Blogging Journey (A Possible Representation)

This year my colleague, Lin Armstrong, and her new students on 2+2 Childhood Studies programme are to start blogging – as their predecessors did in previous years. When I spoke to them at our first blogging session, it occurred to me that the journey these students would have to make could be expressed in terms of transition from collector to curator to creator.

My usual advice to blogging newbies is to start with cutting and pasting the weblinks and YouTube videos, perhaps adding the titles of those pieces of content as well. This should be easy enough.

The next step is to provide a short description of what’s there, behind the weblink. Then another step – to provide also a short response to the viewed/read: I like it because…, I disagree because… Eventually we should reach the stage where the original reflection prevails; it well may be inspired by another piece of content, of course – an article read, TV programme watched, conversation heard etc. On the whole, the blog becomes a reflection of the author’s interests and abilities.

Blogs are not only a tool for reflective practice; they are also portfolios and depositories of useful materials. Therefore, it is quite appropriate to approach blogging as a collector would: to regard it as a huge box for storing all kinds of useful stuff for the future. In that aspect, a blog will provide evidence of the breadth of reading and other forms of content discovery. It seems to me that majority of people on Facebook stay forever in the collector’s slippers: they bubble away about what they see.

Curation starts with first strategic decisions: my blog will be about this and that, only materials on specific topics will be of interest to me and my audience, I would like to be perceived as someone knowledgeable on certain topics and adhering to certain values. Of course, every student has a manifold of interests and the blog should reflect that. At this stage paying attention to the blog’s audience is important: What would I like my readers to discover, get inspired by? The author is likely to move away from the collector’s excitement of “Wow, that’s interesting! I should keep it” to conscious researching decisions: “I need to pay attention to certain fields of academic (or any other suitable) discourse to build my knowledge and my own story and arguments”. Curation involves not only arranging and pointing out, but “collection development” too, using the librarians’ language.

Becoming a creator is exciting. It involves developing one’s own voice and – developing further – interests and passions. Does everyone has to be(come) a creator? – I think it’s a wrong question as everyone is a creator in one or another aspect. Life and learning are processes: we move from one experience to another, being changed for better or worse, feeling more inspired or less so. When we feel frustrated or discouraged, or just lazy sometimes to write anything longish, we should move back to cutting and pasting, and just commenting in few words, and so to starting all again – from collector to curator to creator. The ideal is being all three at the same time.

I was a celebrity (it was fun)

Last Friday I was invited to a session with 2+2 Childhood Studies students. It is a HE course; students do two years at our college and then continue for another two at Warwick. I had seen them already, we did an information skills session– library catalogue, Google, e-books, reliability of information sources. They also had a session on blogging with a colleague of mine, our graduate trainee.

On this occasion, I was invited as a local celebrity (their tutor, Lin Armstrong, and I couldn’t stop laughing when planned all that) to present an award for the Best Blog of the Term. It was an important event as, according to Lin, this year she could observe a real break-through with her students: most of them used a variety of online tools, including personal blogs, to support their learning and did it in a collaborative way. Lin is a great believer in connectivism – a comparatively new learning theory for the digital age – and was very excited when found that her students had started discovering and generating knowledge as a network/community of learning. To celebrate their achievements and encourage further, the ceremony was put together.

Facebook can help pupils pass English

School adopts experimental GCSE prep course that teaches language skills through social media (TES, 19 February 2010)

I liked this especially: “This is using what they already know and pushing them in the right direction” (about using social media for learning).

Participatory media

Yesterday I went to Blogs, Wikis and Social Networking session organised by a local JISC (the governmental agency promoting use of technologies in education).

Already the first conversation brought a surprise - one of the participants was a HR person from one of FE colleges (I did not expect to meet there anyone but librarians and a handful of teachers). She was after ideas for developing internal communication in the College as the traditional ways like newsletters and emails are not sufficient enough any more. It was refreshing to see that not only librarians are taking the reality of fragmented information landscapes seriously.

There was a lot of discussion around threats (to safety, traditional literacy), barriers (to information as experienced by less digitally savvy people), difficulties (bandwidth, waste of time) etc.

I was left with the question whether damage to an institution from not having a blog (or not being present on, let us say, Facebook; or discouraging employees from creative use of "participatory media") is greater than from having it and dealing with a number of serious chllenges and/or unwanted consequences. It's not even the matter of allowing or blocking access. It's rather a question of institutional culture: are creativity and responsibility encouraged or anything that is "un-official" is discouraged? are staff provided with help and advice on positive engagement with the web? is learners' voice - freely expressed, not pre-selected and beautifully pre-packaged - is present in the whole picture of what the institution (College) is like?

If such participation, responsibility and trust are encouraged, the whole discourse about the institution will be quite different - not as polished as we are used to see it in glossy prospectuses, but much livelier, first-hand accounts of people's experiences. It sounds challenging and even scary, but isn't it what we actually enjoy reading and trust the most? That's why the old school editorial control on the web seems to be of limited value.

