http://elgg.ell.aau.dk/ryberg/weblog/21.html

This is my first blog posting - well, at least in this environment. I have had a few other blogs, which never really gained momentum (because I didn't have time to maintain them I guess) - I don't know about this one - but we'll see :-D

Anyway - I am currently working on my PhD dissertation, which is about youth and technology. Here I am especially interested in how learning can be analysed in actual empirical settings in concrete interaction. Often learning theories are ripe with high-level theoretical constructs, which are seldomly easily observable in empirical settings - how can on for instance understand 'legitimate peripheral participation' in practice - how can one analyse and observe it in practice. Here I am working with video-analysis or interaction analysis, where I will try to combine knowledge from activity theory, Communities of Practice, networked learning with methodologies for doing close studies for interaction - for an example Mediated Discourse Analysis.

 The empirical data are from a symposium in Costa Rica where an 8 person group of youngsters worked over a short period of time with a very open ended and complex problem (how to reduce poverty in the world through the use of technology) - here I will do some very detailed analysis of their interaction and the tools/resources they use.

The interest in youth is also connected to a larger project called "Power Users of Technology" ([Click to view link]) and I am currently also on a broader level interested in the Web 2.0 movement as I think there are some underlying thoughts in this, which fit well my own ideas of learning - web 2.0 is very much about participation, networking, aggregation and distribution - I'll get more back to that after I have uploaded some of the resources I have about this - actually I presented some thoughts on this at the DEAN seminar in Dublin just recently - I'll add the presentation later, as I am publishing it as a shareable resource. I think there are some interesting connections between web 2.0 and an empowerment of youth - but I will get more back to that.

So with this outline I hope I will maintain this blog better than the others 

http://elgg.ell.aau.dk/ryberg/weblog/22.html

Well - I guess to me the interest spawned from my empirical investigations during my master thesis - here I looked into the use of IT in upper secondary highschool. What I noticed here was that the youth had a much more varied use and interest in IT than what was really expressed in the classes - they seemed to have much more competence in a variety of uses that were not taking up in class or in the teachings (though this also did happen).

Delving a bit more into the general use of IT among youth it seemed to me that their general competences and skills were not really valued or taken up as a subject of it own; rather it seemed that youth's use of technology is looked at with some suspicion and dislike - "They are becoming isolated and asocial", "computer games are dangerous", "The internet is a dangerous place filled with dangerous people".

It seemed that, rather than looking at some of the amazing skills some kids build up in early ages (often more advanced than most adults) - there is a strong focus on the negative sides of the use (yes - there are isolated youngsters on the internet - but they may not represent the majority - and hey - how about those teens collecting stamps - ghee are they lonely!).

Anyway - that was my personal motivation for doing these studies - I'd really like to shed a light on the competent use of IT that is often shown by young people - thus empowering and legitimising their use of IT. This has urge has only grown stronger through time, as my girlfriend did her thesis on the social networking site Arto.dk [Click to view link] - there youth are creative with descriptions of themselves, they maintain and build up their social networks, they tamper with advanced HTML, manipulate pictures, discuss different topics, build their identities, have fun, communicate with others...and what's in the media...all the negative stuff, which of course is mostly rather isolated events blown up by the media...nobody seems to be asking themselves the question "If this place is really so bad, why would 400.000 youngsters still be using it? - They must be masochists".

But this, I believe, is part of a larger trend, which is slowly being taken up by the politicians as well - micro-management and control of "the uncontrollable and dangerous youth". Firstly, Arto and other chat sites can be mentioned - they should be controlled or shut down. Secondly comes "Happy slapping" an apparently national trend (at least it has happened 10 times in DK) - so why not put a digital watermark in every video or picture taken with a cell-phone - that were some politicians suggestions?! Here, Anders Albrechtslund and I protested in an article that was brought on ComOn [Click to view link]

But the control and management of the "reckless youth" is not confined to the internet - yesterday there was an article about a school who had bought some t-shirts for students to wear, if their clothes are to "revealing" [Click to view link]

Today, there is an article about a school who has forbidden their students to kiss during school-time: [Click to view link]

I actually touched a bit on these issues in an article for the Power Users summit in New York - december 2004 as some have argued that youth pastime is increasingly being dominated by adult control and youth are confined within the four walls of the home generating a "sleeping room culture" - this might also be why the see the internet as THEIR PLACE outside the control of parents (see the article).

I fear, however, that this is something, which will become a real policy issue here in DK - at least I heard it has been for a while in the UK...and in the US I guess it is much the same (there MySpace suffers from the same media critique as in DK). I think there is a need to counter this trend - which is also why I plan to write an article on the subject with Anders Albrechtslund and Malene Larsen for the "rhetoric in society" conference - I think there is a need to empower and legitimise youth activities, rather than limiting and controlling them - as Homer Simpson puts it:

So, like us, let your children run wild and free, for as the Bible tells us, "Let your children run wild and free."

Anyway - the article from NY is attached to this posting:Initial queries into the notion of Power Users of Technology 

http://elgg.ell.aau.dk/ryberg/weblog/24.html

The 17th of May there will be a nation-wide demonstration in Denmark - or at least in the 5 biggest cities. You can read more about the demonstration here:

[Click to view link]

Amongst other things the protest is against cut-back in the Governmental Support for students (SU). One of their suggestions is a lower monthly rate and then a bonus after the student passes an exam. To me as a teacher/lecturer this means that if I flunk a student, I am not only affecting their studies but also their economical situation - I am basically in charge of whether the student will receive a "bonus check" or not. I really find that problematic and I hope others will join the protest as well.

http://elgg.ell.aau.dk/ryberg/weblog/27.html

Writing today on a draft for an abstract The internet has been upgraded to 2.0! Have our theories and practices followed? Investigating the Web 2.0 trend from a learning theoretical perspective, I got a bit carried away and it began to form a draft for an article. I was reflecting a bit on potentials of Web 2.0 on learning theory and how it might bring our theories further. I began thinking about some of the fundamentals of Web 2.0 - 'sharing', 'collaborating' and the term 'social software'. I will get back to these reflections a bit later.

Though, the term and movement around Web 2.0 is both hyped and buzzed, I think the Web 2.0 movement show some emerging patterns or trends with similarities to current developments of socio-cultural learning theories - and this, I think, is quite interesting, though I must reserve this for a later posting!

First, however, it is worth mentioning that there are very serious dark sides of the Web 2.0, both in terms of surveillance and privacy infringements, but also related to commercial interests. There are plenty of reasons why Yahoo, Microsoft and Google host numerous Web 2.0 services free of charge and why Rupert Murdoch bought one the largest social networking sites MySpace.com. Here I would especially refer to a recent blog posting by Ben Werdmuller: [Click to view link]

But also PhD student Michael Zimmer has posted quite a lot on his blog on these issues: [Click to view link]

This critique certainly highlights the need for education and non-profit institutions to take up these issues as to create a counter movement based on other principles.

Anyway, when I started thinking about the web 2.0 - initially under a heading of 'From directories and taxonomies to tag-clouds and folksonomies' I began to think a bit about Flickr, Furl, elgg and other tag-driven services - 

In such services the ascription of 'the meaning’ of a picture and the information architecture of the entire site is not decided or defined by a ‘center’ or authority, but by the various users, through tagging. In a way activity of tagging is a process of, what I will coin intersubject-diversification or fragsensus, thus spinning a pun on intersubjectivity/consensus and diversity/fragmentation. Tagging activity does crystallise in both an enormous fragmentation, but at the same time a sort of 'consensus' emanating through tag-clouds and clustering of tags. In a sense order emerges out of chaos and stucture out of the unstructured. But still the unstructured and chaotic remain present at all  time - there's certainly still a strong sense of fragmentation and diversity visible.

However, 'fragsensus' is not only something connected to tagging. When beginning to think of Wikis, I thought of what they are often associated with - namely 'Collaborative writing'...In what sense do Wikis represent  'Collaborative'. Within the research field of 'Computer Supported Collaborative Learning' the term collaboration has a very special meaning e.g. take a citation from CSCL litterature:

"When referring to collaboration, about what is one actually speaking? To put it simply, in the public conversation the term 'collaboration' appears to refer to any activities that a pair of individuals, or a group of people perform together. Among researchers, however, including those in academic fields, the term 'collaboration' is understood rather differently. Within learning sciences, common to the different definitions of collaboration is that they stress the idea of co construction of knowledge and mutual engagement of participants. In this sense, collaboration can be considered as a special form of interaction."  (Lipponen, 2006)

When reading through citations from CSCL litteraure it seems evident that collaboration is defined in terms of: Joint accomplishment, mutual engagement, coordinated effort, inderdependence, solving problems together – collaboration is even seen as a special form of interaction. But in which ways are Wikis 'collaborative' in the CSCL-way of understanding the term? I can go to an open Wiki, add some changes, disappear and never come back – but my addition might still be there, though others will never know who actually made the addition? Creation and maintenance of a Wiki-page might not actually encompass any form of coordination between the different editors, they might not even know, who the others are (apart from “Guest” made this revision) and there might not be any sort of shared problem or focus.

If we compared this to building a house it could be the same as working without a pre-determined blueprint and just some workers popping by independently of each other, with different types of material, adding a brick, removing a girder etc. and suddenly there would be a house of a reasonable quality. This is not to suggest that this reflect the general way of wiki-writing - but I will suggest that the term 'collaboration' understood as within CSCL might not always fit tools such as Wikis - maybe 'fragsensus' or a term composed of distribution and collaboration, such as 'Distriboration' or 'Collaboramentation' as composed of Collaboration and fragmentation would fit better the process?

Also - in which sense can we talk about ‘collaboration’ and ‘sharing’ if I for instance publish an aggregation of blog-postings, pictures, shared links and other micro-content on a page - or create an RSS-feed that summarises and pull together these pieces of content. In a sense it is a ‘collaborative’ tapestry, as people will keep adding to it (potentially or most likely not knowing they are), but is it collaborative in the CSCL-definition?

Even the terms of 'social' in social software and social relations become obscured. To what degree are people related when they link to other’s blogs or comment on a blog posting; how are people related to those whose blogs or links they subscribe to? Even though we are talking about social software, the notions of ‘social’ and ‘social relations’ do seem to take on other guises that do not seem to fit, for instance, the notion of “social learning” expressed in the CSCL-citations and general literature on learning theory. Here social learning is often taken to be collaboration or moments of learning in which people are strongly linked together and working on (or with) a shared problem.

The Web 2.0 and the sort of loose ties that can exist between people are very interesting. And the notions of aggregation and distribution - or maybe words such as patchworking and tapestry would be better: thus signifying a process where people from the myriads of resources weave their 'tapestry' of news, pictures, podcasts, interesting links and blogpostings or collectively add to the patchwork by sewing together and presenting patches produced by others. I think there are some interesting links to the notion of 'networked individualism' here - in a sense the above mentioned are not quite social or collaborative in the sort of CSCL-definition; but certainly they are not individul either - there is a strange interweaving between individuality and something profoundly relational...an interweaving I cannot quite graps with words or concepts yet and as thus will remain 'work in progress'.

I don't know if the terms or concepts I have suggested are very apt descriptors, but I think web 2.0, wikis and social software in general prompt us to rethink concepts such as collaboration, social and social relations. Not that these terms in any way are becoming obsolete (far from) but maybe there are better ways of describing them? Terms that might open our eyes to other relations between people and broaden the scope of what we think of as learning.