Leaving Lincoln at the end of an era

Sue Watling / October 30, 2015October 31, 2015 / blogging, social media

I’ve become a grandmother to Duke, a 3 year old American bulldog. Quiet, affectionate, nervous in crowds, Duke was taken in by dog rescue in Manchester. We haven’t yet met but I’ve seen him on social media. He’s white and brown with an endearing heart shaped patch on his back and has already demolished his bed and eaten a monkey. New father is my youngest son, and tells me this is as close to a grandchild as I will get. I have step grandchildren and have had dogs but this is my first grand-dog. I’m as thrilled about Duke as all other new entries into my life.

So far Duke’s Facebook debut has 176 likes

Social media has been on my mind.

For me this is a time of change; endings and beginnings but social media offers continuity regardless of time or place.

Thesis Whisperer published Know Your Limits last week, a piece I wrote about my experience of doctoral supervision.

The social media buttons beneath the post track the power of Twitter and Facebook for dissemination. The digitally shy risk being excluded from opportunities like these to link up with like minded people sharing similar interests and experiences.

Social media citations — image showing details of how social media links people and creates networks of shared interest and experiences

Know Your Limits was submitted last December. Much has happened since then. I’m leaving Lincoln to become an Academic Advisor for Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Hull. I live in Hull so looking forward to a shorter commute and getting my hands digital again. I know where my virtual heart lies and it’s online.

I joined the University of Lincoln in 2000, working on what we called the Cottingham Road campus, now the University of Hull Business School and Hull and the York Medical School. Many years before, aged 17 and still at school, a friend and I signed up for a night class through Hull’s Continuing and Adult Education. Called Witchcraft in Melanesia, we misunderstood this was cultural anthropology and not the black hats and cats we expected. Later, in 1985, I took a ‘Return to Learning’ course there. It introduced me to Sociology, Psychology and Linguistics and led to enrollment on my first degree at Hull College of Higher Education, While I was there the College became Humberside Polytechnic. I graduated from the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside.

In 1998 I studied part-time for my first Masters degree at Hull. For the past five years I’ve been on a p/t degree in creative writing there. So me and Hull uni – we go back a long way. We have roots. I know my way around.

This move will be home from home in so many different ways.

I will miss Lincoln colleagues who’ve become friends but it’s only a 100 mile round trip. I should know. I’ve doing it since accepting my first post at Brayford in 2005. We all share common themes around education development in a digital world and will keep the digital flags flying on social media. There will be a new blog and in the meantime I can be found on Facebook, which I use for fun with family and friends. I tweet as @suewatling and am scattered across the internet via LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, About me and multiple others which will vanish as the Lincoln email address I’ve had for the past 15 years is deleted. I will be digitally dead at Lincoln but digitally alive and kicking in Hull.

Looking forward to the future 🙂

Do you keep a blog?

Sue Watling / September 25, 2015September 25, 2015 / blogging, digital literacies, social impact of the Internet, social media, Virtual Learning Environment

Doug Peterson says ‘One of my first questions when I meet an educator is what’s the address of your blog?’ Doug’s JISC piece lists reasons for having an online presence. These include blogging for research, employability and simply yourself. One of the reasons I hear for not blogging is not having anything to say. Really? Nothing? Doug says there’s no such thing as a bad blog. Well, with respect, I disagree. There are plenty of blogs which are too long, too wordy and plain boring but I get his point. Better to blog badly and have an online presence rather than not at all. It’s about digital engagement. Social media are creating niche networks within higher education. Activities like blogging and tweeting emphasise divides between those who do and those who don’t. The gap is getting wider but it’s largely invisible. Like attracts like. If you do it’s with others who do. If you don’t you are less likely to be reading this in the first place.

This week I picked up from a tweet a piece in THES by Bob Harrison about making FE more of a digital experience. Here is the same old language of technology transformation. ‘Hopefully says Bob, ‘this time the transformative potential of technology for learning will be recognised rather than ignored’ People have been saying this since 1997 and the Dearing Report into the future of higher education. Today’s use of technology is mostly limited to uploading documents to a VLE. While this offers 24/7 access to information, the VLE can do so much more in terms of collaborative interaction. The problem is shifting from a repository approach to an activity one. Bob says we need ‘critically, refreshed workforce skills’, a ‘paradigm shift in how learning programmes are designed, delivered and assessed’ (cue favourite image!) and it’s ‘important to remember technology-enhanced blended learning is not a cheap option.’ We know all this. It’s the doing it which is the problem. The article linked to an Opinion piece in the TES about teaching digital literacy.

