That Zengestrom post - scholarship or just 'sociality'?

Some colleagues and I at IET spent an hour yesterday discussing Jyri Engeström's six-year-old posting about 'object-centred sociality' (nb: my earlier posting on this). (I include some of the notes I made about the post itself below).

I introduced this as a topic for our (face-to-face) reading group partly because I'm interested in the theory of object-centred sociality but also because I wanted to see whether talking about a blog post would be different from discussing a journal article, which is what we usually do in the reading group. This seemed to me to be relevant to our ongoing consideration of what is involved in digital scholarship.

In the event, I thought it was a different kind of discussion, although I'm not sure my colleagues agreed with me.

For a start, the presence of the text itself was ambiguous. Usually everyone prints out the article & sits around in a circle holding it in front of them. In this case, one or two people had printed it out, a couple had it on their laptops  (although not necessarily open in front of them), another had it on his phone, another didn't have it at all (although they said they had read it.)  It all felt a bit ephemeral to me, with some of the more extended features of the text (its links out,  its later follow-up postings etc.)  not present at all even when they were being discussed.

And then, I felt that the discussion was more reflexive than usual – with people talking more about their own experiences with social media rather than about what Engestrom might be saying about Knor Cetina's theory, or what the commenters might be saying about Engestrom's views.

Lots of interesting points were raised however: the relation between links in a blog post and references in an academic article; the effects on the persistent text of its links becoming broken over time; knowing where the boundaries of a blog text actually finish...    

On the issue of digital scholarship, it seemed to down to whether we see Engestrom's post as a kind of  mini-example of 'good ' conventional scholarship (well-researched, concisely structured and expressed, appropriately referenced etc.)  or whether we are prepared to take the whole set of connected texts (comments, linked sites follow-up texts) as representing a different kind of, more collaborative, scholarship.

Whilst I'm broadly in favour of the latter view, my problem with it in this case is what has happened to Knorr-Cetina's principled notion of 'objects of sociality' in the translation from Engestrom's invoking of it to account for the failure of some social networking practices in 2005 (45 citations in Google scholar), to, for example, Hugh McLeod's distinctly non-scholarly appropriation of it to publicise his artwork 2 years later (2950 hits on Google).

Reading through the 100 comments on Engestrom's post I only managed to find two  that referred back to Knorr-Cetina.  Most of the other constructive ones ran with the issue of  what makes social networking successful or otherwise, without really bothering whether it might be evidence of a 'post-social' turn  in contemporary social life or not!  Understandable it may be, but rather more digital than scholarly I thought.

****************************

Some notes  on Engestrom's post:

This was prompted by a blog post from Russell Beattie http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008411 explaining that he had decided to close his LinkedIn account because he had too many contacts and nothing to say to any of them, and the system would have required him to delete them individually.

E. claims there is a 'profound confusion about the nature of sociality' due to the use of the term social network to refer to a 'map of the relationships between individuals’.

He proposes an alternative approach to social networks – based on Knorr Cetina - and sets out to explain how this approach accounts for why some social networking services succeed while others don't.

Summary of comments:

<><><>  <><><> 

Content topic	No. of comments
Google Maps, Flickr and Camera Phones as an infrastructure for new location-centred social software	7
Open question/development of original topic	28
General approval/re-blog	20
Own site/blog/talks/promotions	24
Trackbacks	5
Critical	7
Personal	2
Misc/irrelevant/spam	18
Responses from JE	1

Google search: Jyri Engeström "the case for object-centered sociality" -site:www.zengestrom.com/

Approx 2760 results (in all languages), 1930 in English

 Approx 45 citations found by Google Scholar including articles in: - British Journal of Educational Technology, Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, Interactive Learning Environments, Open Learning, Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group, Computers and Composition…

 Subsequent posts on Zengestrom.com on the theme of sociality:

 June 10, 2005 –announcing his talk on object centred sociality at Reboot conference in Copenhagen (links to summaries on David Weinberger's blog, Bohellz blog, PowerPoint and PDF no longer work).

19 comments on this post: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/06/speaking-on-object-centered-sociality-at-reboot-updated-with-slides.html#comments

December 3, 2006 – announcing his talk at the MSN-sponsored Innovate event in Stockholm, on social objects (link broken).

