same tools can be seen as a faint or partial copy of the commercial product, one example being the often superior levels of graphics obtainable in the games industry.

With this in mind, if a tool, like an asynchronous discussion board or a blog, has an inbuilt structure that begets expectations and we don’t use them – what are we saying?

In fannish communities there’s a type of maker (fic, pics, vids, icons, meta – whatever) known as the ‘feedback whore/junkie’. Many makers will call themselves ‘feedback junkies’ in a lighter moment, but the ones who’re occasionally criticised are the type of maker who says, ‘I’m not posting another chapter/pic unless/until I get X number of feedback comments on this one’[4] because it is seen as a form of emotional blackmail.

The ‘virtuous ideal’ says that the maker shouldn’t need feedback because the making and sharing is reward in itself; however, it is understood that it is natural to be curious about how your work has gone down. This is especially true if X comments regularly on your work; if they don’t comment this time, does it mean this piece of making has failed? Why did they respond to Y’s work and not to mine?

You have opened a conversation unless you deliberately disable the ‘Comment’ feature. The default is that an invitation is given for feedback, so to disable 'Comment' is something that requires explanation and within many situations is usually as a result of trauma of some kind. Consequently it also follows that, depending on the actual/implied relationship between maker and viewer, not to comment is uncivil.

So am I suggesting that we, as tutors, if we take on the familiar structures have to live up to the expectations, in reality have to respond to everything posted with some written response?

Yes, I am, for a number of reasons. One is because the ‘comment’ button is there, is an integral part of the tool we’ve asked the student to use. Another reason is because of what it signals about the process to other students. If we ask the group for a discussion, multiple discussions, and then don’t ‘discuss’ ourselves we can unconsciously block them. Some will need a ‘nudge’ to start to comment, some discussions can veer wildly off topic in unhelpful ways, some students posting may need encouragement to persevere if the posting is not especially strong.

How do we train students to comment consistently on their peers’ work – to get involved in the ‘discussion’ on an asynchronous discussion board? There are all sorts of strategies, most of which involve compulsion in the short term, e.g. a percentage of marks given for contributions, and one hopes that the habit becomes ingrained; however, what are we saying about this, if we do not contribute consistently ourselves?

Surely to have to respond to everything is indulging the student, ‘stroking’, in ways we’d never do with f2f students? But we do stroke – the weight of our physical presence in a shared space, the nod, the meeting of the gaze, the half smile, the way we sit, the enquiring/encouraging look – speak volumes and we do it all the time – we keep up a constant flow of non-verbal communication that becomes the glue in the relationship.

We want the glue, to be the guide on the side, but this responding to everything sounds like a lot of work.

Those small visual signals can equate to a brief comment, a few words only, that becomes at once an acknowledgement of work done and a cue for others. The two-word comment – what is it worth? I still have my undergraduate essays (1977-81, English Literature) and two words and a grade were all I got on any of them.

Looking back, our expectations of feedback were much lower, although I think even then it looked a little thin, but now for the e-learning tutor, that brief comment does something beyond its overt meaning to contribute to the Community of Inquiry on a number of levels.

And I think it’s a must.

[1] “Advancing the patchwork text: The development of patchwork media.” Approaches
Paper by Arnold, L, Thompson, K & Williams, T The Sixteenth International Conference on Learning, University of Barcelona. July 2009 accessible on http://lydiaarnold.wordpress.com/category/patchwork-text-patchwork-media/ accessed 16/10/09.

[2] “Facebook ‘Cuts student drop-outs’.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8299050.stm accessed 18/10/09

[3] Andrews, Ben & Thoms, Vickie (2008) Using ‘You Tube’: Academic and Personal Writing with Dance Students 3rd European First Year Experience (EFYE) Conference, University of Wolverhampton. PDFs of the original CMAP presentation EYFE1 EFYE2 EFYE3 Available at http://www.wlv.ac.uk/Default.aspx?page=18361 Accessed most recently 18/10/09

[4] There are two assumptions being made there – that there is something already made that the viewer will not get access to unless they, and others, pay up in comments, and that the maker knows that there are Z number of people viewing their work, but only a small percentage of Z are bothering to comment. The first may or may not be true, some makers won’t start on a ‘next chapter’ until prompted; the second may be evidenced by hit counter software, i.e. you can see that 150 separate IP addresses looked at the fic and you have 5 comments.

Applied Practice in Blended & Online Teaching: Blog 1

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:24:34 GMT

If you look at the profile attached to this journal you will see that it is currently being used in support of my work on a module for a degree in Blended & Online Education at Napier University, Edinburgh. If you come across it accidentally, you are welcome to offer comment, so long as it is appropriate and respects the educational purpose of the posting.

Blog: This blog is beginning late for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with me as a distance-learning student and, incidentally, as a distance-learning colleague.

