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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17/05/2009 by lizit.

OK - I don’t know what people will make of my ideas at my thesis committee tomorrow, but I feel a whole lot clearer and more focused.  The last two postings have been helpful in clarifying some of my own thinking, identifying stuff I know something about and, more importantly, identifying some of the key thoughts that have meaning for me.

My focus hasn’t moved from virtual worlds, but rather than seeing them as the main focus and how their affordances can be used, I am shifting to seeing them as an environment in which people do things.  I have also realised that a primary interest of mine - and I have said it before is ‘ownership’.  By ownership, I am talking about whether we own our own learning and relational experiences or whether we are engaged in activities which are owned by somebody else.  For instance, the model of education I was brought up with in the 50s and 60s was essentially one of learning a lot of facts and then regurgitating them in an exam and being marked on how well I remembered those facts.  There was no real encouragement or enabling to engage with what I was learning in contrast to the more prevalent learning philosophy today where the emphasis is on constructing our own understanding based on a mix of previous experience, information and experimentation leading to an ownership of knowledge.

My main problem with social work was that there was too much emphasis on doing things for people - or pressuring them to do things in a way which met the approval of the professionals, rather than in enabling people to own their own problems and be actively involved in finding solutions.  Today, many older people or people with disabilities are given a budget and are able to determine their own care priorities (the direct payments scheme).  When we started having interdisciplinary meetings with ‘clients’ in the 1980s and letting them know in terms of hours what support they could have each week and asking how they wanted that support divvying up it was almost revolutionary. Yet it was only recognising we were dealing with adults with a right to own their own care agenda rather than having solutions imposed on them by professionals.

Self-determination theory suggests that people are intrinsically motivated from birth to learn and to respond to challenges, or set themselves challenges.  It also recognises that extrinsic rewards can lead to a decrease in intrinsic motivation. The education system has become very extrinsically focused over the past couple of decades - standards pre-date New Labour even though New Labour has gone in for target setting with a vengeance. During the same period there has been a steady decline in adult education - all recent surveys by NIACE suggest fewer and fewer adults who are not actually in education undertake any educational activity.  This may be reflective of the decrease in adult education leisure classes - many classes have ceased because they lead to no recognisable qualification - but it may also be how those being questioned understand learning and education. The more education is certificated in one way or another, the less aware we are of the learning we engage in daily in our interactions with others in the communities where we live and work.

Two things that struck me when I first started looking at Second Life were the amount of learning that was going on and the existence of a gift economy.  Learning was sometimes semi-formal - attending building classes given by other residents - but it was also informal - asking questions in a sandbox or just when trying to move around.  It was the same learning we do when we live, however briefly, in a different country or even a different place in our own country. The gift economy represents the way information was freely given with no expectation of reward.  Not only was information imparted, but gifts of various sorts.  When I set up an area for the Sussex Learning Network, I was able to rent a large sky platform and have it fully equipped with all manner of things for a relatively small sum of money which in no way covered the time that had been given to build the facility.

Although Second Life has been colonised by educators and there is much formal education taking place there, there is a continuing community of people who use/live in Second Life and undertake a range of activities there.  I am interested in exploring what can be learned about informal, intrinsically motivated learning in this setting. I suspect that community development theories will help in understanding what is happening.  It is likely there are similar behaviour patterns in other virtual environments, including child facing ones.  What can we learn from these settings about what motivates people to learn?  What can virtual worlds teach the physical world about re-enabling basic values of wanting to learn and be challenged.

That last bit sounds a bit woolly and pompous - need to work on it.  But basically, I am interested in informal learning, intrinsic motivation, ownership and community and the virtual world offers a place to look at this and relate stuff to the physical world.

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09/05/2009 by lizit.

I’ve got just over a week now to get this report written and if anything I am getting more, rather than less, confused about what I am doing, or trying to do.  Try as I might to focus in, I am finding myself focusing out and looking at big pictures rather than little details - maybe the result of too many OU systems thinking courses.

I am hoping that putting down some of my thinking may help me to make some sense out of the muddle and to come up with something credible to discuss with my thesis committee.  Guess my main concern is not to look too foolish!

My starting point about this time last year was whether Second Life was providing any added value to learners in formal learning situations.  I had read Maggi Savin-Baden’s paper which had addressed troublesome learning and was struck by the language being used being reminiscent of the language used in counselling and therapy - the suggestion that working through a learning disjunction leading to a complete change of thought patterns (maybe I exaggerate!)

During the past months, I have done a lot of learning and thinking and become aware of lots of different ideas which can contribute to thinking about virtual worlds and education. I have also found myself re-visiting my own personal history and ideology and looking at how my own thinking has developed against a background of big ideas and socio-economic-political change over the past half century. In looking at academic papers in particular, I am increasingly aware of the narrowing of focus of so much I read which makes little attempt to engage in joined up thinking across disciplines or ideologies. At times it feels as though wheels are constantly being re-invented or origins of ideas are being ignored as knowledge is developed incrementally rather than holistically.

