Bonnie Stewart’s “Academic Twitter: The intersection of orality & literacy in scholarship?” is one of the most inspirational works I came across recently. Bonnie talks about identity in open scholarship from many different but connected angles: personal/professional divide, multiple identities, performative identities, quantified identities… What interests me most is where she talks about the difference between literate and oral traditions:

Slide 39: Oral Tradition: Participatory, Situational, Social, Formulaic, Agonistic, Rhetorical
Slide 40: Literate Tradition: Interiorized, Abstracted, Innovative, Precise, Analytic, Indexical

I find this distinction, although it is quite obvious to me now, fascinating, because it makes me think about the dominant traditions in academic scholarship and how alternative modes of communication like blogging, tweeting, having a Google Hangout with colleagues, and multimodality challenge that tradition. In an earlier post, I talked about how Nick Sousanis, for example, created a comic book for his dissertation (you can find more examples for comics as scholarship here).

Bonnie also says that we’re experiencing a confusion between oral and literate traditions on Twitter. She talks about how some treat informal speech online as if it’s print based material. The reverse is also possible, very often I see tweets which look like informal speech (they happen in a conversation) but they sound like quotes pulled from a book, which makes me think that they are out there for dissemination. I’ll call these blurry lines in oral and literate traditions “confused speech;” I’m sure a better term exists somewhere but for now it will do the job. 🙂

Confused speech can happen everywhere in education. I see it in text-books (e.g., text that might sound conversational but in fact designed to transfer factual info), in conference presentations (e.g., presenters read their paper in front of an audience), and in conversations (like a Twitter message created for reproduction in  a conversation). Confused speech is also evident in a book I recently started reading:  Introducing Foucault: A Graphic Guide. I wanted to read this book because I came across this journal article (published as part of Comics as Scholarship, a special issue for Digital Humanities Quarterly) on multimodal educational texts via one of Maha’s blog posts and wanted to learn more about Foucault through a non-traditional way of academic writing. The author of the article, Aaron Scott Humphrey from the University of University of Adelaide, says:

Academic writing has generally been understood as operating primarily within the linguistic modality, with writing remediating the “voice” of an educator or lecturer. Comics, by contrast, are more explicitly multimodal and derive much of their meaning from visual, spatial and linguistic modalities. Because of their multimodality, educational comics challenge the conception of an authoritative author’s “voice,” as is typically found in traditional educational and academic writing.

If we throw images into a book, does that make the text multimodal? I don’t think so. I see a confusion between oral and literate traditions in the Foucault book. When I see two people in the same comic frame, I expect them to communicate somehow. I don’t expect them to go into a disconnected monologue and certainly I don’t expect them to talk like a “textbook.” What I actually see in the images below are text highlighted from the book in disguise as “comics.” Take out the text and what meaning is left in the drawings? I think these images just give an illusion of multimodality, the illusion of “something interesting is happening here.”

What do you think about confused speech? Does it make sense? Please leave a comment and let me know; perhaps we can refine this post together. 🙂

Maha posted a live blog while Laura was having her dissertation defense. I have on my desktop about 3 or 4 draft blog posts waiting for me to finish. At this rate I will have only 3-4 posts each semester. But ideas can’t wait! Blogs are more exciting when they capture moments in time, the lived experience, half-baked thoughts, burning questions, and, of course, the not so burning questions.

Maha was saying that because Laura is a public scholar, we already know about her research. We know the process: the challenges, aha moments and tensions she had as she refined her chapters. Not all of them of course, but even having a glimpse of the process through Laura’s voice humanizes the whole research process. So this is more than having a Twitter presence, it’s about having a human presence. And it brings academia back to where it really belongs: the everyday life people.

I can’t wait to check the Tweets at night, join the conversations and be part of Laura’s defense. Thank you Laura for being a human OER and congrats on completing this part of your journey!

I was watching Russell Howard’s Good News and came across Benjamin Zephaniah: “a poet, writer, lyricist, musician and trouble maker.” It was interesting to watch what he has to say about poetry as an art form. Zephaniah was talking about poetry and mentioned how he saw Bob Marley as a poet. As an example he recited lyrics from one of his songs (Burnin’ and Lootin’) :

This morning I woke up in a curfew;
O God, I was a prisoner, too
Could not recognize the faces standing over me;
They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.
How many rivers do we have to cross,
Before we can talk to the boss?

“That’s a song lyric but it’s a poem,” says Zephaniah; “it’s beautiful.”

Russell Howard then at some point asks: Who is your favorite poet? Or your favorite poem?

Zephaniah replies: Well, my favorite poem is by Adrian Mitchell. Very short poem. The version I like is only three lines:

Most people ignore most poetry. Because most poetry ignores most people.

Ever since I watched the program I’m thinking about what poetry means to people, what it means to me and how music can be poetry. I read a few other Bob Marley lyrics but couldn’t relate to them much because his context is so different than mine. But then few days ago I listened to space oddity by David Bowie (Chris Hadfield’s version) and it hit me:

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating
in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do

This was the poetry I was looking for. It inspires me. It makes me emotional. It makes me wonder and think. I can read/listen to it over and over again, I can quote it, I can re-play it in my head, the most important thing: although I have never been to space (!), I can relate to it.

Which takes me to educational research. I’m thinking how people might ignore educational research because educational research ignores them. I’m thinking about the language of “academia,” the alienation I feel when I can’t relate to academic articles, when I can’t really understand what the authors really, simply, in all honesty, mean.

