Reflections on implications of new technologies at work

When I came back from maternity leave I asked if I could work at home at least one day a week – not with my daughter of course, but to save on travel time and childcare time – I could save 36 miles petrol money and 2 hours childcare.

I was refused this offer, despite there being plenty of technological tools to help me do this. We have a remote desktop system that lets you log into your desktop from anywhere and access all the network drives, applications etc etc.

I would say 95% of communication at work takes place by email even when I’m there, so this could still be handled, and we also have an online classroom tool that can be used for meetings if a real time exchange was needed – in fact, we have the phone too.

So unfortunately technologies haven’t advantaged me in terms of flexible working. However, when I have needed to be at home I have been able to work where possible – so my employer is gaining from these technologies being in place but I am not!

Aside from that, the use of email has significantly changed the way we work. Pretty much all communicaiton is by email internally and all communication externally until we get to the critcal point of chasing someone for work that you’ve already emailed a few times.  Email also allows you to record conversations which verbal conversations don’t allow, which is important when agreeing action points or discussions. Unfortunately this is very necessary.

I wouldn’t say that any web 2.0 tools have been used in the way I work yet.

Week 18 Activity 6d Reflecting on Twitter

1. What do you make of the personal messages that appear in a Twitter stream – ones that do not appear to be related to work, but reveal sometimes seemingly banal or trivial matters, such as what a user had for lunch or where they are going for a holiday?

Interestingly I’ve just decided to clear out all the people I’m following who aren’t either elearning or MAODE folk so I can focus on using twitter for educational purposes. When reading Engstrom’s blog it struck me why I hate facebook – you have to see all the rubbish about what games/tests people have done and what groups their in, which hides the important stuff (for me), the object being keeping in touch with people. Twitter, on the other hand, should help to go to someway to separate the wheat from the chafe, but what do we do about banal matters. I don’t think it matters actually, as the twits are so short you can skim over those ones but you don’t want to get inundated with them either. Tweetdeck is a free downloadable desktop tool that lets you send a tweet and or a facebook micro blog from one place. You can opt to where to post it, so some things I want in both places, some just to twitter and some to facebook. Not sure yet, whether I’ve cracked it we’ll see.

2.    In what ways could Twitter be used for the kind of research you have been doing this week to find information on the three key issues?

No idea. I guess it’ll be like Delicious, it depends on what people choose to write as to whether you can find the information. I just typed in Twitter, Education in the search function in twitter and did find some useful posts actually so there is scope.

3.    Do you think Twitter does anything different from other common forms of online communication, such as email, forums and instant messaging?

What it does is allow you to read posts made by people you wouldn’t normally be in touch with by email, forum of IM – you need to know these people already for that kind of communication. Does the key comes in not only reading someone’s tweets, but communicating with them too in order to build up a network and a bank of valuable social objects.

Has using twitter and facebook to keep up with people, eg my best friend who lives across town, stopped me from having proper heart to hearts with people. She’ll have no idea of some of the stresses I’ve been under this week or what’s really going on as in 140 characters I can’t convey it all and also don’t want the world to know. We’ll probably meet up this weekend, but because of the kids, we’ll not get round to talking about it so I won’t get my friend-support when I need it (f2f!). As many people have said here and in their blogs, it’s nice to just talk sometimes and I’m pretty sure I’m losing the skill of conversation as I do so much by typing now.

Openness in blogging

In my forum posting for Week 17 A 6 I wrote some stuff I didn’t want to repeat in my blog. It was sensitive stuff, and the people I’m talking about would know who they are. I didn’t want this going public in my blog.

Is this one of the ways forums have an advantage over blogs…

Ramblings about me and Online Tutorials

On Sunday I experienced my first student led (lead, I never know) online tutorial session. There were 6 of us in the session. a few days before I realised that I didn’t think Lesley would be at the session and to save time in the hour we needed to get over the discussion over what we would discuss so we could save time in the session so I posted up some suggestions, bringing in suggestions from others about blogging. I took Week 12 activities and made some questions to help us learn from each others experiences and relate these to the articles we read rather than just trying to get us all to go over the questions we’d already answered. My motivation for this session was to learn from others experiences.

No one else made any suggestions and every seemed happy with mine. Somehow I ended up starting the session off. Now, since I’ve had time to reflect, I think this is very interesting. Did I wade in and take over or did this happen naturally? I know that in face to face tutorials I tend to take the lead and people look at me for guidance as I’m the REALLY proactive one. I can see how this would happen in face to face, because I’m the one who talks to everyone, gets everyone comfortable, tends to be the most active with the presenter etc etc. So how did this transfer to the online environment.

In the forums I’m really active and people can see that. On my blog I’m really active and as noted, I’m getting lots of traffic on my blog now and as Simon says, it is probably due to my levels of activity on the forum that I’ve attracted attention from the tutor group here.

So as in face to face sessions, when one is seen to be active, other student’s rely on you to take the lead in other activities too. (note for readers, when I say rely I don’t mean this in a negative way I just can’t think of a better word to describe it).

As a result of my ending up usually taking the lead on group activities f2f, I had created a self image that I must be bossy and people just do what I say (as always jumping to the negative conclusion). However, i hope, and don’t think my bossy side has been conveyed in the online forum and if it has, I wonder how? It’s not like I can interrupt, show that I’m not listening, give visual clues as to my desire to lead, etc etc.

So does that mean my selfimage is all wrong, it’s not that I’m bossy it’s just that I’m perceived as a useful co-student and therefore if I take the lead, people know they’ll be getting something useful out of it???? Or is it that people know, don’t worry, Emma will do it, but I would say that in H800 we’ve not had enough group/student lead activities yet for people to have that assumption about me….I could hypothesize all day.