3 comments on this post: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/12/social-objects-talk-in-stockholm.html#comments

September 17, 2007 – comment on cartoonist Hugh MacLeod on wine as a social object with reference to a label created for Microsoft and its employees. Link to MacLeod's website (May 18, 2008)  'Free cartoons as social objects http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/cat_microsoft_blue_monster_series.html

10 comments

 August 15, 2008 –  comment relating object centred sociality to Google Readers updated Shared Items functionality. Chat conversation as a social object.

February 13, 2010 – another message about Hugh MacLeod on social objects for beginners (from 2007) (http://gapingvoid.com/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beginners/)

6 comments

Digital literacy events: Revisiting the twitter debate (rather long post)

I'm going to talk a bit about the LIDU twitter debate at the Society for Research in Higher Education conference next week, so I thought I would revisit it here and create a handy link for myself, for the talk (which makes this post a kind of meta literacy event!).

The twitter debate illustrates the ideological dimension of literacy practices - how communities use them to include or exclude others - so it's quite a good case to use to combat the relentless digital-literacy-as-online-skills discourse that seems to be rather setting the agenda for these kind of discussions at the moment.

I've illustrated it to break up the textiness a bit...

************************************************

It was four o'clock on a sunny autumn afternoon, and the seminar had reached its final plenary session. CJ, in his role as discussant, was summarising the events of the day. Behind him was a large data projection screen. There were about 30 people in the audience, sitting informally in rows. Some of them had notebooks in which they were writing, others were using laptops. Plenty were just listening. It was a typical academic seminar in 'winding-up' mode.

To illustrate what he was saying  about the difficulty of separating technology from practice, CJ projected a view of the live twitter stream to which a few of the audience had been, and were still, posting. The twitter stream remained displayed on the wall behind him while he continued his summary, scrolling occasionally as people in the room continued to post comments.

When the summary had finished, and the audience was invited to respond, a participant said that she felt a surprisingly strong reaction to the the twitter stream (still projected on the wall) which was distracting and intrusive. She felt irritated by the people who were tweeting, as if they were absenting themselves from the live group in order to talk to unseen others.

The tweeters responded that being able to maintain contact with their remote networks enhanced their participation in the seminar. One said that coming from the learning technology world it had not occurred to her that people might object to tweeting, or to the stream being made public.

Others joined in the dispute, but it was relatively mild, nobody punched anyone, and the whole thing was put to rest after about 10 minutes when the projection was switched off and the conversation took another tack. However, most of the tweeting stopped.

Moreover, the episode left its mark on the memories of several of the participants. Feelings were involved: objectors experienced strong negative reactions, some of the tweeters felt got at,  exasperated by the objections. Also, the event disrupted the 'knowledge agenda' of the group: a seminar about literacy in the University was forced to see its own practices as problematic, not just those involved in teaching students. The discussion was followed up a few days later on the seminar blog. It was still being referred to 12 months later, in the third seminar, and here am I rehashing it again after two years.

For me it illustrates the ‘ideological’ dimension of literacy as social practice really well. It was an example of contested social action -- a struggle for the legitimacy of a certain kind of text. The twitter stream, both online and as projected onto the wall of the seminar room at this time, is the text – its legitimacy as part of an academic seminar is under attack.

Social literacy has operational, cultural, and critical dimensions. At the operational level there are skills involved in using twitter to communicate. But it isn't inability to use the tool, or to write the kind of things that tweeters write, that causes the non-users to object. They don’t want to use it. I make this rather obvious point to demonstrate the problems of ‘competence deficit' models of literacy. Whilst using twitter may be an aspect of 'digital literacy', not using twitter can’t (yet) be seen as indicative of digital illiteracy.

