A discourse is a discourse of course

2012-01-25T15:01:00.005Z

Codes, Pedagogy and Kapital 2.0

Reading Codes, Pedagogy and Knowledge, by Hoadley and Muller, it struck me that despite the value of Bernstein’s analysis on codes, he unfortunately had it back-to-front.

Bernstein’s Codes

Bernstein’s Elaborated and Restricted Codes – the distinction between ‘middle-class’, explicit, context-independent meanings, and ‘working-class’ implicit, contextual meanings, respectively) were based on the functional linguistics of Halliday (and others).

Actually, it is the elaborated code that is ‘restricted’ in form and mode (context and subject stripped, and dis-embodied), and the restricted code which is elaborated (overcoded, embedded and embodied). What many people ‘felt’, intuitively, turns out to be correct: Bernstein had it back-to-front, not only politically (‘elaborated’ is by definition of higher value than ‘restricted’, Halliday would surely have pointed out this tacit valorisation to Bernstein?), but conceptually too: elaborated codes are by definition reduced, boiled down, often to numbers, or algorithms, whereas the process of contextualization and embodiment is richer, more elaborate.

Contextual modes realize solidarity with and in a particular context; context-stripped modes realize solidarity only within an abstract set of processes, and a hyper-class, whose solidarity has always been, precisely, across contexts – nationally and internationally (the ‘1%’).

It would be more logical to say that contextual modes are elaborate, and context-stripped modes are restricted. But its more than just a choice of modes. The modes are based on the fundamental distinction between semiotics and meta-semiotics, i.e. the distinction between a discourse of objects, predictability, command and control, on the one hand, and a discourse of subjects, identity, and community on the other hand.

The difference is between objects, whose identity is defined by (the gaze of) others, and by (impersonal) markets, which define them as members of an objectively defined set, on the one hand; and subjects, who create and maintain their own identity, on the other hand. Subjects need to be consulted, objects can (and should?) be controlled.

Ultimately, the choice of modes is the choice between objects for exchange and capital, versus subjects for engagement. This can be, and is, applied to animate and inanimate actors. So there can be no solidarity with objects, only solidarity amongst people prosecuting a discourse of objects. There can on the other hand be solidarity with and between subjects.

Das Kapital 2.0

Schooling as enculturation: learning a context-stripped discourse is not, primarily, a technical and intellectual issue. It is a matter of learning to be (at home) in a discourse in which value is created by stripping out subjectivity, context, and local colour and culture, in the production of metasemiotics: i.e. artefacts and objects as capital and exchange value.

The forms of meta-semiotics include finance (Marx) the functional linguistics of science and money (Rossi-landi), law and regulation (in bureaucracy, Weber), representative democracy, and digitalized data and metadata (stripped off social and financial e-‘commerce’). Metasemiotics is in many ways just Das Kapital 2.0.

For the working class, there is thus always a threat of ‘class suicide’ in this enculturation, unless one can retain one’s cultural ties and roots, and become discursively ‘bilingual’ ('polyontologies' perhaps?). In other words, education is not just a “specialisation of the consciousness of young people”, it’s their enculturation and in-corporation (literally, in the sense of being absorbed into the embodiedments of context-stripped discourse). Its primarily an ontological, not an epistemological transformation.

(Cross-posted to here )

2012-01-23T12:09:00.002Z

Personal Space

... reading some really interesting thoughts that colleagues wrote on privacy and autonomy, I was struck by the question:

What has happened to private space?

One of the most delicious things in life is to play with the frisson that abounds on the borders of public and private space, in which you can create personal space: space in which you can be yourself - a self which is a live, strategic, interactive mashup of public, private (family, cultural, etc), personal, and intimate space/s.

The conceits of upper class, period drama in television and film are full of scenes of people creating private, personal, space within public space. Balls presented opportunities for creating personal enclaves, bubbles, right in the middle of the most public, formal spaces – ballrooms. You had to conform to the (many layers of) rules of social protocol and public space to be allowed onto the dance floor in the first place. But once there, you could create private, personal and intimate space, in view of everyone. In working class society there was so much less space, but the strategies were, no doubt, no less elaborate.

Personal autonomous space, in this sense, has always been earned, you have to make it, to continually reassemble and recreate it, within the social structures of public and private space. Dogging, nudity, mobile phone use, txting, twitter are all transgressive. (We are all trannies now?). Privacy injunctions by the courts are powerless against a twitter storm (Ryan Giggs?). The fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses could dissolve in a twitter storm too – the attempt by fellow writers to do this by reading excepts aloud at the Indian literary festival (January 2012) only partly succeeded. A re-tweet storm might have done the trick. Twitter’s swarming affordances can break through even High Court injunctions, perhaps fatwas too.

Spaces: Public, private, personal. Public and private space are created and disciplined, for the most part, by the formal structures of society, culture and sub-cultures. Personal space intersects both, and creates your own solitary-and/or-shared ‘intimate’ spaces – in which ‘presence’ is simultaneously an individual and shared ‘mind’ perhaps. It may be the case that ‘mind’ has always been a kind of virtual commons – culture, love, friendships – these might all be extensions of mind.

We might say that language, in that it is irreducibly and ambiguously arbitrary-and-conventional, is created in the social mind, no? So language could be a critical threshold, example, and extrapolation of the embodiment of synaesthesia – i.e. literally ‘embodied’ in the way (many) bodies (animate and inanimate) interact with each other.

2012-01-06T10:26:00.011Z

Hemispheres of the Brain and the Globe

Writing in The Master and his Emissary, Ian McGilchrist discusses some interesting variations on the way that Orientals (particularly the Japanese) and Occidentals (the West) organise their thought, and balance their right and left cortical hemispheres ...

"Japanese also preserve a healthy scepticism about language, and this goes hand in hand with the rejection of a reality that must, or ever could, be arrived at purely by reason. In Zen Buddhism, according to Soiku Shigematsu, the abbot of Shogenji temple, ‘a word is a finger that points at the moon. The goal of Zen pupils is the moon itself, not the pointing finger. Zen masters, therefore, will never stop cursing words and letters.^’"(p. 452).

