Digital literacies (2): Why academic literacy is about texts

This arises from a long blog by Robin Goodfellow for the Literacy in the Digital University project, following up a presentation in which he started from the position that "literacy" is not just about reading and writing and the comparable digital activities ("new literacies"), or about communication skills (presenting, reviewing, discussing) but about social practices: that is to say, literacy is purposeful and relational, drawing on "a complex and distributed understanding of the network of personal and occupational relationships that give the text its purpose".

All fairly uncontroversial, one might think. But there was one question which was posed in discussion, and which stayed with him and which is the subject of his blog: "If Literacy is 'social practice' why talk about Texts? Why not just talk about social practice?"

His immediate response had been that "we are focusing on practices in the university, which are uniquely defined in terms of texts" - while explaining that he meant the word "text" in an extended sense, referring to any kind of communicative artefact, not just printed words and not just words at all (so including pictures and recorded music).

But in his blog he poses the question: "it is always going to be the case that what we currently call texts are what define practice in higher education? As HE gets more intermingled with other social fields (industry, commerce, the professions, popular culture - see Mandelson's 'Higher Ambitions' framework) and as practice-oriented communication becomes more mutimodal and time-shifted and otherwise dispersed won't the notion of text as a defining characteristic of university practice become less and less relevant?"

I think the answer is No - or at least, it shouldn't. I follow Diana Laurillard (Re-thinking University Teaching, 2nd edn, p. 21-2) in taking the defining feature of university practice to be its second-order character: "the point about academic knowledge is that, being articulated, it is known through exposition, argument, interpretation ... through reflection on experience and represents therefore a second-order experience of the world." Academic discourse is characteristically not only about knowledge, but about knowledge-about-knowledge: epistemology, or how-we-come-to-know. It is not only what we believe to be the case, but why we believe it to be the case, or why my view of what is the case is better than yours. It is about theories and models, interpretations and frameworks, inferences and arguments.

Here perhaps is the practical meaning of Helen Beetham's summary of the key difference between academic knowledge and internet knowledge (referenced by Robin Goodfellow): that academic knowledge practice is about truth value while internet knowledge practice is about use value. If you value knowledge only for how it can be used, you will not be interested in how the knowledge is derived; you only care about whether it is reliable: Yes, or No. But if you care about the process by which knowledge is made and justified, challenged and revised, then you will need to get into second-order discourse.

Does second-order discourse require the use of texts? No, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. By making the knowledge (the theory, the data, the model, the interpretation) an artefact, it becomes easier for us to stand back from it and view it as an object and conduct the second-order discourse. The text does not need to be a physical thing, or even a digital thing: it can be a spoken object, as for example the thesis or the various points of argument in the formal disputations at pre-modern universities. The technology to accomplish a second-order discourse can be rhetorical and procedural, as well as physical and material.

But do we need this second-order discourse? Do we actually need academics and universities to conduct it, to look at the foundations of knowledge, instead of just using it?

As the historian Susan Faye Canon observed a long time ago (Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, 1978), the best justification for the existence of historians is that, unless you have people whose professional responsibility is the reconstruction of the past in all its complexity and subtlety, then the only accounts of the past which are available will be the simplified and interested accounts of politicians and those with a political axe to grind.

I think we need academics and academies for essentially the same reason: that unless we have people whose professional responsibility is in defining and challenging the basis of knowledge, then all we will have is the claim and counter-claim of parties who value knowledge only for its usefulness to them and its service of their interests.

When learning isn't "learning"

One problem which confronts anyone trying to investigate learning in workplace culture is that much of what you, as a researcher, want to count as learning isn't called or maybe even recognised as "learning" by the people concerned. This is particularly the case with so-called "informal learning".

I've just seen this issue nicely typologised in a white paper on "performance toolkits" by Peter Casebow and Owen Ferguson. There they distinguish three levels of engagement from an employee:

• Just-in-time: "Employee seeks help and suport at the time they need it to deal with an unfamiliar task, challenge or problem." They won't consider this as learning, but as "getting the job done".
• Explore: "Employee recognises that the issue justifies investing some time to investigating the task, challenge or problem." They won't consider this learning, but rather "research" or "investigation".
• Deep dive: "Employee recognises that they need time away from work to immerse him/herself in 'learning mode' to acquire new skills and perspectives." This is where formal learning is involved, and is the only one which employees are likely to consider unproblematically as "learning".