(This is the risk of social media – one thing leads to another and another until an hour is gone – does this make me digitally literate, a champion procrastinator or internet addict?)

Matt Dean says ‘FE needs to work out how to teach digital literacy.’ It was reminiscent of the 2007 blog post about technically illiterate teachers. The question for Matt is not should we teach digital literacy, but how to do teach it well. Good question but Matt is writing about students. The academic staff perspective is missing. HE have the same issues. I think we need to go back further and look at how teachers develop their own digital skills and identities in the first place. To see digital capabilities as ways of being and seeing as well as knowing which buttons to click. Digital divides are growing but for most institutions, access has become less of an issue than meaningful engagement. This is where help is needed. Rather than ‘teach digital literacy’ in isolation, it should be embedded in the curriculum to help ensure digital graduate attributes. In staff development and teacher education programmes to support staff trying out digital pedagogies and practices in safe supportive environments. We not only need to change what we do but change how we think and this is the challenge.

Who’s tweeting now? @TELEDALincoln meets Twitter

Sue Watling / November 8, 2014 / social media, TELEDA social media and eresources

TELEDA is on Twitter. We’ve had our first Tweet Meets. These are synchronous events, also known as Twitter Chat or Twitter Party. Social media creates connections which can lessen the isolation of learning online and on TELEDA we’re learning how. Tuesday, between 8-9 a.m. and 7-8 p.m., and again 8-9 a.m. Thursday, colleagues were invited to pose questions using the hashtag #askTELEDA. Tweets were collected via Storify 4th November and 6th November

Setting up @TELEDALincoln has exposed my own lack of Twitter Literacies. I could tweet and follow, throw in the occasional hashtag, but my performance had no depth. I didn’t really understand how Twitter worked. I’m still not sure I fully get it – or if I need to. This reinforces how shallow our digital literacies can be. We learn what’s needed to perform online. We become good enough. The Tweet Meets raised a number of interesting questions:

Management of multiple twitter accounts for work and non-work subjects
Boundaries between professional and personal online identities
Profile image choices? (@TELEDALincoln is an egghead. I loved the suggestion it looked like a finger on the button!)
Ways to engage students with Twitter
Ideas and recommends for people/organisations to follow

There were also suggestions for the most appropriate hashtag e,g, #Tweetites, #Tweetettes or #Tweetpeeps I like #teledites but I collect fossils so I would. #twite-quette was been used with regard to manners and #tw_eat_ing for twitter at meal times. Clearly, creativity is another reason to engage with tweeting! #askTELEDA collated useful Twitter themed resources.

Ten Commandments of Twitter for Academics http://m.chronicle.com/article/10-Commandments-of-Twitter-for/131813
Twitter Top Tips http://www.slideshare.net/suebeckingham/twitter-top-tips
50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom http://www.teachhub.com/50-ways-use-twitter-classroom
25 interesting ways to use Twitter http://www.slideshare.net/travelinlibrarian/twenty-five-interesting-ways-to-use-tw

Not bad for the first week! There are multiple reasons for engaging with Twitter, not least because it separates the hype from the reality. 140 characters encourages precision with words, attention to sentence construction, rethinking how to communicate via text. These are all useful transferable skills. Twitter is like following a blog but quicker. Another name for tweeting is micro-blogging. The choice of who to follow is influenced by shared interests. Like wiki’s which harness the collective wisdom of crowds, Twitter offers links to information and alternative perspectives. what’s not to like?

Ultimately, Twitter is what you make of it. An online identity has become a prerequisite of professional practice. It shows engagement with digital ways of working and encourages us to consider how our digital selves mirror and extend our personality. Although the internet supports anonymity and alternative construction of character, we’re as recognisable online as off. Even in 140 characters or less.

@TELEDALincoln

image from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/10306627/Twitter-IPO-14-fun-facts.html

Cats, dogs, ducks and other animals…

Sue Watling / October 11, 2014October 12, 2014 / social impact of the Internet, social media, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

The internet offers the ultimate in procrastination practice. Every now and then I wander off into the digital landscape of time-waste. This week’s BBC News Magazine was creepily apt but its much-delayed war on procrastination piece said nothing new. The quote from Douglas Adams ‘I love deadlines – I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by‘ and the list of procrastination app-busters were all familiar although Write or Die sounds a bit extreme – after all, its only will power – isn’t it?

