25/01/2010 by lizit.

Thought it was about time I posted a catch up on what I am actually doing!

The focus of my DPhil is now the learning journeys of the various participants involved in the support and care of children and young people on the autistic spectrum. There are many different people involved from parents and carers to support staff in schools and residential establishments to education, health and social service professionals - and probably a few others as well. Although there is a notion of partnership in the provision of care and support, this partnership can be uneven because of the different levels and types of expertise different partners bring to the table, the way this expertise is or is not valued by other partners and the relative power of the different partners in providing access to resources.

I am planning to focus specifically on learning - which in practice means how people develop knowledge and expertise about autistic spectrum conditions/disorders (the terminology is currently in flux).

I have written an outline of what I hope to cover in my study and am in the process of re-drafting and getting this into a format appropriate for applying for the appropriate ethical clearances.

Another strand I am working on at the moment is trying to clarify what I understand by learning and which learning theories and ideas inform my understanding. This exploration has taken me through formal and informal learning, situated learning, communities of practice and currently metaphors of learning, as well as along a number of interesting side turnings.  I have read lots of interesting stuff and am slowly learning to sift out the things that have less relevance to my proposed study, however interesting they may be. Other posts in this blog summarise some of those explorations.

The other area I am beginning to explore is that of how disability is seen by society and the effect of disability on a family. This is not a major focus for me, but there is a fair bit of evidence showing that families with a disabled member are disadvantaged in lots of different ways and there is other evidence pointing to people with disabilities forming an underclass. If it can be shown that parents caring for children and young people on the spectrum have a great deal of knowledge and expertise in a number of different areas, this might challenge the power structure and also empower parents.

At the moment it feels as though there are a lot of different threads in something of a disarray and my task is to try to identify them and put them in some sort of order so that I can progress. A bit like sorting out lace bobbins and threads after the cat has knocked the lace pillow on the floor yet again. I’ll be more than happy if I can get these threads organised and begin to make something of them.

Posted in lace, ASD, empowerment, research ideas, concepts, learning, reflections, creativity, planning | Print | 1 Comment »

02/01/2010 by lizit.

I’m feeling really positive about where my DPhil is going as I move into the new year. Psychologically, I feel a sense of ownership both of what I am doing and how I am doing it.  I have a sense of purpose and direction and feel I am standing on solid ground rather than wading through a swamp. There is a lot of work to be done and I will need to be clear about what is possible and what isn’t  but the whole task feels much less daunting at this point in time. Whether I will feel the same in afew months time is another matter altogether!

If I look back 18 months to the earliest posts in this blog, I thought I knew what my DPhil would be about. What I did not expect was the experience of the past months, which has not only caused me to re-examine my assumptions, but has given me the time and space to read and think and to begin to formulate some of my own idea.

Some months ago, I wrote some notes which likened the DPhil process to making a piece of lace. When starting out, the pattern may not be at all clear, but it needs to be interpreted. Decisions have to be taken about where to start. It may even be that the pattern can be worked in more than one way. Past experience will be used in analysing the problem and it may well be necessary to seek the ideas of other lacemakers with greater or different experience. There may be new stitches to be learned through working samples. Decisions have to be made about threads - type and thickness - and more samples may be needed. Equipment needs to be assembled -  pillow, bobbins, cover cloths, pins, threads, scissors, etc. Even after all the preparation, the pattern needs to be set - a process that can involve a number of false starts. The first pattern repeat is inevitably challenging - working out which threads to introduce when and identifying the track they will take, where stitches can be worked in more than one way ensuring consistency in the number of twists. However, once the pattern is set and a few inches have been worked, it becomes much easier to see what needs to be done next - the pattern may even include repeats. To the non-lace maker, the pile of bobbins and mass of pins may look complex but the lacemaker can see what they are doing and trying to achieve. That does not mean there are no challenges - threads may break, errors may be made resulting in too many bobbins in the wrong place - and there may be near disasters if the pillow is knocked off its stand by an errant cat - but a process has been set in motion. That is until the point where thought has to be given to finishing the work and what to do with all the bobbins and threads so as to achieve a neat and tidy completion.