The implication, of course, is that corporate training and development should be concerned not only with helping people "learn" but also with helping people "research", "investigate" and "get the job done". I wonder what parts of learning in higher education might not be recognised by students (or lecturers) as "learning"? Some of the administration and organisation needed to carry it out, perhaps, which tends to be undervalued by lecturers but is high up on the list of desirable study skills.

Audio (and video) feedback on written assignments (3)

Russell Stannard - confusingly, not the Open University emeritus professor of physics, but the University of Westminster lecturer in multimedia and ICT of the same name - has been having great success it seems with audio-visual screen recordings (using Camtasia) of his feedback on students' written work. It seems it enables him to be much more detailed in his comments, combining the benefits of audio feedback with the ability to point to precisely the parts of the students' work he's talking about (the example mentioned is correcting the grammar of Chinese students).
See this article in The Independent, and his own write-up of the work.

Digital literacies (1): They've read the research so we don't have to

One of the sessions which excited me at Alt-C was the workshop by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe on "Frameworks for developing digital literacies". But why it was exciting isn't very evident from the PowerPoint - hence this further blog.

What was exciting was that they drew on two enormous pieces of summarising work - one on conceptions of digital literacy, and one on learners' experience - and brought them together.

Conceptions of digital literacy

The summarising work here was done as part of the Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA) project. From nine major frameworks attempting to define the components of digital lteracy, or learning literacy in a digital environment, they constructed a "framework of frameworks" (see the project report, pp 35-38). The resulting set of "top-level terms, framing ideas" is not so exceptional: learning to learn, metacognition; academic practice / study skills; information literacy; communication and collaboration skills; media literacy ; computer literacy; employability; citizenship. What is more interesting is the way they break these top-level framing ideas down into practices, both non-digital ("what competent learners do") and digital ("what competent digitally enabled learners do"). For example, "learning to learn, metacognition" is broken down into the following non-digital and digital practices:

• manage time and study commitments / use digital tools to manage time and study commitments
• balance learning and life / use digital networks and online resources to fit learning into life
• know where and how to access support / access support online including learning communities
• construct strategies for learning, articulate goals / diagnose learning needs [and] choose appropriate learning tools
• reflect on own learning and progression / use digital tools to record and reflect on progress.

What this presents very clearly is the position that digital learning literacy is just a matter of doing learning literacy practices, only with digital tools and in a digital environment. Or, to put it another way, there's no such thing as e-learning: only learning done with e-tools.
The "framework of frameworks" seems like a good starting place for planning progression in digital learning literacy across course pathways.
(See also comment on the LLiDA report by Robin Goodfellow, for the Literacy in a Digital University project.)
Learners' experience
The summarising work here was done by the Support and Synthesis Project at Oxford Brookes University, synthesising outputs from the many projects in the JISC "Learners' experiences of e-learning" programme.
The "Dissemination" section of the project website includes workshop materials, of which the ones used at Alt-C are:

1. a document "Developing effective e-learners", presenting a pyramid model of development, listing both technical and learning competences at the ascending levels of Access, Skills, Practices and behaviours, and Attributes and identities (under "Session 5: Learners are different")
2. a set of one-paragraph summaries of students' strategies for learning with technology (not all of them necessarily desirable), suitable for printing on card for use as a workshop activity (also under "Session 5: Learners are different")
3. a set of "Key messages" cards, as a nutshell summary of the results of the JISC projects (under "Session 3: Themes and issues" - although a nicer designed-up and slightly different version is on the JISC website)

These "Key messages" are worth reproducing here, for the benefit of all those of us who are never going to read through all the reports of all the JISC learners' experience of e-learning projects (the originals include illustrative quotes also:

