 Here's a story of Alan who lives on the Internet and Strawberry and of course he's a brilliant educational technologist that we all know. I don't pay her for that so Mia she's an English prof at Cain University and she teaches classes in electronic literature. And in January 2017 we hatched a crazy idea. We were at the DML Digital Media and Learning Conference which is at UC Irvine and we decided to make some digital alchemy through a networked digital storytelling class. But that's really another story but there's a link for that. In between that time in August 2017 I made a move from New Jersey to Norway my sabbatical year where I took the position of full bright professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen. But there's a situation there were five MA students in writing studies that Mia was advising who needed a thesis advisor and somehow she cooked up this idea that I could do this from Arizona. And he certainly did. So no surprise we decided to roll out a seminar that fall when I first arrived in Norway that was a co-locational seminar. The seminar was called ResNetSem that's the hashtag which stood for research networked seminar. And one of the interesting things was that my students were they were doing two semesters of the MA thesis and Mia's were in a one semester course on a research course and that's the course that Nicholas was in. I'll add that there were two different topics. The students in New Jersey were working on their writing studies MA thesis while the students in Norway were in a digital aesthetics seminar. I forget is this yours or mine? You can take it. Go ahead. I might have gotten off by one anyhow we had separate course sites they're each word press sites in both classes the MA students were writing out their research in their own blogs they were syndicated to these two different sites. And they so we had two different spaces on the internet for their work but then we also tied things quite beautifully together with other writing tools and other platforms that we were using together. So of course we're doing Twitter and of course we have to make a Twitter tags hash cloud thank you Martin Hoxie. We did we did try to have a slack and that'll be a thing we come back to we thought we could create a little bit more overlap in slack and something didn't exactly connect there but we did initially have some things. I wouldn't my students on about hypothesis for social annotation and I also want to introduce them to using RSS feeds to not only read each other's blogs but I had my students sort of start developing their own sets of information feeds that would help their research. So this is a glimpse of our students on both sides of the Atlantic on the left you see the New Jersey students on the right you see the Norwegian students. And one of the things we did do through the slack is we created these little hello videos to each other we're not going to play them here but they're worth coming back to their marvelous. So one of the things we wanted to share out in this quick minute or 15 minutes that we have is the idea of how to seed research in a networked learning experience. So we're arguing that certain infrastructuring moves are need so are needed in order to facilitate that possibility. The first move that we wanted to share with you is the use of virtually connecting as a kind of forum for learning for each of our students for each of our student groups. So in this particular example we we dialed in to the digital media and learning conference that occurred this fall 2017 and in that conference we spoke with Henry Jenkins in my digital aesthetic seminar we were reading quite a bit of Henry because one of the important themes of the course was participatory culture. So it was a really wonderful example of sort of leveling the field and having students directly connect with well-known contributors to that field. One of the powerful powerful aspects of what happened there is that one of our students Catherine who's interested in pursuing a MA thesis on the deviant art community in particular she was able to speak directly with Henry about the formulations of her thesis and fine-tune her angle and her perspective on it. So that's an example again of a specific kind of infrastructuring move that is powerful for student learners. Catherine was terribly nervous and so but she she did beautifully and she was I mean young students they're really worried about not appearing foolish and they want to have their research ideas validated and to be able to ask directly of the godfather of participatory culture was a really great move. Another idea I had was again it's almost like doing virtual connecting again is how can we bring some expertise into my writing studies master's students. First of all I don't know much about literature so I have to rely on other people to bring in as experts so I asked some people to come in for a hangout with my students and each of my students had 10 minutes to pitch their thesis idea to some people and just get kind of some open feedback and so all of them really said that that was a pivotal moment for them to realize of these external experts that were available and willing also to connect with them after the session and also a thesis tank no one wins or loses well everybody wins I think that's the premise. Before we play this next video I'll just say that open doesn't open willy nilly doesn't work unless you sort of think about anchors for students to become empowered to ask the right questions and to direct those questions towards connectedness in particular ways. If it's just why don't you throw out a tweet about this question even in a hashtag environment that might have some attention it doesn't necessarily yield back the kind of results that are empowering for students so those two examples of infrastructureing moves are more specific ways students become empowered in an open environment. Let's hear from the students and also I want to add I mean one of the like the lowest tech thing that was maybe the most effective was email it was connecting my students with some people who had very specific expertise or references or other people they could connect to in the field so just introducing your students by another colleague by email worked really well. I had this grand plan I'd be able to bring my students to the conference but that didn't come short but we have two of them who kind of sent some videos about their response to the experience. Hi my name is Marissa and I'm a student of Professor Alan Levine and Dr. Mia Zamora at the Kane University English and Writing Studies MA program here in New Jersey. Hello my name is Laura Lopez I am a Kane University student enrolled in the Writing Studies program. My thesis is a study of personhood in young adult science fiction dystopian literature. My thesis is basically a creative writing project centered around a series of fictional conversations with my father who passed away on 9-11. What I've liked about this semester is that it's been a really interesting way of exploring new technological ways of gathering data for our individual research projects. Another aspect of the program that I really loved was in addition to being a student I'm a mother and a full-time teacher so each of our sessions was run through a google hangout so being able to connect remotely was really convenient and again I felt connected to both my classmates and my professor. My thesis is about technology and