At the moment I work almost exclusively from home and rarely see UHI colleagues. Even though I knew that our BOE group was fracturing, I was disconcerted by my first look at the module descriptor. Working so much on my own for UHI, I had come to value the support of the Napier group for the human contact and shared experience, with the result that this module structure seemed very off-putting.

Secondly, despite all the positive things I’d done since June, I was also a typical nervous student in feeling that my skills had been diminished over the summer and there were lots of things I didn’t understand here and had no inclination at this point to try to tackle on my own …and I didn’t have any students and this was all about working with students to the extent that almost everyone else had managed to APEL out of it!

By this point I was panicky and resentful, particularly because it had taken me back to how I had felt about the very first module, which I would undoubtedly have abandoned before starting because of major and ongoing technical issues which Napier refused to get involved with. On that occasion it was family support that had made the most difference. I had been pleased with some of the work that I’d done since and pleased with what I’d felt was progress, particularly in terms of ‘seeing’ the possibilities of the work, but weaknesses remained.

I understand my own learning style enough now to know that I have issues with ‘new’ technologies – I’ve still successfully never heard my mobile phone ring, I can’t ‘text’ and after unsuccessfully struggles I’ve put the MP3 player back in its box and abandoned any attempt to get the digital pictures off my camera. On the other hand I’m proud of getting to grips with Visio Pro this summer – simple and menu-driven but complicated enough.

Now it seemed that the institution was repeatedly and deliberately making things difficult for me…and I was paying for this. In many respects it is in the emotional re-connection that this experience has given me with a generation of students who ‘pay’ their way and work two ‘jobs’, when my undergraduate education was grant-funded and my sole occupation, that leaves me with the feeling that I’m every day better equipt to design work and administrative systems that will support my UHI students.

However, all this uncertainty was set aside whilst I worked on a poster presentation for the DRHA09 (Digital Resources for the Humanities & Arts) conference, 7-9 September, at Queen’s, Belfast. It was an intriguing conference and I got a lot of useful feedback, but I lost some of the detail and the succeeding week to flu and had no memory of having discussed the module with Keith at all.

The end result was that come the beginning of Week 4 I was half decided to call a halt to the process now or at least put it on hold for a year. After all, I have a validation event scheduled for January and am the sole writer of this programme, so am busy enough in all conscience. However, having chatted over the matter with my tutor, I decided to press ahead, in good part because what had happened over the Summer needed further exploration if the positive lessons learned were to be incorporated into the methodologies for working the new degree.

The prompt to further work was emerging primarily from Second Life and co-incidentally from my struggles to persuade UHI to take on an immersive and performative environment (a process complicated by the separate IT departments/systems operating at the UHI academic partner colleges.)

At the beginning of July I’d taken a movement workshop session in Second Life for a group of Australasian drama educators at ADSA09. They were in Perth, Australia at 9.00am, I was in Invergordon at 4am. It was interesting on a number of fronts.

1. Getting enough avatars for the student group involved some scrambled phonecalls and my entire family now each have a couple. We also borrowed some. This issue, of the restrictions sometimes placed by Linden Labs on the multiple registration of users by educational institutions, was brought up in discussion at DRHA09 in Belfast and was felt to be one of a number of major issues with the commercial provider which would need to be addressed before institutions planned further expansion of their usage.

2. I couldn’t do this sort of timing on a regular basis. I often join in the ISTE tours of SL, which are held at a manageable 5pm GMT, and they cover most of North America at a reasonable hour.

3. The technical problems. As a drama tutor I’m most used to ‘side-coaching’ in the studio which entails a flow of verbal communication that works alongside the physical. I’d been told that Voice in Game was unreliable and had had experience of serious ‘lag’ on ISTE tours, so decided to use a Skype call, linked to speakers in the studio, to talk with the students. We did a test the week previously which worked perfectly, not a crackle for 40 minutes. On the day, the session had been moved to another room which the Australian team hadn’t been able to test for Skype reception – and it was patchy at best, throwing me off six or seven times. I was able to continue the sessions using text whilst I re-connected, and had planned for this, but I couldn’t work as fluently as I wanted to.

4. I underestimated how difficult it would be to get the group to follow instructions for several different reasons.

a. Some real newbies were so absorbed in what they were looking at, that they unknowingly ‘tuned out’ verbal instructions, so I sometimes doubled up instructions with voice and text.

b. The group got very excited and without being physically in the room it was harder to keep them focused. At points I threw the session plan out of the window, to let them ‘play’, e.g. with flying, but tried to keep them roughly on message.

c. There were a couple of experienced group members who found it hard to deal with limits in this environment, e.g. when I had the group stationary listening to instructions, they would be turning cartwheels behind my avatar. Now if we had been in RL and they had been experienced gymnasts in a class of beginners they would never have thought of doing this behind a teacher’s back and drawing focus, but in this environment, there were not those conventions – and I wasn’t in their space physically to check them privately.

d. I found myself reverting to techniques I hadn’t used since I worked with groups of small children in Theatre-in-Education, e.g. getting them all to sit on the ground in front of me whilst I explained things, being very prescriptive about how, where and when they moved. This worked fairly well, particularly once most had calmed down and begun to work to my rhythms, but wasn’t what I’d originally planned; however, perhaps it is useful to think of gamer newbies as truly ‘new’ to a virtual world.