I feel as though I have done much of the preparation and am now gathering my equipment and tools together ready to start making lace. As with lace, this is a fairly solitary occupation, but there are opportunities for sharing, working together, and admiring other people’s work as the lace grows.

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29/10/2009 by lizit.

I’m aware that informal learning has been an issue for me for quite a long time and it seems appropriate to do another of those memory lane trips and think about my own informal learning - or at least some snapshots.

As I keep saying I must get back to lace making, my experience of learning to make lace seems a reasonable place to start. I have wanted to know how to make bobbin lace since I was a teenager.  I was always quite proficient with my hands - bodged needlework in sense of making garments, but enjoyed fine counted thread cross-stitch and tapestry, lots of different knitting (used to make Aran sweaters for friends because they were so quick to do), taught myself to crochet from a book and taught myself to tat having had the principles explained to me by a shop keeper. But teaching myself lace-making defeated me - I couldn’t make head or tail of the instructions in the various craft books given me as a girl - it might have helped if I had realised a lace pillow was not the same as the one I put my head on at night - but it was something I wanted to know how to do. About 6 years ago, I saw my first ever demonstration of bobbin lace being made at a exhibition and bought the kit that the demonstrator was selling.  I managed to follow the patterns in the kit, but the strips of fabric I produced looked more like badly woven cloth than lace. Then I got given a lace making weekend as a Christmas present. I suspect I would never have progressed without that formal instruction. I was taught how to set up a lace pillow and work a simple pattern - and I acquired a book on how to do it.  A passing comment had been made about the patterns being based on a grid and that there were computer programs available to aid lace design.  When I got home, I looked at the book and quickly saw how the patterns for that type of lace were indeed based on a grid.  I also started doing some web searches and found some lace software and plotted the first pattern in the book onto the grid, printed it and worked out how to work the pattern.  I quickly acquired some other books and realised that although there were different styles of lace, they all used the same basic stitches worked in different ways.  I then started using the program to design my own patterns by adapting patterns in the books, rather than just working them as printed. In the process, I learned a lot about types of threads, types of bobbins, history of lace (making and wearing), modern textile arts. The learning came from a mix of reading, talking to other lace makers, web searches and attending occasional weekend workshops. There was formal instruction, but most of what I learned was self-taught, and all was unaccredited.

Another skill area acquired a number of years ago was bicycle mechanics. I learned to strip down and rebuild a bicycle from a mixture of observation, reading and trial and error. Although self-taught, I got a number of free holidays in return for my mechanical skills, even if I rarely did more than mend the occasional puncture and replace the occasional cable.

Currently, I am learning a lot about using herbs and spices in cooking.  My teacher is my son who has developed an interest in cooking. He goes out and buys herbs and spices and experiments with them. From his experiments, I am beginning to recognise the flavour and effect of different herbs and spices and to experiment myself. This is not a case of following recipes but learning by observation and doing - and teaching each other by the comments we make on the results.

I could go on, but much of what I do, including what I am doing in my studies, is a mix of observation, reading and application. Some of my learning is assessed and accredited, but much/most of what I do is purely out of interest and may not even be known to others.

Would the things I have learned informally be any better or any different if I learned them formally, or if the skills acquired informally were formally assessed in some way? Would I gain more satisfaction from making lace if I knew I was getting a certificate for my efforts than from the pleasure of friends who have received a piece of lace I have made?

When and why are informal skills insufficient and formal recognition and accreditation needed?

Posted in lace, informal learning, creativity | Print | 1 Comment »

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 »

17/03/2009 by lizit.

Week 9 marked the last of the formal classes with the machinima presentations.  During the days running up to the 11th March, I was very aware of increased student activity in Second Life.  Over the weekend, I found myself engaged in trying to assist students with sorting out media streams and providing other last minute advice and assistance.  Monday morning, there were heated words in one group as work had not been done which should have been, and little apparent understanding from some team members that failing to attend team meetings messed up other people’s planning and time management.

