Learning digital research by doing
I’m getting my teach on again! This semester is the third run of my Masters unit Social Research in the Digital World. The unit has been opened out substantially so I now have students from three different courses. This week, 20 students attended the first 4 hr workshop where we certainly set ourselves up for a potentially super cool learning/research collaboration.
A key learning outcome for this unit is that students demonstrate their ability to participate in networked scholarly practices across this web. Students therefore blog and tweet their way through the unit, the ultimate aim of which is to learn in a networked community and set themselves up as ‘social professionals’ online.
Taking to Twitter and blogging in this capacity is generally easier for those who already identify as researchers. Some of the students in my class are well into their Master of Research programme, many heading for the PhD pathway. Some of the students in my class have just started their Master of Social Science and are specialising in applied fields such as Religion and Society, Development and Sustainability. There are also students nearing the end of their Master of Social Science, working on their theses. I also have students studying for their Master of Planning.
In a nutshell, there is greater diversity in my class this year and not everyone identifies as a researcher (yet!). Nor is everyone heading towards a research-focused career. But digital research skills are relevant across the board. So here we all are, becoming digital researchers this semester.
The first workshop focuses on identity dilemmas and ‘blurred boundaries’ as we navigate the digital world as social researchers. I needed a way to make taking up the identity position of digital researcher available to everyone. This way also needed to explore identity since that is what is becoming through all this blogging and tweeting (and all of the other things we encourage students to practice these days). The search was on for a learning activity that ties the threads together and opens up possibilities for becoming.
The learning activity is a social experiment on Twitter that explore identity bias. Students are now in research teams where each team is creating one persona that will have two identities, one masculine and one feminine. There is a ‘live’ research protocol document in development, which anyone in the class can make edits and contributions.
Between now and the next workshop, students are piloting their methodology. They need to create credible identities for their Twitter ‘bots’ and decide what to tweet and where but not to forget the ethical implications of their actions. It may be that this study evolves and we look at more than gender. Simone Betes has already suggested we could add a third gender-neutral identity. We might decide to take an intersectional approach and consider how other social structures shape interactions online. Who knows. Research isn’t fixed, nor is it linear. Where it goes is being figured out between us.
There are so many lessons here I’m sure, from how a research team might all need to identify with their personas in order for them to be credible (check out Katelyn Pickett’s first blog post for more), to research ethics, researcher safety, and the ways we now communicate across social media platforms.
Becoming digital researchers by doing digital research. It sounds pretty simple, it’s also rather complex. The initial idea to explore identity through gender originates from an Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) mail list thread. The social experiment is also driven by the ‘technology-rich’ studio classrooms we now find ourselves in at our new city campus.
The social experiment developed in, and depends on, collaboration with my colleague Jeff Foster who will run Workshop 4 where students will scrap and analyse the data they’ve generated with their Twitter personas. So Workshop 2 on the open web, and Workshop 3 on ontology/epistemology, need weaving into mix. Any thoughts on ways to do this, let me know.
Most important of all, this experiment depends on the ideas, hard work, and enthusiasm of the students in my class, as well as my own.
I have to do too hence this blog post. I got out of the blogging game for a while. Now I’m back giving Medium a whirl (thanks for the recommendation Björn). Let’s see if I can practice what I preach. Peace out and love to you all 🙌
PS I wrote this on my phone before bed. Forgive any typos. I’ll add links later.
PPS you can follow our activities on #SRDW2017
