More Wesch videos…

See http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/07/youtube-culture.html

Week 17 Activity 3

We’re experimenting with a group blog and wiki for this activity so I’m going to come back to my personal blog post later. However, in the meantime I’ll use this as a sandpit to prepare my thoughts.

1. Do you think these issues are representative of the broader picture of technology adoption in universities?

Nobel – yes, at WBS elearning is driven by administrators who are elearning “experts”, administrators however are reluctant due to fears of increase work. At WBS we do not dictate that something should be done as UCLA did; this approach would not have successful results – yes there would be X, Y and Z, but it wouldn’t be effective if it doesn’t have buy in from all stakeholders.

Wesch – students learn what they do, not sitting in a lecture theatre. Very true in terms of the reasons why we’re adopting technology, but fears that people think it’s being adopted for technology reasons not that technology is a solution to a problem. Learning should be relevant to life – so essays should be practical, books need to be opened – elearning can help distance learners and campus learners achieve this. Students want to more things that the time in a day allows so then end up doing more things at once – but how well are they doing these things. Eg if 3 hours in lecture theatres and 3 hours studying, they won’t just be doing that. Students care about world issues – and want to solve them.  ( an aside, I watched this again. The first time I watched it I watched is carefully, in Week 17A1 I didn’t watch it so closely) Now, given the questions we’ve been asked to reflect on I watched it again and it really helped me pull out the key issues. Perhaps video isn’t the best tool for me, I don’t focus well enough on the content whereas with text I re and reread until I’ve understood a point, most of the time, video I  behaved quickly, the same as I do with most technologies, and this is reflected in what I learned/remembered from it)

Hara and Kling – the issues of frustrations with elearning – yes, these issues resonated very loudly with my experience as a student on the MAODE and in supporting my WBS students.

2. What issues would you personally identify as problems associated with the use of digital and networked technologies in education (either in your practice or more generally)?

• People who create the technologies not fully understand user needs and not adapting the technology when problems are found. They don’t understand the new problems the technology has created.
• Academic time – to create worthwhile resources to reduce the lectures/printed notes.
• Money – finding time and money to meet all students needs
• Time – different people working at different paces; you can only learn from those concurrent with you or if you have time to back track.
• Finding the technology that works for you – I tried 4 blogs before sticking with WordPress
• Distractions – last night I spent an hour on Facebook and social forums before starting studying.
• Administrators not wanting additional work created by new technologies
• The risks of relying on technology, the internet connections etc etc.
• Bandwidth issues

Weeks 13 and 14 – Activity 1a – A vision of students today – WESCH video

His use of new technologies is an excellent example of how technologies can be used to support learning and teaching.

1. Is the message being presented in this visual way any different from the primarily text-based presentation of findings used so far this week?
2. How important is the medium and the technologies themselves in terms of conveying messages about this research area?
3. What are the implications for your own practice?

There is something about the music and the use of students writing messages to the viewer that makes you think/watch it really seriously. It’s a very clever way of telling us the results of a survey into student behaviours. I think the use of straight faced students in a lecture theatre, which at the start is dubbed to be a very outdated medium of “instruction”. I liked the lines, “It students learn what they do, what are they learning sitting here?”

The message is the same, but presented differently and without all the researcher’s descriptions of context, methodology, results analysis and discussion of what this means. It simply tells us the stats of student behaviour and they’re prioritise in life, not being spending time on just their study, and how if they were to fit in everything they wanted to do, they need more hours than there are in the day (don’t we all!).

The medium (ie video) is good at showing us the statistical results but not the implications of these stats or why they matter.

Implications to my own practice – The statement I quoted abovge, about students learning what they do struck a poignant chord for me and I think it’s important that the MBA is designed to really enable students to relate what we teach them to their work, to enhance their learning, and really our assessment methods (mostly exam) are really outdated for measuring success.

Week 5 Activity 6 – The spread of social networks (wesch)

We then watched a presentation made by Wesch to the “library of congress” about web 2.0 and he talks about what happened with the “is the machine us/ing us” video we watched earlier.

He states that because of all the web 2.0 tools such as You Tube, Delicious, Digg it, etc, the viral spread of the word to watch his video was exponential.

He highlights the issues of
web 2.0 building community – people emulating each other and sharing experiences
People wanting to share something with others – not caring what they think – being oneself
A celebration of a new form of empowerment, a new form of community and types of community not seen before, global connections, transcending space and time.

About the Machine video he says
I started with text on paper and thinking about what it meant to move to digital text and what that move really means
what I was trying to get at was when you unpack the impacts of the – digital text and you think about the separation of form and content blogs, Wiki’s, tagging; all of these things leads to a necessity to really think what the web is all about.
it is actually about linking people and it’s about linking people in ways that we’ve never been linked before

User control (link to McLuhan perhaps)
This is like user generated filtering where the users can get together and they can they can give it the thumbs up if they like it.
is user-generated organisation eg Delicious and Digg It
user-generated distribution eg RSS
user-generated commentary eg blogging

really interesting integrated mediascape that we now live in. And at the centre of this mediascape is us.

