Housing as a middle class problem

As my research interest has been predominantly on community regeneration, or neighbourhood renewal, in deprived neighbourhoods I have quite an interest in social housing. With my research “turn” to understanding middle-class or affluent communities, I’ve been pondering, in light of recent policy debates around housing (on housing supply, planning for housing and the “bedroom tax”), would the policy debate around housing be different if we were still in the “golden age” of social housing when, in Scotland in 1981 over 50 per cent of the population lived in “socially rented” housing? Would the policy debate be different, or better informed, if the middle-classes were as interested in rented housing as they are in mortgaged or bought housing now?

That golden age?

Big proviso here – this is my interpretation of what I have read of council housing in the late 1960s and 1970s (predominantly from CDP reports) so if there are factual inaccuracies, I’m happy to be informed by them and hopefully change my views.

First of all, I think we need to interrogate that “golden age” of “socially rented” housing – that period up until the early 1980s when local authority housing remained the tenure of choice for a large proportion of the population. In some readings of the debate about housing provision this period paints the UK as a sort of proto-Germanic/Scandinavian housing utopia. From my knowledge this is a simplification of a much more complex story. My knowledge here comes from just a few sources that I’ll be explicit about: the broad narrative of the welfare state in Timmin’s The Five Giants; the account of council housing in the 1960s in Tucker’s Honourable Estates; the account of corporate management and housing in Cockburn’s The Local State; and the accounts of interwar slum clearance housing in Sean Damer’s Wine Alley; and the reports of the Paisley Community Development Project (1972-77), the only CDP to be based in an area of local authority housing.

To apply our understanding of social housing as welfare provision to council housing up until the 1970s is, as I see it, to misapply a modern concept and to misunderstand the strategy of equality that local authority housing provision was aiming for. One thing that becomes abundantly clear reading Tucker and the accounts of the Paisley CDP is that council housing was neither equally good nor affordable to all. Rent levels reflected the mortgage the local authority had taken out to build the housing and grant levels varied wildly. Therefore the more modern and larger your house, the higher your rent and the more affluent your neighbours could be. To use some “experiential” evidence – my parents (a teacher and a social worker) struggled to pay the rent on their first council flat because of this and most of their neighbours in their high-rise block were also professionals and what we would now term “first-time buyers”.

Before the advent of housing benefit, the local variability of rent and rate rebates meant that those tenants in greatest need – those who would now access what we call social housing – were in the oldest, poorest quality housing with the lowest rent. Often this would be the stigmatised “supervised” housing set aside by the local authority for “incorrigible tenants” and such like. This was the class system writ-large over areas of council housing. Even by the epitome of the “golden age” of council housing in Scotland, just before the Right-To-Buy was introduced, the two local authorities in my two case studies for my PhD were actively managing the neighbourhoods as low demand areas, with low rents to keep this “sort” of tenant separate from the “respectable” tenants in other housing schemes.

The other aspect of this, often ignored, is that because of the direct link between rents and finance, local authorities were major builders of housing for sale. Tucker nicely discusses how as the political balance of a council would swing from Labour to Conservative and back again, the signs outside newly built council houses would change from “to let”, to “for sale” and back to “to let”. My own family did well out of this with my uncle buying a house in Essex in the 1960s with a mortgage from the LCC. And we must not forget that with the relaxation of credit controls that Heath introduced in the early 1970s that led to that first residential property boom that crashed in 1973, the pent-up demand for mortgaged occupation in the UK was already being released.

I would actually characterise the strategy of equality for housing policy until the 1980s as being one of one of producing enough good quality housing. You only have to look at all our cities and the vast suburbs of post-war council and private housing, to see the massive amounts of land that were released by local plans following the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The high-rises that have become so symbolic within debates on housing were a product of this “numbers game” in housing policy. There was political consensus that there was not enough housing stock to meet the rising demand and we needed a lot more. And so it was built by governments of all political persuasions.

