Conole Prie Workshop

Using technologies for research Gráinne Conole and Alex Hardman PRiE conference Liverpool John Moores University, 27/06/09

1. Changing technologies

What do you think have been the main, significant changes in practice because of technology in recent years?

How has your own use of technologies changed in recent years?

What are the main ways in which technology is now impacting learning, research, work?

Discussion

Increasingly more difficult to actually speak to people – email culture! Implications for the future of the species!

3 weeks to see supervisor whereas email get a reply the same day!

Lose of writing skills with a pen! Typing skills better. Highlighted pens great technology! Computer-aided qualitative data software – NVIVO etc – do they potentially changing our practice or are we replicating existing technologies?

80/20 rule 80% of users only us 20% of the functionality

Facilitating for using stats programmes – a lot of programmes can be automatic but your mind can then be too passive; but what you get out is only as good as what you put in – need to be able to critically understand the data

E-publications are great! Much easier now

The free movement and culture!!! E-thesis available online

2. What's your personal digital space?

What are your top five activities and tools in terms of

Finding and using information

Communicating

What do you do?

What software do you use?

What hardware do you use?

Where do you do it?

Discussion

Girlie approach! Like phone etc like to talk to people, whereas Peter uses his own website, uses as a communication route – my supervisors can see what I have been up to, they can follow what I am doing and my experiments and trials

Methods space (sage publishing social networking space)– talking to other researchers about problems you are having online in social networks – about 1500

Social network space for early career researchers, most active topics are things like ethics

Amount of information and how you filter out the rubbish! How can you filter? Google scholar for quality??

Learning services – like Taylor and Francis and you can select the journals you want a summary from

The power of RSS feeds – getting the information to come to you!

Google docs – for collaboration, can work on the same file remotely, collaborative mindmap –mind42.com

Online learning communities – allows you to subscribe to email list to keep up to date

Ref manager and cite-u-like, connotea – for free referencing of publications, can dump out in endnote format

The missing reference!!!

Also the value of shared reference site De-licious – social bookmarking, librarything – for books plus pictures

International students away from family – mobiletalk – be able to talk inexpensive, skype – universities need to not blocked

My Personal Digital Learning Environment Information Writing (Word) Finding (Google) Blogging (Wordpress) Presenting (Powerpoint) Recording (Audacity) Communication Writing (Email) Talking (Mobile & skype) Texting (SMS & twitter) Learning (Audio conferencing) Presenting (Video conferencing) Hardware: Laptop, iphone, ipod, portable hard disk, camera, flip video camera Learning, research, work Where: Dining room table, hot desking space, hotel rooms, airport lounges

3. Technology-mediation

What research activities do you currently do?

How do you think technology can be used to support:

Group or project communication and collaboration

Research dissemination and wider community engagement

Conferences

Ways in which you present yourself and your work

Data collection and analysis

Research activities

Collect data

Attend conferences

Write papers

Collaborate

Network

Longitudinal study and have considered trying to find what communication form they will find most useful but on other hand – get out of my space grandma!

Work at Cambridge – learning landscapes project – getting them to be co-researchers, they had cameras etc and got them to document what they were doing and bought them in to discuss; but context is important!

Visual sociology of your desk/workspace and talk about why – multitasking using spaces for different reasons

Use of audio logs to collect emotive reactions about using technologies

Imagine that an artefact was very advanced technology – means of specifying what they would like the technology to do – voice recognition, document summarisation

Online questionnaires for collecting data

Collecting data face to face, surveying literature, networking – refining all the time a spiral

Why do people attend conferences?

