Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
digital cultures
Tony McNeill
Submitted for assessment for P01542: E-learning and Digital Cultures
MSc in e-Learning (University of Edinburgh) • 3 January 2010
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Preface
My assessment piece uses a single technology - this PDF - as the assembly
point for textual and multimodal artefacts using a range of technologies and
hosted on sites such as Flickr, WordPress, Slideshare, Scribd and Prezi.
Already I foresee two different ways of reading this work that suggest that
we’re at a transitional point in thinking about academic discourse. You may, for
example, be reading this as a printed text, perhaps seated on your sofa with a
cup of tea or glass of wine by your side. This is the ‘traditional’ view of the
academic text as print-based essay - what Womack (1993) calls the “default
genre”. Insofar as I’ve made it available in a print-friendly format, I’ve invited
you to adopt this approach as one of preferred or encoded modes of reading.
In this mode of reading, the boundaries of this academic work are defined by
the words on the A4 pages you hold in your hands; what’s ‘inside’ is what’s
contained by the pages. However, the presence of underlined text in a
different colour betrays the work’s digital origins and hints that the text may
be more than a self-contained entity.
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Introduction
The focus of this piece is the trial use of Twitter on an undergraduate module
on Shakespeare. It’s a study of the failure of a technology that many,
especially in the blogosphere, have touted as offering great potential
(Ahrenfelt 2009; Bradwell 2009; Gordon 2009; Hart 2009; Wheeler 2009). It’s
therefore partly about a technology that has been constructed, in the
discourses or narratives around learning technologies, as offering both
‘promise and threat’ (Hand 2008), although more the former than the latter.
Finally, it’s also about my first faltering steps into the world of digital
ethnographic research. It includes data derived from semi-structured interviews
(e.g. Roz, Jenny and Amelia) and questionnaires as well as some analysis of
undergraduate tweeting. The names of all participants have been either omitted
or changed in order to preserve anonymity.
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My Twitter experiment
At the start of the 2009/10 academic year I secured a small amount of funding
from LearnHigher to trial the use of Twitter in higher education. My hunch was
that the bid was successful, at least in part, because of Twitter’s new-found
status as education’s most ‘on trend’ technology in a year when the service
frequently made the headlines. I too was caught up in the enthusiasm for it
based on my own positive experiences of Twitter for conference backchannels
and for professional networking. Could the benefits I found in Twitter transfer
from one context (i.e. my professional networking) to another (e.g. student
learning)?
• the module leader briefed students on the rationale for the use of Twitter
on the module in the introductory session in teaching week 1;
• I developed short guide to Twitter for students accessible via the module’s
Blackboard site and sent, as a url to an online PDF, via a tweet;
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• we both modelled the use of Twitter in early tweets and made sure to reply
with encouraging comments to students’ posts, to summarise student input
and respond promptly to queries;
• I integrated Twitter as best I could with the Blackboard site for the module
as I was aware that we were adopting a hybrid approach in which Twitter
was being used alongside the institutional VLE that remained the primary
delivery mechanism for course-related documents and reception point for
student coursework.
October: 81 tweets
November: 15 tweets
December: 6 tweets
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Fig 2.
number
of
tweets
per
student
What was clear by the middle of the semester was that students had not
taken to Twitter to the degree I had hoped. I therefore shifted the focus of
the investigation away from the original concept of a thematic analysis of
tweets to an analysis of student uses of technology and their resistance to
Twitter.
What emerges from the data is a complex picture of many students aware of
the social and educational benefits of social networking sites but not engaging
with the activities because Twitter is not embedded in their regular
technology-mediated practices. Here are two student interviewees:
I love the idea of Twitter but I guess it's [i.e. not using it] almost
entirely because my close friends and family don't use it. My close
friends that I don't see very often, we've got a thread on Facebook,
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that's how we communicate. So we don't need that [Twitter] I guess.
(Amelia)
Only four of the sixteen students who completed the questionnaire had a
Twitter account prior to the module, a result broadly consistent with data on
Twitter use among young people (McGiboney 2009; Sysomos Inc. 2009). Pre-
module perceptions of Twitter were mixed: there were three negative comments
(e.g. “seemed complicated”, “slightly self indulgent”); ten expressing
indifference (e.g. “just another social networking site”, “a celebrity marketing
tool”, “not something that interested me”); and only two positive views
(“already addicted to it”, “good way of keeping in contact with some people”).
Much prefer Facebook as you're not restricted on the word count. And
more applications.
I think it [Facebook] would have worked a whole lot better; I think you
would have had tweeting every day … well, not tweeting, facebooking
every day, … um … commenting everyday. (Roz)
I guess if it was this same thing [i.e. Twitter activities] but on Facebook
would I have used it more? Possibly. But mostly because it's in my
eyeline more than Twitter was. (Amelia)
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Conclusion
Questions of identity and affiliation informed my participants’ use of
technologies: the desire to be part of a particular social circle or join with
like-minded others into the same things were key to adoption and use of one
digital tool (Facebook) over another (Twitter). I’d argue that all technologies
are, to a degree, social, that is to say, embedded in particular contexts,
enabling particular activities and connecting people in different ways. For my
Twitter project participants, the adoption of some technologies over others
had less to do with their respective ease of use or specific affordances, but,
rather, with the the socially meaningful practices they enabled and the
networks they supported. Technology adoption, then, is about culture and not
about convenience.
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