Exeter CASCADE

Here at the Exeter Uni’s Teaching and Learning Conference, Helen and I set up a stall for the Exeter CASCADE project, which got a lot of traffic.

First of all, let me explain why we stood out from the crowd. Every other stall looked like this:

And our stall looked like this:

So besides my excitement about wearing my favorite Hawaiian dress, what else happened?

We talked to a lot of people, and a big rang of people too. Because the event was in our university’s recently opened Forum building, a lot students were there as well as staff who weren’t attending the conference. It’s interesting how much digital technology excites people’s interest- whether they were happy about digital technology or not. I watched a TedX film recently talking about how education is a topic that everyone has something to say about. Digital technology is quite the same I think.

We asked people to fill in papers and leave them in a bottle, a ‘message in a bottle’ responding to the statement ”Help! I could really make good use of digital technology in my teaching/studies, if only…”, and then we asked people to contribute to our wall wiki, titled ‘how is digital technology changing your discipline.

Like our conversations, the responses on our wall wiki and our bottle brought out a lot of the contentious nature of the whole ‘digital literacy’ thing. People’s messages in the bottle were varied:

‘Help! I could really make good use of digital technology in my teaching/in my studies if only…’
….I was brave enough
…Greater access to mobile projection facilities (this was Helen, making a comment about a certain IT service…)
…I can ensure human support is also available to help me develop the confidence and skills I need to ‘exploit’ the digital age…i.e. training
…more open course content creation. Student uploads
…I had someone to call on when things went wrong (someone who teaches + can spend time with me- not a technician).
…we had the resources to match our ideas.
…there was opportunity outside the course modules to learn more I have access
….more classes on how to innovate within new technologies in English
…I had more time to learn how to do it well/properly.
…I could have time and a person to take me through it + make it happen. I think I am untrainable, so I need a trained partner
…it was easier to collaborate with external partners (NHS)
…

Because people’s relationships with technology are different, and because people are different, I guess it makes sense that people would have some different answers to that statement. What I think it interesting is how many of these people’s answers involved a human element. People weren’t putting their solutions on the technology, they were putting them on human resources. They wanted to change their own human resource, or wanted people to help them through.

Keeping in mind that this is a very small sample of a dispersed group of people ranging from undergraduate students to students skills advisers to Professors, I wonder how this sample would differ from a sample of PhD students or early-mid career academics? Because from our survey and interview data, it seems that PhD students are a group of people who tend to have a strong drive to self-teach and find information. They made many comments about being hindered by a lack of access to technology, not human resource.

The answers to the question ‘how is digital technology changing your discipline?’ were similarly varied. Some were positive, others were negative. Interestingly, negative comments about this subject seem to focus on teaching and learning whereas positive comments seem to focus on research and developments in the field around that. It’s not just this wall wiki that made me aware of this divergence. Why is that? Why should we have such divergent attitudes towards technologies role in teaching and learning as we do in research when we are pushing a research led education agenda? More research should be done to understand how undergraduate students compare to professors in terms of thoughts about how digital technology is changing teaching and learning, and also research practices.

Here is a small version of our wall wiki:

So, you see, there is excitement and there is critical reservation, all present.

You might think that some of the differences in attitudes are disciplinary. However, in our research with PGRs, it was interesting that there were students from the same discipline exhorting opposite perspectives. There were students both in Humanities and in Mathematics saying that we overemphasize the digital. And there were students in Social Sciences demanding more from the University, expecting it to guide them into the future, which will be overwhelmingly digital.

The term BYOD (bring your own device) has popped up from a few baseline conversations to describe the new trend where employees are bringing their own equipment and using it for work purposes.  According to a survey across 17 countries by business technology company Avanade, 88% of executives said employees were using their own personal computing technologies for business purposes.

Looking around CASCADE HQ*, only 3 employees out of 30 staff members using some their own technology on a regular basis.  It would seem that whilst BYOD is becoming more common, it is only a relatively small number of employees who are doing it.

A new adaptation of this phenomenon is ‘BYOS’ (bring your own service), where employees are using third-party services for work purposes.  In my personal experience teaching on a first-year module, I used Google Maps to facilitate extension of an ice-breaker exercise where students wrote short introductory text linked to their geographic background.  Similarly, I have dabbled with using Gmail as my main work account rather than the horrid Outlook - fetching new messages from Exeter’s servers and sending messages back through the Exeter system.

BYOD and BYOS can no doubt cause headaches for IT managers in terms of system security and support provision.  There are also clear cost implications - perhaps employees be subsidised in some way to purchase their own equipment.  This might end up being a more cost-effective solution given the apparent rip-off costs of enterprise hardware (granted most purchases include some support agreement).   At Exeter, IT services seem to be quite relaxed about this, but perhaps this arises from the small proportion of employees BYOD-ing and BYOS-ing…?