Basically he was saying that through the web 2.0 tools of organisation, distribution and commentary, people (us) are controlling the sharing of knowledge around the networked world.

What Wesch was intending to do when he made the video, was not to see what people learned from the video, but to see what social action took place after it was published on You Tube.

You can watch Wesch’s presentation here on You Tube.

Week 5 Activity 5 – Comparing Video and Text for the same message

Now that you have read O’Reilly’s article explaining Web 2.0 and viewed Wesch’s video, we would like you to compare your reactions to these two different ‘texts’ – the written text and the video text – and how the two different media forms affect the way you as the audience receive the messages encoded in them.
How do you think what you have learned is affected by the form of media in which the ideas are represented?
I think what I have learned is significantly effected by how the ideas are represented. For me, reading the printed text was harder than watching the video. This reflects what Saloman found when he did research with children, in the watching a video is less challenging. But he did also state that you don’t use the brain as much as you would with the printed word so perhaps you don’t learn as much or as deeply.
I liked how Wesch used the medium he was telling us about to represent the knowledge, it does seem a bit conflictual to use print to talk about non-print concepts as O’Reilly’s article did.

However, because I read O’Reilly’s article first, you could say that Wesch’s video was being watching with the knowledge from O’Reilly already acquired and that the video was simply reinforcing or helping me to conceptualise the information in O’Reilly. It’s evident from our discussions that Saloman is correct that in what ever media you are practised in interpreting, you will learn the most from (your capacity to interpret) and for me, I know that I have become lazy at reading and do it rarely and the TV and internet take my focus most of the time when I’m not being a mum and housewife! I need things to be short and to the point.

What elements of the video are not present in the written text? The elements in the written text that were in the video including being able to move the text around and edit the text to really reinforce the message to people who are used to viewing and using computer based word processers. Using the HTML background for some of the text narration was useful as it helped you understand what HTML was. Whereas O’Reilly’s article assumed a lot of prior technical knowledge of computer technology which you had to try and comprehend yourself or through other research/ discussions as Frauke did with her husband for Activity 3.
The video not only narrated a message, but showed you what each statement meant too.

Are there aspects of the written text not available in the video? What are they?

The aspects from the written text that were missing in the video were the detail about –
· the comparisons between old web and web 2.0;
· the concept of web 2.0 being about companies with Web 2.0 characteristics;
· the concept of being a service provider and not just a “web site”;
· The strategy a company must adopt to be considered Web 2.0.

Kathy Doncastor writes: -

the video gave an experience of Web 2.0 technologies, while the O’Reilly article discussed them, ie the first *was* the message, was an exemplar of Web 2.0 technologies, and the second was *about* the message of what Web 2.0 is.

I wrote:

Me too, I have reflected on how I wonder if the message would have been different if I had not read O’Reilly first, and just watching the video and how if I’d not seen the video with the sound first, how different I would have really felt about it without the sound. Your point about how O’Reilly gives us the message and Wesch gives us the about is, you could say, the Acquisition metaphor in practice. O’Reilly – the AM and Wesch – developing our understanding of what we have acquired – the conceptualisation metaphor perhaps

. Kathy Doncastor writes

in contrast, the article used text to build a linear argument through the flow and sequentiality of one thing following another that text’s linearity allows. It backgounded text itself and foregrounded *content*.

I wrote:

I thought the video was quite linear and sequential as well. It painted a very interesting picture and linked each narration well giving the viewed a good understanding of the message by the end. But you’re right in that the print gave us more context and background.

Doncaster, K. (2009) H800 les6 09 Week 5 9 March 2009 12.94

Week 5 Activity 4 – Video about web 2.0

This activity was to watch a animation/video explaining what WEb 2.0 is. The idea being to compare in the next activity our responses to the written word from Activity 3 (O’Reilly’s article on web 2) and the video communication later in Activity 6.

The video is on You Tube here. It’s by Michael Wesch, who works at Kansas State University heading up a group which is dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.

It’s interesting to see in the forums that there is a variety of responses to the video. Interestingly I think I was the only one who preferred the video with the sound on. It was just background music, no narration, but for me it helped me to focus my senses on the video. When I turned the music off I found I couldn’t concentrate as easily – 1. because I’d already watched it so maybe if I was watching it for the first time I’d have felt differently and 2. there was back ground noise around me so that distracted my audio senses.

The discussions just show how many different preferences there are out there.
We also talked about accessibility issues surrounding the video and came up with obvious ones just as problems for visually impaired and people without broadband internet.

Taking the quote from McLuhan that the “message is the medium” – what this video did was use the medium web 2.0 to explain what web 2.0 is. The video used images of the internet really cleverly to explain what we were being told so people could relate what they use on the internet with the definition of web2.0.

He concluded the video by saying that we are web 2.0, without individual input there would be no web 2.0.