Enda P Guinan

Wordle

Originally uploaded by Enda P

Wordle allows you to create a very gorgeous word cloud from pasted text, blogs, feeds or del.ici.ous users’ stuff.

To hail Wordle, and to mark the submission of the H809 ECA, I fed my 4,000 word opus (minus bibliography) into Wordle and this very groovy cloud came out.

Nice (if unsurprising) to see that ’students’, ‘technology’ and ‘learning’ were the most prominent words.

Now, what’s next….?

I am the future! Hooray!

The final push is on to get my research proposal which is my final assignment for H809 in on Friday. But I’m looking for opinions on the ethics bit.

My proposal aims to see what can be learned from examining how students with dyslexia who have assistive technology engage with online learning material.

I’m not so much interested in accessibility as I am in looking closely at how the students work with their technology and whatever else is happening in their learning contexts. I think the findings could be extremely useful in feeding back to course designers and assessors. But I’m particularly interested in this data helping to create a community of practice involving faculty, disability services, computer services, learning technologists and of course the students themselves.

I propose to examine how they work in Moodle as that environment gives us access to all sorts of data from the logs (What did they do? How long did they spend? How much clicking around happened? etc). This is to be followed up with focus groups, semi-structured interviews and student audiologs/blogs/diaries/whatever.

My dilemma is should I tell the students from the outset, or should I let them be and inform them in retrospect? Or a combination?

If I tell them at the outset, I will comply comfortably with standard ethical considerations and we can make sure that they understand what we are trying to learn about them. BUT there is a risk that the students will become self-conscious and tell us what they think we want to hear.

If I tell them afterwards, they will have behaved as normal, but there are two drawbacks:

a) it’s ethically dubious, but not unknown to happen,

b) the students may not give me good quality data. I’m interested in all sorts of things that might be happening in the learning context whatever it may be - are they listening to house music? Are they chatting by IM with friends? Are they zipping back and forth between screens? Are they using traditional learning materials? Are they using mindmaps to represent their notes? All of these things may not be considered important by the learner and they may not record (or even remember) that they engaged with the online content in these rich ways.

Or should I let them do their thing unhindred for a while at the beginning and then midway invite them to actively join the study? So, we could monitor the logs for a few weeks and then identify certain individuals to keep learning logs?

I’m leaning towards option 1, but am interested in fresh perspectives!

Increasingly, I’m finding it difficult to say what it is I do*. Just this weekend I was at a party and watched another human being’s eyes glaze over completely as I attempted to explain my post in the university. Sometimes people ask me what I lecture in and I correct them and explain that I don’t lecture. Maybe I should just say ‘technology’ and be done with it!

Either way it’s probably time to change the subject.

* For the record, I’m Assistive Technology Advisor with a communications and research brief. It’s FAR more fun than that sounds though! (I swear… Hey, come back…)

I am a laryngectomee and cannot speak except with a Servox electronic gizmo. Do you know of any software that will instantaneously convert my keystrokes to spoken word with both reasonable volume and natural tone? Everything I read about text-to-speech seems to be about mobile phone SMS or dyslexia, and local computer stores are useless.
Steve Rowlands 

Necessity is the mother of invention. People do find amazing things to do with technology.

Yesterday, we hosted a one-day seminar for ACTON, the network for Assistive Technology Officers in the Irish HEIs. The group had been quite dormant for over a year and a couple of months ago, our parent group, DAWN (Disability Officers Network), sought to re-energise us and it seems to be working!

We had a guest speaker, Neil Maguire from deafhear.ie, who spoke about some existing and emerging technologies for students with hearing disabilities. I find this area hugely technical and confusing, so it was great to have someone explain things very simply. He also brought a couple of bags of equipment to show us. It’s not at all surprising that many radio aids/listening devices are becoming very aesthetically pleasing and less like clunky ‘medical’-looking things.

My colleagues Orla Hanratty and Claire McAvinia (Teaching & Learning, NUIM) gave a fascinating talk illustrating some theories of teaching. I was insistent on this piece as I feel AT staff often come from quite diverse background and don’t have formal teaching qualifications even though we work so much with students.

My other agenda though is to encourage us to think of our roles in the wider teaching and learning context. There is a huge overlap between assistive technology and educational technology, and couple that with the ever-increasing use of elearning (when can we drop the ‘e’ - it’s all just learning, isn’t it?), AT officers have a potentially great role in both promoting technology in learning as well as ensuring good practice in accessibility are met.

Outside of that, the day was a good opportunity to meet (some for the first time) our counterparts across the country. There have been a lot of new appointments, so it’s important to establish rapport and support with our newbies as well as see if we can pick their fresh brains for ideas!

The next event will be hosted in University of Limerick in November.

If someone searches for you on the Web and comes up empty-handed, do you exist?

Mary Brandel, Computerworld.com

So, ethnography seems to be having somewhat of an identity crisis partially inspired by the massive migration online and the various affordances of technological data-collection techniques. Plus ça change perhaps, as Ira reminds us of the lack of consistency of ‘traditional’ ethnography (cf the oddly different “Slim’s Table” vs. “There Are No Children Here” studies from 1991/2).

