14/11/2010 by lizit.

I’ve noticed over the last few months I’ve been blogging a lot less than I did when I first started this blog. Back then, I would often post two or three times a week, but now a few weeks can go between postings. I don’t think the purpose of the blog has changed.  It is still about exploring ideas related to my DPhil research. What has changed is the blog has become more visible. Rather than just a few close friends and associates being aware of its existence, what I write is now fed into an RSS feed and is available to a much wider audience.

What are the implications for me of going public? I think I am more guarded about what I put into the public arena. I am aware that I may be writing for an audience rather than essentially for myself. This means, I am less willing to post about ideas that are very undeveloped - sometimes not even embryonic. Possibly too, I am less willing to post ideas that may actually be novel. Is that a fear of  being laughed at or thinking some of my ideas may be interesting enough for somebody else to want to use and develop them before I’ve thought them through myself?I think too, I am more careful about how I write. My blogs have tended to be written on the fly without drafting and re-drafting, but now I think a bit more about the words I use and the way I frame what I say. The implication is that blogging takes more time and effort and becomes less easy.

Does it matter that I am blogging less? Yes, for me it does! It means I am not using the opportunity to play with ideas and concepts and make mistakes for fear of what an unknown readership might think.

The solution. If I can, forget the audience and allow myself to blog about the ideas I am playing with and the things I am trying to make sense of.

Having said that, it would be great to have some comments sometimes on what I write, if only to let me know there are people out there reading this or to confirm I am actually alone in the metaverse!

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15/04/2010 by lizit.

Looking at my blog posts, they are becoming less frequent but the content seems to often have more substance to it than a year ago. As part of preparing for the writing workshop I will be attending over the next couple of days, I have found I am reflecting a bit on what I am currently writing and how I am writing it. I am actually writing a lot less in general now than I was a year ago - and yet I am playing around with more ideas.

So, if I am not lacking in motivation or ideas, why is less finding its way on to paper?

I think there are a number of things going on.

Firstly, in a sense I am reconfiguring myself again.  I had just about managed to persuade myself I was a techie and had begun to take a serious look at virtual worlds, when I found that I was being drawn in other directions. Although I am very happy and comfortable with where I have found myself, it also is a challenging place to be - and is actually a more difficult place intellectually than where I was. Rather than being a social scientist masquerading as a techie, I am now straddling the two worlds but with an increasing leaning towards the social scientist. Although my roots might be in the social sciences, that doesn’t mean that my past experiences were comfortable. I am a different person now than the undergraduate who never opened her mouth in a seminar because she hadn’t mastered the language others seemed adept with, and from the 30 something year old who found the same veil of silence as a masters student, but that doesn’t mean that the sense of inadequacy isn’t still there.

Secondly, I don’t want to pin my ideas down too much at the moment. I have got a good grasp of the landscape my research is set against and I have been reading relevant articles and books. There is perhaps an anxiety that if I start writing, I may be stuck with what I have written (even though I know that isn’t the case) and that may influence the outcomes of my research rather than allowing ideas and themes to emerge from my data gathering and analysis.

Thirdly, and this perhaps relates to my observations about my blog posts. I am finding that I am less satisfied with soundbites and I am wanting to explore ideas in more depth. When I start trying to write, I lose track of where I am going. Instead of doing a mind dump, which I have been able to get away with in the past, I need to find some way of developing a road map of what I want to write about before starting writing so that I can tackle manageable chunks rather than somehow trying to tackle a whole. This means trying different approaches.

On the positive side, although there are very few pieces of writing emerging, I have been doing a lot more concept mapping and it may well be that I can develop that a stage further into mapping out the ideas around some of the themes I want to address. It may be that if I given myself enough hooks, I might find I need to start creating the textual threads to link the hooks together.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the next couple of days - will it give me the confidence boost I need, or will I end up a jibbering wreck, more convinced than ever that I’m a phoney!

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04/11/2009 by lizit.

Spotted a couple of interesting blogs this morning. Steve Wheeler from Plymouth was responding to a blog from Tillman Swinke in Atlantis. Swinke is discussing personal learning and contrasting formal and informal learning and the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in each.  He is basically saying that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic and asking how the passion of intrinsically motivated informal learning can be incorporated into formal learning, suggesting social learning may be a way forward. (How I find myself wondering just what he means by social learning having seen the term used in so many different ways over the past months.)

Wheeler summarises Swinke’s blog and says that we begin to learn because we are interested - intrinsically motivated - but in formal education extrinsic motivation tends to take over as we seek to keep up with our peers, attain good enough grades, etc, and asks how interest and intrinsic interest can be/is maintained in formal learning. Wheeler then advocates PLEs as a way forward.

A commentator on Wheeler’s blog has pointed to the Futures of Education project which is asking questions about the redesign of education. This brings me back to another blog read this morning, Graham Attwell’s reflections on the use of computers in exams.

At root these posts are all raising some pretty fundamental questions about the nature of learning and education and the dichotomy between them.  Others educate me, but I learn. Some of what I learn is guided by my teachers who share their passion for an idea or a subject area. Some of what I am taught is the use of essential tools to facilitate my learning - the 3 ‘R’s. Much of what I learn now is out of interest and desire to learn and explore ideas and play with them either in my mind or with my hands. Some of what I have been taught in the past, I am rediscovering through my own learning in the present.

Good thoughts to start the day!

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30/03/2009 by lizit.

Just finished a full week of conferencing.  CAL last Monday to Wednesday and Best Practices in Education over the weekend in Second Life.  Interesting participating in 2 such very different conferences and one f-t-f and one inworld.  On a practical note, advantages of inworld are being able to do other things in between sessions, having a cup of tea when I want, being able to join in the chat channel, and not having to mess around with trains and stuff.  On the other hand, it was nice to experience the buzz of the f-t-f, to meet people I had met before and make new contacts, and to discuss thoughts and reactions to the different speakers as it happened.

CAL is a general education conference.  It drew a number of ‘big’ names and there was a lot of discussion of learning and education theory and practice.  Somewhat disappointingly, there was not a lot said or demonstrated of current technologies. It is the only gathering I have been to recently where there wasn’t a hashtag for use in electronic media.  It felt as though there were a lot of old debates continuing to be worked out.  Having said that, I did meet some other folk actively involved in working in virtual worlds and we were ale to talk about what we are doing and the challenges we face.  There was also a salutary reminder that not everybody sees or uses the virtual world the way I do; I found myself questioning the seamless integration of real and virtual advocated by one speaker with little evidence of using the affordances of Second Life. Unfortunately, he had to leave immediately after his presentation, but we did swap cards and I have contacted him asking for details of his blog on how to teach in SL.  For me, the best session in the conference was Carina Garvin’s presentation of the work she has done on mapping SL affordances and pedagogy.  This is a work in progress and Carina and I have agreed to keep in touch.

VWPBE was less intellectually challenging for me than CAL.  There were many good presentations of different aspects of using Second Life in teaching and learning.  Perhaps because the territory was more familiar, I was able to focus more on content and methodology.  Although I had heard both Carina Garvin and Lisa Dawley present during the previous fortnight, it was good to hear their presentations again and to ‘hear’ things which I had not taken in first time round.  Some brief notes on some of the other presentations I attended:

Joykadia is an international learning community drawing together a mixture of individual educators, students, organisations, and parents of younger students. The focus is on informality and activity. A number of ‘unconferences’ are held during the year. There is a major emphasis on community (Wenger), design and use of space, facilitation and recognising skills.

Devon Alderton spoke about the ethics of undertaking research in SL and reminded us that behind every avatar there is a person. Linden Labs ToS and Community Standards are very clear about no disclosure of personal IDs.  IRB tends to focus on potential harm to research subjects, and may be phased by avatars and virtual worlds.  Tom Boellstorf offers some useful guidelines, eg double blind avatar names, locked and encrypted storage, waiver for written consent of inworld subjects (written consent would mean revealing ID) and very clear explanations of what would happen.