implementing it into daily life so it was interesting to explore that in my own life for example using different tools. There were three tools that stood out to me that we used that were new to me. It was doterro, hypothesis and speed leak. Something else that I liked about the network nature of this seminar is that we were able to meet people from all around the world that we otherwise wouldn't likely encounter organically and that was a really cool experience because you got to meet people who might know about your topic and they could really help you and that really that helped that happened a couple times throughout the course of the semester and it was a really excellent opportunity. One of my favorite aspects of the course was the thesis tank that we did early on in the fall seminar and it was basically a google hangout where a panel of scholars in related fields were willing and able to give us advice and feedback on our thesis so we kind of gave them an elevator pitch and they were they were ready with resources and just good insight and that experience really helped to shape the the direction of my project very early on and not only that but after the thesis tank session was over many of these experts you know connected with me via email or twitter or by posting comments on my blog so that experience was definitely one that was well worth it and really made me feel connected and supported by a community larger than just cane university. I've had a great experience in this network class and I recommend it to everyone. So Nicholas is my student in Norway and he was going to share a bit of his own experience in the in the seminar and in the networked context. Yeah so I took part in this seminar last semester found it really interesting. My initial thoughts when we started this semester was that my my interest my key interest at that time was participatory culture and I really enjoyed the thought of this silent majority basically the larger user group of the web that doesn't speak up or do anything but as the semester progressed I got more and more into the notion of being networked and using your networks for more than just a social theme and towards the end of the semester I kind of shifted my focus from participatory culture and the silent majority and onto networked education and how you could use participatory culture in a educational way and in an educational environment. So that was basically how I progressed during the semester started at one point with participatory culture and ending with the same theme just way more specific and something I actually find more interesting. Yeah so we thought we would end on that note because we thought it was an organic and provocative sense of what can happen when you seed research in a networked environment and things grow from an initial perspective into one that might very well grow out of the practice itself. So thank you and we've finished early so that means we can have a conversation a bit if you're curious about anything. No questions for you. But I do have a question for you Mia. You brought up a point which I think is fascinating is the idea of building infrastructure around that sense of openness and can you talk more about that because that's really compelling to me. Thank you so much for opening that up because I think that's really important. So I've been an advocate as you know for a long time of connected learning and I think that those theoretical models for learning might be helpful in this particular case connected learning really gets to your question So as I said before I think the open context is powerful and definitely might lead to a sense of empowerment in students but it could also leave them at risk or or kind of just lost at sea. So how do we infrastructure in a way that's powerful connected learning really helps us home home in on on the specific kind of sense of pillars of what makes for transformative connection. So I'm just going to review some of those pillars in the theory and then maybe even think a little bit out loud about what moves we made or how they connect to those moves. So one of the things that's really important is the notion of self-driven interest. That is students come into classrooms with things they have passion about and those things should have play in the classroom. They should have a role to play within the conversations that occur in the classroom. So that's the first thing. Another idea is the notion of shared purpose. So a community of learners come together for a course experience and they're at first is just this sort of notion of getting to know each other but over time one can apprehend a sense of shared values or something that everybody suddenly feels a kind of shared commitment for and that should play a role in what happens in the classroom. Another pillar of connected learning is the idea of peer supported learning. So it's not only the instructor in a hierarchical fashion that has the knowledge to sort of pass down but rather that everyone in the room has something to bear on what we discover together. So the co-learner model of learning. Another aspect of the learning theory is simply academic oriented learning and that's where the instructor can through experience show all kinds of sort of ways to sort through thinking and analysis and some of those moves that we see infrastructurally are the tools you know some of the tools and then of course that kind of training that comes from the field is also evident I think in the conversations the the kinds of things that happen in terms of building a lit review those are academically oriented procedures and experiences that students can have. Another important pillar I'm trying to think I'm there's I think there's one that I'm missing right now that I'll think of later and get very upset that I've forgotten. But that does I think just those things alone gives you a sense of the kinds of things that move away just from okay here's the open environment into how can we listen to each other and build relationships because ultimately the openness is important for breaking down barriers for teaching beyond the the four walls that we exist in spatially but openness doesn't go all the way and so those ideas like the thesis tank or virtually connected session with the leader in the field we Alan and I often call those studio visits and other learning experiments we do together because we want to give it a feel of stopping by and catching someone at work naturally those kinds of things I think are infrastructuring moves that facilitate connected learning and connection. Well oh I just want to say also like infrastructure sounds like big permanent rigid structures I mean we're talking about stuff that we swap out on the fly and and you can do very quickly uh to change I mean one thing that's like I realized my students they didn't know anything they've never talked to a reference librarian and I'm like you're missing out on the most incredible thing in the library they know about the databases and the chairs and the wi-fi but it's like if you don't know how to like formulate a question to bring to a reference librarian you're really missing out and so that's a non-technological tool. Yeah just to back up what Alan said is it's so important to think of that word infrastructureing more as in the way we're using it or the intonation that we're bringing to it is a move it's a strategy not necessarily a building of a solid thing that will always stay the same.