Encouraging Active Student Participation and

Encouraging Active Student Participation and Development:
the implications of educational social networking using Ning and Wikispaces for the
academic, the student and the university
John N Sutherland
School of Computing
University of The West of Scotland
[email protected]
Abstract
This paper outlines the background to, implementation of, and implications of the use of two Ning-based
social networking social networking spaces and a Wikispaces-based space for formal and informal teaching
and learning support. The study took place with a group of Computer Games lecturers and students from
2008 to 2010, and continues.
A background to the learning environment, as embedded within a new-creation multi-campus university in
the Scottish tertiary education system is given, together with a more general setting in Educational theory.
The project is presented as a series of active participation experiments involving the teachers and students,
and the university's non-academic structures and support facilities.
Three sites are considered. Firstly, WoSGamers, a social network site for the games students where they post
blogs, discussions, pictures, music, events, vidcaps and other learning and industry-relevant material. This is
shown to be an active and dynamic site seen to now be almost essential to the teaching and support of the
subject and the community at this institution. Secondly, Wikispaces sites to support teaching of individual
subjects. This is presented as a low-functionality piece of software, but one which supports delivery of
teaching notes, regular updating, submission of student work, and dynamic recording of lectorials. Thirdly,
TuDocs, a student e-portfolio and graduate recruitment site using a Ning backbone. It works both well (in
purpose) and poorly (in technology), attracting hundreds of members, but requiring a complete rewrite
before it can be deemed correct.
In conclusion the author sees these uses of Cloud technologies as being inevitably growing. The
technologies are free-to use, widely available, and do not require the academic to seek permissions from
university management. Looking further forward the freeware availability of these technologies, when
coupled with student and staff self-provision of base hardware and software will predispose universities to
consider their use more widely into the future.
The Pedadogic Setting
I have just lifted a book from one of my many bookshelves by one of my favourite authors, Sir Walter Scott.
He wrote,
'Of this we shall speak hereafter; at present it is enough to repeat, that Breadalbane bribed, soothed, or
threatened into submission to the Government, all the chiefs who had hitherto embraced the interests of
King James, and the Highland war might be considered as nearly, if not entirely ended.' (Scott,
1933:704).
To the reader there is a context in understanding this text. Who was Sir Walter Scott; what or who was or
were Breadalbane; who was King James; why was there a Highland war; what do the words 'herafter' and
'hitherto' mean; why does Dr Sutherland read books? I am not being facetious in this, just open and plain.
Today's technologically-training students, such as those involved in this study, are not those of the past,
neither are they like those who are studying traditional Arts and Science subjects today. Further, today's
students were formed in a different educational context than that of their teachers' generation. I am bookish,
can write cursive long-hand, programmed the IBM1 360 in COBOL, and carry my work in a 40-year-old
satchel. My year 2010 students interrupt lectures to discuss some new issue, play WoW2 and UT33 in the
labs, stick their posters on our lab walls, call me 'John', and studiously ignore the 'don't eat or drink in the lab'
notices the university puts up. However we all enjoy Computer Science, stay late in the labs and stop in the
street to discuss the latest technological controversy; just as I did in the 1970's.
Tyro games programmers are embedded in different contexts than many of their student peers. A student of
English or Medicine will be expected to read and memorise portions of textbooks from dusty tomes which
often run to many hundreds of pages. An applied Computer Scientist may never read a book in his entire
period of study, not just because books are often culturally alien to him, but also as the knowledge for his
subject is of such a transient nature that if it is printed on paper it is probably out of date. Applied computer
programming students are not philistines in their lack of knowledge of a traditionally static kind, they are
dynamic learning-engines seeking to understand relevant, on-line, volatile knowledge in a subject-world of
change driven not by dry academics based in the 400-600 year old ivory towers where I studied, but by
profit-seeking companies pushing the boundaries of application, based in glass-walled research blocks in
America, Japan, Korea, China, Sweden, Iceland and, yes, even in Scotland, home of Grand Theft Auto,
Lemmings, Crackdown and APB.
These students, essentially Computer Programmers, learn through activity and are ever looking forward,
giving spontaneous attention to problems and topics as they arise (Curtis et al, 1965:478). The rôle of an
educator teaching the internalised task of programming is ever that of an observer: you cannot guess what
they are thinking, you only see what they do and you interpret it accordingly (George, 1912:31). Students
1 All trademarks and copyrights acknowledged
2 http://www.worldofwarcraft.com
3 http://www.unrealtournament3.com
and their educators exist in what is increasingly seen as a learning society where education is intended for the
goals of personal, national and international economic improvement (Pring, 2000:22). Sir Walter Scott has
no value in The University of The West of Scotland School of Computing unless he can be turned to
economic gain and profit via the latest technological wizardry of hand-held gaming.