So, some cast doubt on the validity of online ethnography because, well, anyone can be or say anything online can’t they? But could this not be part of identity - a distributed identity no less valid than that presented face-to-face or through techniques using Relational Frame Theory (whatever that is)?

Image: Untitled by ArielP

I came to this paper not knowing anything about ethnography, and, while Hammersley writes clearly and gives a useful overview of the area, I get the impression that it’s one of those ‘everything-you-know-is-wrong’ topics!

We are reading this with a view to exploring the notion of ‘virtual ethnography’, which appears to be the poor sister of ‘real’ ethnography, but Hammersley’s paper shows that much current debate on ethnography is centred on working out just what ethnography is. And this reflection suggests that a redefinition taking into account the blurring boundaries between online and offline activity.

Hammersley rounds up some of the debates within and about ethnography and helpfully offers a definition that is broad enough to be representative while being succinct enough for newbies to understand:

[It is] a form of social and educational research that emphasises the importance of studying at first hand what people do and say in certain contexts. (p4).

It usually involves ‘fairly lengthy contact, through participant observation in relevant settings, and/or through relatively open-ended interviews designed to understand people’s perspectives’. Thus far, I see no great issue with applying this to participants engaged in online activities, although ‘fairly lengthy’ is a problematic term (I note that there has been a shift towards shorter studies given the changing cultures in universities).

I digress (one of the affordances of a blog is the way it allows one to think out loud. I’m writing this not as a means of sharing so much as a way of constructing my own knowledge. Sorry.  ) We H809 students have our instructions!

13.5: Ethnographic understandings of context

Hammersley describes the tension between observations made at a micro level which are held up to represent a big picture. There is this ‘holistic’ location of the thing being studied but perhaps the thing should be studies in greater detail but at a more local level (micro-ethnography). 

We then have the difficulty of determining whether context is ‘discovered or constructed’. It’s at this stage that I began to remember the discussions of deconstruction and post-modernism from my undergrad years and I also recalled the Sokal Affair. Take this point of view: ‘any attempt by an analyst to place actors and their activities in a different ‘external’, context can only be an imposition, a matter of analytic act, perhaps even an act of symbolic violence‘ [my italics]. Hammersley doesn’t endorse this view, but he does say there is a ‘grain of truth’ in it. My fellow H809 student, John Kuti, sums things up far more succinctly than I do.

13.6: Virtual context

Hammersley points out that in traditional ethnography, great emphasis is placed on ‘the researcher’s participation in, and first-hand observation of, the culture being investigated’. Internet ethnography, however, involves no face-to-face communication, collecting the data online instead. I’m not quite sure again why this is problematic, as I don’t see why physical presence is so vital. With the increasing ubiquity of powerful audio/visual communications technology, surely there is nothing inherent to f2f that wouldin itself devalue online research?*

* As a total newbie to ethnography, I’m aware that I could be in dangerous territory here. Please Prof. Ethnography, don’t hurt me!

Another difficulty of online ethnography for traditionalists is the problem of not knowing what online contributors say ‘beyond what they tell us’ [his italics]. But, as he points out, this is something of a straw man as most online interaction ‘operates in an orderly fashion’ and that ‘participants obviously display enough about themselves through their contributions to be able to understand one another’.

When I think of the amount of data that is freely-available about me online, the relationships that exist only online and the traceable interplay between my profession and recreation, I’d imagine a face-to-face interview would be redundant!

Not an Open University or disability-related post, but a congratulations to students on the Media Studies course at NUI Maynooth who bagged first prize in the DARE2BDRINKAWARE film competition for 3rd level students aged over 18. The competition aimed “to creatively explore the relationship between Irish culture and drinking through considering the values, attitudes and behaviours that young adults have in relation to alcohol.”

And didn’t they do well?

A fellow student sent me this clip on youtube this morning. It shows a person with cerebral palsy explaining how she uses Second Life as a way of socialising. In the clip. She goes to a nightclub in SL called Wheelies and meets Simon, the man who started the club.

At the moment in H809, we are looking at the developing research on Second Life. As fledgling researchers, we are to look critically at the material published. Is it from a peer-reviewed publication? Is it adding anything new? What methodologies are being used? What are the theoretical frameworks? And so on.

Much of the little I’ve found so far comes from Computer Science or other technical fields, but a trend is emerging for papers concerning libraries in Second Life. Quite a few libraries have been ‘built’ there and looking at the clip above, it’s not hard to see why. Cheap, ubiquitous technology is facilitating access to resources previously restricted by geography and time.

In Ireland, we have seen a 50% increase in the number of students with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia attending university. Many of these learners are tech savvy and quickly take to the tools that we are embedding in the university environment. In fact, at NUIM we expect not to have much dealings with students with milder forms of dyslexia in the future as, through technology and good practice, the environment becomes less hostile.

So, great work has been done to get this far. Persuasion, legislation, reason (and some manipulation and cajoling!) have been used to get educational institutions to take accessibility seriously and to take teaching and learning seriously. The traditional chalk ‘n talk model has its dogged adherents. Maybe they could be persuaded to spend an hour in Wheelies to talk about that?

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day. Head over to Diary of a Goldfish for a round up of posts to mark the day.