#byod4l

Wilson Waffling Live Episode 29 - Waves, devices and iMacs #wilwafflive #BYOD4lchat

You would have thought that by episode 29 that I would be able to use the software correctly, but no…yet again, I forgot to turn my mic back on – so if you get that far in the video then sorry. My iMac has crashed and probably burnt, so I had to film this week’s episode with only one machine – but I still managed to get a Mexican wave and a guru into the show! Enjoy! Run titles!

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Bring your own - you're not using mine! @BYOD4L #BYOD4Lchat

I am reeling in disarray at the moment! As snow falls outside I am in my favourite coffee shop at a different time from my usual Sunday write my waffle time, my iMac has died and there is foam on the top of my latte! What else can go wrong today :). This week I have been rushing home every evening to be involved in the BYOD4Lchat. After learning so much throughout the week, I thought I had to…

As part of the task for today's BYOD4L topic of 'communication' we were asked to produce a mind map of the different ways in which we communicate in our personal and private lives. The results of mine (created using the SimpleMind Free app on my MacBook) are shown below.

Mind map of Communicating

Whilst I found this quite a therapeutic exercise, I struggled to think about how I would actually incorporate it into my learning, as I tend to be quite an impulsive thinker, who goes on 'gut feelings' rather than 'deliberated and well-constructed thought patterns'.

However, when I started to think about potential issues of communicating when teaching, I came up with what I think would be quite a useful utilisation of a mind-mapping tool.

Sometimes students are unable to grasp concepts that you are trying to teach them because you, as an educator, are assuming that they approach topics with the same assumptions and pathways as your cognitive thought. This is obviously not the case, and so I think that it would be very interesting to get all of the students to carry out a mind-mapping exercise for their individual 'learning styles' at the start of a course, and to carry out the same exercise for the educator's 'teaching style'.

Incidentally, for those who were wondering exactly who Geoffrey Manton was, I can reveal exclusively that he was... a previous governor at MMU.

Far more interesting though is the tale of Mabel Tylecote, who also has a building named after her, and who was a City Councillor back in the day when MMU was but a humble Poly. When permission was asked for a new building to be constructed her reply was apparently, “over my dead body”.  Some years later the building was duly built and named after her.  

The purpose of this blog is to track my reflective learning during the Bring Your Own Device Four Learning (BYOD4L) event that I am helping to facilitate next week.

[Photo of the tantrum T-Rex and the wise owl - the two extreme end points of my digital identity spectrum?]

Photo: CC BY

I am always interested in the ways people talk about being online and it was during the first #BYOD4L twitter chat on the topic ‘connecting’ that the issue of the personal (more private and informal) social media presence versus the professional (public and formal) presence came up. Quite a few people said that they used specific tools (facebook was mentioned by a few) only for private communication, i.e. with friends and families.

I suppose the potential for tension between public and private personas is nothing new and we can easily recognise that we behave differently and talk about different things depending on the context, who we are with etc. (I feel like I should be offering up a lot of academic references for this so I apologise in advance as I am just writing some inital thoughts here). So the worry about using social media like twitter is perhaps related to the increased potential for conflation of these contexts or ‘multitudes that we contain’ (to paraphrase Whitman’s Song of Myself). And as the #BYOD4L twitter chat was about the benefit of using twitter for making connections for learning, specificallly in relation to our work interests, then things tend to become complicated indeed.

Some people in the twitter chat were concerned that non-work tweets would annoy colleagues or put them off following their twitter account. I mentioned that some of the people I most enjoy following tweet about many different aspects of their lives - not just their research - and this includes frustrations, hobbies, photos of kittens etc. To me these people are tapping into the power of ongoing conversations and engagement as opposed to simply broadcasting messages.

The professional/personal tension was expressed, amongst other things, in some advice that one of the participants had been given about setting up a twitter account: that a professional twitter account should be about 75% professional and 25% personal.

I find this bit of ‘advice’ fascinating because I can’t imagine being able to use my twitter account in this way. The conversation went on to mention that the 25% personal was to inject some kind of ‘authenticity’ (here I guess authenticity means personality or the sense that there is human being tweeting and not a bot?).

The concern about when to be formal and informal is also something identified by Martin Weller in his book The Digital Scholar (2011), where he outlines some questions about blogging in relation to academic practice “Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate their blogging and formal identities” (Weller 2011, p.5). He goes on to say that the "open scholar deliberately mixes personal and professional observations in order to be an effective communicator within these networks and does not seek to keep them distinct" (Weller 2011, p.100).

And if you are interested in this I recommend following Martin Weller on twitter - @mweller

It was Day 2 of the #BYOD4L course with the topic 'communicating' and I was co-facilitating the evening twitterchat with David Hopkins.

I must say that despite my newbie apprehensions about doing this for the first time, it was a great experience and the hour flew by. Our more experienced colleagues were also very supportive and encouraging so that helped.

There were quite a lot of mindmaps, videos and blogposts by participants but I want to pick up on something that I have noticed a few people comment on (not just in the #BYOD4L context I hasten to add) - the limitations of twitter and twitter chats.

I know that twitter chats can seem superficial and can be read as people just tweeting or listing what they did or found interesting and can appear to be a one way stream of communication. But I disagree with this on the basis of the following which I see as sort of "outcomes" from the #BYOD4Lchat: 1. When participants tweeted about their practice/use you could see that others were reassured about their own experiences/practices and/or intrigued by a different approach that they could try out. I think this was evidenced by follow up questions/conversations and acknowledgment retweets.

Me too! RT @kshjensen: A4 I think I started out with mostly broadcasting but am now using them more and more for dialogue #byod4lchat

— Alex Spiers (@alexgspiers)

January 28, 2014

2. It was obviously a networking opportunity to find likeminded people that you could contact later on and apps/tools you wanted to try out. So I would argue that the potential for long term impact cannot be denied.

3. Because it is synchronous, it is useful to build a sense of 'togetherness' that G+ and FB and commenting on blogposts can't quite do. What I am trying to articulate here is that you knew these people were there, online at the same time as you and investing their time/experience. It allows for jokes and asides which make it fun and personal (see the whole convo on finding the pattern for the knitted twitterbird and you'll understand what I mean).