Making the connection with social networking
Robin Petterd
Solving the ‘disconnect’
I’m Robin Petterd, the acting Team Leader of the Art, Craft and Design area at TAFE Tasmania. My teaching area is in our Design and Digital media program which is a Certificate IV in Design and then students move into a Diploma. This is mainly a face-to-face program with lots of elearning supports.
When I first started teaching which was about four years ago, I came to a group of students, mixture of ages and all of a sudden they seemed to spend half their life on a site called ‘deviantART’. I looked at it at went ‘Oh, what the hell are you doing there?’ Especially a lot of the College graduates are being engaged with this community where essentially what they do, is upload their images, they can upload animations and form networks around these and people post and comment on them, and they have friends, relationships as well, and then they can actually watch each other as well. I’ve got to admit, I looked over peoples shoulders and went ‘Oh God, half the stuff on there is really scary’. There wasn’t any quality control—there wasn’t any sort of control. Even in that year I sat there, blogging was starting to become an interesting thing.
One of the things in Design practice that’s really important is process. Rather than actually assessing the students by observing their process, I asked them to start to document and reflect on their process through blogs and documentation. I said, you can do that through images or text or whatever you really want to do. I essentially tried that and tried a few different blogging systems over a couple of years and I really struggled with engaging them with it. There was an assessment task—so that was like ‘Oh we have to do this, I don’t want to do this’ and occasionally we would have one or two people who would really go for it but the majority of them would sit there and I could see them doing this ‘Oh I don’t want to write, I don’t want to want to engage, I don’t want to do this thing just because of TAFE’. So essentially, last year I had this turning point where I had a couple of students who were engaged in ‘deviantART’ in a really different way. One student actually had a following of...I can’t remember how many hits he had on his page...but it’s a massive, massive level of engagement from the community in work and essentially on deviantART she is ‘someone’.
I did this other project with students sharing and trying to work with between Bendigo TAFE and TAFE Tasmania. What was really interesting was that I set up a media-sharing space and the students didn’t engage with it. A couple of Tasmanian students and Bendigo students are still engaged and still in contact. They engage on deviantART. Essentially, I turned around and went ‘Ok time to give in. Can I use this tool in my teaching? Can this thing that the students are actually engaging with...can I harness it?’ So this year, basically I had a group of students, predominantly young students, half of them had deviantART accounts actually started instead of asking them to start Blogger accounts. They showed each other who didn’t have deviantART accounts how to set up deviantART accounts and essentially they use the journals on deviantART to document processes there. All of a sudden I had this flurry of engagement. The people who hadn’t been engaged in these sorts of spaces before, with the people who were, were incredibly supportive and posted on their pages and were giving positive feedback. I got the amount of posts that I needed for assessments and all of a sudden, because I’d come to their space rather than try and drag them out into blogger and any other way of blogging, I actually finally got engagement and excitement around it.
So essentially, I integrate the deviantART website into other learning activities, by asking the students to document process in their journal. What I find is, that when most of the students sit there and are saying ‘Ok, this is a bit of evidence for Robin’ they actually put ‘TAFE’ on it rather than just actually putting up the name of it, so I harness it by sitting there giving them a normal project brief and a task; getting them to share their URLs via the mailing list and it ticks on from there. I also don’t keep it as a thing that is happening all the time. I do it as a task. I think the last time it ran for a period of six weeks so that they can actually then not feel like deviantART has become only TAFE work, so it’s also their other space as well.
Some of my thinking about media sharing sites and deviantART site and YouTube, possibly because my role in TAFE has changed at the moment, as Team Leader I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about how we promote our courses. I’m sitting there thinking, well in actual fact, a great way to promote the course for Year 12 students is to actually sit there and say ‘well, have a look at some samples of some of the students work on deviantART’ so that it actually becomes part of promotion and network in a fairly small community anyway and the people who are interested in the course get to see some of the work the students are working on and some of the things that they are doing, before they actually come to the course.
Merging personal spaces and professional spaces
The secret to deviantART working over something like Blogger was that it is a tool that students are using anyway. So it’s not a tool that students are seeing as a TAFE tool, it’s part of their life and part of their personal and professional life because it’s crossing over their art practice so it wassomething that they saw and valued outside of TAFE as well.
In terms of dealing with the students about essentially ‘TAFE space’ invading possibly a personal space, was that I actually asked permission. I sat there and said to them ‘Look, you normally run this blogging project that’s around developing the critical knowledge and documenting.What are your thoughts on...and can you show me how the journal feature works in deviantART?’ Because, I didn’t’ know how it worked. So essentially, they’d taken the lead technically on it and they sat there...and I asked their permission about it rather than actually inflicting and being something that I thought about and didn’t actually ask about. I did ask their permission about whether or not that could be a space for that and what was happening anyway, was that they were essentially doing TAFE work and posting it on DeviantART so I was actually just harnessing some of what they were doing. I think one reason why they went ‘Oh yeah, this is ok because it’s harnessing part of our activities that we want to do anyway’.
One really interesting thing I found it really hard to get my head around was ‘How do we bring together all these people into one thing?’ One of the students said ‘Oh look, I’ll make little icons for each person. I’ll grab a picture from each person and I’ll build it on mine.’So everybody comes to her site and then they can actually get the links to each other in that spot. That was a really powerful thing to see them taking some sort of ownership of this space as well. Most of DeviantART is open and what’s really interesting is there are actually other TAFE students in the North who have started to link in and become part of the network as well, and for example, an ex-student who is working in the industry, is another person who had a profile and all of a sudden discovered that another student had been following his work based on ‘Oh he’s a Tasmanian and I really like the look of his work’ but they hadn’t actually clicked that they were actually in the same course.
The students are accessing the network and accessing DeviantART on campus. We’ve got an interesting IT setup here where a lot of things aren’t blocked but they are incredibly slow instead, so the YouTube in the lab is incredibly slow, but the students can still access that. My general wisdom about any of these web tools or any online tools really seen now is...look at the tools the students are using and use those, even if other tools look fantastic and look exciting – what are the students using? If they are using YouTube and Myspace – they are the things to use.
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