What happened since the early 1980s is a decline in the supply of new housing. This is a well-rehearsed story, but my take on the narrative is that overly pessimistic population projections from the 1981 census, combined with NIMBYism, and the Thatcher government’s attack on planning (especially the virtual halt to strategic long term planning in Structure Plans) meant new house building dropped dramatically. This was combined with a virtual halt to new socially rented homes being built. Again, “experiential” evidence (looking around Edinburgh) testifies to this. I don’t think I know of a major building or housing estate built in Edinburgh in the 1980s. Quite a few from the early 90s, but a bit of a gulf in the middle.

So what?

So, to return to the original question what if 50 per cent of housing was still socially rented? Well, first of all, based on my work on middle-class activism, I doubt it would be socially rented as we understand it today. The marginalisation of long-term rented housing as a tenure choice in the UK has come about for all sorts of reasons over the past 30 years. Before then, local authority housing was a mixed tenure. So, I’m pretty sure the middle-class, or more affluent residents, would have agreed to higher rents to improve housing management and maintenance, creating a further residualisation of a portion of local authority housing that would be available to less affluent tenants. Further, newly built housing would also be burdened with a higher mortgage and only be available to wealthier tenants as well. In a Britain with income inequality as low as it was in 1979 this would have less of an impact on the accessibility of housing as it would with inequality as high as it is today. A socially just way to manage this would be that as advised by Tucker back in the 1960s – rent rebates (or housing benefit) to enable people to access the housing they choose.

The great unknown at the moment in all of this is the private-rented sector. Lack of data means we don’t really know that much about it, although we do know it is still growing. That great historian of housing policy, my dad, suggested to me in a conversation where we were bemoaning my brother and his wife’s poor experience of PRS, that we’re essentially returning to a housing situation like that which existed when he were a lad, in the 1940s and 1950s – with Rachmannist landlords, and just people wanting a nest egg, purchasing poor quality property, renting it out to provide an investment income, without the reinvestment being prioritised to make these good homes.

And with this rise of the PRS and the short-assured tenancy as the tenure of no-choice (I was a victim of the tenure for five years myself) the middle-classes have been doing what my research predicts they would do and complaining about it – there’s been the long-running column in the Guardian and I recently discovered this group set up in Edinburgh. Alex Marsh also picks up on this here.

Which, oddly enough, brings me onto one of the problems with our research on middle-class activism – namely, is it a problem, and if so what do we do about it? In this case I don’t see it as a problem. Of course, the middle-class NIMBYism side of the debate is a problem in that it is limiting housing supply. But the fact that an increasingly large and vocal group is being priced out of the housing market altogether, or having to fall prey to some pretty horrendous practices by landlords in very one-sided contracts, is raising the issue of housing in national policy debates.

The challenge now seems to me to make this debate an informed one where we can produce some sensible policy decisions, rather than the mess of localism and neighbourhood planning and the poor-bashing of the Housing Benefit debate (latest inflection of this sorry saga here) . Another post on the over-regulation of social landlords in Scotland will be coming this way shortly (hopefully?), but if we are to increasingly rely on the PRS we do need (and this is where I very much agree with eptag) a much more regulated private rented sector that makes financial sense for tenants. Renting a home is not “throwing away” money; it should be about buying your housing needs over the long term with committed investment by landlords in properties.

Bike to work week - what my council is doing

 I'm getting into this guess post malarkey after the last one, so this week it's my colleague Caroline Brown (@DrCarolineBrown) (pictured) who has agreed to help me write this post with her review of Edinburgh's Quality Bike Corridor below.

So, it's Bike to Work Week. As followers are probably aware, that's a pretty normal week for me. As I've talked about on here before, I do a multi-modal commute, the vast majority of which is by bike. I vaguely enjoy cycling, would like to enjoy it a lot more, and journey times for me are about the same by bike as they would be by any other form of transport.

