New technologies and ‘troublesome knowledge’: how Web 2.0 is transforming HE Ray Land, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

Web 2.0

"an attitude rather than a technology". Tim O’Reilly

Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace, an arts graduate (film criticism)

There’s something going onAnd you don’t know what it is Do you,Mr Jones?

Bob Dylan

• more than 60m blogs on the internet;

• 175,000 new blogs are created every day (two every second).

• dominant languages are Chinese, Japanese and English

• there are 1.6m blog posts a day.

• MySpace the busiest website in the world (115m registered users)

• YouTube grows in value more than $100m a month

Source: Technorati 2006

• 62% of content created by users under age 21 is generated by someone they know

• 57% of teenagers create content for the Internet

• 73% of students use the internet more than the library

• teenagers average four hours a day on television, the web and SMS

Web 2.0

1 User-generated content (social software; the read/write web)

2 Speed of access and delivery

• Print culture and digital textuality• Web 2.0, the re-writable web• A shift in the nature of knowledge• The challenge to authority• Implications for pedagogy• Textuality and temporality• Fast and slow time

Putting web 2.0 to work: new pedagogies for new learning spaces

Dr Siân Bayne, University of EdinburghDr Akiko Hemmi, University of Edinburgh Prof Ray Land, University of Strathclyde

Funded by Higher Education Academy UK

text

stability

individual

private

image

mutability

collective

public

The VLE increasingly seen as

Web 1.0, as an ‘ordering strategy’ (Land & Bayne 2006)

web as applicationarchitecture of participationuser-owned datarich, interactive interfacesno walled gardens

[Taken from Dempsey, L.The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/]

Collective

Wikipedia Digg Katrinalist.net People Finder Project Open Wetware

The Great Northern War - Wikipedia Between 1560 and 1660, Sweden created a

Baltic empire centered on the Gulf of Finland and comprising the provinces of Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia. During the Thirty Years' War Sweden gained tracts in Germany as well, including Western Pomerania, Wismar, the Duchy of Bremen, and Verden. At the same period Sweden conquered Danish and some Norwegian provinces north of the Sound (1645; 1660). These victories may be ascribed to a good training of the army, which was far more professional than most continental armies, and could maintain much higher rates of fire due to constant training with their firearms. However, Sweden was unable to support and maintain her army when the war was prolonged and the costs of warfare could not be passed to occupied countries.

In 1617 Sweden's gains in the Treaty of Stolbovo had deprived Russia of direct access to the Baltic Sea, and internal strife during much of the first half of the 1600s meant that they were never in a position to challenge Sweden for these gains. Russian fortunes reversed during the later half of the 17th century, notably with the rise to power of Peter the Great, who looked to address the earlier losses and re-establish a Baltic presence. In the late 1690s, the adventurer Johann Patkul managed to ally Russia with Denmark and Saxony and in 1700 the three powers attacked.

−penntags

[Taken from Dempsey, L.The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/]

Personal

‘me’ media Time Life magazine –’You’ YouTube MySpace FaceBook Flickr

‘If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist’

‘the collectivity fad’

Digital Maoism (Lanier)

‘the hive mind’ (Kelly)

“These sections of the web break away from the page metaphor. Rather than following the notion of the web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation.”Alexander, 2006

• open text – loss of closure and fixity of printed page– a shift in epistemology

• shift in medium implies shift in reading mode, from literacy to multiliteracy, technoliteracy, visual sophistication, multimodality (Kress)

the body of the book = the body of knowledge – makes it stable and ‘graspable’

volatility and instability of digital text – infinitely editable, instantly distributable,

methods for imposing fixity and authorial control (pdf, page scanning, restricted access) work against rather than with the mode of digitality

Shifts in epistemology: how Web 2.0 is transforming HE

• process over artefact• consensus over authority• exploration over argument• open text / the rigour of no completion• convenience & speed over quality• permanent state of new ideas

/emergence• knowledge network/ access over

possession• public/private continuum

authority

gatekeeping – mark poster’s exploration of how digitisation shifts history as a discipline – breaking down boundaries – if all historical resources are ‘googled’, if all history work is instantly publishable, how does that affect who counts as an historian? or a journalist? what is the role of the university, of the discipline?

institutional control

textual instability as a reflection of instability in the university’s idea of itself (Barnett) –

media implicated in the university’s inability to claim universality in its pursuit of Truth

supercomplexity

we now live in a world of radical contestation and challengeability, a world of uncertainty and unpredictability. In such a world, all such notions—as truth, fairness, accessibility and knowledge—come in for scrutiny. In such a process of continuing reflexivity, fundamental concepts do not dissolve but, on the contrary, become systematically elaborated…

