Reflection #3 - Litrature Review

“Whether they recognize it or not, scholars are part of a complex techno-cultural system that is ever changing”

 (Veletsianos and Kimmons: 2012)

Literature Review on the Staff digital Literacy Project

This literature study provides the background to my project aimed at improving staff digital literacy by assisting a group of staff members to enhance their digital profiles. “Digital literacy involves more than the mere ability to use software or operate a digital device; it includes a large variety of complex cognitive, motor, sociological, and emotional skills, which users need in order to function effectively in digital environments.” (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004: 93) 

In my experience, oftentimes, we are so focused on improving the digital abilities of our students that we neglect this essential scholarly attribute in our teaching and research staff.   The idea behind my study was inspired in part by a presentation by Laura Czerniewicz at UCT entitled “Academic’s Online Presence – Assessing and Shaping your Visibility.” (2012)  In order to ensure participation and sustainability I set out to ensure that they would attain easily visible and discernible benefits by participating.  The outcomes of the project are identified as:

•             Improved digital literacy.

•             A free online image makeover.

•             Improved digital curatorship of both research as well as choice presentations.

•             The future expansion of academic research networks.

•             The ability to assess how often their online presence/work are being viewed or utilised.

•             Participation in the growing open access environment.

As a point of departure it has become a fact that most scholars rely on the Web to enhance collaboration and research visibility.  “Academics wishing to be seen as thought leaders in their discipline need to be intentional about how, when, and what shows up when someone uses a search engine like Google to search on their name or area(s) of research.” (Dunlap, J. & Lownthal, P.; 2012: 2)  In a 2012 paper by Veletsianos and Kimmons they examine the relationship between scholarly practice and technology and explore how online social networks foster a new form of scholarship which they call Networked Participatory Scholarship.  Pierce et al’s paper entitled “Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work.” Discusses the importance of reconsidering what constitutes scholarship in the digital age and stresses the importance of integrating research with teaching.  The authors underline the power that technology has to change all facets of scholarship and the increasing role of open scholarship.

“The 2010 Horizon Report identifies some of the following trends as key drivers of technology adoption in higher education for the period 2010 through 2015 :

•        The abundance of online resources and relationships inviting a rethink of the educators’ role in sense‐making, coaching and credentialing.

•        An increased emphasis on, and expectation of, ubiquitous, just‐in‐time, augmented, personalised and informal learning.

•        The work of students being seen as more collaborative in nature and therefore there is potential for more intra‐ and inter‐ institutional collaboration.” (Conole, G. &  Alevizou; 10: 2010)

Weller postulates that such trends then pose important questions about the nature of the future scholar:

•        How will they conduct research?

•        How and what will they teach?

•        What will be the key skills they need?

 (Martin Weller, Thinking about digital scholarship, Slideshare)

Hanson suggests that research into the impact of e-learning on academic identities has been limited and that all too often they are focused on the views of innovators and early adopters rather than the late adopters.” (Hanson, 2009: 4)  This speaks to the need to create opportunities for academics to explore new practices and technologies in a “safe space”. (Hanson, 2009: 6)  For example, Greenhow, Robelia and Hughes provided some interesting examples on how through cultivating our academic lives online we are able to promote social scholarship with our peers and students. “Web 2.0 facilitates "participatory," "collaborative," and "distributed" practices within Web 2.0-enabled formal and nonformal spheres of everyday activities.” (Greenhow, Robelia and Hughes, 2009, p. 247).

Goodfellow writes of the importance of developing academic literacies that ‘define and assert the special relationship of scholars and researchers to knowledge in Society’ in order to meet the challenges of digital literacies that are developing in professional and informal practice.” (Goodfellow, 2001: 140)  In terms of the literacy surrounding some of the tools which have been chosen for this project, I consulted the work of a number of scholars.

The Tools and Web 2.0

The tools were selected based upon the various affordances highlighted in various pieces of literature.  Franklin and Van Harmelin’s 2007 report on Web 2.0 for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education provided a good point of departure for deciding to make use of Web 2.0 technologies for my case study. During my literature search I used a collection of academic articles, technical magazine publications, slideshare presentations and blogs.  After doing some research I decided to make use of the following tools:

•        Academia.edu

•        Linkedin

•        Slideshare

•        Twitter

•        Google sites

The plan at this stage is to introduce a tool a month and each will be preceded by a briefing on how to effectively use the tools and implement them.  I used Mark Fijor’s blog posts entitled “TPACK and Systemic Integration – Affordances and Constraints”  as well as” Google Docs and The Common Core” to assist in developing my thoughts and logic on which tools I which chose.  (http://www.newschooltechnology.org/2011/08/tpack-and-systemic-integration-affordances-and-constraints)  The paper by Prof. Gráinne Conole and Dr. Panagiota Alevizou on the use of Web 2.0 tools in higher education also provided a good overall assessment of various tools.

Bower’s discussion on affordances was an important departure point in understanding the reasons for choosing certain technologies.  Bower speaks about the importance of making a clear distinction between usefulness and usability.  “The current interest is in discriminating how technologies can be applied to design learning tasks, not to evaluating them, so the underlying properties are the focal point.” (Bower, M.; 2008: 5)  Bower also distinguishes between the different types of affordances and categorises them as abilities, thus emphasizing the possibilities they offer the user.  The important affordances from my perspective are:

•        Media affordances

•        Synthesis affordances – capacity to combined multiple tools and the extent to which the functions of tools and the content of resources can be integrated (“integrate-ability”),

•        Technical affordances – capacity to be used on various platforms.  Usability – intuitiveness of tool.