As well as the inferred references to Dewey and the Montessori Method in the previous paragraph as being
critical, if not always visible, to the approach taken in my and other institutions in teaching programming,
Donald Schön's thinking specifically underpins my personal approach, and hence the use of a wide variety of
technologies and approaches in teaching. For in teaching at university to create useful and dynamic
professional graduates, we are educating the reflective practitioner:
'Dialogue of Coach and Student. In their dialogue, coach and student convey messages to each other not
only, or even primarily, in words but also in the medium of performance. The student tries to do what she
seeks to learn and thereby reveals what she understands or misunderstands. The coach responds with
advice, criticism, explanations, descriptions … the coach asks himself what this student reveals in the
way of knowledge, ignorance, or difficulty and what sorts of responses might help her.' [Schön,
1987:163]
This approach fits the conjoined-twins of teacher+learner in applied programming. The professor is both a
teacher with a head-full of decades of experience and structured subject-knowledge understanding, but also
ever one of the learners, having to find his way into learning emerging and newly-related fields, just like his
students. This is a difficult subject-learning space,
' … and we [teachers and students] all feel small, panicked and inadequate to the job. Too often we do
throw in the towel.' [Calkins, 2001:4].
We live in a time of significant educational structural change which has been 'swift in recent years' (Hannan
et al, 2000:35). This has been particularly taxing for many previously-college level institutions which were
small and yet still retain highly centralised, top-down managerialist approaches where staff find it,
'difficult to obtain recognition and support … [due to ] excessively centralized decision-making processes
… [where changes] were forced upon us under duress … factors that … inhibited innovation' ( Hannan et
al, 2000:34-5).
However, it is possible to innovate even in such dichotomous workplaces, moving the focus away from
procedures and paper-shuffling towards innovation and enterprise. This paper presents evidence that,
'academic and industrial development can complement each other in a very effective way' when The Cloud is
used as, 'a responsive culture which relies on short lines of communication … [and] encourages people to be
active … [within] a can do culture … [with] individual academics having the freedom to develop particular
areas of research and academic development' (Burgess, 2001:178-9)
Lboratory-based subjects bear a significant, 'cost of equipment and materials (Boud et al, 1986:5)'. The
Cloud adds little or no direct running costs but it does have implications for institutional structures,
challenging the University writ large, support departments, academic departments, staff and students in ways
that are not clearly visible using simple financial models. When everything educational is measured by the
buck, a university can lack systems for understanding the future implications of such educational innovations
as The Cloud which can evidence the disconnect between the university's perception of learning and of what
the academic and student actually do at the pixel-face, which is often, 'not what the official statements say
about them' for there is ever a 'separate reality … between intentions and experience.' (Boud et al, 1986:9).
The Cloud can also provide evidence of tensions as government and management, 'do references to the
university as a factory' yet academics, 'still … speak of the college and university as a community' [Silver H,et
al, 1997:153], a new Cloud-based community of masters and scholars [Richard, 2008] independent of
managerial control?
It is easy and simplistic to also view The Cloud as the road to the Land of Beulah on the far horizon4 but to
ignore the realities of the enchanting world [Bunyan, 1678] we currently practice in. Yes, (MacFarlane,
1995:52) did perceive a day with, 'computer-based systems … providing flexible access to tutors and fellowlearners … [where] staff [and] … students … routinely use desktop and portable computers with multimedia
and networking capability' (MacFarlane, 1995:60). But, his co-author (McNay, 1995:105) also this
embedded within, 'loosely coupled systems [with] … relative lack of coordination; a relative absence of
regulations; little linkage between the concerns of senior managers and those involved in the key processes
of teaching and learning … infrequent inspection; and the invisibility of much that happens.'
4
Isaiah 62:4
The Location of the Study
This applied study which took place in the University of The West of Scotland5 (UWS), a Scottish stateowned college funded by state teaching and research fees. It is the largest new (i.e. post 1990) university in
Scotland, founded in 2008, with around 18,000 students, based in four county towns. It was founded by
mergers of technical training schools (Paisley University and Bell College), a teacher training school
(Craigie College) and responsibility for a remote shared campus (Crichton Campus.)
It is a challenging and challenged institution even when words are put softly, as in,
'… senior management at UWS ... hope the size of the university will make it "more sustainable" and the
investment will result in benefits for the campuses, making them better placed to meet the challenges of
the competitive higher education sector.' [BBC, 2007].
UWS is an establishment based mainly in poor, formerly industrial or rural working-class areas, scattered
across a large geographic area of around 4,000 square miles, with low-entry qualification students, mostly
part-time, working for applied degrees. The main precursor institution had the highest drop-out rate in the
country [Furedi, 2002] and the non-completion rate for the principal group of students involved with our use
of The Cloud saw failure rates of up to 93%.
In 2008 UWS removed 25% of the curriculum and 50% of teaching by reducing the curriculum from 4
modules to 3 per semester, and contact hours from 6-8 to 4-5 per module. This saved money (by offering
redundancy, releasing teaching space and reducing equipment) and increased income (by upping the module
fee payable by 33%.) In 2009 all part-time teaching staff were made redundant by an academic structural
reorganisation which also added 2 further layers of senior academic managers, embedding a managerialist,
top-down approach to staff control.