In this process of infinite elaboration, concepts are broken open and subjected to multiple interpretations; and these interpretations may, and often do, conflict. As a result, we no longer have stable ways even of describing the world that we are in; the world becomes multiple worlds. (Barnett 2005 p.789)

The risks of Web 2.0The DEFRA wiki

Second Life

textualities and temporalities

fast and slow time (Eriksen)

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage

Ezra Pound 1920

rise of digital information technologies located firmly within the neo-liberal ideology of globalisation, and seen as caught inexorably within a logic of ‘fast time’, increasing acceleration and exponential growth of information.

Web 2.0 practices seem caught in an awkward

tension, if not disjunction.

The pedagogical claims made for them seem to be

located within, and to require the integrative and deliberative logic of, what Eriksen characterises as

slow time.

Slow and fast time (Eriksen)

Slow and fast time (Eriksen)

As digital phenomena, however, they increasingly serve to constitute fast time, can only accelerate in their future modus operandi, and reinforce the dromocratic principle that fast time drives out and occupies the place of slow time.

the defining characteristic of early twenty-first century society, and an increasing source of its hazards, is its relentless acceleration and compression of time.

‘Our history is the history of acceleration’

Virilio, 2000:51

‘Speed is power itself’Virilio 1999:15

‘“Faster, smaller, cheaper” –

this NASA slogan could shortly become the watchword of globalisation itself’ (Virilio

2000:66).

the ‘tyranny of the moment’ - effects of speed

(Eriksen 2001)• speed is an addictive drug• speed leads to simplification• speed creates assembly line (Taylorist) effects• speed leads to a loss of precision• speed demands space (filling in all the available

gaps in the lives of others)• speed is contagious – when experienced in one

domain the desire for speed tends to spread to new domains.

• gains and losses equal each other out so that increased speed does not necessarily even lead to greater efficiency.

our experience of time in the media conditions of the internet (Lee & Liebenau 2000).

• Duration (shortening attention spans)

• Temporal location (internet always on)

• Sequence (loss of continuity)

• Deadlines (positioned differently in a task, temporal shifts)

• Cycles (Constantly renegotiated, simultaneuously operating)

• Rhythms (condensing and dispersal of working effort; new patterns of busy-ness)

• Presence / absence, co-presence

• death of geography

• loss of political space

• advent of universal real time

• loss of slow time

• ‘presentified’ history

• single gaze of the cyclops

• erosion of liberty

Distanciation (Giddens)

The structuring of time–space distanciation relies on such social relations as “presence-availability ”—the organization of presence, absence proximity and availability, and the degree of copresent activities in relation to “tele-present” activities.

Notion that students in the digital age are ‘never away’ but permanently networked

Questions for learning

How do these texts and technologies change the way academic knowledge is produced and distributed?

What forms of ‘technoliteracy’ are required to work in these spaces?

How can assessment regimes be re-crafted for these volatile spaces?

What digital pedagogies will work best in these environments?

‘Strangeness’ as the new universal“The new universal is precisely the capacity to cope, to prosper and to delight in a world in which there are no universals.” Barnett, 2005

contestability and challengeabilityuncertainty and unpredictabilityteaching: from knowledge to being

Troublesome knowledge

These new ways of working, new modes of reasoning, new kinds of practice, constitute a form of ‘troublesome knowledge’ (Perkins 1999) that arises in the acquisition of threshold concepts (Meyer and Land 2006). Web 2.0 to some extent represents a ‘liminal’ state.

Impact on physical campus

CybraryCity2

dark side – psychological profiling what we can learn about

someone's psychology from their metadata.

recent discussion on AoIRpointed to research on 'What your choice of mp3s says about you'.

Blogs as source of socio-demographic data Hello everyone,

> recently I was surfing Russian facebook-clone vkontakte.ru and > decided tocount statistics of political preferences. I don't consider my > results to> be valid, so I've decided to ask about any thoughts, articles etc. > on the> validity of blogs as a source of socio-demographic data (age, gender,> location, political and religious preferences etc.). While I think > that> other interests such as music, reading, films etc. are quite > reliable I> can't say the same about socio-demographic data. What do you think?> Thanks in advance.> Best wishes,> Alexander xxxxxxxx.> MA student> Faculty of Sociology> Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES)> http://www.msses.ru/English/index.html

ray.land@strath.ac.uk