This raises some issues:

The Whorfian paradox: are our words the master of our thoughts, or are our thoughts the master of our words – or is this a dumb question?
The Zen/Mindfulness paradox: can experience (silent contemplation) transcend language?
The Semiotic dilemma: once we have tasted the fruits of the alienation of language from the world, once we can ‘use our tongues to project power into the world’, is immediate experience still possible? Can we still attain ‘no-mind’?

Culture as material discourse is a way of organizing bodies and texts, animate and inanimate and (one might add) the relationship between the two. But we can look at this two
different ways:

If texts are seen as abstractions, and diversions from mindfulness/experience of the real, then it follows that it is (material) culture that is articulated in (abstract) text. On the other hand, if culture is seen as abstract, then the written, ‘material’ (forms of) texts, can be seen as the articulators of culture.

(For a more extensive analysis, see:

If the semantic unit of analysis is, crucially, discourse rather than text or sign, then semiotics is always already constituted at the level of discourse, and can therefore never be constituted ‘upwards’ from the level of signs or objects. Instead, the social (at discourse level) delves ‘down’ into the powerfully ‘cutting’ articulations of the digital and arbitrary sign, and reconstitutes itself in new relations of power, ‘cut’ not only differently, but with powerfully new ‘instruments for cutting’.

However, articulations, lexicalisations, writing, inscriptions, or in more general terms, the ‘cutting out’ of semiotics tends to take on a spectral ‘life’ of its own, particularly as we move on from lexis to syntax, to syllogisms, to text and to inscribed and recorded texts. We get caught up in the textual nets of our own success – success at articulating relationships (and culture). Our articulations and our texts take on a ‘life of their own’.

Japanese culture and language, as described by McGilchrist, does seem to provide interesting alternative approaches to the world, to perception, and to the balance between our rather alienated right and left cerebral hemispheres. However the Japanese proved, in the second world slaughter (aka WWII), to be as adept at mobilizing culture and metaphysics in the prosecution of a terrible war as the ‘West’.

2012-01-04T22:50:00.003Z

Software for social questions and answers

Susan Greenfield in a lecture at UBC in Vancouver, makes the argument that the next generation, and in fact I think she would equate this with the Occupy generation ('generation O' perhaps? - with puns on the story of O, and narratives of 0) - have grown up in a world of an excess of stimulation and fast short interactions, which she illustrates by citing Second Life, and showing a clip of computer games, and says that this is likely to have a negative effect on the connections and functionality of the frontal cortex of the brain, which is likely in turn to lead to a superficial culture and a superficial world, in which we not only consume all the fruits of the planet and become physically obese (she makes link between obesity and excess stimulation of the frontal lobes), but also consume the over-abundant fruits of the media (not the mind) and become cortically obese.

An interesting hypothesis, perhaps.

She contrasts this with the 'world of the book', in which learning is more of a slow burn journey, which enables the slow and gradual emergence of personalised conceptual frameworks. Slow, deep thought.

So far so good?

However ...

She then goes on to say that if experience is dominated by fast moving sensations, and quick, short lived interactions, this imposes an "answer rich and question poor" environment, instead of what we supposedly used to have, which was a questions rich and answer poor environment.

NO. Conversely. Most of us (perhaps Oxbridge dons excluded) have, over the past centuries, lived in an environment in which all the answers were all 'given' - to accept without question, and ours was not to reason why, but to rote learn. We now live in an environment where we can not only ask questions, but provide the evidence, live, on our mobile phones, internationally, bypassing, or 'disinter mediating' all the traditional social institutions, filters, and agenda setters.

The Occupy movement is an interesting case in point. Its agenda is not a series of demands, of 'answers' , but a demand to stop business as usual, and question, talk, think about alternatives. A movement without pat answers.

Some people just don't get it.

2011-12-16T10:12:00.005Z

Variables with attitude and twitter accounts

Networks: the point about ‘networked life’ is precisely that is consists of micro-global networks. The powerful (“1%”) have always conducted business in exclusive micro-global networks, which have often crossed international boundaries – even boundaries that were the centre of disputes and wars. So micro-global networks, per se, are nothing new.
What is new is that everyone who can afford to use a smart phone (and who can afford to be seen without one these days?) can now create their own micro-global networks, and even ‘counter-surveillance’ networks, in tweeted mobile phone pictures and videos. With x billion mobile phones, we now have x billion new sites and mobile presences of surveillance. No training is required – personal outrage is all you need. And personal identity has just expanded from the rather patronizing (and now hopelessly out of date) ‘individual’ to the fascinating paradox of the ‘micro-global player’ (in more than one sense).

The radical shift in the agency of macro-global (high-resolution satellite) mutual counter-surveillance made it possible to bring the cold war to an end – quite simply, the cold war powers could see for themselves if the other side was keeping their strategic arms limitations promises, or not.

This has now been matched by the radical shift in the micro-agency of tweeted mobile phone counter-surveillance, fundamentally challenging what Julian Assange called the ‘conspiracy of [elite, global] governance’. User-generated educational content is nice, x billion self-organising, instant counter-surveillance picture and video tweeters is a game changer. The mobile phone population is an unremarkable ‘organism’ that normally just goes about its day to day business, like an ants’ nest; but like an ants’ nest it is easily provoked.

The ‘unit of analysis’ of sociology and political science has just shifted from ‘variables with attitude’- to ‘variables with attitude, mobile broadband, cameras and twitter accounts’, all in one neat hand-held package.

Discourses of Criticality and Employment

2011-12-09T14:25:00.001Z

Having attended a presentation by Brenda Johnston and Ros Mitchell at Portsmouth on Transferability of Criticality, I started to think through many of these issues afresh ...

A strategic approach
It really struck me that the distinction between providing students with the basic (instrumental) knowledge on the one hand, or criticality on the other hand is a false dichotomy. There seemed to be a tacit agreement that students need both. But it goes further ...

Within 'transferability' or 'transitions', particularly between 'research-based' learning, and 'practice-based learning' (which for me is exemplified by the transition from medical pre-clinical to clinical discourse) perhaps what is needed is not to build criticality on top of instrumental and declarative knowledge (pardon the slight caricature), but rather to somehow situate the learning, as a whole, within a strategic framework, which starts to 'tag' and 'sort' different aspects of learning into what is certain and what is uncertain, and what requires compliance and technique on the one hand, or thinking through alternatives and making decisions about value on the other hand.