Yet here I am browsing Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and posting cat pictures. Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA) starts 24th October and includes social media but that’s a weak excuse. I need to shut the laptop and do something different; instead, I’m thinking about cats.

What is it about furry, feathered creatures and the internet which has such universal appeal? Cats as well as dogs, ducks and other animals; do they really make a difference? I’ve seen a number of presentations which included deliberate and seemingly random images of animals. I’ve even been dabbling myself, revising my slides for promoting inclusive practice and adding cats and dogs in an attempt to grasp attention and make the points.

Cats seem to have the monopoly. If you’ve never Googled LOLcats you’re in for a treat or a nightmare depending on your preference. Then try dogs, ducks and giraffes. I made the last one up but couldn’t resist trying it and they do exist! There’s even a LOLcat which mentions Blackboard Learn….

…plus new variations on the old meme ‘On the Internet no one knows you’re a cat’…. or dog or whatever…

Sometimes you simply have to take the time to explore what’s out there. TELEDA’s social media learning block will encourage getting up close and personal with a number of social media platforms. Developed in response to requests and conversations, it starts with the issue of online identity. Participants will be encouraged to visit and complete their university staff profile as well as join a professional networking site like LinkedIn, Academia.edu or ResearchGate. A TELEDA Twitter account @TELEDALincoln has been set up and there’s an existing TELEDA Pinterest Board http://uk.pinterest.com/suewatling/teaching-and-learning-in-a-digital-age Blogs will also be explored, along with Wikipedia and Google, but there are no plans at the present time for any cats.

Putting myself out there, so to speak, into digital space

Sue Watling / August 22, 2014August 22, 2014 / #BbWorld14, social impact of the Internet, social media, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age is back in October. This is Part Two; a short in-service course (24 weeks, 30 M level cats, @300 learning hours). It contains two learning blocks; social media for teaching and learning and e-resources; developing and using online content.

To help prepare, I’ve been putting myself out there, so to speak, into digital space. Apart from this blog, I was a dabbler. Facebook for photos, a tweet here and there and a bit of collaborative working on Google Drive was the extent of my S&M adventures. TELEDA1 stayed within Blackboard for communication; one reason being when it comes to group work, social media can be exclusive. Not everyone wants to sign up and engage. TELEDA2 is different. It’s being advertised with the expectation colleagues will use Twitter and create a profile on LinkedIn or other ‘professional’ networking site like Academic.edu or ResearchGate. It will be a challenging e-teaching experience. I hope I’m better prepared since I took SM more seriously.

It started with BBWorld14 in July; summarised in a series of reflective blog posts* on the experience of one of the biggest education conferences in the world. Using Storify I created a synthesis of my social media usage https://storify.com/suewatling/bbworld14-sue-watling-1

During August I’ve taken Twitter seriously, with some useful outcomes. My numbers of retweets, favourites and followers have increased and my advice on surviving the write up of a PhD, begun by the Guardian Higher Education @GdnHigherEd, was included in #AcademiaObscura’s Finish That PhD in Twelve Steps https://storify.com/AcademiaObscura/finish-that-phd I’m in there at Number 6 with the meaningful advice Don’t Diet!

So what have I learned? Focusing on Twitter, where the tweet limit of 140 characters or less makes it one for the more challenging platforms, here is my top twitter-advice for anyone wanting to adopt it as a professional networking tool.

Using Twitter takes time, imagination and confidence. That’s it!

It might not sound much but the learning curve was steeper than I expected. The first thing I noticed was I could tweet from home but not the office. To start with I simply forgot. To be consistent meant a shift in on-campus working behaviours to incorporate Twitter into daily routines. It takes time to follow, retweet, say something meaningful in a sentence – this is where the imagination comes it. You need a collection of aphorisms, proverbs or even terrible puns to tweak and adapt if you want to get noticed and confidence is required in buckets. It might just be me but linking to other people – like cold connecting – still feels a bit like gatecrashing. The internet is a mirror and using social media reflects your professional online identity. To be a non-user is to be invisible and risks exclusion in an increasingly digital society. It’s best to take control of the medium before it takes control of you. Benefits include discovery and connections which can be really useful. Ultimately social media is like the Lottery, you have to be in it to win it!

I can’t wait to get started with TELEDA2 🙂

* Blog posts from July synthesising my social media adventures.

