Teaching with Social Media

Alun Digital Academia, Science No Comments , ,

Road building in Nepal

Road build­ing on the Annapurna cir­cuit, Nepal, surely a path to enlight­en­ment? Photo by rpb1001.

I think I took my PhD at Leicester at almost exactly the right time — if you ignore the cata­strophic down­turn in edu­ca­tion fund­ing. The reason is I’ve had the oppor­tun­ity to work with a few people who have been inspir­ingly innov­at­ive in their teach­ing. Derek Raine intro­duced me to Problem-Based Learn­ing, when he built a new degree in Inter­dis­cip­lin­ary Sci­ence around it. +A.J. Cann also help by let­ting me help out on some of his numer­acy / study skills courses for Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences and that’s what he’s blog­ging about today at Of Schemes and Memes and on his own blog at Sci­ence of the Invis­ible.

I’m sure I’ve had plenty of study skills train­ing but I don’t remem­ber much of it. At its worst it was a part of the first year course teach­ing how to use vari­ous sys­tems I might want to use in the third year. By which time the sys­tem might well have changed or else I would have for­got­ten it through lack of use. I don’t do well if I have do some­thing in order to learn how to use a sys­tem. I work bet­ter if I learn how to use a sys­tem in order to do some­thing else.

Alan Cann has a focus on how and why stu­dents want to learn some­thing. To explain the dif­fer­ence, when I was taught I might be shown how to use PubMed. Fill in all the boxes and that’s a pass. In con­trast Alan sets tasks that have a pur­pose and explains PubMed or Web of Know­ledge are the easi­est ways to get the inform­a­tion stu­dents need. The cleverest part is that this is wrapped up with social media icing.

Get­ting cohorts onto Google+ gets them think­ing about pri­vacy, but also makes com­mu­nic­a­tion online a more nat­ural act. Stu­dents can build their own sup­port struc­tures. These become more import­ant as the stu­dents move toward inde­pend­ent study later in their degree. Another clever thing work­ing through social media does is it helps dis­solve bar­ri­ers between modules.

In my first degree what I learned in mod­ule A applied to mod­ule A. What I learned in Mod­ule B applied to Mod­ule B. I wasn’t mak­ing con­nec­tions between the two. On Google+ the work their is for Alan’s mod­ule, but stu­dents dis­cuss more than that. They’ll talk about other mod­ules and make con­nec­tions about why some­thing puzz­ling is hap­pen­ing because we know from this mod­ule that this occurs so when you apply it to that lab exper­i­ment you should expect that and so on.

Another fea­ture is that Alan doesn’t give the same course twice. He’ll drop what thinks doesn’t work and come up with some­thing bet­ter. This shouldn’t be rad­ical. I’ve been on count­less courses as a post-grad that talk about the import­ance of reflec­tion in teach­ing. Usu­ally this reflec­tion in the sense of “how can you bet­ter guide stu­dents along the path to enlight­en­ment?” Alan and Derek have both taken the approach that ques­tions if the path is right in the first place. Even if it’s basic­ally sound, do we need all these wig­gly detours to des­tin­a­tions no one vis­its anymore?

This post is a good entry point to some of what Alan is doing with teach­ing. Sci­ence of the Invis­ible is the place to go if you want to read more.

Photo: Road build­ing on the Annapurna cir­cuit, Nepal by rpb1001. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC licence.

This post also appears on Google+.

Blogging Archaeology 4: What next? Part One

Alun Digital Academia 1 Comment , ,

For our last ques­tion, I would like to ask you to con­sider the act of pub­lic­a­tion for this blog car­ni­val. How could we best cap­ture the inter­play, the mul­ti­me­dia exper­i­ence of blog­ging as a more form­al­ized pub­lic­a­tion? What would be the best out­come for this col­lec­tion of insights from archae­olo­gical bloggers?

This week’s ques­tion is two ques­tions which makes it harder to answer. I’m not sure a form­al­ised pub­lic­a­tion is the best out­come. It’s not a bad idea though, so I’ll tackle that in this post.

My first reac­tion was like Shawn Gra­ham, a Kindle Single — but that’s because a Kindle is my new toy. A Kindle single could work, I liked this art­icle on hydro­frack­ing, which was free to down­load when I got it. It has some per­man­ence and it would col­late the vari­ous entries. The reason it might not be the best solu­tion is that first it helps to know why you’re col­lat­ing the entries.

