I've written in the past about some of the difficulties that schools experience when they are using social media. However, I was wondering whether any schools have successfully created a social media policy that sets out how they use social media to support teaching and learning and student development.

If anyone can provide me with a link to a policy that they've created already that would be really useful.

University of Derby students might be interested to hear that the Career Development Centre is offering a social media programme to help students to enhance their careers.

More details are available at http://www.derby.ac.uk/careers/social-media-internship

Others might be interested in this as an an example of how we can work to enhance digital career literacy. iCeGS will be evaluating the programme and will hopefully publish something off of the back of it.

I’ve been asked to facilitate a discussion of our new EdD cohort on the subject of The Distinctiveness of the EdD in Producing and Transforming Knowledge by Alison Taysum (see http://www.citeulike.org/user/pigironjoe/article/9891108). So these are essentially the notes that I took on the article while I was reading it.

In essence the paper is asking what, if anything is distinctive about an EdD, from another kind of qualification (presumably largely the PhD).  However, it goes about answering this question in a fairly roundabout fashion.

So what did I learn from this paper

• That the EdD is newer than I thought and actually only has a history going back to 1992.
• That in 2007 when the article was written almost 40 UK universities were delivering EdD’s. 
• The underpinning philosophy of the EdD is contested.

Taysum is interested in the following three main questions

1. How do issues of social justice connect with the development of HE? 
2. How do issues of social justice connect with the development of the EdD within HE? 
3. Finally, what new insights and theories can be developed about the distinctiveness of the EdD in the university tradition?

To my mind this is a slightly odd place to start if we are thinking about the distinctiveness of the EdD. Which is not to say that I don’t believe that education shouldn’t be bound up with a drive for social justice. However it seems unlikely that it is possible to conclude that the EdD has a fundamentally different relationship with social justice than other qualifications.

Taysum goes on to trace the history of higher education. Noting that it has its roots in training an elite essentially to help them to maintain their hegemony. She does this with reference to Bordieu’s theory that there are four forms of capital (economic capital, cultural capital, social capital and symbolic capital). She argues that the widening of access to higher education enabled a widening of participation in the ruling class. I’m not sure I buy into this, it seems to me far more likely that it was the other way round. If I’m right this would mean that higher education remained as a privileged tool for the maintenance of (an admittedly expanded) ruling class hegemony, rather than being a tool through which emancipation was achieved.

Taysum then seeks to examine how the phenomenon of the EdD fits into this narrative around HE and capital. She positions the EdD as the manifestation of Praxis (the fusion between theory and practice) suggesting that it is this that makes it distinctive. However, she notes that not all EdD’s hold to this ideal of Praxis, with some seeing what they offer as research informed practice. This is a fine line, but one that I do agree with. It seems to me that knowledge that is created by doctoral students should be fundamentally involved with questions like “what is education”, “what is knowledge” and “is education actually valuable”, “could we do all of this very differently”. These questions are essentially the questions of theory and it seems to me that doctoral level study should take them on. If we end up with EdD’s churning out projects like “Blackboard or Whiteboard: An evidence based assessment of classroom visual aids” I think that we are probably missing the point.

However, my sense of what constitutes good doctoral level research may not be the same as other peoples. Taysum has a strong sense that doctoral level work should be involved in the transformation of educational practice but also in the transformation of society. This is the concept of Praxis that she advances.

She ultimately argues that the unique contribution of the EdD is in its ability to shift the identity of practitioners into that of critical theorists or critical practitioners. In other words it is not about people knowing more, but rather about them thinking differently. Why this is a distinctive role for the EdD I’m not sure as I hope (maybe foolishly) that this remains as a distinctive role for all university based education and even perhaps for all education.

It has taken me a while but I thought I had better get back to blogging after the Christmas period. I’m currently involved in a personal experiment called a diet which is proving extremely interesting. Whereas before Christmas I was the sort of person who would fill his face with whatever was available, who would sneak out to the kitchen and eat lumps of cheese, the sort of person who would liven up any dull moments with a Marathon (AKA a Snickers – not the long race thing), I am now a completely different type of person. I live on diet coke, grass and WeightWatchers’ packet meals. I spend all of my time thinking about food and denying myself. I look constantly for food substitutes that can momentarily kill my cravings. In other words I seem to have managed to turn this very normal activity of trying to moderate my excesses into a completely mentally unhealthy game. Score one for me!

