I’ve seen misreporting and sensationalism in newspapers where I’ve known the true story behind the hype. This sort of fake news is a worrying trend that I’ve written about in other posts. Fortunately there does seem to be some rallying against it and state imposed pressure on media companies to help their viewers and readers appraise content critically to evaluate the likelihood of it being factually correct.
The set of unwritten norms of conduct that guide the behaviour of a group, expressing what is considered “right” and “wrong” Reznal Odnanref.
This final quote, which I have singled out above, is a good mantra for the ethnography exercise in the communities block.
Images inspired by the TED Talk linked above and based on the work of Geert Hofstede
Fenando Lanzer makes some interesting points in this TED talk on the subject of the psychology of culture.
I found the section on hierarchy versus equality tricky. Lanzer suggests that it is the people at the bottom of the social pyramid that determine whether there is a large ‘power distance’ i.e. whether or not a society is hierarchical. He maintains that, in a dictatorship, the people at the bottom allow themselves to be dictated to. To a certain extent I understand the point he is making, indeed we have seen the reverse of this in action when brutal dictatorships have been overthrown by popular uprising. However, I doubt that many people living under such regimes would consider that they have any say in deciding whether the society they live in is hierarchical or not.
Considering Lanzer’s premise in the context of online communities though, I can see that the opposing options I’ve presented visually above do represent some of the types of ‘cultural norms’ that can become established as a community grows.
I also think the point he raises about the way an individual is treated in different cultures is very relevant to this digital cultures course. We have multiple ‘selves’, our work self, family, social, academic and so on. These might be selves where we are physically present (I’ve seen this referred to as our ‘meat self’) or our disembodied presence online. In each of the ‘places’ we take these multiple selves there will be a prevailing culture and often a number of subcultures. We have to adapt to a different set of cultural norms for each environment, choosing to comply with them or not.
From an educational perspective it seems sensible to consider that our students will arrive, physically or virtually, with expectations of cultural norms based on their experiences elsewhere, or they may be presented with a situation, such as an empty discussion forum, where they will take part in developing new norms.
This was a response to ‘Twitter chat’ on the reading for the current block but it’s also relevant to an earlier tweet / post on learners adapting to the locally prevalent culture, in that we are used to segueing between multiple versions of our digital self.
As an aside today I witnessed an example of ‘cultural norms’ in action. Distracted by eldest son while I was attempting to read one on this block’s papers I asked him whether he was on Snapchat. He was he replied, but he then wanted to know how I knew. “Because you’re doing that face” was my reply. “Oh the ‘selfie face’, yeah well it just works” was his retort.
The selfie face is clearly a cultural norm and there’s supposedly research that theorises why it exists, which is attributed to Farhod P. Karimov at the University of Brussels. I wasn’t able to authenticate the source but there’s some believable logic in the theories that are attributed to him. For example selfies are often taken with the camera held above head height pointing down toward the face. The theory here is that when someone is viewed from above they are seen as weaker and in need of protection, which sounds plausible. My theory is that the explanation is probably much simpler, pointing the camera down in this way eliminates a lot of the distracting background, it also stretches the neck and face making the subject of the photo appear slimmer.
In the context of this course the interesting point here is not that the phenomenon of the selfie face exists, but that it is a norm within an online community’s culture.
Joking aside, the pressure on learners is something I’m constantly aware of in my professional practice. While we try to promote a culture that is based on life-long learning and development, the reality is that the commercial need to look after our customers and patients will always take precedence. I believe that’s the reason the current trend toward ‘micro-learning’, spaced learning and video are gaining so much traction in the corporate environment.
I couldn’t agree more with this point raised in Lister, M. … [et al.], (2009). I’m aware that many open source projects have governance and processes every bit as tight as commercial software developers, indeed there’s an argument for needing even tighter control to avoid the shortcomings that can be the product of anything ‘designed by a committee’. But I also believe that the combined brain power of a, potentially, unlimited number of contributors must have some advantages.
Where open source really seems to come into its own though is in its responsiveness to the input of end users of the software. Many open source projects have a nightly build system where everything that has been checked into source control is built and made available for download. This can result in much shorter times between a bug report or new feature request being submitted and a fix or enhancement being made available. The flip-side of this is technology giants such a Logitech who seem to take forever to respond to this input of their users.
So what can we take from this from a digital education perspective? Collaborative / shared lesson plans and peer review spring to mind immediately. Should we be precious about our way of doing things if a collective effort will provide resources that will better meet the needs of our students?
References
Lister, M. … [et al.], (2009) “Chapter 3. Networks, users and economics” from Martin Lister … [et al.], New media: a critical introduction pp.163-236, London: Routledge
“A can of spam. SPAM is made up of “Shoulder of Pork and Ham and was a World War 2 favourite, it’s also a term used to describe irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc. “
As the old saying goes “Flattery will get you everywhere” and that was clearly the tactic behind three of the latest ‘spam’ comments on my Lifestream blog.
I’m not going to approve them and no doubt others on the course have received the same or similar, but I thought I’d share today’s crop as they’re strangely life affirming…even though they’re spam!
“It’s nearly impossible to find well-informed people on this subject, but you seem like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks”
“No, thank you – and I wish I did!”
Hi, I do think this is an excellent website. I stumbled upon it 😉 I am going to come back once again since I bookmarked it. Money and freedom is the best way to change, may you be rich and continue to guide others.
“Well I do have a lottery ticket for tonight…”
You ought to take part in a contest for one of the most useful websites online. I most certainly will highly recommend this site!
“One of the most useful websites online, wow, how about that, and it’s only my first attempt at blogging in public.”
Oh well, one can dream, now back to the serious content – my mindmap of Knox, J. (2015) coming up next.
I decided to complete as MSc in digital education for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to understand more about a field that was relatively new to me and, secondly, I wanted to experience digital education first hand, to give me some indication of how the experience might feel for the learners I support in my professional practice.
One of the ‘halo benefits’ of this is that the course has exposed me to lots of digital tools that I might not have tried otherwise. WordPress is one of these. It’s something of an ‘industry standard’ and for that reason we adopted it as the blogging platform for our company’s learning academy. This education and digital cultures course is the first time I’ve ‘delved under the hood’ of WordPress and it has been a very useful experience, enabling me to help our bloggers present their own blogs in a more accessible and organised way.
“Prof Heppell researched the topic for more than 10 years in 25 countries. Shoeless learning has been carried out in schools in Scandinavia and New Zealand and learning centres in other countries.
“Mrs Tichener said: “We are noticing that the children seem more relaxed and calmer than usual, we hope that in time we can measure their progress and see if it has made a difference in their achievements.”
I wonder if there are some parallels here in gamification of learning, informal versus formal style of e-learning etc. in that they might also provide a more relaxed environment.
via Twitter https://twitter.com/nigelchpainting
January 29, 2017 at 10:44AM
Well this elicited a few responses and some strong feelings from my fellow students that centred on the question of whether the Paralympics should be a separate event. I do see some merit in the point they’re making, as one could see this as a form of segregation, however, I believe the question I raised is still valid. In the same way that we specify criteria for examination conditions, such as open book, calculators allowed etc., will we need to specify similar conditions such as enhancements must be declared, switched off, put in airplane mode etc.?
Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki
