I have been browsing for inspiration. Web 2.0, or participatory media as I prefer to call it today, in itself is inspirational. My new hobby is puppeteering my Second Life avatar. I need to be able to manipulate her movements better, and I would like a more extensive repertoire of “gestures”, but it is great fun. I have vague ideas of the many ways this instrument might be applied to instruction and interactive learning. Part of me wants to let this emerge, intuitively. The other part (the boring left brain, most likely) wants me to find a valid, pedagogical use for it – you know, to prove I haven’t been just mucking around! We all know about necessity and invention and the importance of play, but I like it so much that I can’t help feeling guilty. And I’m not even Catholic!

So, to appease the stupid, logical part of my brain, I will try to list what we have discovered so far about PLEs:

·

The recalcitrant user of Web 1.0 technology may, like Echo in the legend of Narcissus, feel unsure in a context of unfeeling logic. Like Narcissus, technology is self-contained and without empathy for its users. The personality types who thrive in an interactive pedagogical environment (probably those who would score highly on the extrovert/ feeling/ intuitive indicators of the Myer/Briggs test – though I have not tested this. I just have a hunch about it in a feeling/ intuitive sort of way) are uncomfortably estranged by technology. They may resent that it doesn’t care what they think. It is inflexible and will not easily yield to new ways of doing things. It is passively aggressive and it refuses to discuss it. Yes, I think it’s called anthropomorphization. But there goes the stupid left brain compensating with labels for that which it cannot understand.

· Participatory media is different. It welcomes in the unpredictable and the creative. It is inspirational.

I would like to know if these findings relate directly to the learning style of the participator (or student). I suppose I could begin some extensive surveying, but priorities are being pressured by time. Perhaps for now it is enough to know that Web 2.0 engages a new cohort of learners who could not easily relate to predictable “old” technology?

We decided early on that we must bind our research to the technological aspects of PLEs. We know that in any broad sense, one’s personal learning environment consists of non-e things. But we ignore them in order for our research to be focused and manageable. We only look at enabling and enhancing PLEs through engagement with Web 2.0 (yes- still using that term. Maybe we should rename it Harold or Jane?) media. So why can’t we agree on a clear definition for a PLE? It’s got a name, but it doesn’t tell us anything. Is that because we have sliced it up, extracted the technological bits, and thrown the rest away? Do we see the PLE out of its essential perspective?

If I cut up a Yeppoon Pineapple so that only the flesh remains, I have the useful bit, but I lose all perspective on the visual entirety of the fruit. Sometimes that matters and sometimes it does not. But I would not understand certain things about that yellow mush if I could not see it in its own context – its own pinappleness.

Maybe we can’t define PLEs because we are looking at a single segment of it, and wondering why it doesn’t look like a total picture.

So – instead of talking generally about PLEs that we can’t totally visualise, maybe we should acknowledge that our research is only about segments of ideas, not entire concepts. 

Now it makes more sense. Instead of talking about integrating whole PLEs into our HE courses, and creating a nightmare of accountability and assessibility implications, we just aim to slip in little pieces of PLEs (the thin ends of wedges?), into the gaps and maybe where they embellish the existing design?

Maybe this is what Snowdon & Jones http://davidtjones.wordpress.com/ are on about with their  talk of ’safe-fail’ antics. (By George, she’s got it!?)

I don’t need extrinsic motivators, but in this new position (that I’ve been going on about all through the life of this blog), which takes me way out of my depth, it was nice to be able to reach out and touch the lifebuoys. But I can wade through the shallow technical stuff and float through the creative connections. It’s just that there was something nice about synchronised swimming – even if it was just the sense of belonging.

I don’t think I have ever written anything so appalling. You can only extend a metaphor so far, Jocene, before you really sound like a try hard!

I don’t care. I’m wallowing.

(Secret and password protected) Diary of a Web 2.0 Novice – A Subtextual Phenomenon.

Web 2.0 social media tools, such as Twitter, Second Life, Delicious, Flickr, RSS feeds, Weblogs, Webcasts and more, are mutating on a daily basis and have already permeated the daily communication activities of our clients, our students and our loved ones. At (our university) we are currently doing research into encouraging and enabling the use of Web 2.0 technology in the form of personal learning environments (PLEs). Within the Action Research framework, we are using a creative, (and for this study a) blog-based methodology called Subtextual Phenomenology (*Vallack, 2006), to deal with the reflective data, and to thus identify the obstacles faced by recalcitrant users of this new technology. 

In this paper I set out the research design and some sample, autoethnographic-style, reflective data for the project. Surfacing from the thick and candid blog-data are themes about the learning experiences of an academic, middle-aged, Web 2.0 novice, as she struggles to master the social media that will enable her to build her web-based, Personal Learning Environment(PLE). The focus of this paper, however, will be on the reflective component of the Action Research paradigm, and the efficacy of Subtextual Phenomenology as a methodology for processing this (seemingly) random data.

The first part of the paper argues that systematic positivism should give way to more interpretive and comprehensive qualitative data, if the business of tackling new technologies is to be understood. The second part of the paper explains and demonstrates the phenomenological processes that reveal the essential elements of experience for the Web 2.0 novice as she embraces her Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

The general framework for our inquiry into the PLE phenomenon is Action Research. Within the reflective phase of the Action Research, Subtextual Phenomenology is used to critically manage the subjective Weblog data:

Our emergent Action Research has evolved alongside our research questions, to best support and validate the inquiry into PLEs. I demonstrate that the essentially reflective and subjective data can be rigorously processed through Subtextual Phenomenology, to inform the researchers as they confront this Web 2.0 communication phenomenon.

                                                    ……………………………………………………

 SAMPLE DATA ONLY – please do not include in word count:

@http://jocene.edublogs.org/

October 8th, 2008:

Gee you spend a lot of time for nothing in front of a computer screen. I have wasted hours this week trying every password I’ve ever used to get back into this weblog (for some reason I prefer the full name of the thing. The abbreviation sounds obscene.). Anyway, Edublog has been closed for renovations, but, of course, I just thought it was me. When it asked me if I had forgotten my password, I affirmed that this was the case and put in a request for a new one to be sent to my email. Unfortunately, when I set up this blog, I had to use my home email, and to get into that from work required me to send for another password from Bigpond. This line of obscurity is now prominently in my work diary, for there is no way I could remember it, and I am afraid to change it to something else that, clearly, is forgettable. I try    to use the same password, but then some machine trying every password I’ve ever used to get back into this weblog (for some reason I prefer the full name of the demands that I embellish it by adding a lot of B*##y! I style characters. So then, like it not, I have another password to contend with. Another password that will ensure that no-one can break in to see what I am about to publish on my PUBLIC WEBLOG!

I don’t know what all this security is about – it’s just a nuisance. Anyway, I work with a shop load of super-geeks (all gorgeous) who could break into anything I construct (if they really wanted to be bored out of their brains!). 

So the thought for the day is – just because you’ve hit another “invalid username“, doesn’t mean that it’s not because the system isn’t down! (Love all those triple negatives when I’m feeling like the martyr.

Which reminds me – I still haven’t been able to access my car radio since they took out the battery!

 

 

 

 

Philosophers such as Whitehead have argued that life is a process. Nothing stands still – except sometimes in my mind when I recall, not the event, but a memory of it. Like some drag-queen  parody,  a distorted reality, that changes its disguise to suit my fancy. This is my subjective experience.

But sometimes in my dreams I sit gently with the essence of that experience and know it to be a shared and universal phenomenon – a Jungian, collective consciousness. This is the encounter with the eternal .  This is peaceful. Only in our minds can time stand still – only conceptually do we access reality, for its imitations slip daily through our grasp. And it worries us that we can’t pin down this elusive present.  And that makes us sad that we can’t put it in a jar and keep it forever, and watch it die.

In an early blog,  David Jones http://davidtjones.wordpress.com/page/4/ referred to an article by Cronholm and Goldkuhl about strategies for information systems evaluation. They have conveniently created a matrix that reveals six types of strategies. These six types are contrived from research questions related to what to evaluate and how to go about that. I am particularly intrigued with what they call “Goal free” evaluation, which is emergent by nature, and perhaps aligns with what David would call “ateleological” in structure (if that is not a contradiciton in terms).

I am keen to explore the extent to which each of these designs might inform our research into PLEs, and then (as the authors suggest) triangulate the findings for a comprehensive, and perhaps integrated view of PLE potential.

Time to feed the kittens now.

“Be who you want to be.”

Was it that marketing innovation that somehow, subliminally caused me to buy that product?  How clever! How familiar!