University of Lincoln has social authority in an age of digital expectation

Sue Watling / May 23, 2014 / social impact of the Internet, social media

Colleagues are a cross selection of twitterers. Some follow but don’t contribute, others make non-work updates only, some tweet a bit around their practice, while others don’t use it at all. None of us (or are not admitting it) follow Justin Bieber or those with over 30 million fans which social analytics tool followerwonk names as Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Colleagues have differing views about twitter’s use and value and this reinforces the notion of digital literacies as digital mirrors.

Partially thanks to celebrity endorsement, Twitter division of opinions could all change. According to THES, the University of Lincoln’s Twitter account @UniLincoln has been ranked the 22nd most influential in the UK. This means the university has social authority.

Social authority sounds Orwellian. Big Google is watching you. I was surprised how few references were made to Orwell’s 1984 and the rewriting of the past in recent media coverage on deleting digital history. There are now generations without knowledge of pre-internet life. After gender, the largest social divide is digital. I’m on the side with analogue roots. In half a century there’ll be none of us left.

These days I’m a technology DIY’er. On twitter, linkedin, flickr, I use delicious, pinterest and get edgy if I’m not online. I’ve crossed the digital divide. But there are times when the internet feels like it’s going off in directions I can’t – and am not sure I want – to follow.

Social authority is an example of the hip new language evolving out of social media use. According to http://followerwonk.com/social-authority social authority is ‘More than just another self-focused metric, Social Authority helps you discover influential tweeters.’ It’s no longer enough to tweet, you have to be influential too. The THES article links to the Moz blog for explanations of the score components for calculating social authority. These are:

The retweet rate of a few hundred of the measured user’s last non-@mention tweets
A time decay to favor recent activity versus ancient history
Other data for each user (such as follower count, friend count, and so on) that are optimized via a regression model trained to retweet rate

I’m not sure I fully understand this new vocabulary, but apparently the half-life of a tweet is 18 minutes. Users who haven’t recently tweeted get their score ‘aggressively discounted’. Retweets are a scarce commodity and we know what happens to those! An average user needs 10,000 followers before 25% of their tweets are retweeted so popularity bestows social authority. What Moz calls a ‘secret sauce‘ (which means ‘retweet bait‘ which means….)

The social impact of the internet has an increasingly linguistic element. The presentation of information is changing too. It’s becoming more visual through infographics and sites like pinterest. The tweet’s requirement to send messages in 140 characters or less is encouraging brevity. Being succinct has value but higher education involves deeper more considered approaches through reflection and critical thinking.

Moz says social media is a ‘what have you done for me lately‘ medium. This reminds me of Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book the Culture of Narcissism. Like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s in my top two of dystopic non-fiction must-reads. Cultural historian Lasch offers a chilling pre-internet prophecy of egotistic social media. The subtitle includes ‘… an Age of Diminishing Expectations’. Social authority suggests the word diminishing could easily be replaced with digital.

On abandoning Twitter…

Sue Watling / October 15, 2012 / social media

In this weekend’s Independent on Sunday, Dom Jolly says he’s giving up Twitter, His reasons include Twitter is full of twats wasting their 140 characters on smug dullness, ‘Celebrity Twitter’ is the place for dull egos and the PM joining the Tweetfest confirms it is no longer the place to be. These are not Twitter tracks I follow. For me the joy of Twitter is tweet control. I think Jolly’s use of #betterthingstodo in relation to Twitter could be a little misleading.

On the subject of trolling Jolly does give good advice namely Do Not Feed – and there’s no doubt the current fad for Trolling is despicable but to cite ‘revolting/antisocial/shocking’ comments as a reason for abandoning the challenge of 140 characters or less is to miss out on its potential. Like all digital tools, it’s not what they are but the ways in which they’re used which increases their value.

I’m not a prolific Tweeter but when I check it’s rare not to pick up at least one link which is useful. Emails notifications saying someone is following me are checked out. It takes a couple of seconds. Anyone sounding commercial or just downright dodgy is blocked. I don’t know if that keeps the nuisance tweets down but there’s nothing worse that people boasting x thousand followers and at least of half of them being on the a commercial or enterprise bandwagon. The people I follow are those who might be genuinely useful in an educational capacity and who use Twitter professionally. Sometimes Twitter is an email substitute. There are two advantages. I know the tweet will get read and the space limit makes for concise communication. It sounds a bit like Jolly has let Twitter take control. Rather than castigate its dark side, it would be better to focus on the benefits to be had.

@TELEDALincoln

Baby image from http://babyurl.net/names/baby-domain-name/establishing-a-babys-digital-identity-by-registering-their-domain-name