I've been quite critical of how my local authority - City of Edinburgh Council - manage their roads for cyclists, but since them and they're community planning partners are using Bike to Work Week to launch their Streets Ahead road safety campaign, I thought I'd see what their policies actually are.

From what I can gather (it's a bit tricky to follow), policy that is focused specifically at cyclist is spread between six different policies:

• the Local Transport Strategy 2007-12
• the Transport 2030 Vision
• the Active Travel Plan
• the Road Safety Plan
• and finally the quite old Edinburgh Design Guide for Cyclists.

The fact that you have to read at least six policies to find out what provision should be made for cyclists says a lot to me - cycling is not a central part of the transport strategy and the way that the city designs its transport infrastructure. Yes, cycling is covered in many policies, but this fragmentation does suggest something of a strategic vacuum. Interestingly, the final policy - the Design Guide - which is mentioned in some of the other policies is seemingly no longer held on the Council's website. It's a shame that it's become this neglected as it's actually a very good policy. If all of Edinburgh's roads and cycle paths were designed in line with those guidelines there would be a massive increase in cycling (and I'd feel a lot safer).

The frustrating thing looking at all these policies is that Edinburgh Council clearly, in policy, do have a commitment to improving cycling infrastructure. They acknowledge the roads need safe cycle space on them if we are to increase the amount of cycling. But what do we get? This mess.

For example, the Active Travel Plan states that: "surface quality is especially important for bikes, which have minimal suspension. When reviewing carriageway maintenance priorities we will take this factor into account, increasing maintenance priorities appropriately."  Every cyclist in Edinburgh knows the state of the roads is just a joke. In fact, as I stated in a recent email to the Council about one stretch of road, it's beyond a joke; it's just dangerous. When your choice is to hit a gigantic hole and fall off, or cycle down the middle of the road, then the aims of the Active Travel Plan are not being met.

And after a recent trip to the Netherlands, I'm now even more convinced that we need to "go Dutch". I was staying in Amsterdam, just around the corner from here. It took me a wee while to realise that, since they've prioritised the two bike lanes (both wide enough for two bikes to ride side-by-side comfortably) the road was actually almost too narrow for two cars to pass. The bike lanes also run alongside the car parking spaces, so cyclists weren't in danger of hitting a parked car. The bike lanes also go around the back of the bus stops. Even so, the road next to the bus stop was slabs of concrete so the tarmac wouldn't end up looking like crumpled newspaper.

I cycle up Easter Road every morning - a road which is probably equally as busy as that Dutch road - and it looks like this. Across that width of road there is absolutely no excuse for not prioritising cycling on an equal footing as cars. But we just get two advanced stop lines and these aren't there at the two stop lines where they would probably be most useful.

A major part of what Edinburgh are trying to do to help cyclists is contained in the Quality Bike Corridor. Caroline Brown lives in that part of town so she's provided me with this review of this model provision (with photos)

The City of Edinburgh Council says ‘A Quality Bike Corridor from George IV Bridge to King's Buildings is now under construction by the Council. The corridor will include new cycle lanes and bus lanes, and changes to the parking and loading restrictions along the route so that these lanes aren't blocked as often by stationary vehicles.’

The leaflet promises a lot – new bike lanes, new bus lanes and reorganised parking. It’s a great idea, and it is good to see:

More cycle parking along the route 

Clearly marked cycle lanes and ASLs:

But, but, but...

Painting lines on the road does little to change the habits of drivers who park where they like....

[The driver of this white BMW did at least move when I pointed out that she was parked on double yellow lines AND a cycle lane. Note the completely empty P&D parking bays only a few metres further down the road... !]