I’m questioning the language of academic journals also because as I’m coming towards the end of my PhD journey, I’m questioning the whole dissertation process. It has been very rewarding for me, there is no doubt about that, but I feel like I could have followed a much different format, more suited to the affordances of the web and more accessible to others. It’s odd to think that there isn’t a single hyperlink in the hundreds of pages I’ve written. There are people who did really creative stuff with their dissertations. Nick Sousanis, for example, wrote his dissertation in comic book format. I’ve seen a few pages where he was talking about Bakhtin. It was amazing! There is also Dani Spinosa who has blogged her entire dissertation. I wish I had done something different and pushed the boundaries of traditional academic writing with my dissertation, but this has been a stressful journey and at this point I just feel fortunate to have at least a refined draft ready.

I stopped blogging, stopped my inner voice which is in a constant conversation with others to focus on my dissertation. I missed it a lot and I’m feeling excited to be back with this post:)

This post is inspired by author pledges made for open access publishing. I completely forgot about this post until last night when I was cleaning my desktop folders and I didn’t want to lose it again because I find it more and more important to talk about issues of power and privilege in accessing knowledge. So here you go, my take on author pledges!

A pledge can go like this:

or this:

“I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.” (boyd, 2008)

So author pledges often advocate for open access publishing. A common argument is that “we have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society,” so why not open the products of academic work to everyone?

The author pledges I have above are bold and inspiring; they carry with them an air of academic  determination. As a (kind of) fresh academic, I’m not ready to make a pledge to publish only in open access journals yet. So here is an author pledge that makes sense to me the most at this time in my life:

I will share with you my thoughts and research whenever I can… because ideas are also valuable in their draft forms.

I will be open to questions, criticisms, or suggestions about my work… because then I can (we can) find new directions to inquire.

I will listen to you with an open mind and will be appreciative and considerate because that’s the only way openness can be mutual.

…

Here are some useful links if you want to learn more about open pledges and if you’re thinking about making a pledge yourself:

Making a pledge by Maura A. Smale

Open or Shot by Steve Wheeler

Reasons to pledge by Open Access Pledge

Make a commitment for open access by Open Access Pledge

As part of the connected learning webinar series:  Learning and Leading in a Connected World with Educator Innovator, National Writing Project and EdConteXts, Maha Bali kindly invited me to a webinar on Emerging Trends in Open Scholarship with a great group people. I talked about technologies of emergence in the hangout as an intro to the conversation. Here I’m sharing the notes I prepared before the hangout  (they are edited; I turned them into a narrative for this post).

Hi everyone. Suzan here. I’m a PhD Candidate in Learning Technologies at the University of Minnesota. But today, I’d like to be on this hangout with you as an adult learner, not as a Phd student, not as a future academic, just a curious adult learner. Because that is essentially who I am. Also because there are extremely curious people out there, who want to start something new, but they can’t because of the way their life is organized, because of social expectations, or because they prioritize their kids’ education to theirs. We cannot limit open scholarship to academics only. Open scholars are not only those who hold degrees, BA’s, Masters, PhDs; they can be anyone seriously interested in learning. And I don’t think institutional affiliation is a criteria for scholarship either. It doesn’t matter where you participate from; it shouldn’t matter. Only that way the emergence we’ll talk about today can happen on a large scale.

So today we are going to talk about “technologies of emergence” and how that might relate to open education and open scholarship. Maha asked me to talk about the concept very briefly to start our conversation.

And to begin with I’d like to talk about “emergent technologies” first and compare that to Gardner Campbell’s notion of technologies of emergence, because there are fundamental differences between the two.

What is an emergent technology? For example, smart phones, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, tablet devices: anything old or new can be an emergent technology.

The argument is that these are the types of technologies that have promise, that give us new possibilities for learning and teaching, but at the same maybe they haven’t become mainstream in education yet, or we don’t have a general agreement on their role in teaching and learning. Perhaps there is resistance to using them in classes or in everyday practice. So these tools are not used to their potential.

How do we compare that to a technology of emergence? In #et4online Gardner Campbell talked about “technologies of emergence” using thoughtvectors (a connected MOOC) as an example. And he described technologies of emergence as tools (a lesson, course curriculum, a poem…) that create space for learning to happen in unpredictable, messy ways. So what is emerging is “learning”, a new way of seeing things, not technology. And there is a deeper philosophy and understanding of learning here; the understanding that learning is all about making new connections, so it doesn’t be have to orderly (it doesn’t have to go from step 1 to step 2) and certainly not predetermined.

One implication of technology of emergence is that we don’t have to decide everything for our students. Because learning is emergent. We don’t know, and we don’t need to know, how the dots of learning will come together; it’s not a clear cut pattern that we can know in advance. As Gardner Campbell says, thinking through technologies of emergence is all about “designing a learner experience, that will have, at the end, a surprise or two for all of us” (6:40).

Now I don’t think we can say “oh, this is a technology of emergence,” I don’t think we can define that for our students. But we can design learning environments and opportunities that create room for that to happen (1). A space where students can breathe. Designed with a sensitivity to students’ backgrounds, needs, everyday experiences, thoughts, emotions (2).

So connecting all of these to open scholarship and the tools we are going to talk about today (like #tjc15, Hybrid Pedagogy, connected classes, the faculty development initiative at the University of Guadalajara)… I’m hoping that we won’t focus too much on the technology but more so on what happens as a result of our relationship with the technology. Can we think of these tools/initiatives as technologies of emergence and what might be the significance of that?

…

(1)  Laura mentioned in a tweet that people have the agency to change things around and turn them into technologies of emergence. Also, we might do everything in our power to create a technology of emergence, but the emergence we seek might happen elsewhere or not happen at all. It’s all about how people interpret and make meaning of their experience.

(2) Looking for some examples? Check The UdG Agora Project, thoughtvectors, and the connected learning webinars (I have in mind the ones designed by Maha Bali and Shyam Sharma). I’m also sure you’ll find many great examples in your teaching. When was the last time your students got excited about their learning and asked some really good and unexpected questions? How about you?