Jen Ross

Performing the reflective self: audience awareness in high-stakes reflection

Drawing on qualitative data from 31 interviews with teachers and students in higher education in the UK, this article demonstrates the extent to which students, when compelled to write reflectively for assessment purposes, perform their reflective writing for at least one of three audiences: their assessment criteria, their teachers, and a general ‘Other’. It shows that students are strategic and audience-aware in their reflective writing, whether or not teachers acknowledge audience as a legitimate concern, and argues that we need to welcome the concept of performance into reflective practices, and to allow reflection to take account of the addressivity of writing.

‘Digital Native’ and ‘Digital Immigrant’ Discourses

This paper takes a critical approach to a discourse still commonly applied in our discussions and understandings of the relationship between practitioners in higher education and the new digital technologies – that of the distinction between the socalled ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. We critique this over-simplistic binary from a range of perspectives, highlighting its tendency to de-privilege the role of the teacher, its implicit alignment with an understanding of higher education as market-driven and commodified, and its reliance on a series of highly problematic and dangerously deterministic metaphors. We end the paper with a call for a more carefully critical and nuanced understanding of the effects of new technologies on the practices and subject positions of learners and teachers in higher education.

Open education: the need for a critical approach

This special issue is concerned with developing critical approaches to open education: about delving deeper into what we mean when we use this term, how it is recognised and understood, and how the particular claims of open education influence policy and manifest in practice. We hope the work collected here will contribute to the continued development and embedding of this area of educational practice. ‘Openness’ has become a highly charged and politicised term, a movement operating in many areas outside of education (for example, open knowledge, open government, open access, open data, open source, and open culture). In the process, it has acquired a sheen of naturalised common sense and legitimacy, and formed what seems to be a post-political space of apparent consensus. Invitations to question openness are quite rare, particularly within a field like education that is above all motivated by a desire to exchange knowledge, to make it accessible, and to positively affect the lives of individuals. However, it is precisely this view of openness – as a virtue of natural worth – that is problematic, not only because it masks alternative perspectives, but also because it does so with an apparent moral authority that renders the critic at best a technophobe and a cynic, and at worst an elitist and a champion of the status quo. Indeed, we think that in this moment when it is perhaps least fashionable to question open education that critical perspectives are most urgently needed. Open education is gaining increasing traction, perhaps most noticeably through relatively recent high-profile online initiatives such as the open educational resources (OER) movement and massive open online courses (MOOCs), but also many other moves which attempt to widen access to education or challenge the perceived dominance of established institutional provision. Prominent conferences are devoted to the subject, such as the Open Education Conference. In 2015 it was entitled Mainstreaming Open Education, and in 2016 it is set to be Open Culture, signalling not only a growing confidence in open education as a field in itself, but also the sense

Just What Is Being Reflected in Online Reflection? New Literacies for New Media Learning Practices

This chapter makes the case that new literacies are required when reflective practices in higher education move online. Online reflective writing is profoundly influenced by wider cultural understandings of blogging and personal disclosure and risk online. We can see in current blogging practices a convergence of the rise of the concept of personal branding (Peters, The brand called you. Fast Company, 1997; Lair et al., Manag Comm Quart 18(3):307–343, 2005), and what Scott describes as the “cultural tendency to seek out confessional narratives of self-disclosure” (Qual Res 4(1):91–105, 2004; p. 92). This convergence exposes a number of tensions between self-promotion and authenticity, between accusations of narcissism and pressures to confess, and between moral panics around privacy and safety and a growing sense that online invisibility equates to personal and professional negligence, and that the more presence the better. As students negotiate the management of personal, academic and sometimes also professional voices in blogs and reflective e-portfolios, they bring in to play writing approaches which are new not in their substance but in their modality. This chapter proposes a set of (often conflicting) norms and expectations widely associated with blogging. These cluster around themes of authenticity, risk, pretence, othering, narcissism and commodification. It explores how these are reflected in the assumptions and practices of students and teachers, and goes on to argue for greater attention to be given to the nature of online reflective writing, and a more explicit and critical engagement with the tensions it embodies.

Making Construals as a New Digital Skill: Dissolving the Program - and the Programmer - Interface

Making a construal is a way of using the computer to help us in making sense of a situation. Its merits as a new digital skill for developing open educational resources in the constructionist tradition are illustrated using a basic construal of shopping activity. Making construals is the central theme of the three year EU Erasmus+ CONSTRUIT! project. This paper takes the form of an introductory tutorial highlighting key qualities of construals that will shape the CONSTRUIT! agenda.

Structure, Authority and Other Noncepts1

As the rules of social engagement and hierarchy become less clearly defined in online spaces (Dubrovsky et al., 1991, Joinson 2002), so authority becomes an increasingly tricky notion in online teaching. In addition, unstructured digital spaces (wikis, live chat, virtual worlds) have great potential as sites of learning, connection and construction of meaning and self (Turkle, 1995), but the teacher’s capacity to control or regulate these spaces is limited (Land and Bayne, 2006). Indeed, we argue the tutor’s role in such a space is not to regulate, but rather to participate and provoke in creative and playful ways that open up passages or possibilities in chaotic online spaces.

Socially reconstructing history: the Social History Timestream application

For centuries, print media controlled by powerful gatekeepers have played a dominant part in the recording and construction of history. Digital media open up new opportunities for the social construction of historical narratives that reveal personal and situated viewpoints. In January 2012, work began at the University of Edinburgh on the design, development and distribution of a web-based Social History Timestream application for social history research projects across a range of disciplines. The application enables researchers to establish dynamically generated timelines (divided into days, months, years, decades, etc.), to which researchers and members of the public can post photographs, textual descriptions and other media. With the addition of meta-data such as tags and locations, the resulting timelines provide a way to compare thematically related events across time. A primary aim of the application is to provide opportunities for researchers to discover serendipitous time-based connections between topics and events that might not previously have been considered. Key to the projects success will be an engaging interface that allows visitors to see public imagery (e.g. items from the news) alongside personal imagery (e.g. what a given person was doing on that day), organized by themes (e.g. geography, health, politics or media). Among other things, the interface will allow comparison of mainstream versions of particular themed histories with the personal accounts of those who experienced them, or to visualize the development of ideas, technologies and social categorizations over time. At the time of writing, the Timestream application is still in development and is being piloted with three research projects. This paper will focus on one of these – a History of Photography Practices – to describe emerging theoretical and methodological design considerations, demonstrate the interface and offer insights into the process of using the Timestream application.