An Interview with Grazna Zajdow
“Inter” refers to the interviewer and “Grazna” refers to Grazna Zajdow
Int:	I’m speaking with Grazyna Zadjow who teaches in the Faculty of Arts in the areas of Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology, which is what this interview is about. [Grazyna] how would you describe your general philosophy of teaching and learning and how have your views on this been shaped?
Grazyna:	I’ve never considered what my general philosophy on teaching and learning is. I think I come from a very old fashioned notion of academia in that it is actually about imparting knowledge, and the assumption is that I’m here because I do know more than the students. It’s not that the students don’t have lots of things to teach me, but if I didn’t know more of my subject area than the students then I shouldn’t legitimately be here. So, that’s part of it. But in the end, learning is totally interactive, it cannot be this one way process. Learning is best in a situation where, especially in discursive subjects like sociology and criminology and gender studies, it is within the discussion… people learn via the discussion, the conversations, the verbalising of understanding, of concepts and the relationship between concepts and the real world and experience and putting together one’s own experience with what one learns about the world. That’s how one learns, I think. And the issue for many of us now in areas like sociology and gender studies and criminology is that students have to learn that their experiences are clearly important, but their experiences is not the whole world and the important thing is to understand that their experiences might only reflect a small part of that world. And my job is to suggest to the students that what they want do is learn about the larger part of the world.
Int:	I see. So how have you come to believe these things?
Grazyna:	Through a blind grasping of ideas as I work my way through academia. I don’t know how I’ve come to these things. I know that what I enjoyed, I did well, I did the best in my learning experiences through subjects that I enjoyed. On the other hand, I had to do a lot that I didn’t like and I learnt from those experiences too. My pushing and raging against those things that I didn’t like actually taught me how to understand my ideas better. So hopefully, what I do is often in class I will be the devil’s advocate, I will say things that I don’t necessarily agree with, things that I know are unpopular so that at the very least what I do is I get a response from the students and then we can actually start teasing out what it is that students believe, what they know, what knowledge they have, how they use that knowledge and those sorts of things.
Int:	Okay, now you and your team have developed a wholly online unit. Can you just explain what deliberations led you to develop that unit both in terms of the faculty level and your discipline level?
Grazyna:	Okay. Well part of it is that I don’t think that we would have gone for a wholly online unit at all if we hadn’t been directed to do it. It was a decision that was made beyond us and it came down to how best can we do what is being asked of us, or demanded of us, as it was at the time. So then it was, in what area should we develop the online unit that is useful, in what discipline area can we do it so that it is useful for other discipline areas as well. And it was decided that since criminology was a developing area and that it was probably the area that they had the most to be able to develop something new without too much entrenched fighting over who owns a particular area. But also, it could be a unit that was clearly of interest to sociology, to gender studies, and other parts of the faculty altogether so at that point we decided it would in criminology. However, it needed to have a much wider interest so that we brought in people from the other areas specifically in our smaller groups so we have people who’ve contributed from sociology and from gender studies as well as criminology. So that way while the subject matter is clearly of interest to criminology, that is, it is about how the new technologies either produced new forms of criminal behaviour or they facilitate existing forms of criminal behaviour to greater audiences, it means that sociology and gender studies could clearly become involved.
Int:	Okay. Now can you just briefly explain what the components are of your online environment and what your educational rationale is for each of them?
Grazyna:	Okay, so you’re talking about the contents?
Int:	Yes.
Grazyna:	Okay. The content.
Int:	Communication.
Grazyna:	And assessment. Alright, we’ll start with the content. The content was to a certain extent dependent on who was interested in providing material for it, who was interested in writing and what their particular interests were because it is a very wide area it could go in a whole lot of different directions. But also because being sociologists, some, I think, about half the group were sociologists, what we were also interested in is actually the development of this whole new area. So, the unit actually starts from a historical understanding of the development of the net and how it actually, not the technical development, but how it, the net, actually changes the social world, how it works in the social world and that development. So we start off from an historical and conceptional understanding of the net in particular, the world wide web. Then we moved onto what areas has it, in terms of criminal behaviour, has it most impacted and we decided upon two major areas, the area around family relationships, notions of gender and the way that, now this is a very poor term but it is one that is the most used and understood, the way that the net pornography and paedophilia has penetrated the family and family relationships. So coming out of that comes the whole area of children’s use of the net and family surveillance of the net, the fear of children coming into contact with online paedophilia and the way that we understand pornography and gender relations because of that explosion through the net. And then finally we move onto new forms of criminality and in particular we start in the final module on the way that new forms of surveillance have changed the way that we understand the world around us. I have developed this particular interest in the new forms of surveillance particularly around biometric identification and the way that many countries, for example, Australia is bringing in biometric passports, which means that people’s… not just people’s individual details are on there, but if you like, bits of their body are in the passport. The UK’s talking about bring in an identity card which is actually… goes further than any other country on earth in terms of putting information on that card. And from then, how then do we understand crime and the surveillance of crime through the net. So that’s the content.