5. I over-prepared, but was able to get through around 60% of the planned work and was satisfied that the final task would have been appropriate given what I was seeing in the earlier exercises.

6. It threw up into sharp relief the e-learning maxim about moving from being ‘the sage on the stage, to the guide on the side’ and I wonder about the extent to which as e-learning tutors we reflect on how ‘side-coaching’ works in VLEs?

It would be good to work further in a less time-pressured way with drama students, exploring some of the issues around performance on, what is essentially, a new keyed instrument. Since I don’t have any at the moment, I’ll have to try to recruit them from elsewhere, perhaps through an appeal on the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) board.

The second positive of the Summer was preparation for the DRHA09 poster session which entailed some chewy thought around what it was I was attempting to do in the design of the degree. In the course of this I ‘blended’ the Garrison graphic about Communities of Inquiry to help to explain how the blended format of the delivery would hopefully engender a single creative company of learners from the dispersed cohort. In drawing up the graphics I was struck again by the relative positions of the online/remote delivery tutors and the students and now think it might be useful to work in this module on thinking about tutor engagement at a distance.

Accordingly, it is this area, which actually brings together SL as an environment within which to explore the overall blended experience that I plan to take the work for this module forward. I understand that I will be able to work with students from the year below ours and having made the decision to carry on at this time, I’m looking forward to designing something that will hopefully interest colleagues.

Working with Students in Immersive Environments, e.g. Unity, SecondLife?

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:04:52 GMT

I'm trying to assess different immersive environments as good places to enable students on different campuses
to work with one another. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Thanks.

Second Life - the lecturer/student experience

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:54:15 GMT

I'm wondering if anyone has had experience, either as a student or professor, of doing a project or module in Second Life or similar? If you were the lecturer setting it up, was it hard to do and did your students engage with it successfully? If you were the student what did you think? Did it add to studying the topic? Had you been in Second Life before?
(I seem to remember someone talking about a haunted house in one post, but I can't find it.)Thanks.

Practice as Research Survey - Confidential Version

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:09:44 GMT

This is a more confidential version of the survey posted on 3rd October 2007. If you wish to know anymore about the work I'm doing do please contact me initially on baebell18@livejournal.com
Thank you for your time and effort. It is much appreciated.

View Poll: Practice as Research and the Fannish Practitioner (confidential)

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:59:15 GMT

I am currently preparing a paper for a conference in Manchester on the broad area of Practice as Research, outlining some of the similarities and differences in approach between, for example, scholars in theatre and/or dance and those studying and publishing in/on fandom.

Thank you for taking part in this short survey. Its purpose is to begin to gather the thoughts of aca-fen and others writing/studying in this area about how the roles of researcher and maker/practitioner inter-act.

Some terms may be contested or contentious. I am also aware that the categories below will not cover every situation, for which I apologise.

If anyone is interested in knowing more about the project or exchanging views privately, please contact me initially on my LiveJournal e-mail address. I will seek specific permission before quoting any individual and cite them by their preferred identity/name.

ETA: I have provided a confidential version of this survey at http://baebell18.livejournal.com/1783.html

View Poll: Practice as Research and the Fannish Practitioner

Fanfiction as Folk Art - Would it help to be Anonymous and Dead?

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:02:54 GMT

LiveJournal writer narahttbbsrecently commented on the value, or lack of it, placed on fanfiction as writing. She felt (I paraphrase what is a most interesting discussion) that her fanfic was unfairly devalued, thought to be less well-crafted or serious in its intent because it was not put before the paying public and nor did she wish to write for money. http://narahttbbs.livejournal.com/150889.html

It is a complaint that is a familiar one to many fanfic writers. We know how hard we work to shape our writing and for most of the time that struggle is part of the pleasure, but why should our commitment to our writing be seen as somehow lacking and the work itself devalued, because we don't choose to earn our livings through writing?

Perhaps we should be thinking around the issue to see where such assumptions about fandom's type of creative endeavours come from and also recognising that we are in the midst of a period of such rapid change and development in the use of the Internet that attitudes will need reshaping, will inevitably BE reshaped – and people are sometimes, for perfectly understandable reasons, resistant to change.

Is it possible to argue that in fanfiction what we have created is written folk art ? And if fanfic could be classified as being folk art, what is it about folk art that might lead to such a dismissive response?

