A year or so ago I was involved in the Ethics of Web 2.0 roadshow, led by John Traxler, which we took to ALT-C, Educa and one or two other places. Steve Wheeler attended those too, and today we got to revisit some of those issues in the final session at the seminar. The plan was that the people who attended the session get into groups of three, identify the top three ethical issue of using social media, then report back to the group. We went round the table and each group came up with their top one that hadn’t already been taken. This is what we got:

1. Code of conduct or legislation – People felt exposed as educators without guidelines for how to use social media. With a code of conduct then, even if problems occurred then they would have the safety net of a code of conduct to point to and say, well we abided by that, so it’s not really our fault. Steve brought up the idea of a digital tattoo, rather than a digital footprint, since our digital trail is something we’re stuck with and are inscribed with, it’s not something that just washes away next time there’s a high tide. I suppose we could have digital laser treatment to remove it, or is that over-extending the metaphor? The potential of being permanently tagged with our digital trace is the reason why some people resist the use of social media, and therefore is it fair to impose interaction with social media on our students, as there is the risk of them being exposed. I raised the possibility that society will respond to repeated exposure by social media, and that we will be more accepting of behaviour that we all commit, but prefer to pretend that society doesn’t. The teaching profession is particularly bad at this, primary school teachers are supposedly not allowed to fall down drunk on a Saturday night, as if this out of school behaviour reflects badly on their ability to do their job. My suggestion that we may see a reduction in hypocrisy was deemed to be optimistic (although everyone was kind enough not to point out my inability to spell it). The other suggestion was that actually if we become more accepting of outlier behaviour, then people may respond by becoming more extreme, and so perpetuate the issue, a sort of conservation of deviancy. Alternatively, as technology becomes better at tailoring our social networks and our internet searches to the types of things it’s already identified us as being interested in, we become more and more subject to a filter bubble, and anything that doesn’t adhere to our very select peer group as far as behaviour goes, is considered to be inappropriate. These issues therefore raise the importance of pseudonymity in online interactions and presents the importance of balancing our representations of professional identities versus authentic identities.

Next Wednesday I’m running the first dissemination event from the BIM Hub project. It’s a webinar organised by ELESIC and is at 12:30 GMT and can be connected to at this link http://uni-of-nottingham.adobeconnect.com/elesig. BIM Hub is the project I’m working on at Loughborough University, the project website is at http://bim-hub.lboro.ac.uk/ .

It’s a good time to be starting the dissemination because we’re getting to the point of not only having got lots of good data, but have been able to carry out the analysis of some of it.

To give you the story so far, BIM Hub links together students from three universities; Loughborough and Coventry in the UK and Ryerson in Canada. It also links together students from a variety of disciplines, but overall these are architecture, construction engineering and project management. The idea is that the students are given the task of designing a building to fit into a particular piece of land around Coventry, they have to come up with three concepts for the client (their tutors) and then have to go ahead and design something for the concept that’s chosen. The project is funded by the HEA and is a continuation of a previous one funded by the Hewlett Packard Catalyst program.

We’re planning to capture lots of different data sets, focus groups with students, surveys that they fill in, and analysis of some of the recordings of their interactions in GoToMeeting (which is the videoconferencing tool they are using).

Some of the things that have come out so far corroborate what we’ve seen before. Trust seems to be the most important component of a successful interaction. Failure to fulfil obligations as far as passing on contributions by agreed deadlines seems to be the biggest factor in undermining trust, and as we saw before with the HP project, that’s where the distanced nature of the project comes into play; it seems to be far more difficult to rebuild trust in a distanced environment than it is in a face to face one.

There were advantages to working across institutions however. The students felt it was a more authentic simulation of an actual working activity. Since in the face-to-face situations they tend to work with friends, working inter-institutionally meant that they had to present a professional persona to people who they did not know, and represent their institution to others. However, quite a few (about half) complained that working across screens was not as engaging as f2f and claimed that in a working situation they would still meet others at least once.

Part of the problem with lack of engagement appeared to be (when watching the videos of the meetings) the very limited social presence that the students presented online. The meetings did not start off with any pleasantries, the students only saw each others video in brief glimpses when they were switching between windows. Interactions took place for long periods of time in audio only.

Where students did make their presence felt was in the way they interacting with the diagrams on the screen. As you can see in the image above, the students were drawing on the plans in real time, what you need the video to see is how the scribbling was used to emphasise, clarify and draw attention to, specific parts of the image that were the centre of discussion. This wasn’t a skill that the students started with, in other videos you can see them trying to describe stuff orally, then give up and use the images from plans, gradually learning to express themselves at a distance. In very early videos, the students mumble and aimlessly flick through paper plans – separated from each other in their own rooms, and failing to bridge the distance between them.

Other skills we see develop across the videos are basic elements of structuring meetings, using agendas, clarifying action points, timing the discussions. The focus groups confirm this: the students state that one of the most important things they learnt from the exercise was the importance of things such as minutes and agendas in ensuring meetings went smoothly – the generic collaboration skills are being discovered as much as the skills specific to online working.

What was impressive was the fluidity and competency with which the students moved between different technologies. Dropbox was used for organising and sharing documents, GoToMeeting for synchronous communication, emails for correspondence and Facebook for clarifying communications and organising meetings. It was only the one or two groups who crossed these demarcations (eg using FB to share documents ) that ran into confusion, although all had tech problems with the hardware needed to run GTM, and all had software incompatibility problems.