Int:	Alright. How do you get students to engage with that content and how are you going to assess their learning?
Grazyna:	Well, we’re trying to use as many different forms of material as possible so that the students are not stuck with reading very dry accounts of academics’ views of various developments on the net so we are using, we’re not, there is some of that and I don’t see anything wrong with using that material clearly, but we are also using, for example, streamed material from… the American Public Broadcasting Service has a documentary series and many of those documentaries are available to be streamed directly into people’s computers. And there are two or three very, very interesting documentaries that they have done around the explosion of pornography, particularly in the US and on the net and also surveillance materials and hacking, for example, is also one of those things that we’re interested in. So we’re getting students to look at that. We’re using short audio introductions that each of us are doing so that students feel that we’re not faceless beings behind computers. We’re doing lots of small pieces of assessments that will force students to become involved, I mean that’s the end it. They will be coerced. If they want to pass this unit they actually have to actually become involved with their fellow students and with us. So they will have, we will have tutorial groups and students will be expected to involve themselves in tutorial groups and because we have found it unsatisfactorily really to do any meaningful assessment in terms of students’ straightforward involvements with online tutorials, our assessment involves, for the most part, students having to get involved, do a piece of assessment and reinvolve themselves with their tutorial group. There’s a single piece of assessment that’s worth 50% which is a particular case study and that’s obviously much more traditional but all the other assessment are small pieces of involving assessment.
Int:	Okay, so you have quizzes?
Grazyna:	We have some quizzes, yes.
Int:	What else?
Grazyna:	We have, for example, a plagiarism self test, so students from a piece of work that is part of their reading, are asked to assess a number of reworkings of that particular reading and tell us whether they think it’s plagiarism or not and why they think it’s plagiarism or not, so that they understand the nature of plagiarism. There is a small piece, there is an introduction – each student is expected when they first log onto the class to send a 100 word introduction to themselves, not in SMS language, not in electronic language, but in real language with full stops and commas. Then there are the quizzes and there are… there’s also, for example, a piece of assessment where students are asked to take note of all their online interactions for a week, put it onto an Excel spreadsheet that they are asked to download and then upload it. We will present the students with a compiled spreadsheet of everybody’s responses and then they are asked to reflect on their own responses and everybody else’s and the literature that they have read about people’s involvement on the net.
Int:	Now, you’ve already touched on the ways you intend using multimedia. You’ve mentioned the still images. You have a CD don’t you?
Grazyna:	Yes, yes, yes, sorry about that, I’ve forgotten all about. We have a CD that is a documentary on hacking in the 1980’s and basically the development of hacking from a preoccupation of young nerds, if you like, who found a community for themselves and just wanted to have fun and further their knowledge, into a full blown criminal activity and how Australia was the first country in the world to bring anti-hacking laws because hacking in the 1980’s was actually concentrated on Melbourne even. It’s just quite bizarre.
Int:	Was it?
Grazyna:	Yes, yes. So we have this particular video on CD and students can keep playing it, it’s very interesting, it’s not a documentary, it’s actually a fictionalised account. They can even use that in their case study if they want to use hacking as a case study.
Int:	All right, now what design considerations were there when you were developing this?
Grazyna:	There were a number of design and limitations that we needed to take into account and one of them is that most students will still not be on broadband so that meant that we could not have large, particularly video streaming pieces that would force students to timeout effectively if they were on dial up. So that we’ve put on the CD the hour long documentary. Other considerations were about the ability that we would have to be able to from year to year, not within a semester, but year to year be able to make changes so that the unit stays up to date, clearly, so that we could change what we needed to and revise, so those sorts of limitations too. But also we needed to be able to make small pieces of assessment so students would be able to download the assessment, upload without too much trouble and we shall see how it goes because we haven’t actually tested all that out yet.
Int:	Are your quizzes timed?
Grazyna:	Yes.
Int:	Timed release?
Grazyna:	Yes, everything is timed release so that students don’t get access to any piece of assessment before they’re due to. That’s one way, in a sense, we’re coercing them into dealing with us and the classroom. They will not be able to just go to their assessment and do their assessment. They will actually have to go into each learning module and work their way through the learning module before they can actually pick up the assessment piece.
Int:	What are you expectations in respect to the initial offering of the unit online?