* and adjacent University of Exeter Education Enhancement offices

My colleagues and I were lucky enough to be asked by the CASCADE team to create a resource that would introduce academic researchers to the range of digital technologies that are now available and give them an insight into how they could be used to enhance their research practices –  in essence how they can help with the challenges that come with doing research.

I am delighted to say that this multimedia resource is now openly available at:  http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cascade/digital-technologies-for-researchers.php

I hope that you will find the resource as inspiring to listen to as it was to make.  When the development work started, it very quickly became apparent that the value of the resource would lie in the way it brought together the stories and experiences of such a wide spectrum of people – members of the CASCADE team, Librarians, postgraduate development staff  and perhaps most importantly PhD researchers from across the disciplines.  I think you will agree that is it their stories and advice that make this resource particularly worthwhile.

Communicating vast and complex data in a visually attractive manor has becoming more and more of a hot topic over the past few years.  From UK crime reports to US plastic surgery statistics, researchers, journalists and policy makers are finding new ways to make sense of the data that is collected.

There is a cross-over between data, graphic design, computer programming and art.  A fascinating example to illustrate this is Aaron Koblin’s visualisation of  US flight data:

Aaron Koblin - Visualisation of US Flight Data

In the public consciousness, the Guardian newspaper has been leading the way in this field, with an excellent data blog offering access to the raw data as well as visualisations.

Alongside the trend towards open data, we recognise that researchers are becoming increasingly interested in this area to both understand their data and make it viable in a wider scholarly context.  To this end, we are focussing on these skills in the next PGR interns seminars, where we will be delighted to welcome expert graphic designer and data visualisation practioner Flea Palmer from the University of Plymouth.

Following this session, we will be producing the latest in our line of ‘Researcher Briefings’ in this subject.  this will join our growing list of project outputs.

Recently we invited the other three projects in our cluster to share a Devon cream tea with us here at Exeter.
We also shared some ideas and issues in our projects’ development.

We kicked off with a session on moving ‘beyond the baseline‘, which prepared us all well for the webinar on this topic (see Nikki’s post). Bath’s PRiDE team encouraged us to speak from the heart as we collated lessons from our first six months under the heading ‘just one thing’. This included ‘one thing I wish someone had told me about this project’ and ‘one thing we will never tell JISC‘.  The Chatham House rule prevents us blogging the very interesting outcomes of this exercise, but there is no doubt it was a good way to get us all thinking.

Nicola from the Oxford Brookes’ InStePP project described how they are working with the Association of Learning Technology and the Institute of Leadership and Management to provide recognised accreditation to their student e-pioneers. Our model is different and our interns are at a different stage in their academic career, but we are looking at Exeter’s ASPIRE framework to provide similar support, if there is interest.

After lunch we gave the other projects a chance to chat with six of the postgraduate interns who are key to taking Cascade forward. As always they were enthusiastic about the potential for digital technologies in scholarship, challenging of our assumptions, and honest about their motivations for working with us. The Digitally Ready project has already blogged about this encounter, saying: ‘this is an extremely strong model – the postgraduates strengthen their own understanding, are exposed to a wider variety of “use cases”, and the undergraduates benefit from the slightly wiser heads of the postgraduates’. Thanks for the vote of confidence, Reading. We really like your agile evalution model too

Well, time for some reflection. This has been encouraged by the questions below. But I think it’s always a good idea, anyways.

I personally got a lot out of our baseline process. I got an appreciation of just how complicated it all is- how many different needs and perspectives there are about digital literacy. And yet, that there are some things which are pretty unanimous.

Our survey gave us 170 responses from PGRs and told us a lot about them. We got to compare different colleges and departments, and look at how PGRs use technology differently in different fields. While it is true that most disciplines have unique ways of using technology, I think it’s a good point to make that most of the questions did not appear to be affected by discipline. People tended to use referencing software the same across the board, people tended to go to the same places in the same proportions for help with digital skills. People held similar feelings about whether digital technology will be integral to their career and their research.

In the baseline, I talked with a lot of different PGRs and I had a chance to really glimpse at how differently different people see digital technology. Some of them, I would walk into their office and they would have their screen up with 21 tabs open and music playing. Some would be reading a paper printed off. Some of them were quite passionate about their use of technology. And some of them were quite passionate that technology is not very important in the learning process. I came to appreciate that the University has a difficult role to play, pleasing everyone. What might end up happening is a lowest common-denominator. What I hope though is that our research can help see where there is an agreement, and so an obvious way forward. I feel lucky to have done this research, and with PGRs especially, because they really are at the cutting edge of digital literacies. They are the students of yesterday and the teachers of tomorrow!

Below are some thoughts about the questions of tomorrow’s webinar.

