Category Archives: Curtin

National Teaching Award!

Posted by Tama on November 19, 2012 19 comments

Australian Award for University Teaching

At an amazing ceremony and dinner at the National Gallery in Canberra tonight I was surprised, flattered and delighted to receive an Australian Award for University Teaching in the Humanities and Arts. This is a huge honour, and I’m extremely grateful to have my approaches to learning and teaching acknowledged in this manner. That said, I’m incredibly conscious that no one teaches in a vacuum, and in Internet Communications I am but one cog in a very complex and well-maintained machine, so this award is at least as much testimony to all of our team at Curtin University as it is to me.

Most importantly, though, I wanted to publicly thank the students who offered their thoughts and feedback about my teaching. We live in an era where students get asked to fill in an awfully large number of feedback forms, surveys and evaluations, so adding even one more thing to that pile is a big ask. So, THANK YOU to all of my students, current and past, whose kind words led to this award.

I’d also like to think that this award is a reminder that despite the huge media attention being paid to MOOCs and so forth, quality online education has been available and refined over more than a decade, and our Internet Communications program is one such example. I truly hope that as this next generation of online learning matures, close attention will be paid to successful examples already available! Successful learning and teaching is, after all, built on understanding the successes and failures of the past.

Who Do You Think You Are 2.0?

Posted by Tama on November 12, 2012 1 comment

At today’s first day of the Perth CCI Symposium I presented the next section of my ongoing Ends of Identity research project as part of the Cultural Science session. I’ve attempted to use the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are? to explore how social media both before, during and after our lives shapes, frames and reframes who ‘we’ are in various ways.

Who Do You Think You Are 2.0 from Tama Leaver

As always, comments, questions and criticism are most welcome!

Facebook, Student Engagement, and the ‘Uni Coffee Shop’ Group

Posted by Tama on October 25, 2012 Comments Off

Here are the final slides and audio from Internet Research 13 in MediaCityUK, Salford. My last paper ‘Facebook, Student Engagement, and the ‘Uni Coffee Shop’ Group’ was presented as part of a panel about Facebook and Higher Education which also featured work by my collegues Mike Kent, Kate Raynes-Golide and Clare Lloyd.

Facebook, Student Engagement, and the ‘Uni Coffee Shop’ Group from Tama Leaver

The abstract:

While the curriculum, lecturers and tutors teaching Internet Communications via Open Universities Australia (OUA) have been engaging with students for several years using Twitter (see Leaver, 2012), in the past Facebook had been largely left alone since this was viewed as a more casual space where students might interact with each other, but not with teaching staff. However, in the last two years, more and more students have created groups to use Facebook as a discussion space about their units, often attracting a significant proportion of students from that unit. While these groups are important, of even more interest is the establishment of the group called the ‘Uni Coffee Shop’. Unlike the unit-specific groups, the Coffee Shop group, established by two Internet Communications students but open to anyone studying online via OUA, affords group support, social connectivity and a persistent online space for conversation which does not disappear or grow stagnant when students complete a specific unit.

This paper will outline an investigation into the effectiveness of the Uni Coffee Shop group as a student-created space for engagement and informal learning. Three modes of inquiry were used: a textual analysis of the common topics of discussion in the group over several months; a quantitative survey of members of the Coffee Shop group; and several follow-up qualitative interviews with Coffee Shop group members, including the two students who administer the group. In addition, the paper includes the perspectives of teaching staff who have been invited to join the group by students and who, at times, answer specific questions and engage with students in a less formal manner. In detailing the results of these mechanisms, this paper will argue that fostering student-run spaces of engagement using Facebook can be a very effective means to create spaces of engagement and informal learning (Krause & Coates, 2008; Greenhow & Robelia, 2009); the support students give each other can persist over the length of an entire degree; and teaching staff engaging with students in their space, often on their terms, can create a better rapport and a stronger sense of connectivity over the length of a student’s entire degree (and potentially beyond). A student-run Facebook group also provide a space where teaching staff and students can interact using the affordances of Facebook without staff having to explicitly ‘friend’ students (something many staff are reluctant to do for a range of reasons).

References
Greenhow, C., & Robelia, B. (2009). Informal learning and identity formation in online social networks. Learning, Media and Technology, 34(2), 119 – 140.

Krause, K., & Coates, H. (2008). Students’ engagement in first‐year university. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 33(5), 493-505. doi:10.1080/02602930701698892

Leaver, T. (2012). Twittering informal learning and student engagement in first-year units. In A. Herrington, J. Schrape, & K. Singh (Eds.), Engaging students with learning technologies (pp. 97–110). Perth, Australia: Curtin University. Retrieved from http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jump-full&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=187303

Ctrl-Z Symposium: Writing in the Age of New Media

Posted by Tama on November 17, 2011 Comments Off

This Saturday I’ll be participating in the Ctrl-Z Symposium at Fremantle Arts Centre. It’s broadly exploring ideas of ‘writing’ with a focus on new media (being very conscious of the provocative nature of that term, especially its newness!). The symposium is the first big event arranged under the umbrella of Curtin’s new Centre for Culture and Technology, and the title is shared by the upcoming Ctrl-Z journal which will launch next year. You can find the programme here and a spiffy flyer below. If you’re in Perth and free, it’d be great if you can join the discussions this weekend. The event kicks off at 1pm.