Perth College's blogging experience is very interesting from a librarians' point of view. They have two blogs, for users and for their own staff. The first one is used for sharing news. I like the idea of emphasising the new resources purchased. Pity, Heritage does not allow current awareness output in RSS feeds at the moment, otherwise it'd be easy to embed such updates into Moodle pages and Facebook. Another blog is for staff development within the team. The weak point for developing a SD blog is Outlook which - in its current incarnation - does not allow RSS feeds import along with emails. It's not clear to me how to create just one space where all the content and messages intended for the library staff could come and sit together. Will we remember to visit a blog regularly if it's been created?!

An interesting discussion took place during the lunch break. What happens to all the profiles and pages if their owner dies, especially if dies unexpectedly? There was a lot of fun discussing wills which should now include something about Facebook profile management.

One memorable quote from the day? - It's from the Tame The Web blog: "a core value of librarianship - community building". People want to communicate, create and share, learn from each other... where other ways fail - teachers do not have time, insufficient funding, digital divide - librarians (in FE) create physical and virtual spaces for self-guided study and connecting.

One blog post that I made a note of to look at later on more carefully was Should You Friend Your Students? The Short Answer Is No by Josie Fraser from JISC in Leicester. I am pleased that some comments were critical - I do not believe in complete separation of personal and professional life. I mean, it's possible, but rather unhelpful, in my opinion.

Wikis... we used them with Early Years learners last year and it was not as successful as I hoped. Potentially, it can be a great way for keeping library procedures up-to-date and easily editable.

A fantastic characteristic of wikis which I will constantly use when talking to students about Wikipedia: it has a fluid content. It's its strength and weakness at the same time.

Another example of people's desire and need to speak, contribute, being heard - Write To Reply. We do need editors who would inspire learners and staff to write to bulletins, websites, Facebook pages...

A similar session will take place in Nottingham in February.

Image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1108254

Blogging boosts literacy

At last we have a strong evidence of the usefulness of blogging. The National Literacy Trust has published a research, "Young people's writing: Attitudes, behavior and the role of technology" which had involved over 3,000 young people. Those who had blogs and were engaged in social networks had more positive view of their own writing abilities and were more likely to enjoy writing. To learn more about the research, follow the links below (the shortest reports are in the beginning, but if you have time, read the third one):

1. http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6029101
2. http://www.thebookseller.com/news/105621-blogs-can-boost-literacy-says-nlt-research.html
3. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/dont-knock-blogging-ndash-its-the-answer-to-our-literacy-problems-1832593.html
4. http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/research/Writing_survey_2009.pdf (PDF, report itself)

The most insightful educators and librarians have been saying for some time that information empowerment is the way ahead. This means to move away from the old style of controlling learning, reading, "information consumption" - away from broadcasting and transmitting - towards more open discovery, sharing, collaboration, trust- & skill-building. It's not good enough to create a website where only PR people can present the picture of a particular institution. It's dull, unattractive to the most of people and ultimately useless. A much better approach is to involve the "consumers" into becoming creators of content, storytellers... how great would be a story of a school told by its learners! Yes, it's more difficult than just a PR monologue, it requires imagination and a lot of networking, but this would ultimately be what we all in education - whether teachers, librarians or PR staff - are for: to empower our learners, to help them to discover their voices and individual skills.

Personally, I have not mastered that imagination yet... I am trying to imagine how I could do it. Meanwhile, everyone is welcome to comment on my post here, write "guest posts" and join the library's Facebook page, facebook.com/library.nwhc, to contribute to our shared pool of skills and knowledge.

Gosh, I love blogging! And it's getting easier and more rewarding with time.

Primary v. secondary sources

Some time ago I pointed out to the second year 2+2 Early Years students that a literature review should be concered with the secondary sources rather than primary ones. Please see short and helpful explanations about their differences: http://library.uwsp.edu/guides/webtutorials/primary.htm and http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=1483.

However, thinking about application of those definitions to Early Years, it seems to me that it may not always be clear what sources are primary and which are secondary.For example, is the BECTA's report a primary or secondary source? (Probably yes, as such reports normally refer to what has been learned previously and conclusions are drawn for formulating recommendations, rules and policies.) Should a government policy document be analysed as part of a literature review? (Probably not if it does not explain on what knowledge those prescriptions are being founded. Essays and dissertations are more appropriate forms for discussing those documents.)

No doubts that almost anything can be mentioned in a literature review, e.g. to illustrate discrepancies in a policy with what researchers and practitioners were saying. However, the fact of those discrepancies is probably less interesting for a literature review. The problem of those discrepancies should be discussed in other parts of a research paper.

Therefore, the writings which constitute "scholarly literature" (those texts which explore, test, analyse etc. facts, statements and conclusions) should be regarded as the focal point of a literature review.