1. What are you planning to do with your baseline report? (Who do you want to see it, and how do you want it to influence them?)
We are now writing reports which will be delivered within the university, reflecting our research. This is in the form of one generic, internal report and a report for each of the five colleges. We are also taking into account our research in resources we are developing for our website around digital literacy, which will be aimed PGRs but also helpful for undergraduate students and academic staff.

2. What do you think you did particularly well in your baseline report? (Artefacts generated in the baseline process such as data, survey instruments, new or enhanced models, mappings, quotes and recordings etc etc can all be useful to other institutions, and ‘ticks in the box’ for your own project deliverables)
Our survey of PGR students was a big success, with 169 responses from all five colleges. The survey matches well with the Vitae areas of practice categories. We also obtained rich data from our interviews and focus groups. It was helpful that our baseline research was focused on a specific level of study, so we were able to obtain an in depth look at practices among those students.

3. What do you still need to know? (The baseline process often tells us more about what we don’t know than what we do – filling the gaps might be an important activity for the rest of the project)
We don’t know when it’s best to emphasise local, department level resources and to engage with small groups, and when it’s best to encourage people to use frameworks that are at higher levels (college, institution, regional training agreements, national, and international resources).
We know that PGRs want more information about training and digital tools being used outside of their discipline, we don’t know the methods they would comfortably take towards it. We also could do more work examining the barriers and possibilities in the institution around this.
More could be known about good practices in terms of digital literacy in our institution. Specifically, are there any good examples of practice that exist where students are encouraged to cascade skills, and can they be built on?

4. How has project thinking and/or planning changed as a result of the baseline process?

One big realization from the baseline process is that a lot of the technology use is actually quite similar across the colleges- there might be less departmental differences than one might imagine. So, this means that we could focus more on building generic resources than we may have thought previously.

Now that we have a full house of postgraduate researchers working with us it feels as though the project is really making progress. Each intern is contributing different talents and ideas to the group meetings, from which we will be producing a number of briefing papers for researchers on the theme of using digital technologies effectively in the research process. However, the main effort for all of the interns is their personal case study, and these are proving a fascinating set. From new conceptual approaches to visualising course content, through embedding digital skills into third year modules, to supporting new arrivals, the range is broad. I’m as impressed with the commitment to and thoughtfulness about teaching as I am with the technical skills our interns share. We are trying to ensure that the case study interventions have the maximum possible impact given the limited number of hours available and the fact that all our interns are working to complete their own PhDs as a priority.
Watch this space for more on case studies and a couple of big events we have coming up.

It’s been a busy few weeks for the project. First we submitted our baseline report to the JISC, which has now been synthesised into a sector summary report, forthcoming soon. Some of the key findings of the Exeter audit process are echoed nationally, while some are relatively unique. For example, the preference for public, third party, cloud and open source applications among researchers was echoed by the Vitae survey. The emergence of mobile and social technologies was also matched by other findings. All the surveys I have seen confirmed that technology adoption is overhwhelmingly self-directed and peer-supported. But projects differ in the groups of staff/students they are working with, and our focus on PGRs has given us some particular insights into how research practice is changing.

We have had a joint proposal accepted for the HEA conference, put together a proposal for the International Blended Learning Conference, and begun drafting a symposium proposal for the annual Association for Learning Technology conference in the autumn. In all of these we are working with other projects in our programme cluster. There is the possibility of a paper to Improving Student Learning as well.

Last week Dale and I travelled to Bristol to meet a group of projects, professional bodies, and one institution from outside the programme, to discuss the disciplinary aspects of digital literacy. This is an area of work we will be taking forward both through digital literacy profiles of the different subjects in which our PGR interns are situated, and through subject-specific case studies. We know that research practice is highly dependent on the subject and even the topic of research, so the skills researchers need are not well developed by generic programmes or techniques. This is something we will explore further at College level.

Finally I’ve been invited to speak on a Guardian panel, Developing Digital Literacy in Higher Education. This will be live on Friday 2nd March – if you are reading this post at a later date you will find a recording and summary online.

I was talking with a couple of PhD students. One who does work in maritime archaeology was talking about her frustrations with writing her current chapter. She said she was having a hard time with the fact that in each chapter she started to bring in too much stuff- there were too many connections- and she was having a hard time with the fact that chapters always have to be linear- so B follows A and C follows B, in logical order.

I asked her if she had ever used mind-mapping software to help. She said no. The other PhD student who was sitting there suggested that she not use mind-mapping, but rather that she use a graphing software which creates networks in all directions between your ideas as opposed to restricting you to single tree of ideas that is then disconnected from other trees.

The archaeologist said ‘come on, that makes more sense, you don’t really think in this linear way’.