The problems facing UWS are specific but not unique. This is a recognisable mix of poorly-qualified and
financially poor students, ageing academic staff, widely spread campuses, different campus cultures, evermore-limited finance, and high failure rates that background much of this study. Couple this with the rate of
change of surrounding society and technology where the students in this study are embedded. They are
technically savvy, but lack academic self-confidence, smart, but poorly educated, tend to go off-campus
whenever possible and live their lives on-line as they are based in the centre of a town in structural, financial
and social decay [Paisley Blog, 2009].
My remit on arrival at UWS in 2007 (then The University of Paisley) was to stop the high failure rates in
Computing. At the time I was reconnecting to people I had worked with in acadaemia, virtual reality and
video games and came across a site called 38Minutes6 (figure 1), a social network site for those working with
digital media creation, teaching and research in Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is a specialist social
5
6
Http://www.uws.ac.uk
http://38minutes.ning.com
space where people posted their work, chatted, discussed topics, saw upcoming events, talked directly to
teach other and generally went about their online presence in a way that was less stuffy than LinkedIn7 yet
also more professional than Facebook8. After discussions with a couple of colleagues, I decided to set up
WoSGamers9 to see how it would plan out.
Figure 1 – a 38Minutes partial screenshot, the inspiration for WoSGamers
UWS provides technologies to staff on a centralised we-know-best-so-here's-what-you-will-do basis. There
is the Banner system for keeping track of students with its interestingly retro navigation structure. There is
also the Blackboard system with its centralised student work lock-in. Although actual costs are hard to come
by, it has been estimated that these two systems cost over $100,000 per annum and involve the employment
of many dozen administrative support staff. In here lie the most important drivers that caused us to jump
into The Cloud: (i) computer-based support is financed for administration departments only; (ii) there is an
in-built personal survival need by the in-house staff supporting a system to continue it over and above any
potentially better technologies; (iii) the top-down institutional managerialist approach does not support
anarchic use of randomly-chosen Cloud technologies by individual academic staff; (iv) the new university
lacked structural coherence and so gaps existed where programme management novelties could be
experimented with.
A driving force was the potential to create a community of practice (Lave et al, 1991) for our own students,
much like 38Minutes,
'Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared
7
8
9
Http://www.linkedin.com
http://www.facebook.com
http://wosgamers.ning.com
domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of
expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in
the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping
each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a
passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.' (Wenger, 2006)
The aim never was to create a thing which we would know fully in advance. As in any technological
innovation involving real people, there is an amount of user-driven innovation, acting upon user feedback,
trial and error. When we launched WoSGamers we could not foresee the way in which it would work, or that
it would throw up the issues it has done or set us on our current path.
What we are doing in The Cloud
WoSGamers – http://wosgamers.ning.com
figure 3 – WoSGamers front page partial screen-shots
WoSGamers stands for West of Scotland Gamers. Its not UWSGamers as this would imply some formal
connection to the University of the West of Scotland. From initial contacts with the UWS Corporate
Marketing department it became clear that they viewed the potential anarchy of the site as unacceptable to
carry the UWS name or logo. I also set up the site using my private Yahoo! email account rather than my
corporate UWS one to avoid clashes.
WoSGamers is a site hosted and run by Ning10 which states that it is,
'the social platform for the world's interests and passions online. Millions of people every day are coming
together across Ning to explore and express their interests, discover new passions, and meet new people
around shared pursuits.'
It is a basically a do-it-yourself on-line social network-creation tool. Ning provide the software, the servers,
the bandwidth, the storage and the support staff. Up until very recently this was always on offer as a free
option, but we paid to remove the Google Ads from the site at a cost of $24 per month.
The UWS BSc (Honours) Computer Games Technology students (C++ programmers) were invited to join
the site when we set it up in 2007 and the BSc (Honours) Computer Games Development students
(multimedia package-based developers) joined in 2008. The new intake of 1st years joined when invited, but
existing students in later years of their studies, were not convinced to join. So the site began only with the
new intake students, and the established students carried on as before without recourse to it.
As is ever the case with digital media, there were no records kept of the growth of the site over time. It
currently has 367 members, around half of whom are UWS games students and adds approximately 1
member per week. 9 of the 13 administrators are students and we trust them to do anything they want with
the site. Sometimes it goes wrong, but generally the main problems have been caused by mistakes made by
Ning administrators.
The students have rapidly taken to the site and it is generally busy with 10-20 postings per day. Most of the
postings are made by a handful of staff and students, with a large but unquantifiable group of lurkers, and a
number who do not interact. It would be a guess, but I would estimate that 10% of the membership are
active and posting weekly, 20% posting monthly, 25% lurk and about half don't use the site regularly. All
members know that the site is where you go to get information. Regularly asked questions include (i) what
is the timetable next semester? (ii) is there a class on Monday? (iii) where are the lecture notes? (iv) can I
see you, professor, after class?
