Writing for Research

In response to Joanne Logan’s fine blog entry, I submit these thoughts:

Blogging has enormous potential for research activities, but I think the focus may need to be shifted from scholarly publishing and peer review to an earlier phase of the creative, research process.

For me, blogging offers an excellent tool for information management and idea capture. I crafted my own personal blog to be a collection of “learning objects” which would help me capture my ideas in a systematic way and allow me to publish those ideas in a more efficient and timely manner.

My goal was to submit a co-authored paper to a peer-reviewed journal out of the UK. I use the blog entries to capture ideas as I engaged in the preliminary literature review. Even if time passed between article readings, I had captured my immediate responses and could locate them readily due to the archive feature of all blog software.

I was able to blog each article and presentation (while attending conferences) and so had wonderfully detailed entries when it came time to craft the article itself for submission. The blog allowed me also to work efficiently with my co-author, Dr. Patricia McGee from the University of Texas at San Antonio. I sent her the links to my blog entries so she had access to my thoughts on our topic as the paper progressed.

As an information management tool, the blog allowed me to digest research efficiently, capture my thoughts on the key ideas economically and when time permitted, and it allowed me to accumulate valuable detailed experiences. Let’s transfer that to the realm of science (I am an English teacher, by the way). If I am conducting a series of research experiments, I could blog my thoughts on the process itself, explore my own understanding of the experimental research process, and reflect on how the results might fit into a larger scientific picture.

The benefits of blogging (and this will not be true for all researchers and writers, of course):

• Enhances recall
• Document retrieval is simplified – the archive stores and dates them
• Offers opportunity for new insight – read and blog an article on a topic unrelated to your selected theme. Read your blog entries in order or randomly.

Collaborative blogs offer enormous potential for a research team working at a distance from each other. Thought processes, experiment results, and brainstorming can happen effectively within the rich virtual space that is a collaborative blog.

Research ideas often begin in a single thinker’s brain. Begin the research project there, with the blogging tool as an idea capture and information management tool to facilitate the research process.

21st Century Literacy

A Global Imperative

The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit

Adobe Systems, George Lucas Foundation, and New Media Consortium brought together high-end global leaders and thinkers who systematically brainstormed what this new 21st century literacy is, and what our global response should be.

A new language is being born: “rich in ways that extend traditional forms of communication with visual imagery and sound” and it is a global imperative that we understand this far-reaching phenomenon.

We lack a common language with which to discuss this emerging phenomenon, but, as with the learning object dialogue of the past five years, we can begin from a working definition to see where it leads our thinking:

21st century literacy is the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms.

Let's look at just those verbs again:

• To understand a new power
• To use that new power
• To transform media
• To distribute and disseminate
• To create anew

A brave new world.

Here are six characteristics of 21st century literacy to pique your own thinking skills:

• Multimodal
• Includes creative fluency and interpretive facility
• New grammar with its own syntax
• Interactive communication
• Ability to use media to evoke emotional responses
• Potential to transform the way we learn

In Part II we will explore the question:

What does a world that values 21st century literacy look like? Stay tuned!

Blogging in Academia

For those of us in science and related disciplines, the uses of blogs in academia is not as clear as it perhaps for social scientists, communication specialists, commentators, journalists, etc. I recently listened to a 2-hr conference about Blogging in Academia hosted by Stanford University, provided in a Podcast. It helped enlighten me and get me thinking about the role of blogging in research.

Clearly, most instructors can see the potential of blogs in teaching - as a writing tool, as a method for student expression, as a forum for class discussion. What is not as obvious is how blogging might fit into scholarly publishing, peer review and promotion/tenure.

The current "publish or perish" model almost exclusively involves a peer reviewed journal headed by a editorial board with certain expections about the criteria to publish in their outlet. Generally, the more difficult it is to publish in a given journal, the more prestigious the journal, and the more the publication "counts" in your T/P portfolio. Publishing in said journal is what helps to make you part of your "discipline" , learning the "do's" and "don'ts" as you pass through the ranks from graduate student to professor.

