Researching scholarship in the age of the internet

In this paper I review current debates about the nature of scholarship in higher education (following Boyer 1990) and the impact of digital communication practices on its role in research and teaching (e.g. Borgman 2007, Pearce et al 2010), and discuss a methodological framework for researching these issues, drawing on work in Literacies for Learning (Ivani? et al 2007) and Socio-technical Interaction (Kling et al 2003)

Literacy in the Digital University – developing a research agenda

This paper summarises outcomes from an ESRC-funded seminar series, held between October 2009 and April 2011, which brought together researchers and practitioners involved in four research projects focused, in different ways, on literacy, tertiary education, and digital communication. Apart from disseminating the research of the four projects involved, the seminars also set out to develop an agenda for new research, exploring current and predicted developments in practices around literacy and digital communication in higher and further education. The paper gives some background on the four projects involved and summarises the different approaches to researching literacy that they brought to the seminars. Broad research themes emerging from the seminars are presented and discussed

Academic literacies in the digital university

Academic Literacies is an international field of study concerned with literacies and learning in tertiary education. Some recent work in this field has focused on online and elearning environments. In our book of 2007 (Goodfellow & Lea 2007) we used an academic literacies perspective to critique what we see as the focus in much elearning practice on the 'management of learning' at the expense of disciplinary pedagogies. We argued for attention to be paid to the centrality of texts, however mediated, in the construction of knowledge and the practices of learning. Our current focus on the 'digital' extends this critique to engage with three major discourses of technology currently constructing the 'digital age' in relation to education. The first is the metaphor of the 'digital native' or 'net generation'. The second is the discourse of 'Learning 2.0, the third is the trope of the 'unbundled university'. We conclude that we need to pay much more attention to textual practice around learning and scholarship,and that, as researchers and scholars, we need to work for the reconciliation of new discourses of the digital with the continuing development of critical pedagogical and social practice in the academy and the public sphere

Introduction: a Frame for the Discussion of Learning Cultures

In this chapter the authors identify a gap in research on culture in online learning and offer a frame for the discussion of the best-known frameworks available for cultural analysis outside the online world. They go on to describe the developments driving the need to problematize 'learning cultures' for the online world, such as the growth of multiculturality, the expansion of transnational e-learning and new media communication practices

Conclusion: Directions for Research in Online Learning Cultures

In this chapter, the authors review issues currently under-represented in research on the cultural dimensions of e-learning, such as the institutional cultural hegemony over pedagogy that is enjoyed by Westernized constructions of learning and teaching, identity-work carried out by participants in linguistic and cultural online communication, and issues of power and embodiment in network-based language learning. The Open Educational Resources initiative is identified as a site for future research on learning cultures

Web-based writing support: making it useable for distance teachers

This paper considers the issues that distance teachers in higher education who are not writing specialists face in supporting their students’ academic writing development. We discuss the usefulness of open web-based writing support resources, and propose the need for a system that serves as an interface with these resources. Such a system should help teachers to make quick selections of materials that can be offered to students to address specific problems in the students’ assignments. We consider principles for the design of such a system, based on the experience of building and testing a small prototype for tutors on an Open University Masters in Education course

