How 'social' is social networking?

Facebook always provokes strong emotions; some people love it, spending their entire lives on there, and others hate it and will not go anywhere near it.

There is an interesting article in today's Guardian which suggests there is a growing body of evidence that social networking can have an isolating effect on people. People are getting more and more drawn into the 'social' media itself and so spending less and less time actually interacting with real people.

I love Facebook and spend quite a bit of time on there, not playing games, just reading the trivia about my friends lives and sharing my own, along with sharing interesting things I have seen or read. To me this feels like real, meaningful exchange, which increases my sense of connection with my friends. So, how come other people end up feeling that they are isolated observers of other people's lives?

I think the answer is to do with tacit knowledge. When I spend 'live' time with my friends I see their facial expressions, hear the nuances in their voices and can gauge their subtle reactions when we talk. After a while we build a tacit understanding of each other that then carries through to our online interactions. I can read between the lines of their posts or understand a whole lot more than was written into a brief text.

Looking back at my model of learning developed in my PhD, I would say that when I get to know somebody I have moved to the 'expert learner' stage where I can observe their online dialogue and understand without needing the 'bridges' provided by face-to-face interaction. So, for me this virtual contact  is really meaningful, is often the starting point of conversation when I meet friends, and is a vital point of contact with friends who live far away and I see rarely.

For those who find it isolating, I guess they need more balance in their lives. They need to try to spend as much real time with people as they do virtual time, and to narrow that virtual contact to include many more real friends and to cut out many who are just virtual friends. My personal Facebook rule is that I am only 'friends' with people I know. Some of these are people I don't know well and am never likely to, but it would have been rude to refuse. So, I file them into a category where they do not see the personal things I post and I do not see theirs, they have had the satisfaction of adding me to their list but nothing more.

The same goes for so many things in life - a little in moderation is good for you - but too much of anything usually has negative side affects!

Cambodian donut shops

This is a lovely bit of film making and a fantastic story. Their work ethic is phenomenal and I love that the Cambodian community have generated this new knowledge and then shared it with their family and friends so there are a whole load of Cambodian donut shops in the area.

KeyPiece

KeyPiece was a combined research seminar and public exhibition that brought together ten leading researchers in metalwork and jewellery; Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill who initiated the project, Christoph Zellweger who led the workshops, and participants Lionel Dean, Maria Hanson, Grace Horne, Antje Illner, Drummond Masterton, Sarah O’Hana, Tine de Ruysser and Lucian Taylor.

Gallery event
Starting from the ‘object’, the question of how a ‘keypiece’ can be identified and defined provided the basis for debate between the makers. The works displayed functioned as both a physical reference and a catalyst in the development of the dialogue about the nature of research in the field.

To enable engagement with the public whilst maintaining the seminar situation, the exhibits provided a divide of the gallery space; one half public space, the other workshop setting, with paper covering walls and floor for participants to write and draw. After the workshop finished the whole gallery became accessible to the public, providing greater insight into the exhibited objects.

Multimedia documentation
The event was observed and documented by myself using video and stills and writer/curator Monica Gaspar. I used this record to create an online interactive multimedia resource for distribution within and beyond the professional community. The aim was to provide an engaging, accessible and durable documentation of the event, which will be of interest to practitioners, educators, researchers within the creative practices and beyond.

More understanding of "the crit"

A small 'aha' moment about what is happening during "the crit" I described earlier - two things:

• The teacher(s) assess the student's work, tell them what is good about it and where it can be improved. (That bit is obvious!)
• The student experiences this process for their own work and sees it happening to other students. In this way they learn about how to critique generally; the sorts of criteria their work is judged on, things which tend to be praised, things which tend to be frowned upon, different ways of solving different problems. (That was my 'aha' moment!)

In this way they both learn how to improve their current work and how to critically evaluate their future work. Individual feedback wouldn't be as effective, being part of a group is vital, but students don't seem to understand group work. There is a constant complaint from Lecturers that students do not turn up to organised teaching sessions, but are constantly clamoring for individual attention.

Again, during the H&S training session I observed, the small group of students who attended got to see a range of common problems and solutions to them which would have been much more limited if they had been alone. They clearly did not understand this and had a tendency to wander off or be looking elsewhere whilst the others had their go.

I wonder if simply making this explicit to the students would make a difference, or if something more sophisticated with group work and peer support needs to be done?