In a general museum collection, the Folk Art is usually displayed in separate galleries from the High Art.

We usually know who the artists are in the High Art galleries and their work displays both a high level of skill (for hire) and, usually an effort to embody some weighty idea – they are endeavouring to make their art ‘speak’ about what it is to be human. Most of the artists in these galleries will engage with a shared body of knowledge, whether it is Renaissance artists painting religious scenes, taken from texts/stories that they could reasonably assume their audience were familiar with, or landscape artists seeking to depict places their viewers might know, or might wish to be introduced to. Some artists, for example, Warhol, engage with popular culture as a shared arena – the ‘Marilyn’ pieces work because the image of the actress already had a currency – it ‘meant’ something, which Warhol could work with/subvert/undermine/comment on – and the spectator’s response depended in part on how they approached the original material and therefore what impact his manipulation of it had on them.

In galleries of Folk Art it is much less likely that one will find a label identifying the artist. Examples of finely crafted artifacts, both everyday items such as woven textiles, and ritual or gift items, hang on walls or sit within glass cabinets. The carved Christening or Wedding spoons, colourful buckets covered in Barge Art, patchwork quilts or embroidered hangings, beadwork, bridal chests or pottery vessels, are described in terms of their age and area of origin and some explanation may be given of hidden meanings within the work.

Most folk art was intended to be enjoyed or to carry meaning for a limited circle of family, friends and the local community – a shared vocabulary of skills in working materials and design traditions that encompassed meaning, was carefully handed down and outstanding skills and individual artistry celebrated within the community and sometimes sold/gifted ‘out’ to a wider audience.

To those who created the Western canon, who tried to set down principles around which ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art should be judged, this private, non-commercial, decorative, art which was displayed through unusual/mundane formats, did not seem to conform to their ideas of outstanding worth, in part because it ‘meant’ something hidden from the wider audience and was often practiced alongside, or as part of, other activities or employment. Also when folk artists tackled formats that appeared closer to those inhabited by high artists, their work appeared to lack skill or to disregard traditions practised by those valued as high artists. Painted pub signs for The Grey Horse pub, rarely featured horses as painted by Stubbs, poetry written by the so-called Peasant Poets of the Romantic era seemed simplistic in its ideas and ‘clunky’ in its execution. Whether it was a good pub sign or the poems spoke to their audience did not matter to the arbiters of good taste – the materials (paint, written language) had been employed and the results should be judged by standards developed to rank works made for quite different circumstances.

Is fanfiction, or fanart, a form of folk art? It is not generally practised for money and there is a strong element of private pleasure and investment in a gift economy (fics are written for challenges, birthdays, because someone is feeling low and needs cheering up). We take our shared body of knowledge of the original material and work with its traditions for our pleasure, including the pleasure of creation, and the pleasure of those whom we value (our readers). There is no threshold skill level that you have to pass in order to be allowed to make fanfic, anymore than the Embroiderers Guild checks up on every quilter. We do ‘publish’ our work, i.e. we gift it to our public and decide, by placing it in certain archives or by flocking our posts, how wide a public we’re offering it to – and then our community responds to our work and so the exchange of ideas and pleasure continues.

Is fanfic a form of ‘literature’ and should it be judged as such? There is a large, complicated and often hotly-contested argument around where the parameters of literature should lie that I don’t intend to go into; however, there is another argument altogether that says that in making fanfiction in response to a shared vocabulary, offering it to our chosen audience and engaging in dialogue with that audience, we are creating instances of Storytelling, in a performance captured in written words and images? Appreciation of the art of the storyteller has been declining in Western civilisation almost since the invention of the printing press. It is being rediscovered, but slowly.

It is likely that the recent coming together of makers and consumers in new communities that has been enabled by the Media and especially the Internet, will eventually result in a re-assessment of the worth of online written creativity – blogging will be studied/valued as much as Pepys’ diaries, fanfic will be studied for more than the ethnographical characteristics of its producers/consumers. Until then, if one accepts that there may be similarities between folk art and fan creativity, one major hurdle dividing folk art and high art has been crossed by fanfic writers. In the past works of folk art were frequently unsigned and once personal knowledge/memory had faded, it was hardly thought worth recording or researching the names/identities of those who had made the work.

Little or no fanfiction is by ‘Anonymous’ – the public identities of fannish makers may be constructed ones (and plenty of 'high' artists such as El Greco are known by constructed, rather than given, names), but they are visible and recorded for posterity. We post our work, step forward to be 'seen' in our storytelling and then, mostly, invite feedback. That doesn't sound very anonymous to me.

ETA. Many thanks to rez_lo who pointed out that Camille Bacon-Smith in Enterprising Women and Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers have touched on this. See also Kat Macdonald's thesis Reflections on the Modern Folk Process http://sff.net/people/thyme/main.htp Lots to think about here.