(It is possible that there are aspects of the operational skill of tweeting which are to do with managing the general communicative context, rather than the specific requirements of the tool, and which might prove taxing for anyone who wasn't practised at it. For example, an engaged tweeter will not only be posting their own comments in parallel with their participation in a face-to-face discussion, they will also be receiving and replying to the comments of others, both present and remote. Multitasking of this kind is characteristic of digital social communication in general and is supposed to be easier for ‘digital natives’ to do successfully, because of personal disposition and, some say, cognitive adaptation (see Prensky and others). But the key word here is 'successfully' because determining what is successful in terms of communication is a cultural as well as an operational matter. In literacy, performance enacts social relations as well as individual skills.

If twittering is seen as a literacy practice for this seminar, it is clear that operational and cultural dimensions are aligned for some participants but not for others. For one participant, prominent as an expert in the learning technology community, there is no reason not to tweet at an academic seminar. For another, recognised as expert in the literacy community, it feels as if people are engaged in private phone conversations with others not present. The management of focus of attention at an academic seminar is a cultural practice that has developed over time. The purpose of maintaining a single focus of attention, as far as possible, is to further the practice of debate, an academic tradition. At one level those who were tweeting could argue that their activities were not undermining debate, but at another level, some of their colleagues clearly did feel undermined - there were other conversations going on, to which they were not party, somehow devaluing the seminar itself as the focus of the discussion.

Both groups in this case seemed to feel that they were being marginalised or otherwise disempowered by the practices of the other. Empowerment and marginalisation are the central 'problem' of literacy at the critical or ideological level.

Both online and face-to-face debate are characteristic of academic discourse around learning technology. But when they happen at the same time participants can come to see others' alignment of operational skills and cultural practice as disruptive or constraining to their own expression. This is fertile ground for the emergence of a critical sensibility, focused firstly on whose practice has appropriated the right to dominate, and then subsequently on how to recognise the rights of all. The critical dimension of literacy is its ideological expression, the manner in which practices function to 'normalise' power relations, including marginalisation, in a social group. Both traditional academic debate, and contemporary social networking, argue for their role as forces for the democratisation of knowledge. However, as we've seen, the practices of each can be perceived as disruptive, or oppressive, by the practitioners of the other. In bringing these (unsuspected, problematic) perceptions into the open and accounting for them through a social theory, such as the theory of literacy as social practice, a larger truth underlying their apparent opposition can be signalled -- the truth that all communication practices privilege some and disadvantage others.

English in the global academy

Here's (what I thought was) a perfectly good English sentence that I included in a paper that I submitted to a certain educational technology journal:

The role of teachers who have little or no face-to-face contact with their students, and their use of available online resources to support such engagement, is the focus of this paper.

One referee objected to it, and to several others like it, and advised me to...

 "consider using a concise subject to start a sentence, not a long prep phrase or modifying clause".

Here's another of the modifying-clause offenders:

Evidence of ways in which these tutors perceive their students to be increasingly challenged by the conventions of academic writing was provided by a survey carried out in 2008.

Now, whilst I'm satisfied there is nothing grammatically wrong with these sentences I was taken aback to read that the same referee found them 'confusing' and 'difficult to understand'. Aside from the embarrassment that this causes me, as a English-speaking academic writing about the teaching of academic writing, I'm quite deflated by this. It suggests that my academic literacy skills are not as they should be.

In a world where English is being adopted and adapted by readers and writers from a huge diversity of educational and linguistic backgrounds, I may have to learn to modify not just my sentences but my whole approach to writing in English. Out with 'left-branching' rhetoric (politically suspect too)! In with the 'concise subject' as theme. I stand corrected.

Still, I vaguely yearn for readers like those the Capital Community College Foundation advises:

" if, as reader, you let yourself go a bit, there's a well earned delight in finding yourself at the end of such a sentence, having successfully navigated its shoals."

Object-centred sociality – what happened to this discussion?

Jyri Engeström (not to be confused with Yrjö Engeström – which I did at first) wrote a blog post back in 2005 entitled Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality, which attracted about 100 comments and seemed to open up an avenue of discussion about social media and social networks that look like leading to some interesting new theory, and perhaps new approaches to the design of social media.

In fact, not much came of it. Apart from a couple of responses in other blogs at the time, mainly of the 'wow cool'  ilk, and subsequent journal articles (Hoogenbloom et al 2007), Conole & Culver (2009)  the idea seems to have missed its moment.