• Expectations of technology - Learners have high expectations of technology with respect to access, choice and reliability.
• Expectations of VLEs - Learners expect consistency across modules in use of the VLE: most see it as an essential aspect of course admin and communication.
• Expectations of tutors' skills - Learners have high expectations of their tutors’ use of technology. They expect use of technology for learning to be appropriate and skillful.
• Keeping the balance - Students stress that learning with ICT should be balanced with face to face and paper-based learning. A minority positively dislike the distractions from study that computers entail.
• Tutors as mentors - The way in which learners use technology is still led by their tutors and the design of their courses. Even ‘google generation’ students are often introduced to educationally important technologies by their tutors.
• Playing the game - As the use of technology makes more learning happen in ‘public’, learners are being socialized to play the academic game in new ways.
• Personalisation - Learners expect to be able to personalise institutional technologies and to use personal technologies in the institutional environment. Disabled learners may be excluded if they cannot do so.
• Meaningful choices - Learners want meaningful choices from technology. This is not about the look and feel of online services, but about key issues in how they learn.
• Google generation - The Internet is the first port of call for information: sites such as google and wikipedia are referred to before academically approved resources.
• Academic digital content - Access to academic digital content is regarded by learners as a unique benefit of attending HE and FE institutions.
• Underworld - Communication technologies most used by learners are also often outside institutional control (mobile phones, skype, chat): there is an ‘underworld’ of social networking in support of learning.
• Digital divide - There is evidence that the ‘digital divide’ is becoming deeper but narrower: a minority of students lack basic access and ICT skills, while an increasingly large majority have a wide range of devices and competences, especially with laptops
• Skills gap - Despite their facility with personal technologies, learners often lack skills in using technology to support learning. This can be true even after considerable time at college.
• Maturing - Students report an increased use of technology as they mature in their studies
• Different strokes - Learners display enormous differences in past educational experiences, needs, and motivations. These have a profound influence over their preferred strategies for using technologies.
• Attachment - Learners attach emotional significance to technologies, particularly ‘their own’ technologies, which many perceive as extensions of themselves.
• Social software - Many students make extensive use of social software such as Facebook, including for informal discussions about their learning, but rarely for formal collaboration.
• Public / private spaces - There are divergent opinions among learners about the use of social networks such as Facebook to support learning, and about how they manage their online identities.
• Digital conservatism - Only a small minority of students actively investigate the potential of new software or technologies beyond those in general use. Disabled students can be among the most pioneering.
• Technology hurdle - Where technologies require learners to adjust their usual study practices, they can become a barrier. Such technologies require careful introduction and clear communication about the benefits of use.
• 1000 words - Very many learners, particularly younger learners, are used to accessing knowledge via images and video. They can struggle with an academic practice which only values text as a medium for communicating ideas.
• Collaboration - Technology-mediated collaboration is increasingly common. Student experiences range from pride in their collaborative work to fear of ‘free riders’ and frustration at the available technologies.
  

Learning as doing two things at once

I'm having a problem with the screen layout of some online course materials. The student is being taught how to write definitions, and in one section they're presented with six different definitions of globalisation and have to fill in a table to analyse, for each of them, the different components of the definition. It's a common sort of distance learning activity, and the screen layout problem is a common one too: the student really needs to be able to see the definition they're working on and the table into which they're writing their analysis at the same time. I don't know how we're going to achieve this on our VLE - unless we put each of the definitions on a separate screen and repeat the table six times!

I find it astonishing that with all the effort and design talent which has gone into developing online learning platforms it is still the exception rather than the rule to find an easy way of enabling a learner to hold two things in view simultaneously. (For OU staff only: here is a rare exemple from D821.)

But this doing two things at once, or switching rapidly between them, is the essence of learning, is it not?

If we think we're simply transmitting information (as tends to be the assumption with people from the IT industry, which is based on information theory's conceptualisation of complex problems as the transmission, modification and reception of information), then a single view, single activity interface is not a problem. The student is just reading text, or looking at a picture, or watching a video, etc.

But if we're thinking about learning, then the student needs to be not only in the text, the picture or the video, but standing back from it and doing something else: relating it to their existing knowledge, forming new knowledge structures to accommodate it, thinking how to apply it to other circumstances. (It's the back end of the Kolb learning cycle.)

Good students, of course, do this whether we make it easy for them to do it or not. They take notes, they think about what we've shown them, they talk about it with their mates, they try it out.

But given how fundamental to learning is this doing-two-things-at-once (or, more accurately, switching between them quickly), and given that the distinctive capability of the contemporary digital computer is the integration of different functions on the same screen, isn't it extraordinary how little our VLEs and teaching platforms help our learners with this second function, being still designed on the assumption that they will be doing only one thing at a time?

Seen and heard - October 2009

A.S. Byatt, "The Childrens Book"
Coll Bardolet paintings at the Fundació Cultural Coll Bardolet, Valdemossa, Mallorca
"Electric dreams" (BBC TV)
"An online university - with no fees", article in Education Guardian about University of the People
"Disney.Pixar" on The South Bank Show (ITV)
The Clerks, at Olney parish church - concert including items from their new album "Don't Talk - Just Listen!"
"Assignment feedback in language courses: current practice and student perceptions", research seminar by Maria Fernández-Toro and Concha Furnborough with Mike Truman, Department of Languages, The Open University
"Six Characters in Search of an Author", by Luigi Pirandello, in the new production by Rupert Goold and Ben Power, at Cambridge Arts Theatre
"Glamour's Golden Age" (BBC TV)