And further, to frame this within a more explicit discussion (and reflection on) different kinds of roles-in-context in which more or less 'instrumentality' or 'criticality' as is appropriate, expected and legitimate (or not!). And then to add another layer, which you referred to as nacent criticality, along with the appropriate nacent roles-in-context to which one might aspire (intellectually and/or professionally).

to wit: appropriate application of instrumentality &/or criticality in roles-in-context

... its a mouthful, but it's a start, no? And interestingly for me it starts to integrate Barnett's domains of formal knowledge, self, and world in an intellectually satisfying and, hopefully, a practical kind of way. This could even serve as an interesting first draft for an overarching professional benchmark statement (which might have some 'transferability'?). And it also includes a smattering of one of the rather unstated aspects in: knowledge/self/world, namely enculturation, which is much broader than 'self'.

Employability
Arising out of these issues is the role of 'employability' in HE discourse. The point is that in HE what has happened is that policies and funding have hijacked 'employability', equated it with instrumentalism, and defined it largely to the exclusion of criticality - in other words, reduced it to what is actually the provision of degrees for 'sub-graduate' employment roles, where fixed outcomes, predictive learning, and compliance is (indeed) all that is required.

And ...

I am coming at this from a slightly different angle, previously from critical discourse theory, but now working with emergent v. prescriptive learning, and uncertainty/unpredictability (from complexity theory), and from a more Heideggerian/ Barnettian perspective.

In terms of these frameworks, in both 'research practice' and 'applied practice', you need to be able to identify and locate the borderlines of uncertainty:

i) As an apprentice or professional researcher - because that's where you need to focus, and try to make a contribution - pushing the boundaries of knowledge, and finding the next domain of uncertainty;
or,
ii) As a practitioner, e.g. in medicine , where you often don't have all the answers or resources, but nevertheless have to be able to quickly think through alternatives, choose, and make sensible executive decisions - which need to be informed by what you know about good, reasonable, or just plain dodgy alternatives, based, hopefully, on research and experience of knowledge, context and social and professional culture.

This give us ...

research-&-experience-informed creativity, in response to professional uncertainty

This is a particular angle on 'criticality', but I think it covers the same ground as the 'mouthful' above. And it, too, seems a world away from 'employability-as-instrumentalism'. It would link and integrate practice and research, but it would still differentiate teaching into 'teaching for research' and 'teaching for practice' - the relationship between certainty and uncertainty, and even the value of certainty and uncertainty, is so different in research and practice.

Hegemony of Open Courses?

2011-12-08T10:06:00.001Z

Reading through the work of a colleague, and reflecting on some of the recent articles in the IRRODL special issue on Emergent Learning (12:7, 2011) a few things struck me:

1.

“Being connected, without creating and contributing, is a self-focused, self-centered state…. there is never a good time to be a lurker. Lurking = taking. The concept of legitimate peripheral participation … is actually negative."

(Siemens: elearnspace.org/blog/2010/12/01)

I am speechless ...

2. CCKs are NOT the only MOOCs or MOONs in town. PLENK sounds much better, in Rita Kop et al's discussion of it, and the KPI Jams (very ably assisted by Nancy White, amongst other facilitators - there were about 12 of us, for about 120 participants, and facilitation was on a rolling roster basis), as well as Inge de Waard et al's MobiMOOCs, really need to challenge George and Stephen's hegemony on MOON/Cs and even on 'connectivism' (I am still prefer 'networked learning' to connectivism, but what's in a name?).

The seduction of 'social software'

2011-12-05T11:00:00.001Z

I have been rereading Greg and Maartin's collaborative knowledge building paper and particularly their remarks about the need for 'providing shelter from the academic panopticon' (from Foucaul't Discipline and Punish). Made me think - there are some important issues here.

There is one sense in which 'self-organisation' is positive, if not downright cheerful.

However, looked at another way, its also about organising the 'self' (not just 'being self-organised'), and making that 'self' transparent to the 'academic panopticon' - at worst, its like putting your mind on the dissecting table. That might turn out to be positive, but it's inherently hazardous, and might or might not increase the self-confidence and self-esteem of the person concerned. There are examples in the 'Narrating the Self' paper, some of which show this quite painfully, and just dealing with reviews and refusals of papers for publication happens to all of us - and its not always possible 'not to take it personally'.

So ...

self-organisation =
i) the self gets to do more of the organisation

ii) the self has to organise the self, and the resonance/ dissonance between the different parts: academic, affective, professional, networked, social, cultural, etc.

iii) the self has to take the plunge and expose academic texts for publication and scrutiny in various forums - some more collaborative and supportive, some just harsh 'market places'.

iv) in the process, the self creates new 'structures and agency' and presence/s.

a-ffordances / dis-fordances =
i) the self has so many new (and fascinating / mesmerising?) affordances for 'putting this stuff out' into new spaces, and for creating new personal and collaborative spaces - its all a bit like being in a new sweet/ toy shop.

ii) one of the fundamental changes is the change to public and private space, the ability to switch and move stuff across between public and private space, and the liquidity (see Baumann on 'liquid' lives and spaces) of public and private space (sometimes under your control, sometimes usurped by google/ facebook/ phone hackers, etc).

iii) the term 'social software' is beguiling and seductive - and simplistically so - it could even be misleading. Its a set of affordances for renegotiating the 'social' (re-assembling the social, in Latour's blandly 'objective' register), but that means renegotiating the balance, rules, and a-/dis-fordances of the crucial boundaries and fences that determine the 'social' - the intricately interwoven domains of the public and the private: across the personal, cultural, social, legal and technical.

'Self-organisation' - just got so much more interesting, and fragile. I think I had an overdose of the 'cheerful's' on this one.

Hats, wives, vampires, voices ...

2011-11-30T13:42:00.001Z

Suzi Orbach's latest book is a fascinating window into the therapist's point of view (quite literally). An amazing 'mash-up' of stories, creating an engrossing, dramatic narrative. In terms of 'nested narratives', I found myself switching from one side to the other - at first, I was fascinated by Adam's narrative, but as it developed, Orbach's 'voice' comes through so loudly that Adam (as a vampire casanova) is relegated to a mere a prop in her sense making (or should one call a spade a spade: he's a prop in her marketing - of herself).

In fact, too much so, as I wanted to hear Adam trying to make sense of him-self, but all I could hear and feel was Orbach's 'textualised' account of her-self. (And its so different from Oliver Sacks's book: The man who mistook his wife for his hat).

In a sense it came across as a rather uncomfortable reminder of, and metaphor for 'extractive' academic work - the type of thing we do as researchers all the time, where what counts (for us) is to be able to write in a clear, recognisable 'research voice' all of our own, which we can use to build up intellectual and peer-group 'capital'. And where the texts of our students are just the (ephemeral) resources for our publications, our annual reports and, nowadays, our evidence based reflective practice.

The question is: Is it possible to provide a space for the narrator's (own) voice, or is their voice always contaminated by the way one, as a facilitator of some kind, inevitably colours and flavours that space? In my experience with 'nested narratives', the only way to get even close to this, is to stick to the 'raw' primary data - unprepared audio stories. Text sucks, to coin a phrase.

One issue remains, though, namely that 'nested narratives' are (also) nested in a relationship of trust, however short lived, and the narratives are (also) narratives of that implicit relationship ... so the trick is to try to make the 'facilitator' disappear as far as possible.

We thank Guttenberg and Tim Berners-Lee for the written texts we can create, read and circulate so effortlessly, but maybe there is a price to pay - text is soooooo mono-vocal, and always tends to get appropriated by the writer and 'incorporated' into thier identity and agenda - though Oliver Sacks (above) is to a large extent an interesting exception to all that.

Context switching tools

2011-11-28T15:27:00.001Z

Jon Dron posted a comment in the Networked learning hotseats:

Without having to build multiple social spaces, we can shift between social contexts both for inbound and outbound communication and sharing, allowing overlaps and crossovers and links to form naturally. This brings us a little closer to what the physical world naturally facilitates. Our online world has historically been a bit weird: we have actually had to shift to a different space to have a different conversation with different or, often, subsets and supersets of the same people.
...But the current generation of tools are simply filters that show the same stuff in the same way, just filtered according to the community we are engaged with. In real life, people behave differently and present themselves differently in different contexts' It's not just a matter of filtering. We are therefore creating a set of 'context switcher' tools, that allow people to not only apply filters, but to present and observe different facets of an individual, group, net and/or set in completely different ways with different content, different organisation, a different look and feel, to match their current contextual needs.

Maybe we will finally catch up with the inter-subjectivities, multi-subjectivities, and inter-discursive debates of post-modernism in the later 80's. 'Intuitive' inter-interfaces will need to be able to do what children do by the time they go to first grade - switch attention and conversation, along with switches in language, discourse, register, genre, accent, etc. The idea that you have a (single!) 'profile' on Facebook is so 1970's! Context switcher infrastructure demands icon/avatar-switching 'one-click' functionality.

Epistemological capability

2011-11-16T12:43:00.001Z

In response to a recent email I recently received, in which Noss (1999) was quoted as asking: “What kinds of pedagogies are appropriate to using (social media) technology and, more fundamentally, how does this technology change the epistemologies?”

The second question is particularly interesting, and it is not one that I would think of, as I am, I suppose, far too allergic to ‘technological determinism’ – but this is not about that at all …

So … technology does change the (range of affordances for) Epistemology, yes, but then we probably need to tease out and differentiate “epistemology”. To wit, epistemology could be differentiated into ‘epistemological (or investigative) technique’ on the one hand, and ‘epistemological communities’ on the other hand.

This is nothing new, you might say. However, the two domains: epistemological ‘investigation’ and ‘community’ are increasingly intersecting, overlapping, and generally becoming increasingly fuzzy at the edges – one might even say they are becoming integrated. This means that a ‘community of inquiry’ is not just another fashionable name for a community of practice of a special type; within social software ecologies, it’s actually something quite different.

Or to put it another way, the ‘subject’ of the epistemological project is becoming distributed. That is to say, the way we (individually-and-collectively) construct our knowledge – i.e. our ‘capability’, or our ‘capacity for effective action’, needs a new term, a new hybrid (mashed-up) concept, as it includes epistemology, and networking, and sequence, and (layers, fractals of) work-in-progress – like this blog, as well as ontology: who we desire to be, and to become.

Capability:

A ‘capability’ approach (with deference, but not necessarily reference to Amatya Sen) might help us (see here …). So we might ask: “what new ‘capabilities’ do these new (social media) affordances open up – capabilities which are a mashup of epistemology and what I have (elsewhere) called ‘c-ubed’ (siting, sighting, citing)” (see here …)

C-ubed, to take it a bit further, includes:

Sites: What site/s (nodes, portals) do you inhabit &/or create - as a digital resident or visitor (see David White), and as a person or spectre (avatar, etc – see Sian Bayne’s work on Second Life).

Sighting: A ‘site’, in turn, provides a space, a platform – at which, and from which, you can i) extend your presence, your network, and what you are able to engage with [what you can ‘see, hear, feel – we need new ‘synaesthetic verbs’ here]; ii) manage what you can use, and how you can use it (twitter, blogs etc) …. iii) what ‘social-network-capital’ you can ‘accumulate’ (as links, and virtual resources, not necessarily as ‘things’) as you tweet, blog, wiki (vt), publish, etc: i.e both traditional intellectual capital as well as ‘social-network-capital’ (a new mode of IC);

Citing: Citing used to be a separate, formal, activity, and the stuff of ‘citation indexes’ and ‘research assessment exercises’, but it too has ‘fuzzed up’ at the edges, and is just another part of the networking loops, above, as part of the new knowledge ecologies, and ‘networks of inquiry’ (“digital scholarship” is rather ‘last season’, no?)

Talking of data ...

2011-11-14T14:47:00.001Z

... in response to a query about content analysis and critical discourse analysis ...

