08/12/2009 by lizit.

Over the last couple of weeks or so, my thoughts about my DPhil research have taken some quite dramatic and unexpected turns but in a way which is making me feel rather excited and very grounded.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a planned meeting with my supervisor and a consultant from Social Sciences. The plan had been to look at methodology and data gathering for the studies I was planning of informal learning in Second Life. But in the time between arranging the meeting and it taking place, my thinking about informal learning had moved considerably as recorded in earlier blogs! We ended up talking about where I currently was, and recognising that I was talking about a very broad area, but one which could be examined in a narrow domain.  The advice accompanying that was that such a domain should ideally be one which I knew well.

It was one of those transforming moments when suddenly things which had not been coming together suddenly made sense. With no difficulty at all, Second Life and other virtual worlds were no longer part of the picture. Instead the very obvious domain which I know best was staring me in the face - people caring for children with an ASD. The whole range of learning styles is covered with the possibility of looking at learning journeys and the mix of learning types involved in a learning journey. Not only that, but I have access to so many potential study subjects - the parent support group I run, online groups, contact with schools and medical specialists…. Not only that but my supervisor has links and an interest in the area… The only question is why did it take so long to see the obvious!

So many of the themes that have been important through my professional life come together with this focus. My anger at the failure to recognise the skills and knowledge of people without appropriate qualifications. Questions about empowerment and change management, who are the experts. Ownership and change agency.  The creation of underclasses where people are stigmatised and disempowered …. Empowerment.

In the fortnight since that meeting, I have begun to think about what my research might involve, I have met another DPhil student who is looking at issues around stigmatisation, a colleague has given me links to references on expert patients, I am being given contacts with senior paediatricians, I have been given a contact with the person leading a major course on ASDs in Birmingham and had a useful formative discussion and the possibility of access to students on the course, I have met somebody working on the problems associated with labelling, I have come across the idea of using critical incident vignettes as a way of examining learning experiences, I have been encouraged to look again at Wenger’s work around boundaries …  I could go on and on, it seems so much has happened and come together in such a short time.

I’m very aware that I have a lot of work to do, not least scoping my studies, but I am feeling absurdly excited by the thought of doing work in an area I both understand and have a long term commitment to. I also know that I would not be where I am now if I had not spent the hours reading around lots of stuff and beginning to appreciate some of the complexity of things which on the surface seemed so simple and straightforward.

Posted in methodology, ASD, narratives, informal learning, community, research ideas, change agents | Print | 1 Comment »

07/09/2009 by lizit.

One of my declared interests is social change. Been musing a bit on informal learning and social change.

In a sense all learning/education is about change. There is a sense in which knowledge is power. I reckon this has particular resonance when related to informal learning and within the context of community development, community action and ’self-help’.  I’ve seen the effect of informal learning in the parent support group I am involved in; parents of children with SENs are frequently at a loss over how to best help their children. Within a parent support group, parents share their experiences of schools and discussions with education officials, learn how to complete forms, etc. Increasingly, parents find out how much they know and have learned through assisting other parents. No longer is it down to somebody like me to act as the fount of wisdom, as I know and others know that they know.

The story, as narrated by Lovett, of Liverpool EPA (a 1970s education initiative) is one of people engaging in learning from a position of being labelled as education failures - people who had left school at 15 with no qualifications and few, if any, aspirations. Through learning, or rather through discussion and gleaning information and taking new levels of responsibility, people were empowered and enabled to make choices and contribute to processes which made decisions about their lives. The same change process is evident in the community development projects of the 1970s and other community initiatives and in the various case studies described by Foley. Reading these accounts reminds me of my own work in the early 70s working with parents to set up holiday play schemes. In one, I recruited members of the neighbourhood social work team as volunteers, and in the post-project review, I recall their amazement at seeing parents they had viewed as inadequate and unable to cope with raising their own children organising large groups of children and volunteers for trips to the swimming pool or to the beach - perhaps wouldn’t be possible now in an age when risk assessment precedes just about any activity.

Although there are other  aspects of informal learning which are beneficial to the individual, the community or society more generally, the social change agenda cannot be ignored. It was that agenda which lay behind the Sunday schools, both christian and socialist, of the early 19th century. It was that which fuelled the development of trades unions and the establishment of Ruskin College. It was that which led to the establishment of the WEA. Even today, education is presented as an agent of social change in creating greater equity of opportunity by admitting more young people to universities where they are the first member of their family to enter higher education. Years ago Michael Young wrote of the rise of the meritocracy. We still haven’t seen it, but perhaps there is hope for those formerly considered failures.

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19/05/2009 by lizit.

I really didn’t know what was going to happen yesterday at my annual review.  it was all very well my supervisor telling me it would be OK, but I had paperwork that seemed to be making value judgments, and although the words pass/fail were not used, perhaps inevitably I felt there was some kind of hurdle to jump and feared that I would be found seriously wanting.