I think this might be because it was the approaches to the design of social media rather than the interesting new theory that caught people's attention. Engstrom's post was apparently triggered by reading Russel Beattie's account of why he was stopping using LinkedIn.  Many of the comments addressed the issue of social networks needing something to socialise about and discussed the pros and cons of systems that support the sharing of different kinds of 'objects'. The authors of the two journal articles referred to above also pick up the idea of the object as a kind of focus for the relation between people in a network, and discuss the design of systems  intended to facilitate object-centred exchanges conceived in this way.

My own reading of the work of Knorr-Cetina , cited by Engstrom, however, is that she was conceptualising object-centred sociality as being about relations between people and objects – where objects include epistemic entities, like theories, models, descriptions of things in the world. In describing these relations as sociality, she ascribes reciprocal agency to the objects themselves - a relation markedly different from our usual view of objects as either instruments or commodities. The way that this kind of socialty 'aggregates' into relations amongst human collectives (networks, communities etc.) is not really addressed.

Knorr-Cetina's kind of thinking seems to me to be quite different from what is going on in the discussions referred to above.  It is much more challenging for a start, and may be able to lead us to quite different ways of conceptualising the objects of our knowledge construction activities online. For example, what is the difference in the 'sociality' of my relation to each of the two 'objects' pictured below?

 

On the left, the journal where I found Knorr-Cetina's article in the OU library.  On the right,  the same journal on the Internet (sadly not going back to 1997 - hence the library ).

I'm not going to attempt to answer my own question (above) in this post - for the time being it will have to remain rhetorical!  Suffice it to say, that Knorr-Cetina's concept of an epistemic object includes the dimension of textuality – the capacity to be represented via different semiotic systems.  You can see where I  might be going with this....  textuality is also central to concepts of literacy.

Do we still need academic journals?

As we in the UK higher education sector approach the next round of our periodic national research assessment exercise (this time hubristically called the 'Research Excellence Framework') the pressure to publish in 'high-impact' journals intensifies. One of my colleagues has, in fact, this minute sent round some advice on identifying high impact journals, and a couple of useful websites, e.g. the Journal Citation Reports Website: http://admin-apps.webofknowledge.com/JCR/JCR

Impact in journals, as we all know, is calculated on the average number of citations each paper published in the journal gets. Citations are regarded as measure of the extent that papers are read, indicating their contribution to a particular field, but they may also be a measure of the overlap between readership and authorship in a particular journal. If a group of authors frequently publish in a particular journal and frequently cite their own and each other's work in their papers, the impact factor for that journal goes up.

Reviewing my own case,  I've put myself at a disadvantage (I only just managed to scrape into the previous two research assessment exercises) as I haven't tended to pay much attention the impact factors of the journals I publish in. This is because since I stopped being part of a particular scholarly community writing about computer-assisted language learning, in the late 1990s, I  haven't tended to pay much attention to journals for reading purposes at all.  Almost everything I read I find in the reference lists of papers and articles, or through keyword searching in databases and through Google.  Yes, these sources are usually organised into journals, and I'll sometimes find myself downloading two or three papers from the same journal, especially if there has been a special edition in in an area I'm interested in, but my point is that I don't go to the journals first,  I find them incidentally while I search for papers on topics.

I think my 'topic-driven' behaviour is a consequence of the fact that there aren't any journals   dedicated to 'literacy and technology in higher education', which is how I define my interests.    Not only does this mean that I don't have a natural home to publish in, but it also means there are no obvious other authors whose work I can follow consistently - or who are likely to follow mine - as most other authors sensibly associate themselves with particular fields and journals.

As I look through my CV I realise that, not only do I not publish consistently in a single journal, but I haven't published in the same journal twice in the last 10 years!   Here are some of the journals where I've published one paper in the last 10 years:

ReCALL
Distance Education
Language and Education
Journal of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education
Education communication and information
E-learning
International Journal of Educational Research
Teaching in Higher Education 
With this range it's not surprising my citation count isn't very impressive. I've managed to maintain a research profile within educational technology by writing and editing books and book chapters, although this would probably serve me in better stead as far as citations are concerned in the Humanities than it does in the social sciences.