They also got over all the cultural/language problems. For example, every time a floor was mentioned it was accompanied by “first for us, second for you” and so on. All seemed to struggle with timezone issues, particularly in the week between UK clocks going back and Canadian clocks going back. North American candy companies have a lot to answer for.

The ease of use of the technology, the development of social presence, the application of project management and time management techniques all seem to develop in concert with each other. One of the hypotheses we’re exploring is that these things are interdependent; for effective collaboration online all of these factors need to be exhibited – and we won’t see competent project management techniques without a correlating development of online presence. The question then becomes; how much of these skills that the students learn can we pre-empt by just telling them this stuff at the start? Experience in staff development tells me that there’s no point telling people in advance, they don’t really listen until things go wrong. But maybe students would be more mature about paying attention than staff are.

There’s a phenomenon in media studies called trickle up, the idea that cultural themes, ideas, creativity, start on a smaller scale and then get adopted by larger and more prominent media outlets and then become mainstream. The tendency possibly happens more nowadays due to more people getting into being creative and sharing their outputs globally. Advertising agencies look at what DIY animators are doing and think “that looks rather good” and copy it, or better yet employ the animators in their campaigns, or film companies see character designs from cartoonists and rip them off, or blogs become well-known and get turned into novels and then films. It’s an important concept I think, because so much of our cultural assumptions are that it happens the other way round, media create ideas, which then become copied by the masses. Trickle up is far more common than trickle down as far as I can see.

This blog post has been prompted by two different conversations I’ve had about two examples. The first came out of a tweet from my friend Sarah Sherman, who at a conference tweeted, “anyone remember the Swap Shop logo?” to which i replied that I was more of a TISWAS person myself. When I was at school there were definitely two camps of people, you were either a TISWAS person or a Swap Shop one. When TISWAS started it was a bit staid, one person, then two people at a desk, which then opened out into a studio of messy kids shouting at each other, phantom flan flingers, cages, grunge. If there was ever an animal segment, the animal would escape and the hosts would have to run round the studio trying to catch it, slipping on bits of flan. It was anarchic, surreal, raucous and a bad influence. Swap Shop on the other hand was quiet, reserved, based around the idea of exchanging material goods. The children were well-behaved and asked the guests serious questions. It was dull, reserved and set out to improve the audience. I could see why either could appeal to an audience, but for me TISWAS was full of the kind of people I wanted to hang out with, Swap Shop was full of the sort of people I resorted to hanging out with.

Where the trickle up example comes in though was that TISWAS started several years before Swap Shop, but on ATV, back in the days when ITV had a lot of regional programming. It was the first of the model of an entire Saturday morning show, but with segments of cartoons etc. The BBC copied the idea, gave it the swapping twist, and made it national. Fair enough. Most TV entails stealing a format, changing it around slightly, then representing it as your own.

Where the trickle up phenomenon becomes less acceptable though, is often the way that the larger media outlets create a revisionist history which pretends the previous versions didn’t exist. In a recent TV celebration, the BBC did a programme called “It all started with Swap Shop” as if the precursor didn’t exist, and as if they could get away with the retcon because not everyone had seen the original. That kind of revisionist history of how things were created underplays the role of the smaller outlets and the less well-know creators in order to take all the credit for itself. It’s this side of it that annoys me; not least because all too often people who aren’t familiar with the origins fall for it and fail to recognise where the true origins lie.

The same has been happening on the BBC with the 50th Dr Who celebrations. Bringing back Dr Who was a difficult process for Russel T Davies I’m sure. There were a lot of people at the BBC who needed to be convinced of its relevance to a modern audience I’m sure, but all the documentaries I’ve seen about it (for example, the Culture Show one last week) make out that they were working from a blank slate, that there was no idea whether it would work if it was brought up to date. And yet there was six years of Dr Who, remodelled for a modern audience, keeping the essential elements but changing the tone and the direction, in the Big Finish audio material, which had been going since 1999. The nu Who exactly matches that direction and timbre, and uses many of the writers (and some of the scripts) so it’s no coincidence. And yet the influential role they’ve had in the 21st century regeneration have been written out of the history. In fact even before the 9th Doctor appeared, there was a TV discussion between a journalist and Sylveste McCoy (oh that dates me, spelling his name without the “r”) where the arrogant twat of a journalist was saying how it couldn’t work, because it was so old-fashioned in its essence, to which SM replied, “well it’s been working fine for years on audio”. Hopefully that segment is still around somewhere because it would be great to see him held up to public ridicule now.

So — I’m actually relieved I didn’t pursue a career in media. I could imagine how galling it could be to have your contribution overlooked and written out of history, and for someone else to take the credit for your innovation. In this job, both the education aspect and the academic aspect, people seem (on the whole) scrupulously fair about attributing ideas. The trickle up thing happens just as much, the larger organisations trawl the practice of teachers in the classroom for idea, or ask for them to be contributed to reports, but always the origin is acknowledged. In fact there was an excellent JISC programme called LEX which focused on drawing ideas from students themselves, and integrating those into practice. Wherever possible those were credited too. If only the media industry had the same ethos.