In reality, I found the meeting very positive, helpful and affirming.  OK, I came out of it aware that I have a whole heap of work to do, but it is work that I have plenty of time to do, and some of it is much more potentially onerous than other bits.  Some of it is around being clear why I am not looking at some things and some of it is stuff I do need to look at and understand. I am in awe of the breadth of knowledge of some people - how do some folk know so much, even to the level of being able to point at possible things to read! I also see the need for clarity of definition - what is a community? How does one differentiate different types of community?  How does Twitter, for example, compare with a text-based forum, or a 3-D virtual world, or a group of people who meet face to face, or a neighbourhood? What are the characteristics of community?  Are some communities in some way richer than others?

What is it that I am doing at the end of the day?  That is still a bit of a fog - and it was acknowledged that it is OK to be in a fog and that is part of the DPhil experience - but what was clear to me is that what I am saying probably has something to do with policy.  That perhaps isn’t that surprising given my background in voluntary organisation management and in community development, but no bad thing to acknowledge it and recognise that is OK.  I guess it also affirms one of the other things that has appeared in my diagrams which has been around change and being agents of change. This is as much about who I am as about what I know and what I understand.

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27/04/2009 by lizit.

I keep feeling as though I am going around in circles, but struck me that some of the stuff I am thinking about actually relates to things I have thought about before in other contexts but where I haven’t looked at connections.

Nearly 40 years on, it’s difficult to remember details of my social work training and I can’t claim to remember any of the detail of the various theories we learned except that they were primarily psycho-analytically driven.  There was little about the socio-political systems which led to a whole range of inequalities, but a lot about the personal/psychological growth and behaviour and what led to a healthy individual and what led to dysfunction. If I recall correctly we first of all considered ‘normal’ growth and development, then considered what can go wrong and finally looked specifically at issues around mental health, aging and disability. I remember being deeply dissatisfied with what we were being taught as it seemed to me that this particular form of person centred psychology had little to offer people who were struggling through inadequate housing, insufficient income, poor health, etc, etc.

When I finished my training, I became a community worker.  The philosophy here was different and essentially was that people working together can make a difference to their lives and their environment through collective effort and action.  The reality was that most people were alienated from their environments and rather than seeking to change them, they were looking for opportunities to escape to somewhere better.  There was little sense of ownership of the problems within the community, and little belief that anything could be different. At the same time, I can remember individuals who somehow did find they could do something to change some elements of their situations. Perhaps the person who made the greatest impression on me was a man who was probably 30 something. He had grown up in care and had never been in employment as far as I knew.  He lived with his wife and 2 sons in a 2 bedroom flat on a notorious sink estate in a northern city.  As a result of various community development projects on the estate, he had been persuaded to get involved in producing a community newspaper. The hitch was that he was barely literate.  But the newspaper task somehow provided him with the impetus he needed to learn to read and write and to commit himself to ensuring that somehow his sons would have a better future. What struck me most about him was that he took ownership of his situation and began to do something about it in a situation where most people felt unable to take any action at all.

I didn’t remain a grassroots community worker for long, but took the lessons I had learned into a voluntary organisation support role and later into management roles in both statutory social services and voluntary organisations.  It was a time when voluntary agency culture was moving from doing good to others, a sentiment expressed in more sophisticated language in most charitable deeds of governance, to a time when it was slowly being recognised that people could do a lot for themselves. The 1981 International Year for Disabled People challenged us to rethink the terminology to International Year of People with disabilities.  For all the political correctness that has followed, the emphasis was on seeing people first and foremost as people and then taking note of the problematic almost as an afterthought. My MSc research was concerned with intermediary bodies for disability and the change which was taking place from these being organisations with a membership made up of other organisations to organisations with a membership of people with disabilities.  Instead of able-bodied people being the experts in matters of disability, there was a change of ownership and people with disabilities were expressing loudly and clearly their expertise and their right to have a say in what they needed by way of housing, employment and care provision. In the 21st century most provision for people with disabilities is made through direct payments and the client of yesterday is the customer of today choosing how to spend the money to meet their needs.

I could go on tracking this strand through my other work and personal experiences, but that would get boring! Suffice it to say that I have a deep seated belief that people should be in control of their own destinies - and this includes making resources available when necessary to enable that personal ownership and control.

So where does that fit into education and virtual worlds?

The first link is with constructivism, that educational theory which suggests (if I’ve understood it correctly) that knowledge isn’t something which is learned or transferred from teacher to learner, but rather that each individual is responsible for their own learning and constructs their knowledge framework by incorporating new information and ideas into their existing knowledge structure.  This process sometimes involves dismantling parts of that structure as new knowledge leads to re-evaluation of former knowledge.  Underlying this thinking is the idea of a learner owning their own learning. The nature of a virtual world which encourages and enables exploration and experimentation offers opportunities for creating and building knowledge frameworks.