The Theorists’ Project was advertised as teaching difficult concepts in SL and turned out to be a total learning experience developed by and with counseling and psychology graduate students.  A fascinating place to visit and experience.

Jackie Darkstone (Jackie Marsh from Sheffield in rl) presented her work on literacy and ClubPenguin.  I found this more interesting and meaningful having seen ClubPenguin.  Hopefully she is sending a copy of a paper currently in press.

The DELVE project made two presentations based on different aspects of the current research project.  Interesting for me to hear Shailey and Ahmad talking about what they are doing.  Should be helpful with the work I am doing for the project!

Now the conferences are out of the way, I am hoping to be able to focus on doing some thinking and starting to pull some of my own ideas together and beginning to work out the way ahead!

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11/03/2009 by lizit.

Please sir, my avatar overslept…

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27/01/2009 by lizit.

I have posted a fair bit of what is below as a comment, but I thought it probably merited a posting too as it was really useful getting that feedback and pointers in various directions.

Firstly, thanks for the comments. I think it did me good to get my thoughts off my chest - and also led to positive action in opening up this blog (OK I still have to approve the first posting for anybody and that seems to be a system thing that I can’t knock off). More importantly, it led me to looking at wikis again - thanks Carol for the pointer to yours - and I have now set one up and that is proving extremely useful for the kind of things I felt a blog wasn’t doing.

Yes, this blog really is a personal journal more than a public account. It probably is helping to keep me on track and helping to make me accountable.

I endorse what has been said about Plurk. Haven’t looked at Netvibes, but have been using Google Reader for quite a long time and if it ain’t broke why fix it!

I guess, like earlier discussions in other places about bibliographic tools, one of the important things on this DPhil journey is getting the different props in place for myself - and making sure they are tools which I personally feel comfortable with.With so many support resources available it is important to recognise that what one person finds useful, or how another expresses themself, is not necessarily what works best for me.  There are tools I would now find it very difficult to survive without - yet not that long ago I did and didn’t realise I needed them - and other tools which I can happily take or leave (and more often than not choose to leave).

Currently my list of must have tools:

• Google reader - enables me to scan large amounts of stuff and decide what if anything to read in more depth
• Plurk - keeps me in touch with my friends and provides an awareness of the world out there, not only in my bit of the universe
• EndNote - now I am working out how to use it, it is keeping all the assorted reading I am doing accessible to me
•  PBwiki - although still at an early stage is providing me with a place to organise myself and to pull lots of different stuff together
• This blog - jury still out, but it does have its uses if I am not using it for what I don’t want it to be

And tools I can survive without

• Twitter - just too much going on and too confusing for me
• Facebook - is it my age or is it that I just don’t get it

Guess that will do for now.  Now to work out what I want/need to do today!

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16/01/2009 by lizit.

Been pointed to an interesting article on procrastination this morning. It is a summary of a report of work by some German psychologists who were looking at procrastination in relation to concrete and abstract tasks.  In short, the concrete tasks got done and some of the abstract ones never got done - even though all the volunteer participants were receiving payment on completion of the allocated task.

The suggestion is that thinking about abstract tasks more concretely - breaking down into smaller parts, etc, can assist in getting things done.

Looking at my ‘to do’ list, over the last week, it is true that the concrete tasks have been done, but the ones where I need to get brain in gear seem to be languishing and looking at me! Now I’m sure if I was feeling clever, I could relate this to motivation and flow…

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13/01/2009 by lizit.

The comments on the last blog were very useful.  Through Plurk, I have been put in touch with Carol Daunt Skyring and have been looking at her wiki which seems to make it possible to do the things I was complaining about not being able to do in a blog!  I have now set up a wiki - very embryonic at the moment - and am already finding it useful as a repository for stuff.  I suspect it may take over from OneNote in some ways, except OneNote does enable me to grab emails and webpages and scribble on them.

Will keep under review my use of the various tools and their pros and cons.

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