Tweet the week 18-24 september 2010

In my tweets last week I crossed a line: more personal tweets than before. Strange abberation because I don't think others are interested in my daily pursuits. None of these will appear here though.

The main theme of my (re)tweets is the Net generation. This was caused by the publication of a special section in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning titled 'debunking the net generation':

• Please, no more generation generalizations. Thank you. 4:21 PM Sep 22nd
  
• Good point about quest against assumptions RT @smartinez: Open myths, closed responses about ‘digital natives’ http://bit.ly/c9ctZY #edchat 2:16 PM Sep 22nd
  
•  @sbayne Journal of computer assisted learning: special issue on 'net generations': http://bit.ly/bNlfDc #mscel #mscidel 5:21 PM Sep 20th
  

Furthermore:

• @daveowhite Captured exactly what I was trying to put across, thanks :) RT @jobadge Notes from @daveowhite's #altc2010 barnstormer http://post.ly/ykyk 11:08 PM Sep 20th
  
• @shobhav 'Google before you Tweet' is the new 'think before you speak'.
  

Informing teachers about the debunked Netgeneration?

Main thought: How to make empirical evidence of young people's interactive media use available to teachers?.

A growing number of studies provides empirical data that 'debunks' the existence of a Netgeneration. Chris Jones (Reader in the Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK) created an international network of researchers working on this type of research. Jones organized with this network a symposium at the Networked Learning Conference 2010 (proceedings freely available). He als edited a special section in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. And another special section will be published soon in Learning, Media & Technology. I contributed to both the NLC symposium and the LMT special section.
The JCAL special section has been discussed on twitter and blogs. @smartinez on her blog added important comments to the availability of the research papers:

The Journal has some fabulous looking articles – but I can’t read them. Most of you can’t read them either. It’s a closed journal. Sorry, only for academics and researchers. Here’s the problem. The “digital native” myth is being perpetuated in popular culture, books, and keynote speeches, all easily accessible. These rebuttals, well-researched (I assume), peer-reviewed, and not sensationalized, are locked behind closed doors.

So when teachers hear that the curriculum is being modified to meet the needs of “digital natives” – what can they do? When educators present at conferences about this issue, should they cite the abstract to refute the silly (but free) sloganeering? When they talk to friends, neighbors, teachers, or the school board who think that kids “brains are different now” can they pull from a deep knowledge of brand new, relevant research? No – it’s not available

I agree, the papers should be publicly available for free. At the same time, I published my research in closed journals as well. This shows the dilemma for researchers which recently caused discussion on twitter and blogs.

However, I am not convinced that open access solves the problems: I know a lot of teachers who are interested in my results, but who can not find their way to journals, open access or not.

So the main question for me is: How can we bring our results to them, apart from emailing a paper to teachers in our network (which according to journal publishers is illegal...)?

I tried to solve this problem in the last few years by giving presentations at schools and publishing a report, available for free via Dutch institute Kennisnet. But something tells me there should be better ways...

Diversity in interactive media use among youths.

Leraar 24, a Dutch website discussing educational innovations by means of video-reports, published a video about my research on interactive media use among youths.

Considering young people's motives for interactive media use

Educational Research Review published my article on young people's motives for interactive media use. It contains a literature review of empirical evidence against the Net generation assumptions. The review was finished March 2009, just before we submitted the article. However, since that moment a number of studies were published that describe diversity in young people's interactive media use to more detail. These were not included in the review.

The abstract:

Young people's increasing use of interactive media has led to assertions about possible consequences for education. Rather than following assertions, we argue for theory-driven empirical research as a basis for education renewal. First, we review the existing empirical research, concluding that there is almost no theory-driven research available. Subsequently we discuss sensitizing concepts as a perspective for research on the relation between interactive media and youth culture. These concepts, derived from the literature, include insecurity, reflexivity, affinity spaces and shape-shifting portfolio people. With this perspective we examine social and cultural functions of interactive media within contemporary Western youth culture. This examination leads to questions for education and a subsequent plan for future research, with a focus on diversity among students and the development of local cultures. This entails studying both the motives as well as the actual use of interactive media, which should be the concern of educational practices.