If you want to give blog­ging a degree of cred­ib­il­ity among people who don’t value elec­tronic media then an elec­tronic out­put is a per­fect way to be ignored. You could try and self-publish via some­thing like Lulu. I’d be against try­ing to cover up the self-published nature of the book by adding a spuri­ous imprint — unless the pub­lic­a­tion were part of a long-term pro­ject involving sev­eral books. Still, I’m not sure to what extent this is a good idea. I can’t see a tech­no­phobe buy a book about archae­olo­gical blog­ging. This is why I think Colleen Morgan’s approach is clever. She’s put­ting the ses­sion into a main­stream con­fer­ence. Both John and Mat­thew Law raise the pos­sib­il­ity of pub­lic­a­tion via an SAA related pub­lic­a­tion. If that’s pos­sible then this is a sens­ible out­reach com­pon­ent of pub­lic­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally then, a Kindle Single would be the elec­tron­ic­ally per­man­ent ver­sion — the advant­age of the Kindle Single being that you can embed links in them. Add a CC licence and drop a big hint to Amazon that you’re mak­ing avail­able free on the web and Amazon could make it avail­able free on their site, like Hydro­fracked was.

In terms of how the con­tent of the book could look, a good model that comes to mind is Philo­sophy and Archae­olo­gical Prac­tice. Per­spect­ives for the 21st Cen­tury by Cor­nelius Holtorf and Håkan Karls­son. Each paper in the book comes with at least one response by another author. A com­mon obser­va­tion is that the com­ments have added value to the car­ni­val. I think Kand­in­sky adds some­thing to my post here, and I’m hop­ing this adds value to the pre­vi­ous posts I’ve linked back to. Jonathan Jar­rett is leav­ing some excel­lent com­ments in vari­ous places. I think adding these to the pub­lic­a­tion demon­strates that blog­ging can be part of a reflect­ive pro­cess and need not be a static out­put, even if by pin­ning it into a pub­lic­a­tion the posts become static on paper.

I think col­lat­ing the blog posts in some way is bet­ter than not col­lat­ing them, so I don’t want to run down the idea. I do won­der if it’s going to be ter­minal. Freez­ing the posts marks an end. It could be pos­sible to start a new pro­ject in a few months, but it would be start­ing from scratch again. Colleen has put in a huge amount of work get­ting the SAA ses­sion to work. She’s been e-mailing people for sev­eral months organ­ising this, and the vis­ible part is really just a frac­tion of the effort. It would be a shame if someone else look­ing to start a group pro­ject had to rep­lic­ate all that work again. Terry Brock has raised the pos­sib­il­ity of using this as a spur to some­thing more ongo­ing, like a group blog. Mick Mor­ris­son has also been ask­ing what people think about the future of Four Stone Hearth, an anthro­po­lo­gical car­ni­val with a large archae­olo­gical com­pon­ent — with little suc­cess by the looks of it.

An ongo­ing event is not exclus­ive to also form­al­ising this cur­rent car­ni­val, but it is a dif­fer­ent prob­lem, so I’ll tackle that in another post. For now my response for Colleen is “form­al­ise the car­ni­val how­ever you like”, but in a cheery and enthu­si­astic tone of voice.

Blogging Archaeology Week 3: If I were after more comments here’s what I’d do.

Alun Digital Academia 5 Comments ,

And now Blog­ging Archae­ology Week 3.

A final down­side to the short form is the appear­ance of dia­log. Not­ing this vir­tual round table and other blogs (like MS) as excep­tions, most archae­olo­gical blogs that I read have very little in the way of dia­log through com­ments. Often on this blog, I feel like I am talk­ing to myself, which in a way is cath­arsis, but if an archae­ology blog­ger writes and no one reacts, are we really chan­ging opin­ions or mov­ing the field for­ward?” I would add to this, how do you attract read­er­ship? Without too much in the way of SEO chat­ter, who is your audi­ence and how to you inter­act with this audi­ence? What do you want out of inter­activ­ity by means of blog­ging about archaeology?

I’m not sure if I’m the right per­son to answer this for archae­olo­gists. For a while I set up a sep­ar­ate site and barred Google from it, so I could blog thoughts without large num­bers of people vis­it­ing. I’m not hos­tile to read­ers, but the read­ers I want are the one who come here any­way, not simply a large num­ber count. It’s partly down to why you blog.

At the same time I can say this worked depress­ingly well in terms of view­ers. I also changed the name of the site to “The Brit­ney Spears Site of, like, Really Old Stuff” and changed the theme to a Brit­ney theme (it was 2005). But I don’t know if it changed anything.

I think I can come up with three reas­ons why com­ments might not happen.