There are a number of software packages that provide content analysis, such as Nvivo. Contrary to some of the more inflated claims, most of them dont do much more than compute correlations. The more linguistically-detailed software is more interesting, but that varies from package to package.
Computer-based content analysis provides a picture of links and frequencies between words, concepts, and possibly terms of 'value', and more recently 'learning analytics' (see George Siemens recent conference, on blipTV) has been reversioned from consumer analytics to learner analytics (which itself has interesting 'critical discourse' dimensions, no?)
All of this stuff will get you lots of data, which is always a good start, and might prompt you to ask more generally informed questions. That said, you still have to do the analysis, but at least you have some basic data, and you know which correlations might or might not be interesting.

CDA does the analysis in more detail. The basic question here is: what signs, texts, concepts, networks, platforms, are being used, to what purpose, and for whose purpose? So, a basic VLE 'sorts' students to see if the student (a fixed category) complies with a set of outcomes (a fixed and generally narrowly defined category). Whether the student is actually learning something in the process, and learning something useful to them, or their careers, is not something you can necessarily tell from this data.

Further, VLE data (and its more sophisticated learning analytics data) might also tell you, for instance, what pages, posts, etc the students opened, at what minute or second of the day, but it doesnt tell you if their 'mind was open and engaged' at the time, or not.

In short, lots of the data you can get from computer-aided analysis will tell you about compliance (sometimes at quite fine, and useful, granularity), but it wont answer the question "compliance for what?" or "compliance for whom?" or "whose interests in particular compliance ranks above other people's interests in compliance?" (The same questions would apply if you substituted 'compliance' with 'openness and 'emergence').

So ... a learning 'network' could close down, or open up, learning (VLE, Facebook, etc, etc), and that's the interesting part: What networked systems open up or close down learning, agency, self-organisation, creativity, application (add to taste), and whose interests are being served (or marginalised) in the process? To put it crudely, is the 'networked system' being run just to meet the insitutions or lecturer's needs, and/ or to meet the student's needs? And is there a single set of 'student's needs' or are they i) diverse, and ii) dynamically changing.

There are two applied research examples: The analysis in Texts and Discourse, of the front pages of four SA newspapers' reporting on an election in Apartheid South Africa; and the application of CDA to primary health care management in Carletonville, in SA.

Student Charter

2011-11-14T14:36:00.001Z

There is a new proposal out for Student Charters.

In principle, of course its a good thing.

In practice, some of the requirements ('consistency across all subjects') are put there in the interests of simplifying management, and cutting the costs of aggregating data for national dissemination and consumption. Reducing diversity between subjects (or Depts) does not allow for creativity in approach or responsiveness to context.

Convenience data is like convenience food - tempting but not good for you, no?

resonant fractals and other patterns

2011-11-10T11:04:00.002Z

In response to a comment by John Mak on Change MOOC,

Should we say that the the patterns of learning are 'in' the engagement, rather than 'in' the network?

and ... what of reflective, personal/ conversational / networked knowledge?

To go back to conversations we had on pbwiki about the research we did on CCK08, it would make sense (for me) to say that in all three cases there is a good possibility for 'emergent' learning - i.e. unpredictable, adaptive, interactive ('open' if you like) learning.

The difference would be in the patterns of interaction ( - is this the 'same as' patterns of learning? I dont know - is the pattern of learning something quite different, or derivative from the pattern of interaction?) - anyway, the patterns of interaction could be distinguished by criteria such as:

Long loop, short loop, multi-loop (corresponding roughly to blogging, 1-2-1 conversations, and networked interaction (either in material or virtual space).
The iterative, and fractal (multi-path/link?) nature of the event (independent of the nature of the loop, but not necessarily unrelated to it).
Fractal-resonant: what fascinates me is the possibility of 'core' fractal or 'holographic' characteristics - i.e. not just tangenital paths (which look fractal-ish) but actually patterns that repeat, iteratively, at different resolutions, so that the whole is the 'same' as its parts - not literally, but 'resonantly'.

This relates to your idea of fractal 'rebirth' - emergence, in a new instance, and perhaps iteratively at new resolutions, of resonant patterns.

Subject / Object oriented pardigms?

2011-10-31T11:08:00.002Z

Re: #Change11 George Siemens presenting his views on MOOC and Connectivism

Responding to Ken Anderson's post on constructivism/ connectivism:

"For me, the biggest difference between constructivism and connectivism is in their respective epistemologies. Constructivism considers knowledge to be constructed by humans and not discovered. Connectivism considers knowledge to be discoverable by humans through pattern recognition. Constructivism is a subject-centred paradigm, connectivism is an object-centred paradigm. What may really be desired is, as John says, an understanding that bridges this specific binary.

Like (the issues that it raises):

However ...

1. What part of 'pattern recognition' is not 'human' and 'constructed'? (Even machine mediated pattern recognition has an algorithm or two in there: constructed by someone, no?)
2. Are 'object-centred' paradigms not essentialist?

3. Conversely, what part of 'constructed' does not entail at least a bit of 'discovery'?

I am increasingly drawn into synaesthetic, embodied and embedded 'cognition' (if you have to use the word), which works with an 'engaged' (rather Heideggerian) model - not too different as I understand it from Latour's 'reconstructing the social', but maybe that's another story.

See for instance Noe's work on the back-sides of tomatoes (used quite directly in recenet robotic 'object recognition').

Food for thought ...

Emergent / Knowledge / Weaving

2011-10-26T11:21:00.003Z

to continue ... on Scardamalia and Bereiter's Knowledge Forum article (see earlier post)

... I know it reasonably well, and its has very particular 'building' affordances. However I think there critique that ....

Although communities based on shared interests do develop in some threaded discussion forums, this technology provides little means for a group to organize its efforts around a common goal. As the number of postings increases, what appears on the screen becomes an increasingly incoherent stream of messages, leading discussion monitors to impose arbitrary limits on thread length and to erase threads of a certain age. Thus a cumulative advance in the state of knowledge is hardly conceivable.

is a little OTT.