And I doubt very much whether the forest of new signs that is springing up along the route will do much either.:

Why is it necessary to have all these poles foresting the pavements? What do they do for cyclists? CEC seems to have a very bad case of street sign-itis, as you can see here:

Not only is this short stretch of kerb painted to distraction, it also has a sign! Note how the placing of this sign now creates a pinch point on the pavement. Multiply this by a zillion, and that means the QBC is bringing with it a zillion more obstacles for pedestrians along its route. That doesn’t help with the outcomes the QBC is supposed to be addressing:
National Outcome 6 – ‘We live longer, healthier lives’
Local Outcome – Active travel, namely walking and cycling, allows people to integrate health promoting physical activity into their daily lives
Supports National Outcome 10 – ‘We live in well-designed, sustainable places where we are able to access the amenities and services we need’
Supports National Outcome 12 – ‘We value and enjoy our built and natural environment and protect it and enhance it for future generations’
Supports Local Outcome – Edinburgh residents and businesses find sustainable travel options increasingly attractive resulting in growth in traffic levels being contained.

So, to return to the issue of cycle parking: while it’s good to see cycle hoops along the route, given the width of the pavement along Ratcliffe Terrrace, these also have the potential to simply create more obstacles for pedestrians.

Why isn’t it possible to put some of these obstacles in the road rather than on the pavement? How about on-road cycle parking, rather than on-pavement cycle parking? What about the award winning car bike port from CycleHoop?

Finally, looking back to the consultation leaflet about the QBC, it is clear that implementation is far from complete. Presumably things are being phased in a logical way; but there is no information about this on the CEC website, and no info about when things are supposed to be completed. As a result, the QBC is currently a dogs dinner of half painted and half implemented ideas. It is full of good intentions, but let down by: poor road surfaces; poor enforcement of parking controls; the ‘advisory’ nature of the cycle lanes; and, the forest of poles, signs and other pedestrian obstacles appearing along its length.

To be honest, the creation of a joined up route of cycl lanes, parking controls and increased cycle parking will be an improvement. However, the quality bike corridor could be more than that – a demonstration route where cyclists and pedestrians are given more space and more priority, and cars and parking are given less space and less priority. Imagine it: 20mph along its length; a dedicated cycle lane which is uninterrupted by parking bays; wider pavements; a narrower carriageway, oodles of cycle parking. That would be the start of a real revolution.

Thanks Caroline - and I have to agree with her. While it seems Edinburgh's policy could be revolutionary and really prioritise space on the roads for cyclists, we actually have very poor quality provision, that puts lives in danger, and prioritises high speed motor traffic over anything else.

Debunking “the pink pound” – LGBT poverty and place in Scotland

I did a research project recently with our fantastic Research Associate Kirsten Besemer (pictured). One of our finding was so interesting I've invited Kirsten to write this entry - my first "guest blog"! Do get in touch if you want to write something for me.

Over to Kirsten...

Arguably the most pervasive myth about the wellbeing of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people in the UK is that of the “pink pound”, the idea that LGBT people are prosperous, with an extensive disposable income which allows them to afford an abundant range of luxuries. According to this stereotype, LGBT people are childless and somewhat self-centred, with no dependents inhibiting them from spending their ample salaries on a lavish lifestyle. The “pink pound” myth may have its origins in a longstanding association between gay men and high-end fashion, and has certainly been perpetuated by stereotypes in popular media.

Further, in terms of planning and land-use, as LGBT people were often excluded from mortgage markets, they were also one of the groups commonly identified as “urban pioneers” in processes of gentrification – upgrading cheap properties they could afford and investing their sweat equity to improve the neighbourhood. This picture of a cool, hip, young couple living in a fancy loft conversion is all too common in the media. Non-mainstream sexuality is not commonly associated with poverty or economic disadvantage.

Yet there are a number of reasons to suppose that LGBT people are probably more likely to be in poverty than heterosexual people.  Firstly, employment discrimination against LGBT people has only recently become explicitly unlawful in the United Kingdom. It was only after European Union legislation came into force at the end of 2003 that discrimination in the work place on the basis of sexual orientation became officially recognised as against the law. Although there has been fairly little research in this area, there is some empirical evidence that homosexual men continue to earn less than heterosexual men with similar characteristics.