Digital Culture Links: September 21st 2011

Posted by Tama on September 21, 2011 1 comment

Links for September 7th 2011 through September 21st 2011:

Game over for Japanese teens as grey gamblers take prime slot at arcades [News.com.au] – “The country which gave the world classic arcade games such as “Space Invaders” and “PacMan” is facing a demographic crisis, with a dwindling birth rate and ever-swelling numbers of elderly people. So Japan’s amusement arcades, once an exclusive resort of youth, are increasingly becoming the abode of the old, The (London) Times said today. According to the Hello Taito game centre in the Tokyo suburb of Kameari, as many as 90 per cent of its weekday visitors are over 60 years old. In an effort to encourage elderly customers, the company is making concerted efforts to appeal to this unfamiliar demographic. Metal stools have been replaced by benches covered with old-fashioned tatami mats. Seaweed tea, popular among retired people, is provided free, as well as blankets and reading glasses. Even the deafening noises emitted by the arcade machines have been turned down to a minimum out of consideration for geriatric sensibilities.”
Ctrl-Z new media philosophy – New broadly-themed and inclusive academic journal looking for submissions under the broad umbrella of “New Media Philosophy”.
Harried, underpaid staff plan to flee the sector [The Australian] – *sigh* “Two in five academics under the age of 30 plan to leave Australian higher education within the next five to 10 years because of high levels of dissatisfaction caused by lack of job security, poor pay and mountains of paperwork and red tape. And for those aged between 30 and 40, the figure is one in three. Dissatisfaction and insecurity are so rife among casual and sessional staff that a new report for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations estimates that close to half the academic workforce will retire, move to an overseas university or leave higher education altogether within the next decade.”
Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle [The Age] – Collaborative online gamers manage to crack a crucial enzyme which is key to combating HIV. This is tangible evidence of collective intelligence of game players when usefully directed and harnessed.
danah boyd | apophenia » Guilt Through Algorithmic Association – How algorithms can make someone look guilty or attached to something, even if it’s only other searchers making that connection: “You’re a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you’re a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes “is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?” and “Mohammad Abdullah al Qaeda.” Google’s search engine learns. All of a sudden, auto-complete starts suggesting terms like “Al Qaeda” as the next term in relation to your name. You know that colleges are looking up your name and you’re afraid of the impression that they might get based on that auto-complete. You are already getting hostile comments in your hometown, a decidedly anti-Muslim environment. You know that you have nothing to do with Al Qaeda, but Google gives the impression that you do. And people are drawing that conclusion. You write to Google but nothing comes of it. What do you do? This is guilt through algorithmic association.”
Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich join Charlize Theron in new Dior J’Adore advert [Mail Online] – Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich all posthumously join Charlize Theron in a new perfume advertisement thanks to the plasticity of computer generated imagery.

Creepy: Educational Tool or Privacy Nightmare?

Posted by Tama on April 1, 2011 5 comments

Like Please Rob Me and I Can Stalk U before it, Creepy is an application which lives up to its name. It’s a recently-released basic desktop application (Windows or Linux) which scrapes Twitter and a bunch of image sharing services, including Flickr, TwitPic and yFrog, and builds a diary and map of someone’s movements and the times these were logged. Now, Creepy only accesses data which is public, data which is shared online but, like Please Rob Me or I Can Stalk U, it presents this data is a way which isn’t conventionally available. More to the point, when confronted with a map of your day-to-day activity, plotted on the basis of social media activity, it can be quite confronting. The tool is described thus on the website:

creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.

Additionally, the FAQ adds this detail and rationale:

1) Dude, this app is disturbing , what were you thinking ?

Well, I don’t think that the fact that your geolocation information can be gathered and aggregated is disturbing. The fact that you were publishing it in the first place , is , on the other hand. Just to be clear, the intention behind creating creepy was not to help stalkers or promote/endorse stalking. It was to show exactly how easy it is to aggregate geolocation information and make you think twice next time you opt-in for geolocation features in twitter, or hitting “allow” in the “this application wants to use your current location” dialog on your iphone.

So Creepy does explicitly claim to be an educational tool in the ‘here, look what you’ve already done, now change your habits’ kind of way. Running Creepy just based on my own Twitter information produced a rudimentary map of my logged activity in Perth (clearly Creepy is following data from FourSquare and Flickr images which I posted with my Twitter account):

However, when I zoom in a long way, for example onto my workplace, there’s certainly a quite explicit level of geographic information:

Now, I’m well aware of the data trail my Twitter, FourSquare and Flickr photos generate and acknowledge that if someone wanted to they could aggregate that information and build a reasonable picture of my activity. The point, though, is that many people aren’t that aware of the data trails they are leaving and that’s what Creepy purports to fix: it’s a very visible, confronting and explicit visualized map of the data trail you’re leaving. It’s not a technical privacy violation, but it might feel like an invasion of sorts. If it does feel that way, perhaps it’s time to think a little more about how, when and where you share information about yourself on social media and what data is actually embedded in your photos.