Brian Kelly conference amplification

http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/lessons-learnt-from-the-amplification-of-the-cilip2-event/

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/952282/Conference_Amplification

4. Three examples of Web 2.0 tools

Slideshare

Sharing Powerpoint presentations, disseminating your research to a wider audience

Blogging

Reflection, archive of research, peer critique, disseminating

Twitter

Just in time findings, ideas, social and work, community

Slideshare

Means of sharing Powerpoint presentations

http://www.slideshare.net/grainne

Blog

Reflection

Archive of ideas

Dissemination channel

Dialogue

Identity and community

Blogging

Commoncraft introduction to blogging

http://www.commoncraft.com/blog

Reasons to blog

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-reasons-to-blog-and-top-ten.html

Twitter

Mix of social and work

Community based

The lstest news

Great conference back channel

Integration with other apps

Dissemination root

Subtle practice - retweet

Uses of twitter

Commoncraft introduction to Twitter

http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Top reasons for using twitter:

http://online-social-networking.com/top-reasons-for-using-twitter

Alex & Gráinne’s Aha moments!

… With slideshare

… With blog

… With twitter

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avdleeuw/2621070473/

5. Focusing on the social...

What for you is different about web 2.0 technologies?

What web 2.0 technologies do you use and how?

Three examples

Conference back chat – esym09

Social networking for education – Cloudworks

Peer review and publishing – JIME and JOVE

Conference back channels

Evolution or revolution: The future of identity and access management for research http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym09

Live conference broadcasting

Hash tag (#) for conference #esym09

Ning social networking site

All presentations as video podcasts on slideshare

Fielding questions via twitter etc.

Cloudworks: Education 2.0 Changing practices through use of social networking Many repositories of good practice, but little impact Blogging Facebook Twitter Slideshare Flckr Youtube Commenting Live commentary Tagging RSS feeds Embedding Following

Core concepts Clouds: Learning and teaching ideas Design or case studies Tools or resources Questions or problems Cloudscapes: Conferences Workshops Course team Student cohort Research theme Project

Journal of interactive multimedia education http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/

Journal of visualized experiments http://www.jove.com/

6. Academic discourse

What are the implications for the future of research and the nature of academic discourse and publishing? i.e how and where we communicate and disseminate our research findings

What impact do you think blogging, twitter, slideshare etc are having on "academic discourse"?

What is the relationship between these and traditional forms of communication and publishing?

What do you thinking is likely to be the impact on traditional channels and measures of worth - publishing houses, Research metrics??

Some blog posts on this

Some blog posts

The nature of academic discourse http://e4innovation.com/?p=45

The ABC of academic discourse http://e4innovation.com/?p=151

Quality discourse http://e4innovation.com/?p=105

Blogging a health warning http://e4innovation.com/?p=66

Shift from information to communication Co-evolution of tools and practice Conole, forthcoming in Lee and McLoughan Function Pre 2005 Now.. Text/Data Word, Excel Google docs Presentation Powerpoint Slideshare, podcasts, YouTube Finding info Google Google+, RSS feeds Managing info Bibliographic tools, repositories, e-journals Social bookmarking, blogs, wikis Personal management Microsoft exchange Shared calenders & to do lists Communication Email, forums, chat Skype, elluminate, social networking Visualisation Mindmaps Compendium, mind42, cohere

7. Researcher 2.0

Given the characteristics of web 2.0 and the current practices with see with social media, what would a "2.0 researcher" look like? what are implications for research?

Researcher 2.0

Modern technologies

Researcher 2.0

Web 2.0 practices

Location aware technologies

Adaptation & customisation

Second life/ immersive worlds

Google it!

Badges , World of warcraft

User generated content

Blogging, peer critique

Cloud computing

From individual to social

Contextualised and situated

Personalised research

Experiential research

Inquiry learning and research

Peer learning and support

Open Research

More open and visible Reflection

Distributed cognition

Pros and cons… Change +ve impact -ve impact Free resources Specialised niche use Literacy skills Ubiquitous access Technology as core tool for learning Narrower, but deeper digital divide Many communication channels Increased peer dialogue Fragmentation Free tools Personalisation Lack of institutional control Media rich representations New forms of sense making Lack of digital literacy skills Instant & multiple distribution Information repurposed to meet different needs No centralised repository of knowledge User generated content Variety and acknowledging individual contributions Quality assurance issues Social profiling Knowledge sharing and community build Inappropriate descriptions

8. Other uses