I know where they are coming from - they have a specific 'rise above' affordance, which lets you make meta-comments (you can do it in CMap too, but there is less obvious structure there to do it). If you really want to do K construction and building, KF is suitable. However, to put it politely, they are disingenuous in their critique, because they only include 'threading' and not 'weaving' - I suppose the rejoinder to that would be that, ah ha, but in discussion forums, only the moderator does 'weaving' - well, not necessarily so, no.

I like KF in principle, and I think it has much stronger affordances as a (computer-based, networked) tool for (at least in part) synchronous - F2F interaction, whereas I think well threaded and woven Discussion Forums are much more open and much more suitable for online ('distance') and all-asynchronous learning. KF in the applications I have seen is generally more prescriptive (implicitly - but it is quite strong).

Flash Evensong

2011-10-26T09:34:00.003Z

Nathan Jurgenson recently wrote an article about why Chomsky is wrong about Twitter

Like (apart from his use of the term 'nonwhites' (ouch!!!)

Its time for Chomsky to wise up.

Twitter has affordances for froth-groupies, and even froth-mobs, but it also has affordances for flash-mobs, and even 'flash evensong' (I kid you not) - the parishioners at St Paul's Cathedral in London organised a 'flash evensong' last night (24th October 2011) at the site that the #occupy protesters have taken over - the steps of the Cathedral - way to go.

You can use Twitter to 'get in touch' with your 500 most intimate friends/ groupies, or you can use it to organise something more 'real' like 'flash evensong'.

to wit ... here is an extract from a fortcoming chapter on the new political ecology:

"Webworld and Rights The interesting question about the new political ecology is the question of who is in and who is out of what might be called ‘webworld’. The threshold for whether a country is a member of Webworld, or not, can be defined by whether the country is irrevocably committed to being ‘switched on’ to technical functions, as well as to political and constitutional guarantees, in some of the following areas (listed, loosely, cumulatively) ...

Constitutional Rights: Constitutional rights have not caught up with the Internet. Countries that are radically changing their constitutions (e.g. Egypt, in 2011) might consider whether to include, in some way, the provision not only of general rights, but also of ‘digital rights’. For instance, freedom of speech, of the press, and more interestingly, of assembly, could be formulated to expressly guarantee rights such as the right to ‘digital assembly’"

Emergent / Knowledge / Building

2011-10-24T14:10:00.001Z

In an article linked at Stephen Downes' OLDaily, by Scardamalia and Bereiter, there is an interesting discussion of the issues of developmental and knowledge creation frameworks for learning design.

The idea of framing learning in both knowledge creation and (ontological) development is great. One question is to what extent knowledge creation goes beyond just 'epistemological enculturation' - from what I know of Knowledge Forum, it is entirely possible to go beyond the enculturation, but it does require some work to be done there - it's not 'automatic'.

The other question is whether the ontological development is somehow confined in this process to development as-a-knowledge-creator, or whether this goes beyond that (also) to the application of knowledge, and the broader communities (beyond communities of inquiry) that that would involve.

See the recent article on 'narrating the self' which deals with similar issues, here ...

MOOCs and Cat boxes

2011-10-20T10:29:00.002Z

In response to Ailsa's posts in the NLC forums ... about ChangeMooc:

"There is no centre"

I responded ...
Agreed, one of the problems with ChangeMOOC is that it feels more like a twitter convention to me, so I migrated over here (the NLC forums), and love it. This made me think that perhaps I am just a forum-junkie, but I think not. I object to the undertow of controlling affordances in linear modes of interaction, as in the linear comment strings in the mooc, and the large, linear, lecture-format presentations.

"Centre" - now that's interesting: centre / centres / central spaces ... a centre doesnt have to be an enclosed or enclosing space, it can be an open space. I guess I just need to 'meet' people (with their ideas) when I learn, and not just pass them (individuals - see above) in the (cold) night.

... to which Ailsa responded with a stunning example of schrodingers cat, at:

http://amusingspace.blogspot.com/

or: here ...

... to which I responded:

... on (schrodinger's cat's) multiple realities ... I used a great piece by Latour on Einstein's theory of relativity in my PhD thesis, to define the semiotics of power and discourse (as one does).
Basically, Latour used an imaginary set of frames, some of which you could step into, and through, or see through, to explain where the various observers were (on trains, etc) and the consequences for how and what they perceived as the speed of light.

I mashed that up a bit, and drew up an ANT-ish model of Barthian semiotics and Foucauldian discourse ... something like this:

1. In semiotics, and particularly the semiotics of reversable pronouns (I talk to you, you talk back to me - or to I? who's going on here? - but in any event, we routinely engage in many pass-the-parcel pass-de-deux's) you always occupy, or take up a position, a presence, which occupies social space / is embedded in relationships of power.

2. In Latour's model of the observer of light, the observer is always in a frame, but has contingent access to, and sight of, what is in other frames. And some frames are not what they seem (what with the speed of light being constant, and the train moving, etc).

3. So your discursive presence is a mash up of how you are:

sighted -what you can see, are allowed to see, and how far (into whose frames?)
sited - where are you 'present' / situated (in material, virtual, social, etc frames)
cited - who's looking at you / who's referring/hyperlinking people in other frames to your frame/s

... so

I need to be present in a place that is both comfortable (and stable) and able to engage with other presences ('actors'? - why actors?) (who might push some interesting un-stable levers which challenge my reality).

or ... I need to be able to move in and out of the network from where I am sighted/sited/cited, and still feel centred? (I dont want to have to retreat to Shroedinger's cat box, or at the very least I want to throw away the lid - and that damn physicist).

The Affordances of Virtual-synchronous Silence

2011-10-18T11:52:00.002Z

To continue the discussion on paradoxical affordances and virtual choirs (see the 'Architectures for productive networking' hot-seat at the Networked Learning Conference site ).

The performance of the Virtual Choir is created by mixing together a huge number of individual recordings, all following a score, and following the conductor. The result is stunning as a performance, and fascinating as an affordance.

Several people in the discussion (see above), like Peter, Jeffrey and Hilary, pointed to the role of the imagination in creating a 'network', and possibly some networked learning - certainly networked experience.