The second link is possibly around ownership and autonomy, one of the facets of self-determination theory, and what motivates learning.  From what little I’ve read about this theory so far, it seems that it focuses on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and seems to say that extrinsic motivation decreases the intrinsic motivation which is a basic human quality.  From my early work experiences, change happened through intrinsic motivation and believe in self rather than extrinsic motivators, whether carrots or sticks. In a virtual world there are few experts as everybody is on a learning curve.  This changes the relationship between teacher and taught and leads to greater fluidity, flexibility and experimentation. Is it possible that virtual worlds enable ownership of learning and contribute to a positive feedback loop which enables further experimentation, exploration and learning?

Guess that will do for the moment!

Posted in creativity, community, motivation, change agents, learning, ownership, virtual environments | Print | 1 Comment »

23/03/2009 by lizit.

Catching up with myself!  I need to make some proper notes about last week’s event at City University before I get too caught up in CAL and never get round to it!

A number of things struck me during the day as being potentially useful to my thinking and to student’s use of Second Life.  These included:

• An observation in response to my talk questioning whether it was a good thing to introduce students to building so quickly when many people are not ready to consider building for weeks or months after entering Second Life.  When we invite Sussex students into Second Life, it is in relation to a specific course and the deliverables from that course include creating a product for a client. Essentially we are using Second Life as a tool or platform and the focus is on its affordances rather than on enabling students to become SL residents.  I noticed when I cleared the group for this year that very few of last years students had been into SL after the end of the course and I wonder if we are effectively making the students augmentalists in our approach.
• In contrast, OU students have not been required to do anything when they enter SL and very few demands are made on them, but they have formed a vibrant community and initiated a number of activities and events, some with support from tutors and some of their own volition.  The community has formed itself in such a way that it is able to welcome newcomers and help them to feel at home in the environment.
• Should socialisation (I hate that word as it is used to mean something different from what I was taught when I studied sociology) be explicit or implicit in the induction of students to SL? With the Sussex students, we don’t really address this at all in any meaningful way and we do not encourage use of the island as a social environment. We don’t discourage it either.  Socialisation and community building is the main purpose of the OU island and other activities stem from this.  OU tutorials introduce students to SL, but they are encouraged to visit SL other than for tutorials and to become part of the community.
• Consider communication patterns - one of the reasons text threads can get complex is a tendency to use several part sentences or incomplete thoughts (cf micro blogging) rather than a complete idea and these can get lost or misunderstood when there are multiple threads with a large group of people.
• The idea of doing things in SL because they are difficult to do in real life came up with a couple of speakers, reminiscent of difficult, dangerous, impossible.
• Levelling - a changing role of teacher and student.  This sometimes occurs because people are unsure who is who and also occurs because students may have greater expertise in aspects of SL than their teachers.  A few months back, I was seeing SL creating a situation where ‘teachers’ and ’students’ become fellow travellers or ‘learners together’, changing the usual student/teacher dynamics and hierarchy.
• Being outed by the technology. This phrase was used in a talk about being a deaf or hearing impaired user of SL but might have other applicability.  I that instance, an avatar wearing an ‘anti-voice’ t-shirt and with a tag indicated involvement in a hearing impaired group was asked if they were deaf in real life and felt a sense of violation as the virtual world and real worlds collided (the question had not made sense as the person concerned had not been consciously aware of the message they were giving out).  Presumably the same thing can happen with cultural differences (accents) and possibly with people who choose to have opposite gender avatars in situations where voice communication is being used.

There was a lot more content during the day and when I get chance I will go through the notes and write them up properly.

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22/11/2008 by lizit.

I guess I should start a blog entry on the conference even though I haven’t really had time yet to assimilate much, if any of what I heard and experienced.  Perhaps the biggest highlight of the whole conference was the high quality of so many of the presentations - thought provoking and lots of evidence for conclusions throughout - not a load of case studies and icing sugar. Although the most mentioned virtual world, perhaps inevitably, was Second Life, there were presentations based on other virtual worlds including World of Warcraft - is WoW a virtual world or a game or both? An excellent presentation by Sarah Robbins focused on the development of a taxonomy of virtual worlds - in my opinion much more thought through than the recent JISC review of serious virtual worlds - I must read the paper and look at the slides!  Another presenter dealt with the necessary issue of what standards do we apply to our research in virtual worlds - and how do these compare with work in the ‘real world’; a number of research tools were considered alongside ethics and informed consent - remember there is a human behind every avatar (very few non-player characters in Second Life at present).

I have a lot of reading to do if I am to assimilate the content of the presentations I saw and also get a flavour of the many I was not able to see.

An interesting observation on my presentation from Mike Hobbs - he hadn’t considered using students to facilitate change in his institution before.  Even though I had left change from the table on my presentation and had said we did not consider ourselves change agents, Mike has a point.  We were engaged in a change process and maybe I am failing to notice the obvious - the effect of being involved in this type of project on the attitudes and practices of the staff involved. Moves into the world of psychology.  I need to think more about this!

Looking at the blogs and twitter feeds, it is clear people enjoyed the conference - and frighteningly are talking about ReLIVE09! It even seems as though some might be considering offering some funding!  For the moment, I need a good rest and an opportunity to recuperate before thinking of going near organising any more conferences!

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