events, papers, phd

general research update

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c2daf5b37289a156cc2542f4ea8d0b0a5fa68a9d_mIt’s going to be a busy year of research! The main thing is that I am finishing writing up my PhD this year, and will be submitting at the end of August. I’ll post up some bits and pieces as I go.

My paper, Traces of self: online reflective practices and performances in higher education, has just been published in Teaching in Higher Education, 16/1. The issue’s table of contents is online.

I have a chapter appearing in the forthcoming edited collection, Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning. It’s being published by Springer in 2011, edited by Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Vivien Hodgson and David McConnell.

The “student writing: innovative online strategies for assessment and feedback” proejct is finishing up in May and, along with a manifesto, the team will be writing a couple of papers for publication over the next few months, drawing on the data produced by a series of student-generated virtual ethnographies of courses on the MSc in E-learning programme.

The digital futures of cultural heritage education project has two workshops this year, in March and June, and those should be a really interesting extension of the excellent open seminar held in October.

papers

transcription/translation paper published

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My paper about what we can learn from translation studies theory about qualitative research transcription has just been published in the open-access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research – here is a link to it, and the reference:

Ross, J. (2010). Was that Infinity or Affinity? Applying Insights from Translation Studies to Qualitative Research Transcription. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11/2. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1357

This is my first sole-authored full paper, so I’m very excited!

elearning, events, teaching

Learning from the “E-learning and Digital Cultures” course

E-learning and Digital Cultures was a 12-week course taught by me and Siân Bayne as part of the MSc in E-learning programme. It was innovative for the programme because of the nature of its engagement with digital cultures: it was open-access and disaggregated (you can see for yourself by browsing the web site), and made use of blogs, lifestreaming, twitter and a range of social and user-generated tools from across the web.

We’ll be presenting a paper at the Academic Identities for the 21st Century conference at Strathclyde University in June called “Posthuman academic identities in digital environments”, drawing on Siân’s recent work on uncanny digital pedagogies to talk about some of what we’ve learned from this course: how to work productively with volatility, disorientation, and strangeness.

elearning

nomination for edublog award

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For this year’s Edublog Awards, I want to nominate the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in E-learning virtual graduation on 26 November 2009. Four of the students from the programme attended a graduation ceremony in Second Life, while two graduated in the University’s face to face ceremony in McEwan Hall. It was an extremely moving and amazing experience, especially when the principal asked those in McEwan Hall to give a round of applause for the virtual attendees. The whole concept and event (masterminded by my colleague Fiona Littleton) really deserves an Edublog award, I think!

Nomination for best educational use of a virtual world: Virtual Graduation at the University of Edinburgh

Update: Virtual Graduation won!! More information here: https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/VueWiki/Virtual+Graduation

events, phd

Forthcoming talks at SRHE conference & University of Glasgow

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I’ll be giving at talk at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference on Wednesday 9 December called Reflective practices as masks: a new way to think about reflection in higher education

Summary: This paper discusses ongoing research into how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in high-stakes online reflection in higher education. I define high-stakes reflection as reflection which is summatively assessed or has a gatekeeping function into a profession, and use a metaphor of the mask to draw out different aspects of high-stakes reflection online: performance, disguise, protection, transformation, discipline and trace. Conceiving of online reflective practices in these mutiple and overlapping ways has implications for how educators understand and support reflection, and the expectations we place on our students in terms of what high-stakes reflective writing can and should accomplish. These practices should support development of academic or professional identity and voice through explicit engagement with matters of authenticity, power, narrative, subjectivity and agency – not through a discourse which frames the recording and improvement of the “true self” as the ultimate goal of reflective practice.

I’ll be giving a longer talk on similar themes at the University of Glasgow’s Learning and Teaching Centre’s seminar series, on Wednesday 13 January 2010. I will have time at this second event to share more of the data that’s emerging from my PhD research.

I’ve been thinking about the masks for a while, and I’m now starting to draw some conclusions about what I think that thinking about reflective practices in this way might imply for teaching and learning. Both of these talks will represent the cutting edge of my ongoing doctoral research looking at online reflective practices in Higher Education!