Lack of access to marriage may be another contributory factor linking poverty and sexuality. Until 2004, there was no way for same-sex couples to form a legally-recognised union in the UK. Although the 2004 Civil Partnership Act created a form of union which is very similar to marriage, civil partnerships are not fully identical to marriage in terms of their legal protections and responsibilities. Successive Governments have gradually removed some of these legal differences, for example by extending domestic violence legislation to all couples, by calculating benefits according to household occupation rather than married status and by extending occupation rights to partners and parental responsibilities to all categories of persons.  As these changes have all occurred within the last ten years, particularly older LGBT couples may have experienced a long periods of considerable economic disadvantage resulting from their barriers to marital union. These advantages include, among others, easier access to a mortgage, and various tax advantages including exemption from capital gains tax and inheritance tax in the event of the death of a spouse.

Furthermore, family conflicts and estrangements over coming-out may have considerable economic implications. At the extreme end, LBGT people may experience a sudden need for independent accommodation resulting from severe family conflict over their ‘coming out’. On a more subtle level, they may simply receive less or no family support in times of financial difficulty (See also this pdf working paper).

For all of these reasons, we would expect to see an association between poverty and not identifying as heterosexual. In this light, it is interesting to note an incidental finding from a study recently conducted where we analysed the representation of a number of equalities groups in the 15% most deprived areas in Scotland. From our analysis it emerged that people who identified as heterosexual were significantly less likely to live in the most deprived areas than people with other sexual orientations (p<0.05).  The table below shows just how striking this difference is. If populations are distributed evenly then there should be 15% of that particular group in the most deprived 15% of neighbourhoods in Scotland. As we can see, only 13% of all people who declared themselves heterosexual live in the most deprived neighbourhoods, whereas 17% of those who declared themselves lesbian, gay, bisexual or “other” do so. Quite a finding.

An interesting observation was that of those who refused to answer the question about their sexuality (which was asked as self-completion and therefore anonymous even from the interviewer), were as likely to live in deprived areas as the people who had indicated they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or “other” (LBGO).  Although inferences should be made only hesitantly, it may be that this population is more likely to belong to the LBGO group than to the heterosexual.

Further analysis also showed that people who did not identify as heterosexual were much less likely to live in owner-occupied accommodation, and were overrepresented in the social and private rental sector. This difference might be indicative of earlier-mentioned barriers to access to mortgages.

In terms of the debates around urban regeneration and deprived neighbourhoods this is a really interesting finding. Firstly, we know of no area-based regeneration policies that have specifically focused on sexual orientation as something that might lead to concentrated deprivation. Further, Scotland’s deprived neighbourhoods are not blocks of tenements awaiting gentrification. They are predominantly peripheral social housing estates around our major cities. These are not capable gentrifiers, but people who find themselves in a neighbourhood of concentrated poverty.

Low sample sizes make the LBGT population difficult to study statistically.  However, it may be possible, for example by using merged years of large statistical datasets, to look more closely at possible correlations between sexuality and poverty, and gain a better understanding of why people with non-mainstream sexualities are overrepresented in Scotland’s poorest areas.

Scottish regeneration - getting the poor to pay for services for the poor

I spent most of today at the SURF annual conference.I have a lot of time for SURF (once the Scottish Urban Regeneration Forum, not Scotland's Independent Regeneration Network). One of my first regeneration policy events was a SURF event and every one I've been to since has been excellent with a lot of food for thought on deep issues. 

I have two main reflections on the day that I want to share here. I started the day sat next a couple of community development workers I've met through various things. One of them was trying to help get community growing going in a neighbourhood through the fantastic Edible Estates scheme. However, they talked about a meeting with a local authority where there was some enthusiasm from other officers. All the other officers were entirely negative and highlighted all the problems: "oh it will just get trashed", "nobody will care for it". Listening to this I shared my stories of similar conversations overheard during research that belie the fact that stigma and prejudice against communities and people leads to poor service delivery (more on that from my colleague Annette Hastings' work here and here). This is where our work on middle-class community activism comes from.