It occurred to me how true that statement is; you don’t think in a linear way- the progression of a 100,000 word PhD thesis will have to act as a tour guide through ideas, taking you along the way to the right sites at the right time. But all the sites might have connections with each other.

Now, humans have been telling stories for mellenia. We have been telling stories to our children and grandchildren, to our students, and to our community verbally for God knows how long. Thousands of years ago, we started writing stories on rocks, and then eventually on scribes of Papyrus. Obviously, a story- a linear progression of ideas- is a good format for transmitting knowledge and ideas. But knowledge transmission doesn’t always follow a linear path- for example, listen closely to how someone tells you a story- it’s rare that it really goes from A, to B, to C in a logical way- usually it meanders a little, and the meander is often an important part of the logic of the communication. And some people argue that communicating things in a logical, linear progression is actually not the best means of communicating about a complex, interconnected world.

I am quite interested in systems thinking as an approach to the world. I first began to think about linear logic when I was an undergraduate student studying intercultural communication for business, and I was really inspired by one paper we had to read about different approaches to communication. The Western world’s communication is shaped like an arrow- the ideas move in one direction, whereas this is not universal and other cultures have a variety of different approaches. For example, it’s common among Native American cultures to use a circular logic. Having lived in Alaska and worked for a Native Company, I can say I can understand this, although it’s not something that is easy to explain as cultural things often are not. The point is that Native stories are often not quite the same as European stories, although they are both communicating their message.

When I started to learn about systems thinking, I got very excited about this approach. I guess it’s probably because I studied environmental science, environmental archaeology and environmental economics at an interdisciplinary university that I became really aware of how linked things are in the world, and how much things exist only in their surroundings, especially in the context of something like the environment.

The Open University’s Learning Space has a page dedicated to Systems Thinking in Education, where there is a big image of what looks like a neural network-several topics linking with each other. Systems Thinking as a Languagediscusses how the way we use language relates to notions of linearity and interconnectedness.

Okay, I will finally get to the point. As of now, we publish things in a very linear format. But how is that changing or going to change with increasing digitisation?

Ten years ago, you would read a newspaper and you would read story (and it might say ‘look at this place for more information, but the story was there and contained) but now, you read a newspaper article online and there are constant links in the text- to explain what or who they are talking about, to relate to another article, to give more information in case you want it. Just look at the homepage for the New York Times, it’s not the same as the front page of a print newspaper.

In academia, increasingly articles are being linked in text. On blogs, people commonly refer to other blogs or other sources of information very freely and in a way that is much more integrated with the post than a citation in a paper. When I share Google Docs with the Exeter Cascade Team, I often link different Google Docs to each other, to show that each Google Doc relates to the others and to simplify where the different, related information can be found.

I think that what I am trying to say is well illustrated by looking at PowerPoint and Prezi. Many agree that Prezi is the presentation tool of the future. Why? It allows more connection, more ideas within ideas, more freedom than the PowerPoint which says 1,2,3, now 4, oh let’s look for another minute at the graph on 2, 5, 6, 7…Prezi, I think, works more in the way that I think. It allows me to express that more adequately. I can still draw a path through the presentation, of course, but it’s set up in a way that doesn’t assume that what I have to say is in essence linear.

So I started to wonder about my friend the archaeologist’s frustration. In the future- say, 50, 100 years, or less, from now, will writing still be expected to follow the same format? Will PhD theses of the future include links and connections-will ‘chapters’ become ‘ideas’ which are not placed in order, but rather shown as a package? I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think that publications, including academic ones, will look different in the future. Publishing is always changing. Print publishing changed from being something that only a small few could produce to something that could be mass produced yet was still selective because of economics, to something that is growing less dominant to online.

Anyways, just a little ponderance.

I’m not sure I know the collective noun for a group of postgraduate interns, but given the calibre of people we have been privileged to interview over the past few weeks I’m going to suggest a ‘talent’ of interns. The ‘talent’ we’ve collected together is larger than we first imagined, partly because there were so many applicants we couldn’t bear to let go. So after a period of baselining and taking stock, it feels as if the project is really ready to start making an impact in the colleges and departments of the University.

We know from our baselining process – public report due shortly – that many PGRs are innovators in their research fields, particularly when it comes to collecting data, and supporting collaboration and communication. Data capture and visualisation, use of video, simulations, and the more generic research processes of information and reference management, are all issues we will be exploring in more detail. And of course we will look at how we can cascade digital know-how to other PGRs, undergraduates, and senior members of departments.

We are also looking at what PGRs need to be effective researchers in a digital age, and how the University can provide an exceptional environment for innovation.

All this kicks off on Thursday with our first monthly seminar. With so many different perspectives on digital scholarship, and so much technical know-how in the room, I’m a little nervous about orchestrating it all. But I’ve no doubt it will be fascinating.