Obviously, being on a diet is something that most people do all of the time. In particular most women I’ve met spend pretty much all of their time on a diet, about to start a diet or falling off of the wagon. The opportunity to consume surrounds us all and so the decision to go on a diet is essentially an impossible one to stick to. What is more it also requires us to shift our personality from one conception of ourselves to another. I am not just someone who likes eating, I’m also someone who likes to like eating. There is a part of my personality that enjoys excess and feels that any kind of personal editing of desire is giving in to “the man”. The anthem when I first went to university was Primal Scream’s Loaded and while I may not have really embraced the lifestyle, I was sympathetic with the idea that I should be able to do whatever I want to do.

However, once you leave university life isn’t generally about doing what you want to do all of the time, it is more usually about doing what you have to do. But, when you buy a chocolate bar or get a kebab then you are saying hell to the consequences and just living in the moment. That is a seductive state for someone like me who lives most of the time in the nexis of work and family commitments. Diets are clearly difficult.

However, lots of the messages that career development practitioners push are similarly difficult for people to pick up on and implement. “You should plan more”, “you should aspire more”, “you should be more organised”, “you should put yourself forwards more”, “take more chances”, “you need to network” and so on and so forth. They all key into our conceptions of who we are and ask us to engage in sustained behaviour change. The university student who does very little work, can’t think of any jobs he would like to do and has no interests or hobbies is unlikely to get a job unless he can either transform himself or counterfeit a different self for the length of a recruitment process. Careers practitioners aim to help with the transformation but are often involved in the counterfeiting by coaching people through recruitment processes.

Career counselling, career education and their tools such as LMI and self-examination tools (e.g. MBTI) are designed to help people to transform themselves and to become something different from what they are. Whether the different is described in the terms of “being the person you’ve always wanted to be” or whether it is described in terms of “the habits of successful people”. However the question is really do people change and if so what makes them change.
Let’s look back at the diet example. What does the research say about diets? What is it that makes a dieter successful or not? Obviously this isn’t my field and you should be very careful about believing my summary of the research – but what it seems to say is that dieting and weight loss programmes aren’t very effective. While there are lots of techniques that can get people to lose weight, very few seem to work over the long term. In other words behaviour change is jolly difficult – have a look at my diet tag on CiteULike to see what I read and make your own mind up http://www.citeulike.org/user/pigironjoe/tag/diet.

OK, so it doesn’t look good for me over the long run. But, hold on a minute, I made a New Years Resolution – surely that must make it more likely to succeed. However the little bit of research that I can find on New Year’s Resolutions is confusing (see http://www.citeulike.org/user/pigironjoe/tag/new_years_resolutions). Broadly it seems to say that they don’t necessarily work, but if they are combined with some active and conscious behaviour change tools , they can be more effective. I think that this means that if someone just wishes themself different they aren’t going to get very far, but if they actively change the way they behave they might be able to. For me this means dieting in tandem with my partner, no longer centring our lives around food and not going to the pub any more. I think I’m going to cry.

The point of all this is that behaviour change is difficult. Even with good will (a New Year’s Resolution) and a mechanism (such as a diet and exercise programme) achieving long term behaviour change is difficult. I don’t see any reason why this should be any different if we start to talk about people’s career management or approach to work. If this is right then someone should be doing some research about career behaviours and looking at ways to influence these. Can anyone direct me to any of this work.

Anyway, Ryvita don’t just eat themselves, I’ve got to get back to engaging in what I now is likely to be an ultimately futile struggle with my own personality. Yay!

A while ago I read and blogged about The Spirit Level. Essentially this argues that income inequality is one of the major causes of social problems and low levels of personal satisfaction. Since then a number of organisations have been trying to actively campaign on this issue. This film from the Fair Pay Network is an attempt to engage with mainstream politics around this issue.

iCeGS has produced a lot of research reports over the year. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read all of them so I thought that it might be useful to go back and work through all of the publications to see what I could learn.

First up I thought that I'd have a look at

Barham, L., & Morgan, S. (1999). New Start: Paving the Way for Learning: An Interim Evaluation of Personal Adviser Pilot Projects . Suffolk: Department for Education and Employment.

URL http://www.derby.ac.uk/files/icegs_new_start_paving_the_way1999.pdf

One of the problems that I have in reading some of iCeGS early reports is that they pre-date my involvement in careers work. Because the careers world is so dynamic it is very difficult to access the policy and practice context if you weren't around at the time. Our publications would prove pretty useful to anyone putting together a history of career guidance.