Then the presentations got underway. One thing a community activist from Fife said reall struck home for me; I can't quote her directly, but it was something along the lines of, why do we have to bid for money? We have need (they're one of the most deprived five per cent of deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland) so why don't we get the resources to meet that need? We then moved onto presentations about what funding is available - of course all of it is competitive bidding. Another trend that was very clear was the move towards loan financing for community projects - particularly funded through the EU JESSICA scheme. I can see part of the thinking behind these - to make sure that projects are not dependent on grant income. But as I listened I couldn't help but ponder a comment from a colleague on my housing association management committee about the current reforms to housing finance and housing benefits, that "we're getting the poor to pay for the services for other poor people". The move to loan finance really smacks of this for me - these projects are expected to generate enough revenue, and in most deprived neighbourhoods this will be from people experiencing poverty, to survive. And I'm sure a lot of these will be projects like community halls, or youth projects, that seem like nice, unaffordable add-ons for many people, but will make a real difference to people's lives.  The issue for me is, we do not expect a the affluent to run their schools on loans. They only do this is they exit from public provision through private schools. We're making deprived people exit from state provision through changes in public services.

Which brings me onto my second reflection. We discussed our Sharp Elbows work in a workshop and the same thing happened as in previous seminars - the discussion ended up back at well, we just need to make sure deprived communities are more empowered. Yet this is the very opposite of where I research was coming from and what we think it means for policies. If the middle classes are generally favoured by public service provision then we're setting up deprived communities to be like King Canute among a sea of public services that do not meet their needs - the opening conversation of my day showed that is still the case. At worse we might be making things even worse - the evidence suggests there are virtuous cycles and vicious spirals to complaining behaviour and once somebody is fobbed off or ignored they are less likely to complain in future. So, why does the debate always end up at "we must empower deprived communities?" I really don't know. And what's really funny is, our group had to leave a question for the plenary session to vote on using keypads. Our question was "is their a class bias in public service provision", and 75% of people agreed with it. If we know about it, why don't we do something about it?

Reflections on teaching and learning: well that came as a bit of a surprise

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know about this already. On Monday afternoon, after spending a day popping in and out of exam boards, I got an email from our Students' Union with an attached letter. This informed me that:

"I am pleased to inform you that you have received the Graduate’s Teaching Award in the School of the Built Environment.

You were nominated for this award by the graduating students in your school as part of the Learning and Teaching Oscars.  We received many lovely comments as to why you should receive this prize and I hope this recognition from your students of you work will in some way show how much your efforts are appreciated."

I'm not ashamed to say that reading the email made me cry I was so touched that my students thought so highly of me. And it's not as if I've taught that many students - across the two courses I led and the two courses I helped on, I had probably fifty students in total.

As I've previously posted about and reflected upon in one of my PGCap assessments I am slightly ambivalent about some of the teaching quality agenda - it can turn teaching and learning into a popularity contest, a higher education X Factor. A basic factor that has probably helped me get this fantastic feedback is that my students do relate to me because I'm young; a bit more like them.

I have tried out a lot of innovative things - getting students to tweet in class; lots of different class activities to embed learning (I still have an aluminium Vauxhall Corsa engine in my office); put some videos and screencasts on the VLE; and even had a go (unsuccessfully) at using Prezi; giving essay feedback as audio recordings (highly recommend that - quick, easy and students engage with it). But from the bits and pieces I've got back from the students so far it's actually just pretty basic stuff that they liked: I was approachable and friendly; they could empathise with me as a person; I was lucky enough to have the time to write two large sets of course notes (had to be distance learning ready) so I had a very good idea in my head of what curriculum I was delivery. And I did not shower my students with good marks - when they did well I rewarded them. But my marks are similar to all my colleagues.