The students expect the staff who use the site to do so regularly. We are a small unit of five, three of whom
use the site every day. The students know this and so expect responses within 24 hours. In practice I use the
site at least once a day and find it a great way to do fire-fighting before an issue becomes a conflagration as
the site makes students' concerns very visible.
10 http://www.ning.com/
The site is HTML codeable. Indeed, this a bit of a pain as it involves knowing where to find colour codes,
how to code tables, how to embed references, etc. A typical bit of hand-code on the main WoSGamers News
block on the front page includes,
iNwbcvi/weebluebar.png?width=721" alt="" /></font></b> <center> <b><font size="4"
color="#FF1122"><b><font size="3" color="#FFFF22">Do The Survey on Video Games and Players'
Personality <a href="http://wosgamers.ning.com/forum/topics/survey-on-video-games-and">
here</a><img
in no less than 50 lines of HTML code. If the code is incorrect Ning will try and correct it, sometimes
creating little less than mayhem; I once had a piece of Ning-corrected code that had no less than 200</font>
commands at the end.
The WoSGamers site contains a wide range of features, which we change regularly as the feel of the site and
feedback on it arise. At 367 members, most of whom know me, there is a lot of tolerance for change and
little outright complaint. However, any complaints are quick and must be treated rapidly.
The site remains the single most important place where we communicate with our students. It is quite
normal to be on-line and posting to the site, answering questions, tweaking features, to find that another ten
people are also on the site. It is quite regular to find a recently posted question, to answer it, and to get
immediate feedback on your answer from other members. It is important to deal with questions quickly as
they often relate to the next day's teaching. The question, 'is there a class tomorrow?' may need more than
the person-to-person reply, it might also require a WoSNews headline or even a spam-out to all members.
But spam-outs have to be used sparingly or they become a cry-wolf. Interacting on an educational social
networking support site is more than simple emailing or texting; you need to consider the wider implications
of the postings the students place, and to take care with your own postings also.
We post both tech and games news RSS feeds (figure 3, bottom picture left) and feeds from our e-portfolio
site, TuDocs (below). For individual news items that we reckon may be of particular interest to our students
we create a link directly off the front page (figure 3, top picture left). These items must be changed every
few days, by hand, to keep the site up to date, mainly to encourage the lurkers to encourage to return
regularly or they forget the site exists.
WoSGamers is a mix of the serious, the interesting, the trivial and the downright stupid. This is a deliberate
mix that we encourage. These are video games students and we need to expand and extent their
imaginations, and encourage them to live in the games ethic of, 'Fun! Fun! Fun!' It may seem odd to say so,
but these students are highly trained technologists who specialise in the digitisation of fun. And this fun
needs to be ever-renewed in the marketplace. So, what may appear as stupidity may well be so, but it isn't
pointless. WoSNews (figure 3, top picture) shows this range of tendencies. Firstly, there is a message posted
by a student welcoming a games programming lecturer who has been finally drawn in to the site, there is a
link to a useful games development site, a survey from a Business Studies student, a link to the RSS from our
other Ning site, a link to UWS classes for 2010-11, and a warning message from a student who lost her
memory stick. WoSNews is regularly updated by staff and students.
There are vidcaps of student work on the site, silly pictures that have been found elsewhere, music created by
students, discussions, blogs and links to our other Cloud sites. The most active feature is the Discussions
which have become a kind of on-line common room. In figure 3, top picture, can be seen an example of this
where a group of members - including a PhD student, a 1st year undergraduate and a professor - are
discussing video games violence.
There have been issues and problems with the site. There was a temporary ban on theosophic discussions
after the site activity, which is relatively slow, was taken over by a shouting match between two members
discussing the (non-)existence of God. This ban was raised after 6-months, but only after asking the
members' permission. There are also features we can find no use for.
Wikispaces – http://jnsak.wikispaces.com, http://wosgames.wikispaces.com
It is UWS policy to encourage staff to use the intranet facility Blackboard to store notes. As students
increasingly move their lives, work and studies on-line, it became clear that this was not a suitable place for
outward-facing material. Again, with a bit of digging and serendipity, we came across Wikispaces11. The
aim was to find a place where notes could be stored for students to pick up, which were prepared away from
the main campus (e.g. at home), where students could interact with staff by adding their own study-related
material, and where live records of interactions could be stored as evidence of teaching.