At the end of the session discussion was heading towards another similar discussion next week so I could see no one was taking the lead in wanting to actually organise it and I could see that if someone didn’t organise it, it wouldn’t happen so I asked for someone to take on the mantle. Pat offered to do this.

However, I now see in the forum that Pat’s understanding of what I was asking for was different to mine as it looks as though he wanted to set up a wiki for discussion rather than an elluminate for a discussion. The question is now, do I try and organise a student lead session or do I just sit back. If I sit back then no-one, including me, will benefit from the opportunity to have discussion like we did the other day.  But, it really needs someone to design good discussion items for it to be effective. Do I now, already have a good track record at this, should I just go for it!

I’d do it if asked, but after doing the last one I 1) want to give someone else a chance and 2) don’t want to appear bossy.

Week 3 Elluminate Session & Bayne

Week 3 – Elluminate Session

1.      What were your experiences and feelings during the session?

As the tutorial only had 5 people it was a nice number of people to manage us all being able to say something and to keep up with the discussion. We did not use any formal “hands up” protocol and just spoke when we were ready. Somehow this worked despite us not being able to see each other.

I think the use of Elluminate for a discussion encouraged active listening. In face to face discussions most people are busy thinking about what they want to say and when they can say it rather than really listening to the person who is talking. I found last night that we were all listening to each other really closely and the following speaker was able to link to what previous speakers had said rather than just speaking their own mind.

The fact that no-one really understood the articles or the questions about them helped in that you didn’t have anyone ready with a predetermined answer who wanted to get their point across. The conversation developed organically from Lesley’s starting point and to Kathy’s first input.

I was positively surprised that we all engaged happily with the audio function and used it; there is something about listening to and concentrating on one person that I found really valuable.

Sometimes we were text chatting at the same time. The benefits of this were that – you could comment on what people were saying while they were talking or if you thought of something you could write it down in case your forgot it. Lesley said she prefers synchronous conversations by text and that it means she can scroll back up and re-read things as she needs. However, I would say that the disadvantage of the texting alongside someone speaking is that while you’re typing/reading you’re not really listening to the speaker. I would also say that you could end up with lots of people typing the same thing at the same time rather than letting one person speak/type one response, and then forming your response on the basis of that first response and so on.

I think the combination of both was good. The text gives those who were nervous of speaking or without a microphone chance to contribute.

One of the Simon’s, at the end, said how by the end he was much more comfortable at hitting the microphone key than he was at the start.

Lesley also said that she doesn’t like to impose any protocols on a group and likes to see it develop naturally. Does this mean that as a group we should set our own protocols? I wonder what everyone else thinks. The discussion last night flowed really smoothly, we even ran out of time, but we did not have a nominated or self-selected chair to keep things moving and keep us to the point, we did not have a speaking order until towards the end when we did start to raise hands to dictate the order of speaking. In f2f discussions body language tends to dictate the natural leaders unless a tutor delegates.

 

In one of her forum postings Lesley said that Lyceum was less democratic than Elluminate. I have no idea what this means, however by having no leader in yesterday’s discussion it did feel very democratic. We moved forward at a nice pace, we were able to gauge ourselves when to move on but I still think there is a role for a chair just to ensure we keep to the time limits and reach the desired outcomes.

I did notice that the person’s name appeared just above my microphone button when they were speaking so this is a good way of knowing who is speaking, the name goes when they switch their microphone off so you know they’ve finished as you don’t necessarily have the visual clues of someone pausing v. Someone finishing.

 

2.      What did you learn about the Bayne chapter itself?

That everyone was confused by the high level of academic writing in the article and no one was sure how it fitted into e-learning or our roles. It was a very abstract article, with little way of understanding how the cyber identity issue was relevant. However, I was by the end of the discussion able to see how I had changed my cyber identity over the years and how I do have different identities in different forums. Interestingly I didn’t think I was different when we began the discussion. I realised that I used to use a nickname, e.g. for my eBay screen name, but when I started using formal social networking and learning forums I have since signed up to everything as Emma Nugent. After all that’s who I am.

However, in the online diet forums I partake in, I am Livia’smum and not Emma Nugent, this must say something about my need to be professional/formal in some contexts, and informal and “not me” in others. I am labelling myself by my associations with others/priorities in life and not by who I am. But then this has nothing to do with cyber space – I always think it’s strange that when we introduce ourselves and say a bit about ourselves it’s always what we do for a living that comes first, generally, and not WHO we really are.

 

Were some parts of the session more useful than others?

The discussion about cyber identity really helped me to realise how it applies to me over the years.

3.      Can you come to any views about the pros and cons of using Elluminate for this task?

Pros – able to discuss it with others, find out how others think, get support, feel less isolated, help develop understanding through participation, will stimulate further discussion in the forums, whiteboards helped focus our attention and give us a visual stimulus to concentrate on, verbal and text chatting added to the participation, making you feel part of a community more than the forums, breaking down another barrier of distance.

Cons – not having everyone there, now the discussions in the forums are going to move forward at different paces and the session on Sunday will probably be quite different to the one last night. Time limited.

Compared to online forums – I think that these live sessions will add value to the forums, by having “met” people in real-time it breaks down the barriers and may make conversation in the forums more lucid. Hmmm, on our courses we are saying that there is no need for the f2f induction day for the DL MBA students – what does it really add. Perhaps I’m wrong at work, perhaps it does add a lot, if it gets the students more comfortable and confident at communicating online

6. How do you use these tools in your context?

We are already using a similar tool and my experiences as a student using Elluminate on this course certainly feed into me developing more types of sessions with our tool. We’ve only had our tool a year, and only used it for intro and revision sessions, I would not say that it’s been used for learning yet.