A computer-based strategy for foreign-language vocabulary-learning

This work sets out to establish principles for the design and evaluation of a computer-based vocabulary-learning strategy for foreign language learners. The strategy is intended to assist non-beginner learners who are working on their own, to acquire new words in such a way that they will be available when needed in subsequent communicative situations.The nature of vocabulary-learning is examined from linguistic, psychological and educational perspectives, and a strategy for autonomous learning is derived which emphasizes the processes of: selection of new items from text, mental lexicon- building through the association of items on the basis of their lexical-structural features, and practising productive recall of items by activating the same associations as were used to build the mental network. This strategy is considered from the point of view of the support it would need from a computer-based interaction, and the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) for vocabulary is reviewed for examples of system design which meet the strategic and interactional requirements. Specifications are produced, based on general principles for the design of computer-assisted learning, and on current technological capability to integrate large text-databases and on-line lexical tools such as dictionaries etc., within an interface which facilitates learner control and exploration. Questions of evaluation are considered, in the light of the computer's ability to record interaction data, and a psycholinguistic model of word production is proposed as a basis for assessing the learner's performance in terms of processes as well as quantitative 'end product'. A general model of deep and surface approaches to learning is then adduced to provide a way of interpreting learner subjective data, and an independent means of evaluating the quality of the learning outcome.A system implementing the strategy is tested with learners of Spanish and English, and the quantitative and qualitative data on learning process and outcome is analyzed in depth. The system is shown to support the learning objectives for learners who adopt a deep approach, or whose approach complements the assumptions of the design in some way, and the general design principles are therefore considered as validated. Some aspects of the strategy related to lexicon-building, however, are shown to be inadequately supported, as is the capability of the system to help learners remediate surface approaches. The main conclusion of the study is that, whilst learner exploration of powerful lexical information resources is essential for autonomous vocabulary-learning, on-line tutorial help of the kind that will encourage deep rather than surface approaches, is needed to optimise the quality of the learning outcome

Literacy practice, pedagogy, and the ‘digital university’

This paper applies a critical social literacy perspective to the idea that contemporary pedagogies of the ‘digital university’ are involved in transforming not only the writing practices of the university but also its larger social role. It argues that the values of written scholarship that have underpinned the university’s contribution to the public good in the modern age are still important to its pedagogy in current times of increased focus on its contribution to private benefit. It draws on examples from classroom practice in UK universities to suggest that pedagogy is becoming increasingly polarised between academic writing that attempts to inscribe ‘truth’ values, and digital knowledge work that is focused on ‘use’ values. It discusses the nature of academic literacy practices in the digital university and argues that teachers and academics who wish to ensure that the traditional value of university scholarship to the public good is preserved in the emerging ‘digital university’, need to do so by developing their own practices of digital scholarship

‘You’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy at the Open University

This article explores the effectiveness of the Open University’s (OU’s) Digital and information literacy (DIL) framework (Reedy and Goodfellow, 2012) in promoting the integration of digital skills into modules and qualifications - a key strategic priority for the university - and in contributing to cultural change in the digital practices of teachers and learners - a key aim for the UK HE sector as a whole. We trace the history of digital and information literacy in the OU curriculum and elsewhere, leading up to the development of the framework. Four sets of interviews tell the story of academic and library staff engagement with it. These case studies are supplemented by two further interviews giving the perspective of OU middle managers responsible respectively for learning design and digital and information literacy development. We evaluate the success of the framework, and suggest how it might be further developed in future. Conclusions point strongly towards the need to involve students in shaping their own skills development, as found in other recent research (for example, Jisc, 2011a; 2011b)

Supporting language students' interactions in Web-based conferencing

In this study we look at online tutor strategies for the support of students learning a second language with the help of a Web-based asynchronous textual conference. Our previous research has shown us that in such a conference environment, communicative activities can be mixed with reflective tasks, where students are encouraged to exchange reflections on the language being studied, and on their own learning experience. While we have found that such a mix can be beneficial for language learning, nevertheless there are further efforts to be made in persuading learners to integrate linguistic task completion with reflective work, in an interactive mode. Online tutors have an important role to play in furthering this aim, and in this study we look at the strategies used by three tutors who participated in a project with students of French at the Open University in 1998. First we propose a categorisation - according to message-type - of interactions found in the project's three conferences. Then we compare interactions in the three groups and, based on the pattern and content of tutor intervention, we distinguish between two main tutorial styles, which we associate with two different types of student behaviour, one more oriented towards communication, and the other more reflective. We conclude by suggesting ways in which tutors could support online learners in trying to integrate those learning approaches more closely