The imagination is truly powerful, and (to re-coin my own phrase) learning which takes place amongst (imagined, synchronous !! ) participants can be really inspiring (see example in the Facebook discussions on the Virtual Choir, on the woman who took up choir singing again after learning how to 'leave her ego at the door').

To go back to an earlier quote from Peter, the conductor creates a virtual synchronicity with his conducting of silence that 'opens up the space for the spirit of the participants'. Another (completely different) 'paradoxical affordance' for my framework (see elsewhere in these discussions, and here ...).

As an erstwhile semiotician, the idea of creating an architecture, and conducting a choir, in 'virtual, synchronous silence' just blows my socks off - who would have though there was an affordance that powerful, in a place like that? (See a related affordance here ... )

Paradoxical Affordances and Virtual Choirs

2011-10-14T09:35:00.002Z

At Peter Goodyear’s session, in the Networked Learning conference’s current ‘hot seat’ discussions, there was a fascinating discussion of the ‘virtual choir’ …

Singing in a choir is enjoyable for a number of reasons, one of which is creating harmonics/ harmonies live. So the virtual choir (“individual recoded elements that in turn were spliced together” as Jeffrey Keefer has it) – the virtual choir seems to almost undermine the sense in which music (in ensembles, whether vocal or instrumental) is, in many genres, about creating harmonies and chords, rather than individual notes.

But I must listen to the results! Perhaps it is a challenge (and an odd one) to see to what extent different musical ‘voices’ (in this case literally) can be recorded separately, and harmonized later – a very risky business., more usually done in a series of cumulative ‘over-dubbings’ (see the classic Tubular Bells, etc). If all the above is valid (?) then the ‘network’ provides not so much an affordances as a (substantial) challenge to individual/subgroup control of pitch.

So, in principle at least, this is in a sense a completely new type of networking affordance – to provide a ‘facility’ (ironically) to make things more challenging, or even more difficult, rather than easier.

Which in turn (?) makes me think that there must be other affordances of this kind – lets call them ‘paradoxical’ affordances (or even ‘ironic affordances’).

For instance, maybe the (by now) traditional discussion forum is also a paradoxical affordance, as it provides the challenge of developing and projecting a non-synchronous presence/voice, for which the usual ‘facility’ is grounded in the very different social space of F2F, synchronous interaction.

Makes me rethink the distinction I make between affordances and disfordances, and extrapolate that simple binary into a more ‘fractal’ conceptual map/framework, including at least paradoxical affordances. Whew! (See the diagrams for a forthcoming paper on affordances, here …)

And perhaps this ‘fractal extrapolation’ of ‘affordances’ applies to other networks (both virtual and material spaces) too, no?

2011-10-12T11:29:00.000Z

Open is as open does ...

Just listened to David Wiley's TEC presentation on Open Ed ...

He identifies powerful affordances of sharing through the internet, and affordances for 'increasing our capacity to share' and 'giving without having to give it away'. Indeed, there is lots that should be shared on the internet, and lots more that should not be shared on the internet. Suffice it to say that the courts are full of people who didnt respect private spaces, private zones, private thoughts, etc. Privacy is, it is true, about possession, but it is also about respect and acknowledgement.

While the thrust of his presentation is great, and even admirable, its a bit like Connectivism which, at worst, seems to 'romanticise' connectivity as not only necessary, but also as sufficient unto itself. I look forward to finding out where the meat is in the shared sandwich (in David's view).

2011-10-11T09:01:00.006Z

Identity, Capability and Power

Affordances are the 'product of the interaction between the actor and environment'. But they are not created in a vacuum, so we need to extrapolate out to a wider social and political framework. An earlier post (here, see below) dealt with the basic relationships between affordances and uses. This is the second diagram, which deals with the broader issues ...

Fig. 3: Identity, Capability and Power

Figure 3 sketches out the way that identity is constituted, edited, revised, re-arranged and re-aligned, viz-a-via affordances, based on the following:

• Competence: the ability to use resources and tools for specific functions.

• Curiosity, Adaptation and Innovation: the interest and the willingness to explore, create, benchmark and master new affordances (i.e. affordances which may be new to you, individually, and/or may be new to everyone).

• Capability: what you are capable and willing to continue doing, in existing and in new contexts.

Your repertoire of affordances is reflected in your capability - what you are able, interested and, most importantly, willing to carry out. It includes the history and memories of how you acquired the affordances, which leaves conscious and sub-conscious traces and legacies – positive and negative - in the actor, as well as in other people and texts in the environment. You act within your identities, within various communities and networks (Etienne Wenger 2009), and within professional and cultural discourses, all of which are potentially different, and may make conflicting demands on you. You exercise power within some of these communities and networks, based on your identities, your networks, and your access to technical capacity. In more particular terms, power is exercised within discourses (Text and Discourse ,Williams 1993).

Discourse, Affordances and the Internet of Things

2011-10-07T13:52:00.003Z

Thinking about 'discourse' in the critical discourse analysis (CDA) sense ...

Key to a critical sense of discourse is that "Foucault restores ‘materiality and power to what, in the Anglo-American tradition, has remained the largely linguistic concept of discourse' ... I would put it slightly differently—a discourse is a system of signs and alliances that orders texts and bodies, animate and inanimate, within a discourse community—but the
gist of it is the same". (See here and here).

The point is simply that Discourse (with a capital D?) orders words, ideas and things - orders them around/ orders them into place/ orders them into categories - some of which have lavish permissions, some of which are confined to a poverty of opportunity ... and so on.

Affordances are also about materiality, creativity, capability (and ultimately power) - they are embodied in perception (on the one hand) and embedded in materiality (including digital 'materiality?) on the other hand. Sure, there is some fascinating stuff going on in between, but its not confined to the space between the ears.

And Web4, the Internet of Things, is a (set of) dynamic, elastic, discursive 'footprints' too- in a digitalized medium. The interesting thing is that the Internet is not so much an infra-structure as a hyper-structure - its more flexible, adaptable - simply, more 'switchable',and anyone can sprinkle their own nodes all over the place.

Here are some neat examples of earlier 'footprints' - in this case of a resource-sharing network between Mycorrhizal Fungi and Douglas Firs (going strong for about 200 million years, and counting) ...