 ...and more recently I've been exploring avenues of digital scholarship such as with this blog (although if comments are the equivalent of citations there's not much progress here either).

For myself, and I think quite a lot of other academics in interdisciplinary fields, the identity and the impact factor of a journal is not the main consideration, rather whether some of the people whose work we are citing have published there, giving us an idea of who we are writing for. As  I tend to read quite eclectically, and very seldom from some of the journals with high impact factors in what is supposed to be my official REF-oriented field - educational technology - I find myself wandering from subfield to subfield around the topics  of literacy, language, pedagogy, e-learning, social theory, culture, higher education practice, teaching and learning, etc etc . Not very scholarly I admit,  and not very efficient either.  No way to have an impact but still rather satisfying all the same.

To answer my own question - yes I think we do still need journals, to help us organise our thinking and to ensure that we think about how we write for different audiences. (This only really works, of course, if we write for lots of them, which brings this argument full circle!).

Reflections on the Bayeux tapestry

The famous multimodal tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 combines figurative images (the events depicted), symbolic images (around the borders), and written text (the Latin commentary), all mediated via a popular representational technology of the time -- embroidery. Here's a typical section of it:

This bit shows William' s men feasting before they get on the boats for England. (Actually this is not a picture of the original tapestry, but a drawing I did  of it while I was on holiday. Yes they did have postcards that I could have bought but I wanted to see how difficult it would be to draw. The hardest bit turned out to be getting the colours something like the originals. I don't think I was particularly successful here - despite having 10 times as many colours at my disposal than the original authors did).

It's interesting too from a literacy-and-technology point of view, not least because you wonder why they bothered with the literacy bit - the Latin commentary which runs throughout the strip and simply describes what you can see happening. It identifies some of the characters, like the Bishop (Odo) in this example,  but they could have done that just as easily with little labels, like political cartoonists do today. You can read the whole text at http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources/bayeux/bayeuxIndex1.html  and it's clear it must have added quite a bit of work to the overall job. Given the relatively few people at the time who could actually read it (mainly the bishop and his mates),  you wonder if the authors were thinking about readers from the future who might not necessarily already know the story-- like putting a message in a time capsule. Or perhaps they were using the Latin as a kind of stamp of authority - validating the account, as it were, by giving the Church a hand in it.  

Also interesting are the little pictures in the borders top and bottom which as well as decorating the strip apparently contain all sorts of allusions to Aesop and other myths and fables.  According to middle-ages.org (http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/bayeux-tapestry.htm) the running theme  of these references is cunning  and betrayal -- and interesting literary, if not exactly literate, device.   

Is tweeting literacy? Or just short-winded conversation?

This is a pic I took sitting in the observation room of the IET Ambient Lab, here at the OU, during a focus group discussion set up by colleagues on the digital scholarship project, that I happened to be observing. The group was discussing their, and other people's, use of twitter for professional communication.

The group is being vidoed live - shown on the screen on the left. At the same time, other colleagues around the university are discussing the same questions on twitter -- shown on the screen on the right. (One of the group facilitators is tweeting the questions as they are asked). The feed from this twitter discussion is projected on the wall in the room where the live group are, but only one of them is paying any attention to it -- she's actually tweeting to the remote group in between contributing to the discussion of the 'present' group.

A lot more words are being used, inevitably, in the face-to-face discussion. And other signs are being used too - facial expressions, body language, as well as the  bits of paper and other media that the facilitators have on the table. By contrast, the tweeters  get through fewer words (even though there is no break in the stream) and their visual signals are limited to punctuation, capitals, smileys, and the odd URL.

Both groups are discussing what they do with technology. The focus group reflect across a range of life and work contexts, going on at length and wandering off at tangents. The twitter group stick mainly to talking about twitter. They 'talk' in turn, are very concise, and generally keep to the point.

I would love to do a proper discourse analysis comparing these two discussions around the same topic. I wonder if it would provide me with grounds to talk about the twitter activity as 'literacy', in a way that I could not do with the face-to-face discussion?  Or would it show the twitter stream to be basically the same kind of conversation, only with a lot less said?