Figure 4 – wikispaces pages showing module navigation
figure 5 – wikispaces page showing dynamic note-taking
Wikispaces is another free-to-use Cloud tool. It allow you to create an account, individual wikis, text and
11 http://www.wikispaces.com
imagery on the pages, and add links to the pages within your wiki or to other Internet URLs. It is a tool
whose use has changed considerably over the two years we have used it as problems arose, solutions were
sought, bugs worked around, and new uses of the tool experimented with. Overall it is functionally simple, a
good teaching and learning support tool, but lacking the smoothness and usability of the Ning product. So
why did we not just use Ning? One of the main problems with Ning is that it is structurally-inflexible and
content-anarchic. Wikispaces allows us to create our own spaces and navigations, and to do so dynamically
during class teaching, under a strong sense of control by the teacher.
Figure 4 shows one teaching support page, with three modules indicated. There is very little formatting in
Wikispaces, you produce a page of text using a simple word processing interface. You can add some
columns, formatted text and imagery to pages; it presents a visibly poor interface, but in our experience
significant formatting is not necessary for teaching purposes. Indeed, the more the formatting, the more
complex the page, the less navigable the site becomes. Our earlier pages from the previous year attempted
more formatting and became nigh-impossible for the students to use.
We store university documents, prepared lecture notes, lecture slides, live tutorial notes and student
coursework submissions using Wikispaces. Unlike Ning, which is generally used by staff and students as the
place to work together, Wikispaces has never became more than a personal tool per academic or student.
Indeed, other staff use other personal tools of a similar nature to store their notes and work. This can make
student life complicated as he has now to keep track of many teaching and learning official and unofficial
URLs.
As in Ning, Wikispaces is limited by the design and functionality of the software. Navigation, if not done
via hotlinks, is via a menu bar that contains pages on the wiki arranged alphabetically, but not all are shown
if there are more than 20, default page names are often semi-cryptic, and they are not easily searchable.
Upload times of new content can be slow, particularly frustrating when you have updated a set of notes the
night before the class, it's now 1am, you want to get to bed to sleep a bit before the 9am class, and the 10Mb
PDF of the lecture takes 45 minutes to upload.
Another frustration is when asking students to insert a link to the URL where they have stored their
classwork, for example a private page of Flash games. Wikispaces has no implementation of page locking so
you get the classic StudentA loads, StudentB loads, StudentA saves, StudentB saves, StudentA's changes are
lost. As students tend to submit at the last minute, links get lost. The partial solution to this lack of page
locking is to create one submission page per, say, 10 students. But, even then, things get lost.
In the first year of using Wikispaces I simply used it to store lecture notes online. In year 2 I have used the
site to store UWS information and to keep dynamic records of tutorials (see figure 5). The example shown is
from a 3rd year discussion class on writing an academic paper. The classroom was fitted with an Internet-
linked PC and projector, and was a comfortable discussion space rather than a confrontational room. The use
of Wikispaces allowed me to enter the class with some basic ideas, and allow them to develop as the class
continued, keeping a tidy record of the discussions. An initial teaching structure was created by having a
basic draft of class headings for each teaching week established before the semester began, with scheduled
assessment dates inserted. Each week would begin with a checking of what had to be taught, and ended with
a look forward to student work to do for next week. At the end of the class I could walk away knowing the
students could at any time check back to the Wikispaces notes to remind them of the work discussed and that
required to be done for the next week. At no time during the year was my memory of this challenged by
students (as it could clearly be seen to exist online) and at no time did a student have an excuse for a missed
task deadline, for much the same reason.
A word of caution though, there is a strong degree of trust involved as Wikispaces, like Wikipedia, defaults
to anyone-can-edit a page; there is a log, but edits can be made without logging in to Wikispaces. I now used
it to dynamically record the teaching of small groups of 3rd year students, not mega-classes of 1st years.
TuDocs – http://www.tudocs.org , http://tudocs.ning.com
figure 6 – a TuDocs member page12
figure 7 – a TuDocs Studio member page
12 All information on TuDocs is made public unless the member chooses otherwise; these pages are public.
Our latest entry to use of The Cloud has been to create a Ning site that supports student e-portfolios, newstart studios and work placements. TuDocs (pronounced 'two docs' as it was set up by two UWS 'Dr' staff) is
a temporarily Ning-hosted site that intends to make our students become more 'real world' and to make their
work face outwards towards employers. Unlike WoSGamers (which seeks to emulate more usefully the
traditional collegiate campus experience) and Wikispaces (which replaces inward-facing electronic notes
storage), TuDocs has no simple single analogue at UWS.
Students had been using WoSGamers to store their imagery and other work, but found it too cluttered with
conversations, jokes, external links and other paraphernalia. It was, unlike 38Minutes, unsuitable to attract
professionals to visit their work on their My Page, essential as there is a real-world difficulty in getting
students work and CV's before the eyeballs of the digital media professionals looking for new employees.
So we decided to create TuDocs as an experimental Ning site: as a professional space where work of students
and graduates could be stored, edited and viewed.