•        Aesthetics – appeal of design, appearance of interface, relates to user satisfaction and ability to hold attention.

•        Reliability – robustness of platform, system performs as intended whenever required. (Bower; 2008: 6)

Academia.Edu and LinkedIn

Kelly and De la Salle discuss the possibilities of using academic identities such as Academia.Edu to promote access to open research resource repositories.   They also highlight the personal benefits which academics enjoy from creating inline identities and sharing their work online.  “Kelly & De la Salle, 2012)  In terms of promoting the digital footprint, social networks tend to be ranked highly in Google search results, and Academia.edu is no exception.  Uploading  links to one’s research to sites such as Academia.edu and Google Scholar citations can increase SEO, which may then lead to increased numbers of downloads, citations and take-up of the ideas described in the papers. (Kelly, 2012)  The advantage of Academia.edu is that it’s a network that speaks the language of academia.  (The Higher Education Chronicle, Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics, Feb 2011)

In LinkedIn’s favour is the fact that it is so widely used and that it enjoys great authority on Google.  Interestingly a recent study in the UK by Kelly points to the fact that LinkedIn is used by approximately 3 times more academic staff than any other social networking platform.

Slideshare

Slideshare encourages a number of specific skills towards digital literacy, such as sharing in OER practices, the potential to integrate video and other media. “Media sharing has become an important example of Web 2.0 practice that has emerged in the last five years or so. Users can download and upload a variety of different types of media objects to the Internet. These provide access to other OER and aim to engage users using social networking and rating tools.” (Conole and Avenziou)

Twitter

Veletsianos  paper entitled “Higher education scholars’ participation and practices on Twitter.” Was instructive and informative and provided good insight into scholarly participation on academic networks, although he cautions that it is still too early to tout online social spaces as closely knit scholarly communities. (Veletsianos, 2011)   Regarding Twitter and the use of micro blogging, Kirkup writes that Twitter has the “has the potential for re-engaging academics in the activity of being public intellectuals”. (Kirkup, G.; 2010:21)

Google Sites

Ross discusses the role of certain online practices for example e-portfolios in how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in online reflection in higher education.   Having said that, Ross proposes the view that this induces negative pressure on both academics and students. (Ross, 2012)  On the subject of e-portfolios, the work of Preet Hiradhar and Jeremy Gray was not all that helpful as it speaks more to student portfolios but it made for instructive background reading. 

Herrick’s paper on the use of Google Educational Apps provided a solid introduction to the organic nature of Google and how to use the various tools in an educational setting in order to extract further benefit.  The article also discusses Google sites in particular. (Herrick, 2009)  I found the work of Helen Barret on e-portfolios and using Google Sites particularly useful. (http://electronicportfolios.org)

Article Bibliography

Bower, M. (2008). “Affordance analysis – matching learning tasks with learning technologies Educational Media International.” Vol. 45, No. 1, March 2008, 3–15.

Conole, G. and Alevizou, P. “A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education.”  A report commissioned by the Higher Education Academy, The Open University, August 2010.

Czerniewicz, L., & Brown, C. (2005). “Access to ICTs for teaching and learning: From single artefact to inter-related resources.” International Journal of Education and Development using ICT [Online], 1(2).

Dunlap, J. and Lowenthal, P (2012).  “Intentional Web Presence: 10 SEO Strategies Every Academic Needs to Know.”  Boise State University, 2012.

Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2004) “Digital Literacy: A Concept Framework for Survival Skills in the Digital Era.”  Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia.  13(1), 93-106.

Goodfellow,  R. (2011) “Literacy, literacies and the digital in higher education.”  Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 16, No. 1, 131144.

Greenhow, C., Robelia, B. an Hughes, J. (2009)  “Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age Web 2.0 and Classroom Research: What Path Should We Take Now.”  EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER, 38: 246.

Hanson, J. (2009) “Displaced but not replaced: the impact of e-learning on academic identities in higher education.” Teaching in Higher Education, Volume 14, Issue 5, pages 553 – 564.

Henderson, M. and Bradey, S. “Shaping online teaching practices The influence of professional and academic identities.”  Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 25 No. 2, 2008, pp. 85-92.

Herrick, D.(2009 ) “Google This! Using Google Apps for Collaboration and Productivity.” SIGUCCS’09,  St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Hiradhar, P. and Gray, J. (2008) “From a social digital identity to an academic digital identity: Introducing ePortfolios in English language enhancement courses.” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, V34(3) Fall.

Kelly, B. and Delasalle, J. (2012) “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” In: OR2012: the 7^th International Conference on Open Repositories, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Kemp, B., & Jones, C. (2007). “Academic Use of Digital Resources: Disciplinary Differences and the Issue of Progression revisited.” Educational Technology & Society, 10 (1), 52-60.

Kirkup, Gill (2010). “Academic blogging, academic practice and academic identity.”  London Review of Education, 8(1), pp. 75–84.

Priem, J and Costello, K.L. “How and why scholars cite on Twitter.” ASIST 2010, October 22–27, 2010, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Ross, J. (2011) “Traces of self: online reflective practices and performances in higher education.” Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 16, No. 1, 113126.

Veletsianos, G. (2011) “Higher education scholars’ participation and practices on Twitter.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

Veletsianos, G. and Kimmons, R. “Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks.”  Computers & Education 58 (2012) 766–774.