What about publishing scientific results in a blog? Suddenly, there are not just 2 or 3 peer reviewers, but perhaps dozens or even hundreds. But what are the credentials of these reviewers? If your research blog is open to the public, anyone can submit comments and make recommendations. Is this a good or bad thing? Academics, especially scientists, are more removed from the general public than ever, and perhaps a research blog would help take their message to the masses. But is this what we want to be judged on down the road?

If research results were to be published as a blog, cost becomes irrelevant. Publishing costs have skyrocketed lately, as have subscription rates. In a blog, authors can easily incorporate multimedia, color photographs, links, etc, which is difficult at best with traditional journals.

Just some food for thought... I know I will continue to investigate the potential of blogging in research activities. The link below lists many academic blogs. Be aware, however, that there are only a few related to science.

http://crookedtimber.org/academic-blogs/

Gaming and Education

Role of video game technology in educational settings

Innovate: an interesting journal of online education, recently devoted an entire online issue to gaming in education. I have begun reading through the articles and find them marvelous. Let's look at the first one: “What would a state of the art instructional video game look like?” by J.P. Gee.

Before you run fleeing for your life from that very title, let me suggest a few parts of the article that sound a very different note, one which those of us in faculty support units need to heed.

Education, K-12 and higher ed, is suffering from a “continued allegiance to bad theories of learning.” Ouch. That's rather harsh. How about if we say that the theories of learning are out-dated, rather than simply “bad.” He does make a telling reference to what he has called “content fetish,” and, being an ex-high school English teacher, I know what that means. I felt compelled to cover British literature in one year. Tough job.

He then moves up a level of abstraction and begins to explore what defines a “domain of knowledge.”   In my work with Educause's NLII in their virtual community of practice pilot project, I became very familiar with looking at an area of learning as a domain of knowledge, defining that domain, and trying to create a virtual learning environment that would embody that domain. Heady stuff.

“Any domain of knowledge, academic or not, is first and foremost a set of activities and experiences.”

That's a good premise. Because it moves us seamlessly from the traditional domains of knowledge that originated in Greek times and were formalized in medieval times as the university system developed to the 21st century. Now. Let's look past that spell-binding term “academic,” and consider a university of a different kind.

An article on the Fast Company blog (a very rich feed),   “Welcome to Video Game University,” describes a Video Game University. This institution was created because of one company's perception of “the talent shortage that now grips the whole industry.” Some statistics will reveal a little bit about the economics and perceived value of this university:

• 20,000 prospective students requested applications
• 800 applied
• 60 were accepted

Since games are never produced by one person, the entire learning structure is based on teams. One student notes, “We're trying to grab the school by the throat and take everything we can from it.”

When was the last time you heard a traditional university student respond like that to the experience of freshman year?

Reading the two articles side by side triggered some new areas of thought about teaching and learning. Thoughts?

Studying the Learning Experience

The writings of Christopher Dede from the Harvard Graduate School of Education always offer provocative and deeper perspectives on emerging technology and learning environments.

In “Designing and Studying Learning Experiences That Use Multiple Interactive Media To Bridge Distance and Time” Dede and co-authors Tara Brown L’Bahy and Pam Whitehouse, describe a study of “distributed learning” examined through the lens of a graduate course called “Learning Media that Bridge Distance and Time.”

In brief, the authors examine eight media:

• Face-to-face
• Websites for informal learning
• Groove (groupware tool)
• Tapped In (multi-user virtual environment)
• Wireless handhelds
• Videoconferencing
• Asynchronous threaded discussion
• iCommons (Harvard’s homegrown course shell)

The metacognitive question directing students’ thinking about these learning experiences was:

How does each medium shape the quality of information and interaction you receive and contribute?

That’s a question that all staff who support faculty in integrating technology and its associated Literacies into a curriculum should be asking, and answering!

Many definitions of “distributed learning” exist, but I think Dede’s definition (2000) broadens the horizons of our thinking in an effective way:

He describes the facilitation of distributed learning as “orchestrating educational activities among classrooms, workplaces, homes, and community settings.” I like the idea of an instructor as a conductor of a learning experience that can be designed to reach into students' larger world and enrich that world as well as academia itself.

Worth pondering. Thoughts?