This has been a journey with expected success and unexpected failure combined. First the good story, at the
time of writing it has been up under 3 months, has 277 members, including members from around the United
Kingdom, USA, Canada, Germany, South Africa and beyond. TuDocs has a rich mix of digital media
professionals, studios, students, recent graduates and academics. TuDocs has hosted jobs postings from the
BBC, Ubisoft, Blitz and RockStar and members on the site have been interviewed for jobs. Members have
described the TuDocs concept as 'brilliant' and companies have joined because they were looking for
precisely this access to good quality evidence of student work.
The downside has been Ning. There are numerically more cons than pros to TuDocs, so do bear in mind that
TuDocs actually works before you read on. We were warned that Ning might not do the job, but felt we had
to make a move and Ning was the only suitable product that we had had direct experience of via the
successful WoSGamers site. One of the great advantages of The Cloud is that it is there to be used. We also
did not know, in the kindest possible way, what we were doing. TuDocs.ning.com is a pilot requirements
gathering exercise seeking to fix a problem in getting graduates and studios to talk to teach other. We are
currently now in the process of finalising the site specification and design and will have a new, more
functionally correct site up and running before the new academic year start in September, still accessed off
the tudocs.org url.
The second major and a continuing dangerous issue has been creating clear blue water between UWS and
TuDocs. There is no 'WoS' prefix. TuDocs is a limited company owned and run by a consortium of
academics. TuDocs cannot be a UWS project as it can only work, we believe, if it is inclusive of other
college and university students and staff in order to create the feeling of mass which will attract employers.
As such TuDocs is not a hobby, like WoSGamers, or a closed world, like our Wikispaces pages; TuDocs is a
public-facing organisation of the same legal standing as Facebook: sueable, subject to the whims of the
Internet, involving real people who have committed their future to us, people we do not know. Fortunately, I
have run small companies before, and there is advice available from government agencies and others on how
to be safe when The Cloud becomes The Real World. TuDocs has a code of conduct, terms and conditions,
legal status with Companies House in the United Kingdom and costs us money to run.
The team behind TuDocs has been carefully constructed. Dr Malcolm Sutherland, TuDocs CEO, a 3-times
natural science graduate with no career, with a heart for helping other graduates into employment and an
approach that is best described as precise and effortful. Mr Martin Smith, TuDocs CMO, reading for a PhD
in games marketing and with 3 previous degrees covering business studies and multimedia. Myself as CTO,
with a wide network of contacts and relevant experience. As we await the better site appearing, as Dr
Malcolm Sutherland stated recently, TuDocs on Ning is like a room-full of expectant people waiting for him
to clear his throat and say, 'You're probably wondering why I have gathered you all here …' and so needs a
lot of active involvement from the three directors.
One of the real plusses of TuDocs has been the interface it has created across inter-institutional boundaries.
There are staff and students from universities and colleges across the world collaborating on the site. We
receive invitations to travel to other establishments to encourage their students to join the site. Academics
and professionals from around the world have joined the TuDocs Mentors group on the site to allow them to
help newbies get their e-portfolios right, answer specific questions, start and contribute to discussions on
working in the games and wider digital media industries.
Perhaps the most surprising spin-out from the site has been several new-start studios. Figure 7 is the page
for a studio set up by a UWS graduate, employing current students as unpaid interns. This way students get
real-world experience, and the studio gets started with very little money. Most of the studio's work takes
place at UWS in our labs during free time. Another studio has been spun out of the site by a 2nd year games
student. Each studio has 12 staff. There are a further 5 new-start student and staff-led studios come out of
TuDocs in its first three months, one not based at UWS.
An unexpected downside of TuDocs has been the difficulty in recruiting non-games students from UWS to
join. The university is the only one in Scotland which has degrees covering all aspects of the creative
industries, yet there are no more than a handful in the current 277 membership, from an estimated 3,000
potential members at UWS, who have joined, despite being strongly encouraged to do so. TuDocs has more
digital art students from The University of Newport, 500 miles away in The Principality of Wales, than it has
from the equivalent UWS degree. After the initial flush of UWS games students joined, we now have only 1
UWS student join for every 10 new members. A fact we find difficult fully to explain, despite strong support
from within UWS in the right places. This may relate to the similar problem in getting established students
to join WoSGamers, who were already encultured to existing support procedures. However, we intend to
make membership of TuDocs compulsory for all new intake students reading for degrees in games,
multimedia, music technology and computer animation from September 2010. The new site will also
enforce better information presentation structures as Ning allows members currently to join and post nil
returns on their pages; the new site will ensure all pages contain certain minimal information to ensure all
pages are populated enough to get students started with their e-portfolios.
The TuDocs site runs more like LinkedIn than Facebook. It is slower in activity per member than
WoSGamers. Whereas WoSGamers will have around 10 people a day each posting 1-2 pieces, TuDocs will
have 1-2 members a day each posting 5-10 portfolio pieces. As a social network TuDocs is poor, despite the
broad intentions of the Ning designers. This is due to the different nature of interaction required by TuDocs
as a recruitment and portfolio building site over a discursive site like WoSGamers. TuDocs is a place where
people meet professionally. These people are academics, students, graduates and digital media developers.