  1. Sub­ject Mat­ter.
    If your blog repeats the news, then I won’t com­ment. It’ll be some­thing that I’ve already seen before or else will see repeated sev­eral times over. What about the oppos­ite? Add ori­ginal com­ment­ary and that will encour­age com­ments yes? I’m not sure it will. There’s plenty of people writ­ing good ori­ginal posts. I won’t always com­ment though because these will be inter­est­ing art­icles out­side my imme­di­ate field. What I need to do is read round the sub­ject before I can add any­thing more than “Nice one”. That takes time. It’s some­thing you don’t get on some sci­ence blogs, because a lot of sci­ence is the same round the world, but archae­ology is very localised.

    I think for most archae­o­b­log­gers one way to more com­ments is to dumb down massively, or go over the top and aim for a purely aca­demic audi­ence. In the lat­ter case I think you’d still need the social con­nec­tions to pull com­ments in. To get com­ments you will need people read­ing who feel happy talk­ing about the sub­ject of your posts. Which takes us to…

  2. Audi­ence Size.
    Of your audi­ence only a small frac­tion will par­ti­cip­ate by com­ment­ing. This is gen­er­ally known as the 90–9-1 rule. For blogs Neilsen, writ­ing in 2006, said that the ratios were skewed fur­ther to 95–5-0.1. These num­bers describe how people inter­act with your site. The first num­ber are pass­ive con­sumers. The second are occa­sional con­trib­ut­ors. The final num­ber is the heavy con­trib­ut­ors. Using these fig­ures if you have 1000 people read­ing your posts you can expect around five or six com­ments, with one from a reg­u­lar reader. Most archae­o­b­logs aren’t get­ting that kind of read­er­ship. There are ways to lower the bar to com­ment­ing, but even so it’s not likely many blogs will get the read­er­ship levels to get reg­u­lar com­ments. Because of their size though, they’ll be much more vis­ible and you’ll have a skewed idea of how suc­cess­ful you blog is or isn’t.

  3. People don’t com­ment on blogs.
    This is from AJ Cann, who does have com­ments on his blogs. He also runs Micro­bi­o­logy­Bytes. Com­pare the num­ber of com­ments on the blog with the num­ber of com­ments on Face­book. On the blog there are acres of No com­ments, while the Face­book page picks up com­ments and likes.* This is part of a shift in where we com­ment on blogs. For the last post within a quarter of an hour I saw this tweet from the light­ning fast Åsa M Larsson. Com­ment­ing has moved from blogs to Twit­ter and Face­book. Often the com­ment is purely asso­ci­at­ive, as a like or retweet. Com­ments on blogs aren’t dead, but usage has changed. It isn’t 2006 anymore.

So what do you do? One is to pull the com­munity to you. Ning built their busi­ness on this and every so often I’ll get someone telling me I should sign up to their Ning site. I’ll do it for work, but not if I don’t have to. The oppos­ite way is the answer. If you want to use a blog as out­reach and com­munity engage­ment then you go where the com­munity is. There are plenty of good reas­ons to be Face­book­phobic, but that’s where the audi­ence is. If I had an out­reach blog then I would have to have a Face­book page for the blog, and AoB Blog does. If you ‘like’ it for a few days you’ll see there’s a con­stant drip drip of botan­ical good­ness into your Face­book stream. The reason AoB Blog does this is that we wanted to put the blog where the audi­ence was, and in a place where they’re already com­ment­ing on stuff.

That’s not enough for most archae­o­b­log­gers. A small audi­ence on your blog is still going to be a small audi­ence on Face­book. I think what Face­book could offer blog­gers is easy net­work­ing to increase the poten­tial audi­ence. A col­lect­ive could set up a Face­book page and choose a few admins. The next thing you add is RSS Graf­fiti. This takes an RSS feed and adds a post to a Face­book page wall for each RSS entry. It’s what we’re using for the Annals of Bot­any page. The clever thing is that RSS Graf­fiti can poll mul­tiple RSS feeds. So mul­tiple blog­gers could auto-post to the same page with RSS Graf­fiti. For any­one who’s post­ing less once a day, the tick­ing over of posts from other blog­gers helps keep the site act­ive so that when your post appears it’s in front of the col­lect­ive audi­ence of all par­ti­cip­at­ing blogs and not just your own. The Face­book wid­get also acts as a way to advert­ise your posts other blogs in the col­lect­ive (wordpress.com users might need a spe­cific RSS feed). And because it’s Face­book you still keep you blog on your own site with your own design, etc. Blog­ger users aren’t com­pelled to move to Word­Press and vice-versa.

It sounds simple but there is a prob­lem. Some blogs you like some you don’t, so who do you include and who do you exclude? Can you exclude people in an inclus­ive way that doesn’t erect a big “Sod off” sign to read­ers? That’s a head­ache that I wouldn’t want, but it does emphas­ise that the answers to social media prob­lems are social.

*Though the inverse is true for Civil War Memory blog and Face­book page, so it’s not a hard and fast rule.