Come the day of the presentations, I was bowled over by the work the students had done and the professional quality of the machinimas.  Given that most, if not all, the students had never been near Second Life before early January, their achievements were truly remarkable. Perhaps as important was the response of the clients, one of whom is planning to use the resources developed on a course next term and another who is planning to discuss how the machinima and materials might be used with colleagues on the Newton Project.  Although the ethnography project is incomplete, it is still possible that this migh be used in some way with students next year.

Although it probably only applies to a very small percentage of students, there was a warning note sounded about the potential to become over-involved in Second Life.  Some months ago, there was discussion on the SLED list about the fears expressed by some that Second Life might be addictive.  The general view was that this was not the case.  Students did not choose to go into Second Life, but were there because we took them there and, in general, did not engage with the virtual world beyond what their courses required them to do.  Although students might spend long hours in Second Life engaged with specific projects and course requirements, this was seen as relating more to ‘flow’ rather than indicating anything more worrying.  One student in his ILE presentation did indicate that he had found himself over-involved in Second Life to a point where it was becoming addictive.  Not only had he engaged with the project, but he had become involved in the virtual world to the extent of finding a partner in the virtual environment.  Although for many students this would not have been problematic, for this young man it was.  He did acknowledge that he had ignored advice and it was only now he was aware of the problems, but nevertheless there may be something to be learned from this experience when it comes to considering the advice given to students about SL risks and the formation of working groups.

Apart from the housekeeping that will need to be done now - arranging to get builds moved to more permanent locations on the island, I have a number of tasks to address.  I need to look at the chat logs and make sure files are appropriately named and saved.  I need to speak to Pablo (and hopefully Judith) and sort out arrangements for next term.  How will students be introduced to SL? What kind of induction will be needed? Possible use of the Sussex avatars?  I also need to consider what kind of tracking can be used to monitor what use is being made of the island and the resources.  For the past term, I have been clear that my interest is in how SL supports learning experiences and in how students deal with it when they get stuck when engaged in a learning experience or task.  I need to clarify what I want from the use of the SL resources.  Something about the effectiveness of SL as a learning environment when there is not the involvement and engagement that comes from creating products within the virtual world? I need to look at the augmentationist/immersionist stuff again - althought students may not fit those types, we are asking some to use SL as a tool and asking others to be more involved by doing stuff there. A lot to think about and plan!

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26/02/2009 by lizit.

This week isn’t over yet, but as I am now away from Sussex, it seems fair enough to treat it as the end of the week. Looking back, the last few days have felt a bit like a roller coaster ride with moments of deep despair about what the students are or are not doing combined with exhileration at seeing activity and hearing excitement at achievement.

Starting with the low points - and, I guess an acknowledgment of my personal involvement and investment in this course and in particular the Second Life aspects of it. On Monday, I covered the U/G project meeting.  Before the meeting there was an email from one of the groups saying they would not be present and everything was in hand.  If only I could believe things were as under control as reported, especially when there was clearly some misunderstanding about the tasks still needing to be completed.  An exciting project with an enthusiastic client, but so little being done to use the affordances of SL.  (By chance, I bumped into the client later in the day and she mentioned she might be meeting the group, but was a little concerned about assisting them - I encouraged her to both meet with them and to express high expectations of what they might achieve, especially as she hopes to be able to use their deliverables with real students and potential students.)

Initially 2 students turned up at the meeting.  A positive was that one had at long last produced a project specification and we were able to discuss that and potential extensions to it.  The other student was feeling pretty low as he was having difficulty getting communication within his group and getting things done.  The frustration was compunded by the late arrival of another student, who refused to accept my suggestion that those present in the group could make decisions and allocate work within the group; how could people be allocated tasks if they were not present and might not want to undertake those tasks.  Some time later a third member of the group arrived and the 3 of them decided to go and do some work on their project in the lab. It felt as though we had moved away from rock bottom.

