Changing Conditions
for Networked
Learning?
A Critical View on Social Technologies as
a Springboard to Unfold the Opportunities
and Potentials
Thomas Ryberg (ryberg@hum.aau.dk)
Associate Professor
E-Learning Lab – center for user driven innovation,
learning and design
Dept. Of communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Outline
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Beyond the web 2.0 educational hype – as a springboard to singling out
the novel
Problematising and nuancing the Digtial Natives discourse
What might be somewhat novel?
How can conceptualise this?
– Knotworking
– Trajectories
– Patchworking
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This is work and thinking in progress – more an invitation to dialogue
than presenting fixed ideas or results!
Why social media or web 2.0 in
education
• Some of the keywords from the tech-ed buzz-o-sphere:
Web 2.0
’Progressive’ education (since 19XX)
User-driven
Learner-centred
Collaboration
Collaborative learning
Participation
Active students vs passive recipients
2 -way communication
Dialogues and interaction
Creating and sharing
Knowledge construction vs acquistion
Bottom-up
Ahierarchical, flat – students as co-producers
• Realised through use of: Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking etc.
• But many of these ideals are not new!
Web 2.0 in educational context (elearning 2.0) – general buzz
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From hierarchical structures based on courses and topics towards more
student centred networks
From distribution to more horizontal patterns of exchange – peer-learning
From Learning Management Systems (LMS)  Personal Learning
Environments (PLEs)
Encouraging exchange, sharing of knowledge and students’ production of
knowledge and artefacts
Encouraging the production of personal portfolios – personal repositories
THE DIGITAL NATIVES
DEBATE
Quick overview
• Increasing numbers of studies are problematising the
digital natives or net generation as hyperbole (Jones
& Czerniewicz, 2010)
• But also pointing out that changes are happening
– Complex digital ecologies and social networking
• However, use of web 2.0 tools among students less
advanced than ‘imagined’ or ‘hypothesised’ in the
tech-ed sphere
• Gap between ‘what could be’ and ‘what is in fact’
• Just a brief intro to a study we did
Methodology
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Data collection across different levels of scale - multi-method study
combining qualitative and quantitative studies
Questionnaire (cross-campus to 3000 students – 253 completed):
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Background
Mobile life style (where do students work)
Project collaboration
Familiarity with Web 2.0 tools (state of diffusion)
Narrative analysis of blog post (133 student narratives from 51 M and 82 F)
– 1.semester students within a programme (humanistic informatics) asked to write
blogs about technology use during 1.sem (analysing diffusion of various
technologies)
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Oberservational studies
– Following a 2.semester group (interview and observation) – their use of
technology
Findings from blog posts and
observational studies
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How they support problem and project based collaboration
Facebook & Dropbox rather pervasive
Skype used among many groups
Some groups utilised Google services (e.g. Calendar, Docs)
Live next to formal systems (e.g. Moodle) but are not intertwined
– formal system for course activities
• Cautious about bringing in new tools in their problem and project
based group work
• Some of the more ‘advanced’ tools for academia 2.0 purposes
(tech-ed-buzz) and problem based project work were not very
pervasive
– Google Docs
– Social bookmarking (delicious, diigo)
– Social referencing systems / bibliography (zotero, refworks)
SO WHAT MIGHT BE NEW?
Sharing across different social
constellations
Homebase(s) – profile
Strength of tie
PLE
Own content
Friends’ content
Groups’ content
Shared fields of interest –
imagined communities
We all become entrance
points into complex
(overlapping) networks
Collectives’
content –
aggregated
other
Glued together by RSS, Widgets,
‘open standards’, open APIs –
Streams of continuously
evolving ‘data’ and ‘information’
that can be somewhat easily
manipulated
Ideas about “new” social
constellations or aggregations
• Networks between people
working collaboratively
• Networks between people
sharing a context
• Networks between people
sharing a field of interest
• (Dalsgaard, 2006):
Learner in the
centre
http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htm
Let’s briefly explore some
examples of this – there are
however many other sites and
mixes
Picture taken from: (Andersson, 2008)
http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/networks-versus-groups-in-highereducation/
Flash activities
• Cloudworks – clouds where
anyone can add content, ,
tags, references, discuss
etc.
• Twitter-streams e.g.
#Occupy – stream where
content and conversations
are pulled together
• MOOCs - Massive Open
Online Courses
How can we conceptualise this?
KNOTWORKING, TRAJECTORIES,
PATCHWORKING
How can we conceptualise and
utilise:
• Content is easily shareable and can move fast
through multiple networks
• Flash-like activities (maybe run-away objects) – fastpaced (or slower) stitching together - or creating temporary stabilisations content and conversations
• Pulsations and complex moves between individual
and collective/collaborative networks
• How can we make sense of this in relation to learning
and educational theory and practice?
• Maybe viewing what enters and leaves ’the class,
course and programme’?
How can we conceptualise and
utilise:
• How is knowledge distributed, but more importantly – how
is it sustained and made ’productable’ – becoming part of
deeper processes of meaning making and knowledge
production
• Does it or how does it become more than ’streams of
content’
• Understanding the movements between:
– Individualised traversing of personalised social networks to
collaborative meaning making
– From serendipitous encounters to sustained interactions
• How do we make sense of both individual and
collaborative engagements?
• Pulsations between foraging of information and digesting
this?
Knotworking
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Increased focus on / interest in less stable types of activities and
organisations – what happens when activity systems come together
and collaborate on-the-spot?