New Start describes an evaluation of a series of projects that used Personal Advisers to reengage disadvantaged young people in learning. The personal advisers operated in the context of "Learning Gateway" which I'm a bit vague about. The role seemed very similar to the Connexions Personal Adviser role but very much on the social work end of that role. From reading this, the research really seems to be examining early pilots that may have been part of the thinking that led to the creation of Connexions. One of the main forms of practice that is discussed is the development of Individual Development Plans.

The report finds that Personal Advisers were effective in helping young people to make progress, but that it was intensive work and that more thought needed to be given to the training of the Advisers and to how they integrated with the rest of the Careers Service.

As ever, there is much to be learnt from looking back... the problems just come round and round.

Here in my intro to the iCeGS Annual Lecture tomorrow. Thanks to @kg53 for helping me put them together.

This is a presentation that Dave Devins and I are giving to the Sustainable Employment through Skills conference tomorrow. It is based on some research that we are currently conducting for the UK Commission for Employment and Skills.

Click here to download:

employers_presentation_final.ppt (1.67 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

employers_presentation_final.ppt (1.67 MB)

Never work with children or animals. That’s what they told me at RADA. Many a performer’s career has been ruined by an unruly elephant or a scene-stealing brat.

Actually I never went to RADA and I reckon that I could probably manage working with children or animals from time to time. The thing I can’t stand is computers. Never work with computers – that is my motto.

You may feel that this is a somewhat limiting position for someone who has made what little reputation he has on the back of “knowing a bit about computers”. However, they remain the bane of my life. When computers treat me well I’m as happy as Larry, when they go wrong I storm around like a bear with a sore head. On the whole I’m not a violent person, but a slow internet connection and a buggy Word document have me reaching for the pick-axe.

Why do computers make me so angry? I think it is because I know what I want them to do. No actually that isn’t right, I know what I want to do. I just want the computer to be an invisible instrument of my will. I don’t want to sit there looking at the screen and watching an hourglass or a rotating circle. I just want what I want to happen to happen. I don’t love technology I love being able to do what I want without thinking about how it works or why it works. Ideally I’d like to be able to shoot messages directly out of my eyes and have them appear on bill boards around the world. But, unfortunately I’m told that that breaks a number of laws of both biology and physics and so I have to use a blog to achieve the same effect. When it works well I don’t have to think about the technology of the blog, when it works badly all I can think about is the technology and how frustrating it is.

OK, if you are still with me you have probably spotted that this is a rant. But, hopefully it is a rant with some kind of purpose. What I’ve realised is that the secret of getting people to use any technology is essentially about making the technology invisible. While people are worrying about the technology, looking at manuals and so on, they are focusing on the technology rather than what it can do. Ultimately they might walk away with a sense of how this bit of technology works, but they won’t have expanded their conception of what they can do. They won’t be dreaming of shooting information out of their eyes onto billboards around the world, all they’ll be doing is trying to remember the sequence of buttons that they pressed to make the light go on.

This is why technical faults are the death knell of any attempt to get people using technology. When things go wrong all people can see is the technology and all they remember is its wrongness. Even if they assimilate the sequence of buttons to press they won’t have experienced the sensation of flying and if something can’t make you fly or do some other kind of magic then why use it. I’ve already got buttons to press elsewhere.

So how do we make it invisible? People have got to actually use whatever technology you are showing them. What is more they’ve got to use it to solve some kind of problem – ideally a real one. At its best it has got to convince them that they are capable of things that they didn’t believe they were capable of. Remember when you made your first poster using Word or Publisher? Remember when you gave your first PowerPoint. It felt like flying didn’t it, because all of a sudden you could make something or do something that you never thought that you would be able to do. Because you had that feeling you were motivated to change your practice and once it became part of your practice you found that you were able to learn more about how the technology worked and the more you learnt the more invisible it became. Eventually it was so invisible that you actually couldn’t remember how it works when you’re trying to explain it to other people.

So that’s it. The best way to teach people technology is to make it invisible and to give them superpowers. Is that too much to ask?

I'm going to run the 5 things that careers professionals can do with social media course today. The slides are basically the same as the ones that I used last time but I've made a couple of tweaks.

Here they are

Click here to download:

all_5_things.ppt (7.37 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

all_5_things.ppt (7.37 MB)