Craft learning and "the crit"

"The crit" is central to traditional design education and I sat in on one this week as part of my current research at Sheffield Hallam University. It brought back memories of doing it myself, it is a fairly scary experience, and it made me think about the Japanese craftsmen's apprenticeship experiences described in Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo.

Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.

It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!

Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.

This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!

I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...

via my kesurokai blog

Traditional craft apprenticeship

As a great admirer of traditional craftsmanship, I am saddened when craftsmen come to the end of their working practice without having passed their unique skills on. However, the more I read about traditional apprenticeship, the more I can see why this has happened and cannot wish for a return to the old ways of teaching.

I just finished reading "Edo Craftsmen, master artisans of old Tokyo" and of the twelve featured craftsmen only two appear both to have long-term viable businesses and trained apprentices to pass on their skills. Part of the problem is the increasing accessibility of cheaper, mass-produced alternatives to whatever they make. However, many craftsmen manage to market their produce in such conditions by selling a small volume at higher prices to more discerning customers. The failure is in part caused by a lack of younger people coming into the crafts with the vision to exploit such markets.

The descriptions in the book of the craftsmen's experience of traditional apprenticeship reveals both the rigour and the modern-day drawbacks of the system. They would start very young and spend several years doing menial tasks whilst observing the breadth of the practice, then gradually take on small tasks followed by increasingly complex ones as they grew older and more able. The emphasis was not on teaching, but learning; observing and imitating, rather than being shown how.

With a good master and a willing student this clearly works well. In her study of the Japanese ceramicist Shoji Hamada, Susan Peterson describes the relationship between deshi (apprentice) and master: “To learn as a deshi means to submit one’s self to the master, to leave one’s own self, to become ‘in’ the master. This ‘surrender’ to the master does not mean just blind imitation, but gives a spiritual discipline and the opportunity to absorb a skill into one’s bones.”

However, it is a system that relies on a huge amount of trust and non-verbal communication between master and apprentice, and that is not always going to work well. Whilst a very strict master might ensure that very high standards of craft skills are passed from one generation to the next, it might well be at the cost of creativity and the ability of the younger person to see new opportunities and develop new markets. Given also that young people stay in school much longer nowadays, I cannot see a traditional craft apprenticeship being a very appealing option.

The future, however is not all bleak, I think there are craftsmen who have adapted to new ways of teaching and also multimedia offers huge potential to record and transmit quite complex skills. In my last research project I worked with traditional Sheffield knife makers and made an online resource which was successfully used by a variety of learners. The wonders of the internet mean information travels fast and those who wish to learn in this way can readily access such resources and conduct their own apprenticeships in their own way.

via my Kesurokai blog

Folding knives

This research was carried out in association with Prof Chris Rust at Sheffield Hallam University and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

This project focused on the skills of traditional folding knife makers in Sheffield, once a significant part of the cities famous metalworking industries but now declined to just a few master craftsmen. In our research we undertook case studies with two of these craftsmen, a blade grinder and a folding knife maker, to demonstrate the tacit nature of such craft skill and reveal the methods we used for elicitation and interpretation.

Traditional Sheffield folding knives

Contemporary knifemaker and co-resercher Dr Grace Horne acted as an expert learner, working alongside the craftsmen, observed by myself as designer, and then through experimental making and collaboration together prototype learning materials were generated. The materials were tested and developed into an online resource using a small group of learners who come from a new generation of creative metalworkers whose interests lie in adapting traditional skills to new craft practices.

Knives made by Grace Horne

As a result we were able to demonstrate that the principles for craft transmission developed in previous research could be applied to a specific example of craft knowledge with useful results for the learners. We also developed a more robust methodology for the elicitation and design development methods needed for this form of design practice.

Knives made by a learner using the online resource

Multimedia outputs
FoldingKnives: a public version of the learning materials developed during the project.
TransmittingCraft: online documentation of the project; its background, the work undertaken and outcomes, including video and images from the research.
YouTube channel hosting video clips used during the research.

In this video Russell White makes a folding knife at Taylor’s Eye Witness, one of the last Sheffield manufacturers to still make folding knives.

Expert learners

When I started working with craft practitioners, I started with ones I knew. They were all woodworkers because I’m a woodworker myself and by the end of my PhD studies I realised that, whilst what I was doing was successful, I was relying on my own skills to interpret the skills of others. To make my methods more generalisable I needed to work through someone else in an area unfamiliar to myself.