At the same time, in my own thinking, I am finding I am looking more at big ideas, influences and trends.  For example, when I began work in community development in the early 70’s, there was a strong awareness of the roots of community development being in the philanthropic movements of the 19th century, the university settlements of the inter-war period and post-war socialism, all tinged with the emerging rights movements (at that time women and black, but later others), and counteracting the individuality of the 60’s.  Though there was a recognition of links between community development in the UK and community action in the States, there was little attempt to look for common methodology with community development elsewhere (I can’t even remember what the terms used to describe the third world or developing nations was back then).

Community development in the UK effectively disappeared in the early 80’s - no funding - and the volunteer movement had to re-assess itself because of changes in political ideology.  It is possible to trace the language used by Margaret Thatcher in various key speeches through that period which signalled a change from community being important to the rise and fall of voluntarism to emphasis being placed on the individual with the famous words ‘there is no such thing as society’. Behind these changes seemed to be a growing awareness than community development, voluntary organisations and even volunteers cost money.  By the end of the 1980’s the notion of voluntary organisations being contracted to undertake specific tasks by public bodies was firmly rooted and much social care is provided today on this type of contractual basis.  At the same time, the lottery was born and grant giving to charitable bodies gave a new lease of life to more innovative organisations.

Other major changes during the past 4o years have been in communications and globalisation - each feeding the other.  We have become familiar with seeing news as it happens.  Film of famine in Africa no longer has quite the shocking quality it had when we saw the first pictures of the Ethiopian droughts, but perhaps we are still shocked by the effects of natural disasters in New Orleans or Italy - at least briefly. In recent months we are being reminded again of community, this time in the form of the global village as we are told that it is only through collaboration and working together that the credit crunch can be overcome.  Again in recent days, the risk of global pandemic has raised its head, and with it a realisation of what a small place the world is now that so many people are involved in travel to so many different places.

Returning to virtual worlds, my starting point was very simplistic - what does Second Life offer to education by way of added value.  Over the past months, I have become much more aware of the existence of other virtual worlds and have visited some, albeit briefly.  More importantly, I have realised that any thinking about Second Life has to recognise previous thinking about virtual worlds  - and the scope gets quite scary.  At the very least this needs to acknowledge Usenet and bulletin boards, the 2-D web, gaming, virtual reality and social networking.  In considering education and virtuality, there is a need also to be aware of changing trends in elearning and open access learning materials such as the MIT and OU repositories. Second Life was not developed as a learning environment, although parts of it have been colonised by educational institutions. There is a lot of informal learning happening in Second Life, just as there is throughout Web 2.0, and much of this reflects community initiatives of one sort and another.

My journeying over the past months has also led me into an awareness of some motivational theories, principally Flow and Self-determination theory.  SDT is of particular interest with its emphasis on autonomy and relatedness (both important themes to any community development professional).

Looking even more specifically at Second Life, apart from reading a lot of stuff about things going on in the virtual world and attending several workshops and conferences with a virtual world focus, I have been involved informal educational experiences with both OU and Sussex students. There is no doubt that the virtual world does offer an opportunity to develop learning experiences using the specific affordances of the virtual world, but I am beginning to question whether this is actually what I am interested in. However, I am still interested in Second Life as a learning environment and I am finding myself thinking again about some of the tenets of community development and self help and how they apply within the virtual world.  Linked to this is the recent government white paper with its emphasis on informal learning.

This blog is getting even more disjointed now!

Informal learning has always interested me as so much of what happens in community is experiential, informal learning involving a transfer of skills and knowledge. It fits in with various personal growth philosophies. Self-help fed the development of the WEA.  Early years education in the UK has formalised the work initiated by parents in the development of pre-school playgroups. Although APL and APEL have been around for some years, there is very little accreditation of informal learning - it is so varied, it is difficult to see how this can happen and even if it is a good thing.  Does formally recognising the informal change or restructure it?  Some would say the early years curriculum with it’s emphasis on assessment runs totally counter to the objectives of playgroups.

So where is this leading?  I am interested in the potential of Second Life as a learning community and I am interested in informal learning.  I am also interested in how people own their own learning and how they support each other through self-help and exchange of skills.  I am interested in what makes people want to learn when there is no formal recognition or validation of that learning.  I am interested in drawing connections between the developing community in Second Life and the trends which are observable in the bigger world picture. I am interested in joined up thinking rather than disconnected nuggets.

Now how do I turn any of this into anything that will make sense for my DPhil annual review meeting?!

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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 »

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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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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