Their conversations are slower and subject to academic year cycles. Students post a lot when first joining,
then leave the site only to return when there is more work to post (e.g. at the end of semester) or if a job is
posted that interests them. As the experiment continues, we are seeking to increase site traffic by finding
new ways for members to interact using such as projects, competitions, etc.
Overall the TuDocs Ning site has been a 50::50 success-failure. It is attractive to a wide range of people of
all career stages. It hosts elements of their work well. It offers good discursive spaces. But it lacks the
flexibility of structure to really work as an equivalent of LinkedIn. So, why not just use LinkedIn? Because
it is structured to support a different kind of community. LinkedIn exists to support established professionals
and extend their influence through professional peer-to-peer networking. Students are not established in
their field, nor do they yet have this network, nor is such a network very useful to them (with the single
noteable and significant exception of new-studio creation.)
Issues The Cloud Has Raised For Us
How has this use of The Cloud changed the educational process for our games students when compared to
the alternative methods previously, and currently, used? Firstly, WoSGamers has been used by 3 out of the 5
games lecturers. They represent around 50% of the teaching on the two undergraduate games degrees.
Wikispaces, as presented, is used solely by the author, but similar approaches are used by the other 2
academics who also use WoSGamers. TuDocs is used heavily by 2 of the five games academics. So the
games students are still widely exposed to more traditional and other methods of teaching. Any discussion of
the effects of our use of Ning and Wikispaces should be tempered by the knowledge that this is only a part of
their overall learning environment.
Figure 6 – a learning overview chart (Fisher, 1995:ix)
Considering the categories in figure 6, how does our use of The Cloud change teaching and learning?
Questioning and Discussing – this is improved by WoSGamers and TuDocs as questions can be posed as
discussions at any time, answered quickly, and are tackled by a wide group of people, quickly including
other students;
Planning – this is improved by Wikispaces as notes and schedules can be posted dynamically, and by
WoSGamers and TuDocs as important upcoming events can be posted and commented upon;
Cognitive mapping – there is affective no change;
Divergent thinking – there is a major change from the traditional new-university approach which is
designed to deliver factual subjects and to discourage argument with the professors;
Co-operative Learning – perhaps the best evidence of this is in TuDocs which has seen several start-up
studios formed, often from students who had not previously co-operated or met, sometimes being from
different campuses; WoSGamers also supports co-operative learning through the creation of groups;
Coaching – WoSGamers and TuDocs allow and evidence one-to-one questioning and answering in public by
blogs and discussions and in private through the use of messages and private comments;
Reviewing – to an extent the easier posting of preliminary work-in-progress via Wikispaces does allow the
professor to check it, but in practice this facility proved to be a time-intensive task, consuming rare professor
time; so, on balance, the effect can be negative;
Creating a Learning Environment – it is more likely that the use of The Cloud will extend rather than
replace the learning environment as there remains an important place for face-to-face teaching and learning,
particularly with younger students straight from high school; also, the reduction in formal teaching time
made available to students can be improved by using The Cloud to link students to a wider learning
community, such as via the Mentors Group on TuDocs.
An unspoken reality of working with The Cloud has been that it has allowed us as Applied Computing
teachers to keep up with events. Computing Science has changed little since my undergraduate days at the
University of Glasgow in the 1970's or my masters' postgraduate studies in the 1980's. From the viewpoint
of a lecturer seeking to teach newbies to learn useful skills, so that they can hit the ground running on
graduation and stay up to date with developments as their career progresses, there is ever a need for the
professor to stay on top of developments also. Real-world interaction with newer technologies is in and of
itself good for us.
In many ways those of us who teach in applied institutes need to progress a need for scholarship over and
above pure research. Our teaching must remain relevant and so our studies must be applied. And as much of
our knowledge is experiential, reflective and our practice must be reflexive, so we must be doing rather more
than simply thinking. In recent out-of-classroom conversations with undergraduate students we have
discussed Internet TV, Dell mobile phones (which don't yet exist), the Apple iPad, Microsoft Courier (which
may never exist), HTML5 (which I can't get to work) and the comparative language design roots of C++ and
Objective C relative to C. Yes, there is some static knowledge involved in teaching Applied Computing, but
mostly it is a matter of keeping up to date as best as possible, and respecting the student's knowledge as
being also potentially valid. These conversations can take place in a corridor, on-line or, more likely, in both
places.
With respect to the tools we used in Cloud Teaching there were no ah-ha! Moments for us as Computer
Scientists or as educators. Ning was known in advance to work functionally, as was Wikispaces, and they
generally behaved well. When there were problems they were all easily understood. What has been
unexpected has been the wider Sociological and organisational implications; what could be described as the
politics of using social media to support teaching in a 1990's technical university in Scotland and beyond in
the early 21st century.