Inspired by some of the learners I had worked with, I realised the probable solution was working with an expert learner; that is one who is self confident, self motivated and already is possession of a useful set of skills relevant to those to be learned. I then gained AHRC funding to work with just such a person; contemporary knife maker and fellow researcher Dr Grace Horne.

We spent two years working with some of the last traditional knife makers in Sheffield, a city once famed for its knife making industries. During this time Grace worked alongside the master craftsmen whilst I video recorded, then we worked together to develop learning materials. Grace undertook experimental making, I designed experimental interpretation, and we worked with a group of enthusiastic amateur makers to develop on online learning resource.

The expert learner can learn with minimal instruction. They have the advantage that they have enough skill to learn through observation without needing 'bridges' as they are operating in the zone circled below:

Our research showed that, as the knowledge was recently acquired and the expert learner was consciously engaged with the elicitation process, she was able to rapidly adapt her understanding of it to improve transmission to the learners. Hence, she was able to develop the bridges needed by the novice learners to start developing their skills:

A key part of this process was the expert learner’s interaction with myself, the
designer and the developing learning resource. Through a process of video recording and summarising events using drawings and flow charts, I was able to assist with articulation of the knowledge and develop interpretation suitable for transmitting the knowledge.

Mind the gap

The skills involved in craft practice involve a large degree of tacit knowledge; the principles governing a skilled practitioner’s actions are often only known through undertaking those actions. This internalised nature of craft knowledge makes it difficult for experts to communicate their knowledge to others, presenting a barrier to transmission.

In addition many practitioners have little or no experience of training others and tend to be defensive about their skills. Possibly this is because they are uncomfortable with not knowing how to explain what they do, and maybe also they worry their explanations will over simplify the complexity of their skill.

My experience of working with numerous expert craft practitioners over the last eight years is that this defensiveness needs approaching sensitively, but can be overcome so such craft skills can be recorded and transmitted. The key concept behind my elicitation and transmission strategy is that of bridges across the knowledge gap, which draws on the theories of Michael Polanyi [1] and Donald Schön [2].

The first stage of craft learning is through observation and imitation. Polanyi described this as a process of indwelling: the novice seeks to dwell in the actions of the expert through observing them and taking action to imitate them. However, at an early stage of learning
it is very difficult for a novice just to observe and imitate successfully [3,4]. According to Polanyi, the difference between the skill of the novice and that of the expert is “a gap to be bridged by an intelligent effort” and Schön similarly referred to “an apparently unbridgeable communication gap” between novice and expert.

This is a drawing I have made to represent the concept; it might look like a graph, but it is not intended to be in any way measurable! The x-axis represents some measure of time and the y-axis some measure of skill. The expert has already achieved a high level of skill and the novice is setting out to become at least as skilled, but initially there is a gap between the two where the novice struggles imitate what they observe the expert undertaking:



Polanyi only views this knowledge gap from the perspective of the expert, explaining “Our message had left something behind that we could not tell, and its reception must rely on it that the person addressed will discover that which we have not been able to communicate”. The onus in his terms is on the novice to understand through intelligent effort. However Schön suggested the solution was in “reciprocal reflection-in-action”, implying that the expert needed to make as much effort as the novice in the process of bridging the gap, observing the novice's attempts at imitation and modifying their instruction until accord is reached.

However, as I mentioned earlier, many expert practitioners are not familiar with training novices and are reluctant to engage in a discursive process; simply correcting 'mistakes' at face value rather than seeing them as the novice's way of trying to understand the problem. This is where I come in. My role is as an intermediary between expert and novice, facilitating reciprocal reflection and recording the bridges that are needed to cross the gap.



It is important to note that these bridges are not tacit knowledge made explicit as is sometimes suggested. They are pieces of explicit knowledge enable the novice to dwell in the tacit knowledge of the expert and build their own tacit knowledge. Some might end up as fundamental to their practice, but many will just be stepping stones on the way to mastery.

[1] Polanyi M (1966). The tacit dimension. Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA [1983 edition].

[2] Schön D A (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. Jossey-Bass, London.

[3] Wood N (2006). Transmitting craft knowledge: designing interactive media to support tacit skills learning. PhD thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, available here.

[4] Wood N & Horne G (2008). The new journeyman; the role of an expert learner in eliciting and transmitting skilled knowledge. Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference, Sheffield, available here.