“Distributed and partially improvized orchestration of collaborative
performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity
systems” (Engeström, 2000)
“A movement of tying, untying and retying together seemingly separate
threads of activity characterizes knotworking. The tying and dissolution
of a knot of collaborative work is not reducible to any specific individual
or fixed organizational entity as the centre of control. The centre does
not hold.” (Engeström, 2000)
“Groups of people, tasks, and tools are mustered for a relatively short
period of time to get some task accomplished.” (retrieved from:
http://kplab.evtek.fi:8080/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Knotworking)
Knotworking
• Based in CHAT –
consciousness of both the
fleeting interactions – but
equally how these are
affected by and affects
historically shaped and
sustained activity systems
• How knotworking functions
at the intersections of
multiple interacting activity
systems
Knotworking and Mycorrhizae
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Smart mobs and mycorrhizae (rhizome-like) – Linux communities, birding,
skateboarding
“Mycorrhizae are difficult if not impossible to bound and close […]. They
may lie dormant for lengthy periods of drought or cold, then generate again
vibrant visible mushrooms when the conditions are right” (Engeström,
2007)
“A mycorrhizae formation is simultaneously a living, expanding process (or
bundle of developing connections) and a relatively durable, stabilized
structure; both a mental landscape and a material infrastructure.” (Ibid)
But where is the individual located in this? Identity and individual
development over time?
Trajectories – or Itineraries
Picture from Wenger, 2005
• Development and
learning happens
through
multimembership in
overlapping, conflicting
CoPs over time
• Pulsations between
individualised foraging
and meaning making in
CoPs
“This simultaneous focus on constellations of communities of practice and
individual trajectories will place emphasis on aspects of the theory that have not
received as much attention as communities of practice per se: boundary structures,
multimembership, cross-community trajectories, various modes of belonging, and
large-scale properties of composite systems” (Wenger, 2005 – Learning for a Small
Planet)
Interpretative communities of
practice
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An interpretative community can be seen as a more loosely bounded
CoP
CoPs are usually thought of as networks with strong collaborative ties
and interdependencies
In my view – we might point to a more loosely bounded structure – like
” Networks between people sharing a context” or an ”interpretative
CoP”
This could be e.g. a research centre, a semester / class / subject
An entity where ties are pulsating between strong and weak, but where
there is an overall potential for collaborative sense or meaning making
One place where resources might be digested
Patchworking
• Patchworking as a metaphor for learning (Ryberg,
2007)
• Looking at how various knowledge artefacts
(conceptual or (semi)material) are actively stitched
together by drawing on existing or creating new
resources
• How (or do) such artefacts “travel” between context,
become remixed, re-purposed – and is it critical
knowledge construction
• An example of young people’s construction of a
presentation
An example
Copy-catting and plagiarism or
creative reappropriation?
Rich multimodal presentation
incorporating e.g. graphs from a
lecture
We need to pay close analytic
attention to how and why patches
and pieces are woven into the
patchworks
A glimpse into
• Patchwork of many different sources, means and media
that were assembled to convey their conceptualisation of
poverty and how to address this issue
– Some graphs came from a presentation of an expert, which had even
ripped some from an UN webpage
– Facts and information came from various web pages and books
– Ideas came from interviews, a bus conversation and other sources
– They made four different interviews which were video-taped, edited
(some subtitled) and made part of the presentation.
– Music was carried on the computer from home
– Poor people’s pictures through Google image search
– Pictures in animation were hand-drawn and animated in PowerPoint
– Their stage show was choreographed and practised the night before
Foraging and gathering –
no no – we want it NOW! –
E-mail won’t do!!!
Cycle of stabilisation work
and production – Working it
into the final slideshow
’Cycle of stabilisation work and
production’ – re-ordering and
selecting slides
Cycle of ’patchworking and
remixing’ – negotiating the use of
the slide – constructing the
’conceptual blueprint’
Process of reweaving….negotiating the
meaning of the slide – Success
or Problem
Summing up
• Fast paced interactions and flow of materials – but how do
we go beyond this – collecting content is not enough!
• Study how (or if) these contribute to more collective or
collaboratíve processes of digesting and making sense
• How are the movements between individual engagement
and collaborative sense making? (Brokering?)
• Study partcular incidents of:
– Foraging, gathering, aggregating
– Vivid patchworking and knotworking
– Information stabilisation points (hub, plazas, cafe metaphorically)
• Wonder if the following model can be a help
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From study of informal knowledge sharing in social
network/community site (Computer problems) – (Ryberg &
Christiansen, 2007)
Studying the movements between these
References
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Engeström, Y. (2000). Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and
redesigning work. Ergonomics, 43(7), 960-974.
Engeström, Y. (2007). From communities of practice to mycorrhizae. In J.
Hughes, N. Jewson & L. Unwin (Eds.), Communities of practice: Critical
perspectives. London: Routledge.
Jones, C., & Czerniewicz, L. (2010). Describing or debunking? The net
generation and digital natives. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26,
317-320. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00379.x
Ryberg, T. (2007). Patchworking as a Metaphor for Learning –
Understanding youth, learning and technology (PhD-thesis). Department of
Communication and Psychology Aalborg University. Retrieved from
http://vbn.aau.dk/files/18154524/eLL_Publication_Series_-_No_10.pdf
Ryberg, T., & Christiansen, E. (2008). Community and social network sites
as Technology Enhanced Learning Environments. Technology, Pedagogy
and Education, 17(3), 207-219. doi:10.1080/14759390802383801
Wenger, E. (2006). Learning for a small planet - a research agenda.
Retrieved from http://www.ewenger.com/research/index.htm