The other really low point of the week was Wednesday and the workshop.  Just 3 students turned up with no explanations or apologies from any of the others.  Although students are free to choose whether or not to attend classes, it is incredible to think people are choosing to miss out on opportunities, some of which cannot be repeated.  This week there was an opportunity not only to interact with each other and hear a theoretical, scene setting to the topic in hand, but the opportunity to interact with people from elsewhere. Others gave their time freely to benefit people who just didn’t show.  I felt angry and disappointed at this lack of engagement.

Alongside the lows there have been highs.  Monday evening I was able to go in world and find 5 students engaged in work on their builds. There was a real buzz as one project (the one with the 3 students from the morning) had begun to take shape and had a direction to go in and the effort was beginning to pay off.  The other group were tackling the problem of the dead parrot - or how to remove oxygen from a virtual glass globe and make the globe implode!  Again it was good to see the amount of work going on and the sense of enjoyment and effort as people created their build together.

Perhaps the real high of the week was Tuesday morning, when the dispirited student of Monday turned up wanting to check out what he was doing was OK.  In fact, he was beaming and full of pride (rightly so) at having cracked some tricky scripting problems and got his build doing what is was meant to do!

Although students have not engaged with the project in the same way this year as last year, nevertheless, there has been engagement and clear demonstrations of student learning and overcoming problems to achieve success.  It might be a rollercoaster ride but there are definitely some highs along the way!

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14/02/2009 by lizit.

Halfway through term already!

There has been a bit more activity this week but things are still slow.  Two groups have sent in their specifications and received feedback (one group having then prompty sent in a further submission incorporating the feedback, but missing the point to some extent).  Another group has sent in 2 progress reports - lacking in detail but at least meeting the requirement.

With the remaining 2 projects, I am keen to see both specifications - one of them because the student seems to be living in Second Life but it is unclear what is being done for the project apart from building, demolishing and rebuilding.  With the other group, I have seen one of the students in Second Life trying to get an understanding of scripting - we were able to discuss a couple of points inworld.

I spent an interesting hour or so on Thursday inworld.  I had some stuff to do on the SLZ island and there was a student working on trying to get a video player working.  We spent some time looking at the problem together.  There appeared to be a number of problems to overcome, from knowing how to program the object to making it play the desired film, to setting the video stream in the land details to having to make the student a member of the SLZ management group (with very limited permissions).  The good thing was that the video was playing by the time I left.  I noticed the same student was working on this again this morning, but I did not get involved this time - he knew I was inworld and if he needs to contact me, IMs go straight into my mailbox. It would be interesting to know what is the motivation to continue striving for a solution to the problem.

On Wednesday, we tried to play Primtionary in the ILE class.  There were a number of learning points from the exercise:

• Have laptops booted before needing to use them so students only need to log-in
• Stagger log-ins (some students had multiple versions of SL loading simultaneously)
• Stand up to get student attention while explaining activity (I should know that by now!)
• Be clear about activity -short, precise instructions
• Be clear about need to use IM for privacy

I suspect the activity works better in a distance environment where there isn’t the temptation to chat in real life or watch what others are doing.  Nevertheless, it was interesting to watch the activity and see how some students very quickly created artefacts while others didn’t seem to know where to start.  Some of this may have been lack of imagination at that moment in time (just the same as in Pictionary or charades), but some of it may have been lack of familiarity with the building and editing tools.  It would not be an appropriate activity with a group where building skills are not needed, but could be a fun warm up if there was a regular class with a building focus.

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03/02/2009 by lizit.

I am plodding on with trying to work out how seriously to take Csikszentmihalyi.  Given that he has spent over 30 years working in the area of flow and optimal experience, has written several books and papers and presented his findings widely and his ideas have been adopted and applied in many different disciplines, the implication is that something meaningful is there.  However, having just read Creativity (see summary in wiki) I remain unconvinced, especially when the final chapter appears to be a self-help handbook on how to become a more creative person. I would like to find a knowledgable critique of his work, which might help me to assess better what I am reading, how seriously to take it, and how to apply it.

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