Reputation Management and Social Media

Posted by Tama on May 27, 2010 6 comments

Today the Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project released their report Reputation Management and Social Media (2010) which is based on research undertaken late 2009. There is a great deal of important and topical information in the survey, with the US results likely to be slightly higher but certainly comparable to trends in Australia. I want to really draw attention to the way that younger adults are using social media according to this report, using three of Pew’s graphs to talk about their findings.

The first graph indicates how many internet users search for their own name online:

This result is particularly interesting for two reasons: firstly, it shows that across the board, interest in our own web presences has increased dramatically across the last decade; and secondly, it highlights that younger adults (those 18-29) appear to be the most concerned with their online reputation. As danah boyd celebrated earlier today, this result really undermines the cultural myth that younger people are the least interested with online privacy. Obviously this survey excludes people under-18, but it’s fair to assume that part of the process of growing up these days includes becoming sensitised to the importance of being aware of our web presence.

Similarly, the Pew report also highlights the face that younger people are the most active in controlling their presence online, insomuch as they are most likely to have changed their privacy settings on social networks, they are the most likely to untag a photo of themselves, and so forth:

Here we see that younger people are also the most conscious of shaping their web presence, by editing who can see what they share online, and which elements of the digital artefacts linked to them remain visible, and remain linked to their names.

The last Pew graph shows how much information people are seeking about others online:

Everything from contact details to photos are being sought online, which similarly highlights how important it is that everyone be aware of what their web presence really ‘says’ about them.

Since I teach in the Internet Studies department here at Curtin, it’s hardly a surprise that all of this information is vital to consider when we design the learning experiences our students encounter. In the first-year unit Web Communications 101, the notion of web presence is our central organising theme. However, one of the distinctions we make, which Pew does not, is the difference between digital traces we leave purposefully, and maintain control over, versus those we don’t. In Web Comms 101, as Pew does, we talk about footprints, but we also talk about digital shadows, those bits of digital media that are somehow attached to our names, or chosen identities, which we have minimal, if any, control over. Given how much people search for each other, and how much thought is going into how we appear online for the average internet user, it’s probably how we address and deal with those shadows which will be one of the most important topics to seriously consider in the coming years.

Developing a Web Presence During Candidature

Posted by Tama on March 31, 2010 Comments Off

I gave a short seminar today on the topic of developing a web presence during candidature. Honours, masters and doctoral students increasingly need to be aware of the tools and conventions that most directly allow them to be part of their scholarly field online. Hopefully this presentation gave some students here at Curtin some beginning ideas. I fear the slides are somewhat less useful without the presenter, but on the off chance they’re useful to anyone, here you go:

Developing Web Presence Candidature

View more presentations from Tama Leaver.

As always, comments are most welcome.

Learning, Authenticity & Online Policy Primers

Posted by Tama on November 17, 2009 10 comments

This year I’ve been enjoying designing and implementing a series of new assignments and assessment techniques with students in our Internet Studies programmes. One of the most challenging things about working in Internet Studies is trying to make assignments authentic – which basically means doing assignments which can end up being meaningful and, ideally, viewable by the world-at-large on the Internet. One assignment that has worked particularly well and I thought worth sharing is from the unit Online Politics and Power, which looks at power in various guises and instances online.

One of the most interesting ways power is deployed online is through those infamous Terms of Use and Terms of Service which 95% of people never read, but always agree to, when signing up for a new service. So, I thought it’d be useful to ask students to really interrogate the Terms of Service of some online tools and platforms. More to the point, I wanted this to be a useful assignment beyond the confines of a university unit. So, I asked students to find a way to communicate the core elements of some Terms of Use in a way that would be accessible to the general public, hence an Online Policy Primer. (If you’re interested the assignment outline and requirements are online here.)

I have to say, I was blown away by how good the Primers are, and how, ultimately, useful they are, too. Also, while we did discuss the Creative Commons, I didn’t stipulate that students had to use a CC license, but I was delighted that many chose to do so. Of those that did, I’d like to share three stand-out examples.

The first, by Paula (@MXYZ_), takes a close look at Flickr’s Terms of Service and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attributions Share-Alike license [CC BY SA]:

Online Policy Primer: Flickr Terms of Service

View more presentations from Paula L.

The second, by Simon (@whoisimon) explores the Terms of Service for Slideshare and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license [CC BY NC SA]:

Net23 – Slideshare Policy Primer

View more documents from dsko.

And the third, and final, policy primer I wanted to highlight is by Chea Hwey Yea, looking at Twitter’s Terms of Service and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license [CC BY NC SA]:

Net 213 Policy Primer

View more presentations from cheahwey.

These are just three examples of the many, many wonderful primers students created; while not everyone used a Creative Commons license, three more Primer’s worth highlighting are a machinima presentation exploring Second Life’s Terms of Service created by Rhys Moult, Renee Bird’s close look at the Terms of Use for the Multiplayer Online Game Evony, and Veronica Fry’s analysis of YouTube’s Terms of Service.

As you can see, these students have a lot to be proud of and have, in many cases, created Primers which are likely to be useful well beyond the confines of the unit!