Grazyna:	We’re not sure. I don’t know. What we’re expecting is that, at the moment it’s still, it’s a small group, I think there are about 60, I think, enrolments. So that they can be relatively easily divided between the two of us who are teaching in the unit for second semester this year into two tutorial groups. They’re not too large to handle and we can work out whether we need to have smaller tutorial groups in the future or we can handle larger ones. It will mean that when the assessment comes in, we will be able to understand how to deal with that assessment better. So it’s a small enough group to be able iron out, we hope, all the difficulties. I have no doubt that it’ll actually get quite large in the future once students know about the unit.
Int:	Are you expecting any particular issues to arise and if so do you have plans about how to address them?
Grazyna:	Well the major issue is technology. Will students be able to keep up, if you like, with the sort of technology that they have. For example, students who are on campus will probably be able to deal with the technology, they’ll be able to go online via our own servers and computers and that will be relatively easy for them to do. If students are restricted to dial up that will be a very interesting thing to deal with and we shall see how that is. And also the other issue is how we are going to deal with students who complain, who claim they can’t do the work because of the technology, because in a sense technology is not an excuse anymore for them. They have to understand that they have to have the technology to deal with it and if they don’t then they have to rethink the technology rather than how they deal with the unit.
Int:	In respect to the timed release of quizzes, for example, are they only going to be available for a certain length of time?
Grazyna:	Yep.
Int:	And if perchance the technology is down or students can’t access them, what’s your plan then?
Grazyna:	Well, the good thing about it is they’re mostly small pieces. Some of them are mandatory, some of them are hurdles and obviously the bigger pieces are mandatory but they’re not all mandatory so that they could miss two or three or four percent. However, nobody wants that to happen. We’re hoping that the pieces are open long enough for them to be able to, if the technology fails on one day, that they can go the next day to do it. Certainly, it’s not, you know, a one day piece so they have to have it on, they have to pick it up on this particular day and drop it on this particular day and that’s the end of it. It is open enough for them to be able to do that. But, it has to be said, that if they can’t, if for some reason their technology doesn’t operate for more than one or two days at a time, it’s going to be difficult. It will be interesting to see how it happens. We don’t want to be punitive so we shall hopefully be able to rectify it for those students in other ways.
Int:	Now this might be a hypothetical question but …
Grazyna:	They’re all hypothetical questions.
Int:	… but in what ways, in what ways to do believe the online environment might enrich students’ learning, particular in their subject area?
Grazyna:	Well, I mean, what it will do and I was thinking about that when I was writing my piece on surveillance, The technology allows us actually to monitor students very intimately in many ways. We can through DSO know when students log on, what they’re doing, and effectively how they’re doing it.
Int:	So you can do your own surveillance?
Grazyna:	And we will make that very clear, we are looking at all of you and hopefully what that suggests to them is that this is a very disquieting outcome. That the surveillance of society has unintended consequences that can be very unpleasant for people really.
Int:	Is this a bit of an ethical dilemma for you given your content?
Grazyna:	No, because in a sense this is a living example of what we’re talking about. If they don’t like the outcome they can actually start thinking about what surveillance really means.
Int:	So it’s very illustrative.
Grazyna:	Yes, that’s right and it’s very open.
Int:	Yes.
Grazyna:	We’re very clear about all of this to the students. They know that, you know, if they’re claiming that they may not have posted a message to their tutorial group, but they were always reading, we can tell them whether they were or they weren’t.
Int:	So in a way you’re suggesting that learning should be pretty powerful because they’re going to be embroiled in that kind of activity that you’re discussing.
Grazyna:	Yes, exactly, that’s right. I think that a lot of people use the net, hide behind the net for various reasons, hide behind the technology but that technology also has the… can have the opposite effect too, that they can’t hide and this is illustrated by that.
Int:	Yes. Okay [Grazyna] do you have any other comments you’d like to make about the unit?
Grazyna:	Well, for me it’s a difficulty because, as I said right from the beginning, as far as I’m concerned, learning is an interactive experience, but a face to face interactive experience, and part of the other issue that we, in terms of content, that we deal with is the way that, for example, social control is actually very… most social control comes from informal, face to face social interaction and that one of the effects of some like the world wide web and the net is it allows the explosion in something like pornography because people don’t think that they’re hurting themselves or anybody else because there is no way of knowing what they do, or the effects that they have, and so they hide behind that. And it will be interesting to see how, for example, the conversations about all of this very risky sort of material in a way, how that is dealt with in the online conversations. Will we be able to, if you like, pull into line people whose behaviour or whose behaviour online is not legitimate. I mean, we impress upon them the importance of netiquette, but what really means in our experience is what will be interesting out of the project.
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