There are significant difficulties in wearing several hats and in playing the corporate game. On my LinkedIn
page13 I am now apparently three people: a UWS professor, a private recruitment site director, and a games
studio manager. To my employer I am one and only one person who works for them doing what they tell me
to do. But, to do this properly involves pushing technological and educational envelopes until I can do the
job properly, which has meant creating 3 iterations of myself. In a recent visit to a college to talk about the
TuDocs project I left wondering who I was selling, who I was working for, and who was paying me to do it.
However, I do not see this as a moral or ethical issue as I remain a UK-government employed public servant
and I am working to better the educational and professional prospects of my and other students. This may
well be a uniquely Scottish perspective as so much of our educational sector is owned and run by the
government. However, should any of the TuDocs projects, in which I legally own shares, prove profitable,
there might well be a future legal problem.
Organisationally, UWS has had difficulties coming to terms with WoSGamers. The site is anarchic whereas
the University is a credit to Taylorist Managerialism. This creates more than a little cognitive dissonance in
the individual minds of the academic staff who use it to communicate to students. How do you react when a
student posts such as (i) “I'm drunk and you are all b*st*rds”; (ii) “UWS teaching and courses are totally
cr*p” (ii) “God does not exist and those who say he does should be tied up and burnt”? The UWS response
would probably be to suspend the students from their studies, shut down the website and give me a severe
reprimand for allowing this to happen. However, the Internet response is to allow people to have their say;
which is much closer to my preference, and since the website belongs to me as a private individual this is
what happens. Positively, it has been useful, if dangerous, to be able to quote such publicly-posted student
obscenities in order to get senior management to realise where there is a problem. When students were
complaining abusively about computers in the labs we reported this back and received $130,000 for
equipment upgrades!
The one we have had most trouble with was the God debate which variously involved a very angry atheist
student, a Christian professor, a Jewish professor and a Pagan part-time teacher. Attempts to turn it into a
philosophical debate failed, probably because a technical university does not have students who are mentally
13 http://uk.linkedin.com/in/akademos
equipped by a classical education to debate such topics at the required level. It became a firestorm of words
and images that frightened other site users, causing the debate to be stopped. Sadly the student involved
dropped out. Incidentally, the drunk student apologised later and is still with us.
Wikispaces has raised other issues that UWS deemed important, but the professors did not. If a lecture is
prepared by a UWS staff member and is then posted on a public website, has UWS lost ownership of it?
This is a question that greatly troubles management, but not games teachers. We live in financially straitened
times, and anything UWS can sell it will as there are no guarantees that UWS will still be around in 10 years
time, after all, none of its predecessors are. We have agreed for now not to discuss the matter, partly as so
much of our teaching material includes intellectual material belonging to others (e.g. video games
screenshots) and so for management to push the point would damage teaching. Further, so little of what is
taught has a shelf life of more than 1-2 years as Applied Computing lectures must be regularly rewritten and
are ever being updated. Indeed, I now have three Wikispaces sites, one for last year's notes, another for this
year's, and a proto-one for next year's.
There is a major, unspoken at UWS at least, issue that further and greater use of Cloud and other open and
free technologies poses to universities. How much of what is currently provided from an expensive, central,
monetised resource can be provided in other ways at little or no cost? Students at UWS can access teaching
and learning materials using wi-fi provided at cost to the university or paid for on a public network by the
student, they can use their own laptops or university computers, university-provided software or Open
Source equivalents. Academics can also use software and hardware provided by the university to aid their
teaching, or use their own. As more teaching-support work moves away to The Cloud and to personal
private means, whither the role of the centralised, expensive and often inefficient university-funded
equivalent? This is not a call now to move away from having a centralised, for example, ICT support
department, it is more a recognition that events may well be moving us in that direction as surely as, in
Applied Computing terms, centralised mainframes lost out to distributed networks, as the newer solution
replaced the older one. I regularly take labs where students bring in their own computers, use open source
software, student-paid-for 3G wi-fi dongles and access notes held in The Cloud; the university, in teaching
terms, effectively only provides me and the room.
For now The Cloud, as evidenced in this paper, is not yet fully viable as a general teaching environment.
Ning is at best OK, but never great; if it falls over tomorrow it may be gone for ever. Wikispaces has the
functionality of an undergraduate Computer Science project. TuDocs will later this year have to be rebuilt
and moved to a commercially supported server, and so become not an almost-free Cloud-based social
network, but a specifically-designed students portfolio and recruitment site running on a commercial server.
Teachers will continue to experiment in social networking and other Cloud technologies.
The bigger story is with the universities. They can continue to play safe and stay with what they know. But,
certainly in UK and Scottish terms, when a squeeze truly comes upon them as public finances continue to
dry up, there will be further pressures to move away from the non-core and expensive business of technical
and administrative support, to the core finance-provider and cost-centres of teaching and of research.
Ultimately, The Cloud is a cheaper option, it works at least as well as the current expensive teaching support
models, and this may be what drives its continued uptake and success once the financial benefits becomes
visible to management.
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