Lifestream postings for week three comprised links posted to twitter (on cyberspace users and other news articles) and blogs postings on punk teachers (edupunk), comments on other people’s blog postings and a link to Niall Sclaters blog posting on allowing students more control over what they can do in the OU VLE.
More musings:
This is a little bit late for a week three roundup, but I have my reasons!
Week three was about transliteracy and how that is affecting cyberculture and learning. The skype tutorial took place a little early in the week for me as I’d only read 4 pages of Thomas’ paper on transliteracy. She and her colleagues gave a good outline of what transliteracy meant, but nothing from the paper seemed particularly groundbreaking. I started with this paper because in the time I had ad with the other things I needed to do at the same time, a paper from First Monday seemed more accessible than articles from Computers and Composition. I found the skype tutorial useful in all the usual ways – connecting with other course mates, picking up new ideas etc. and generally not feeling like I am the only one struggling with certain issues. Our chat moved on to whether text is dead and whether transliteracy is a well adopted concept. Our discussions around the primacy of text, certainly in academia, seemed to suggest that other forms of media are not deemed to be as serious. Our discussion made me think back to an article in THES about transliterate students coming to a university near you and how all sorts of adaptations may need to be made for them. When I was at IBLC09 earlier this year I remeber hearing from someone who said that his students (media studies students) didn’t feel an assignment to make video artefacts was ‘acadmic enough.’ So where does the problem lie? Where does ‘text snobbery’ originate? Is it coming from the academy? Is it coming from the publishers? If either of these is the case, how come this is perpetuated in students, new to both the academy and world of academic publishing? Is it more the case that textual snobbery is ingrained in everything we do? One the news we hear of how a report published by so and so organisation has lead to this, that and the other. The news we are encountering (watching, hearing or reading) is still based on a text artefact. Are we doing this unto ourselves?
Another thing I picked up upon and worth a mention here is the University of the People. An e-university offering free HE to the general population. Although their courses are as yet unaccredited (presumably this is where the ‘free’ ethos starts to fall apart) the teaching is offered by volunteers – people who are experts in their subject area and are happy to help the furtherance of others. Very utopic. Harnessing peoples’ grasp of the cyber to deliver education. Once again, the people have to be willing to learn in this way, but by making the courses free it opens up HE to a much wider audience. Although I can imagine high attrition rates where people choose to dip their toes in the water to see how they find it and then drop out later. I think also there’s the possibility that free things are sometimes seen as having little value – you get what you pay for, and if you’re not paying, what exactly are you getting? Dystopic. I remember having similar discussions around an Aim Higher project in my last place of work. How cheap can an education product be before its value (regardless of its quality) drops below an attractive level?