For my latest PGCap assignment (which is turning into something like a dissertation) I'm concurrently reading the 60's classic Teaching as a Subversive Activity (big PDF) and Brabazon's University of Google. They have very similar messages in many ways, except the former is from the Fordist age and the latter is speaking to the post-Fordist age. But one major difference is Postman and Weingartner's use, focus even, on Marshal McLuhan's axiom "The medium is the message" - a real insight into a World being rocked by the advent of television and radio. I thought this notion delivered profound insights into VLE and distance teaching. Reading Brabazon made me think again. The message still needs to be good quality and adapted to the medium, no matter what that medium is. Technology can't make up for ropey teaching (or learning, for that matter). I can make as many mediocre screencasts as I like, but my students will do well with a good set of notes.

And part of that medium has to be the empathy and trust with students that I think I developed - an insight from another bit of reading recommended by my wonderful colleague Marilyn Higgins for my PGCap project, Carl Rogers Learning to Be Free. And this email that popped into my inbox from a student today reassured me of that:

"First off. let me tell you what an amazing lecturer and academic you are. Your enthusiasm for learning is infectious. It's no surprise that all the students feel the same way. Secondly, I really appreciate the support and interest you have shown me in the last year. You reminded me that people in the university really do care about their students...I wish you all the success with your career and if its any thing to go by with your first year at Heriot-Watt, you have a bright career ahead of you. All the best and it was a pleasure to meet you."

No amount of rubric generated feedback from Blackboard will beat that! Now, the challenge for me, and to reflect on in my PGCap project, is how to deliver that in a curriculum that is internationalised and dual mode. And before then, I get to go to Graduation and collect me certificate for being a great teacher! I can't wait to hang it on my office wall.

/edit: spookily, just as I clicked "post" the course feedback started arriving in my inbox. Having looked at it, and focused on all the comments below, I was thinking "ooh that's a bit mixed" and was wracked with guilt. On reflection, I got 100 for nearly every score, and the comments are things I need to improve on next year.

Spellink and grandma - social media and organisational risk

This blog post has been mulling in my mind for a while, but an impromptu lunch with Ian Eliott today and this tweet:

Got me thinking about things, so rather than concentrate on the stuff that pays the bills, I thought I'd bash out my ideas here.

One thing that fascinates me about social media is the perception of risk around it, especially among large public sector organisations. I'm fascinated, firstly, by the way that many of the people on Twitter I follow maintain both personal and "work" accounts, essentially "being" the organisation in the social space of Twitter. I'm also fascinated by this perception of risk - that somehow twitter and Facebook will be the downfall of these organisations and everything they stood for. It was interesting listening to Dominic Sandbrook's history of the postal service and how there were similar moral panics about the penny post. Like post, the telephone, and increasingly email, I know that eventually social media will just become something we "do" with social norms around its use. The scare-stories around its use I think are beginning to create that. The only barriers I see to this are if the technologies move faster than the social norms can develop and the impact of capitalism - Facebook needs to have shonky privacy policies to make its business model work and generate the revenue required. 

But the tweet above from the BBC got me thinking about organisational risk in terms of spellink and grandma. The Edinburgh Council neighbourhood office near our campus has been experimenting with giving Environmental Wardens access to their twitter account while they're on the beat and they then tweet with the hashtag #edinclean. Not the most riveting of reads, but an interesting experiment. But one thing I did notice early-on was that some of the grammar was not perfect - nothing massive, usually incorrect your/you're or their/there/they're being mixed up. My initial thought was "ooh, I'm surprised they don't get them checked in some way". On reflection I thought instead how in terms of social media this was probably a good thing - you actually want to know the person behind the account - this is why Orkney Library and their trips to Steps concerts, among other things, are so popular. So, in this case, I'd say let the bad spellink and grandma go, introduce us to the person behind corporate account so we can say "hello".