Full text (subscription required)

Scientific publication as narcissism? Or is it lack of responsibility?

Dan Cohen is hacking the academy in a week (#hackacad). In his pursuit he talks about open access publishing and scholarly values. There appears to be an attitude problem among scientists: they increasingly use Googlebooks and other publicly available digital sources as jump off point for their research. However, when it comes to publishing their results, they opt for the traditional journal. Sharing will be done only after the finished product has been published and resulted in a new line on their CV.

Of course, this has much to do with academic funding and subsequent publication rules. All fair enough. But Cohen wants us to share work in progress. Weblogs, tweets, wikis...

Stephen Ramsay responds to Cohen's post by stating that scientists don't have time to read other's work. Therefore the judgement of value is outsourced to publishers. They will value the quality of research. In return you hand them over copyrights...

Honestly, I think our goal as a community should be to present our colleagues with as many inscrutable objects as possible. We should be making lots of videos, podcasts, maps, "books" with a hundred authors, blog posts, software, and web sites without any clear authorial control. And yes, we should put open content licenses on all of it and give it away to everyone we meet. And then we should dare our colleagues to tell us that our work isn't of sufficient intellectual quality.

Software for qualitative analysis

Jeffrey Keefer is currently attending the QI2010 conference (hashtag #icqi10) and liveblogging about sessions. His post about a session hosted by Judith Davidson and Silvana diGregorio on technology and qualitative analysis showed interesting new developments.
I always thought there was the Dutch application Kwalitan and there was Atlas-ti for QA. Of course, you could use wiki's or tagging applications. But recently, 'new' platforms such as mobile devices, have become hosts for QA software as well. A small list to be considered:

Judy is now sharing some sorts of apps that may help with this, including wikis, A.nnotate, tagging (del.icio.us), Everyday Lives (an ethnographic software tool for iPhones), blogs, IBM Social Research Group – Many Eyes, Word Tree (for document analysis), and how these things will move forward.

The use of interactive media among today’s youth

The pilot study about young people's interactive media use I did has been published by Computers in Human Behavior. Here's the abstract:

The intensive use of interactive media has led to assertions about the effect of these media on youth. This paper presents a quantitative study on the position of interactive media in young people’s lives. Rather than following the assumption of a homogeneous generation, we investigate the existence of a diversity of user patterns. The research question for this paper: Can patterns be found in the use of interactive media among youth? We answer this question by a survey among Dutch youngsters aged 10–23. Four clusters of interactive media users, namely Traditionalists, Gamers, Networkers and Producers were identified using cluster analysis. Behind these straightforward clusters, a complex whole of user activities can be found. Each cluster shows specific use of and opinions about interactive media. This provides a contextualized understanding of the position of interactive media in the lives of contemporary youth, and a nuanced conceptualization of the ‘Net generation’. This allows for studying the intricate relationship between youth culture, interactive media and learning.

Download the full text

Networked Learning Conference 2010

I just came back from two inspiring days at #nlc2010.

Repository:
conference site
Cloudworks
Matthew Allen's liveblog
Archived twitterstream
Jean Lave's article on learning

Intrinsicly motivated? Nah, sheer peer pressure...

While transcribing interviews with 15 year olds about their interactive media use, it struck me that they all reported to use social software, such as Hyves or Facebook, 'because all the others do so as well'. My first thought was "you're 15, you should be a non-conformist". My second thought was, referring to Brian: "You're all individuals"...

However, today a blogitem about the SXSW festival described the same issue. A girl (15 years old) reportedly told the audience during a presentation " All my friends do Photoshops, use Photoshop. So I use and learned Photoshop to impress them".

This indicates that, as far as the Net generation debate is concerned, peer-pressure is an important factor explaining the use of interactive media. A more constructive term is of course 'peer-driven participation', as defined by Ito (2008) in her report on the Digital Youth Project.