Although this does lead me onto thoughts about the high levels of literacy needed to successfully engage in the world of Web 2.0.

Reflections on teaching and learning - using Prezi

Like many in this wired World, I’ve been playing around with Prezi – the non-linear presentation tool. I came across it about a year ago thanks to Nicola Osborne and like many tools in the Lakeland Plastics of the tinterwebs it seemed to fill a need I only ever had a niggling sense I had – for a presentation tool that unlike PowerPoint did not make you present in a linear fashion (I have since discovered the ability to press “B” in the middle of a PowerPoint and also am a lot better at designing and animating slides). The fact Prezi is free to academic users also helped my conversion.

I’ve watched one presentation delivered by Prezi (I felt a little bit seasick too) and delivered three – one for a Petchakucha of my research interests, and twice in teaching. I’m going to focus on these two and think about Prezi as a teaching tool.

The student experience

I’ve got a bit of an insight into the student experience of being subjected to a Prezi from two perspectives – firstly from everyday feedback and secondly, rather usefully, from an autoethnography I have a couple of students doing for their dissertations and my PGCap. From this it seems Prezi makes for a poorer teaching and learning experience than PowerPoint from a practical and seemingly pedagogical point of view. One practical problem – students cannot print out a Prezi. Or they can, but it’ll either be one sheet the size of a billboard or 70+ sheets of A4. I had trouble enough because I saved my PowerPoints as pdfs, so this was a bit of a problem with Prezi. This was the case even though ever lecture was twinned with exhaustive distance learning notes. I embedded my Prezis in our VLE (BlackBoard) but I’m not sure how many people went back to them. Also, students feel seasick too – and I didn’t do that much zoomy swoopy stuff on my Prezis! My student doing their autoethnography also thought I’d presented using Prezi three times, whereas it was just twice in two separate lectures. This suggests that it actually failed to deliver a lasting impression for this student.

My experience

I deliver my lectures as a story. The beginning is usually a real-world, nice example of some of the issues I will be discussing in the lecture. The middle is the construction of theoretical scaffolding and then fill in some the gaps with real-world examples, often through the use of group work in class, and then end (now) with a “this is what you should know” section. So, PowerPoint actually suits this way of speaking. I felt much more comfortable speaking to the narrative of PowerPoint. Further, it was much easier to get an overview of a PowerPoint presentation written some months before in the five minutes before a lecture began, than it was the equivalent Prezi.

To be fair on Prezi, I think it was also partly my fault and that I was trying to be too clever. In the effort to make something that looked good I discarded the PowerPoint rules-of-thumb: using bullet points to summarise points and act as prompts; using strong images as prompts and to provoke thoughts etc. In one of my Prezi delivered lectures I got to one frame and it was just a gigantic question-mark. Clearly I’d put this in a year before with the idea that this would be a good time to ask the class questions of clarification. Could I remember what the question was? I’d hidden the answers in the dot at the bottom of the question mark and had to swoop in, check what they were, and zoom back out again and ask the question. Which rather defeated the purpose of asking the question in the first place. And as an interactive lecturer I also found Prezi, by making me a bit more nervous, reduced the amount I happily engaged with the class.
 

Finally, the one thing I started using Prezi for – the non-narrative nature of it – wasn’t helpful at all. The couple of times I did have to go off-piste, so to speak (navigate around the Prezi field without using the pre-drawn path) I was just lost and it took my far too long to find what I was looking for and zoom in on it properly. The one thing that really bugged me was at the end of drawing your path around your Prezi, if you had to change it, especially if it was near the start of your presentation, the only way to do it was delete the whole path and start again. This compares to just inserting a new slide in PowerPoint.

So, in conclusion, I have to say I’ll probably be ditching Prezi entirely for teaching next year and sticking with PowerPoint (for all its flaws) for the foreseeable future. The real test will be in the end of semester feedback and the exam results!