Which when you analyse it, turns out to be a dynamic footprint / 'social network' (Kevin-Beiler, UBC), like this ...

Is Wikipedia tooooo conservative?

2011-10-04T12:04:00.001Z

Wikipedia is self-organising, as anyone can add and edit any page they like, and in fact it depends on people taking the initiative, starting new pages, adding new data and ideas.

However, it is also remarkably self-correcting - if you put up something that is untrue, unsupportive, or plain rude, it get corrected, or taken down entirely, pretty quickly - even in minutes - otherwise in hours or, for more obscure pages, days. This is good and bad - its good that 'emergent nonsense' (malicious or naive) gets 'fixed', quickly, but its bad in that it probably makes wikipedia more conservative than it might otherwise be. That, however, is probably the nature of 'encyclopaedias', and maybe that's the way it should be, no?

Much of this happens just by the interaction of the 'many actors interacting frequently'. The 'editors' (and I think there are now 'super-editors' or 'managing editors' too) are necessary in a resources a big as wikipedia, but they don't fundamentally change the principle of self-organising agents who create a self-organising and self-correcting system.

The self-correcting system does, pretty much, provide 'external' validity - that is, external to the posts of individual agents, whose self-organised ideas might be a bit flaky in parts.

The question is whether Wikipedia has the balance right between emergence and constaints - is it too conservative, reliable and boring, or too interesting and unreliable? Are there examples, in practice, of other kinds of wiki-knowledge-aggregators that do this differently?

Webinar on Emergence

2011-10-04T11:54:00.002Z

My two colleagues, Jenny and Regina, and I will be holding a webinar on the IRRODL paper on Emergent Learning on Oct 5th, for CIDER (Canadian Institute for Distance Educational Research), see: http://cider.athabascau.ca/CIDERSessions/rwilliams/sessiondetails

CIDER sessions are open to all - just login as a guest.

2011-09-26T13:09:00.002Z

MOOCs and Spaghetti

In reply to a comment-string on the Change MOOC, which said that

MOOCs are like Chinese Buffets ...

No, more like strings of Spaghetti ...
I guess I am just allergic to what I called 'string discourse' many years ago.

String discourse is a discourse of 'single beads along a single string', which means that you are, almost inevitably, restricted to relating the meaning of your post to just the one before (in the string) or the one after, with no cross links, no back links, no side links allowed - unless you loop through hyperlinks to external sites.

The main affordances are to keep the 'discussion' on a single track, which seems to allow for a 'focused' discussion, but actually ends up fragmented at best, and controlling at worst. Academics (my 'birth tribe') have controlled academic discourse in this way for a few centuries, and counting, so maybe I'm just a little sensitive to the issues.

The single-string comment format (in the MOOC, see above) is an excellent example.

2011-09-26T10:21:00.003Z

Remembering and Forgetting

'Angel' writes on OLDaily ...

"On Facebook I am Angel Fuente
I am not Angel Fuente.
I do not wish to share my identity, my data or my location with Facebook, because Facebook will use this information to make money. I dont monetise what I know about my friends and I am uncomfortable about Facebook doing that. I cannot trust Facebook with my data."

Technology does go in cycles after all. Over the past few years, I think we have all been struck by the unprecendented affordances of social media - 'Grafiti in the clouds' (what an opportunity!) and more ...

The dialectic bites back though. Anything as large, successful and penetrating as the Internet must have a cost, a business model, and if you arent paying for it up front, why, you must be paying for it via a back door, controlled by a revenue collector, if not a bouncer or two as well.

The initial impression was that you need to tolerate some advertising, or pay a few bucks to operate 'free' of advertising. This seemed to be a reasonable way to go about social networking, and seemed painless.

However, discussions (on Radio 4 in the UK) recently highlighted a much more invidious issue: simply, that social networking have changed the 'default setting' on social interaction from 'gently forgetting' to 'persistently remembering'. That changes where you are, what your 'presence' is, who you are, its a kind of 'bird lime of the past' that sticks you to time line like a butterfly in a specimen case. Aaagh!

One of the joys of life is that it is always new (even 'fashionable' see here ...).

The nightmare of all this is that we are all being pursued by a data-vacuum machine (or several - Google, Facebook, Twitter, ...) that sucks up our data, and commoditises, monetises, remembers it, and sticks us to it.

'Stuck in the past' takes on a frighteningly new meaning.

2011-08-10T11:34:00.002Z

Cycles of Dispersal and embeddedness (moving on, again) ...

There is another dynamic (see previous post), which is overlaid/underlaid/projected from the 2D graphic, namely the occilation between embeddedness and dispersal, which happens at various stages, including:

Genetic information embedded in RNA/DNA, and dispersed in viral, bacterial, and sexual 'relations' (see here), as well as throughout organisms.
Social gestures, embedded in signs and texts (from the dances of bees, onwards), and dispersed in interaction and networks.
Social semiotics, embedded in human artefacts, and dispersed in interaction, networks, media, inter-net-works (web 1 & 2), CoP.
Web (3) semiotics, embedded in web artefacts, and dispersed on the web and in augmented-realilty interactions, and spectal semiotics (Second Life, Games, avatars).
Web (4) functions, embedded in things and networks of things, and dispersed in interactions across artefact-networks.
Temporal cycles: iterative cycles, embedded in places, days, and years; and dispersed across global, 24/7, continuous flows (See Knorr-Cetina (2005) on 'micro-global networks' and the new 'temporalisation'.

Cross-posted here

2011-08-04T10:22:00.003Z

Fractal Narratives #2

Moving on ... to web 3.0 and 4.0 ...

The picture (referenced and linked in the previous post), needs an update to incorporate web3.0 (augmented reality) - which promises to 'seemlessly' integrate and overlay virtual-knowledge onto embodied perception, and and update to incorporate web4.0 (internet of things) - which is already re-embedding/ re-inserting the end-points/web-endings of virtual-networks back into the material world. But for the meantime I will leave those two tasks in the hands of the reader, and invite any additions/variations to this diagram to be posted here.

Of course in one sense 'all knowledge is virtual', or all value (financial and other) is derivative (or multi-derivative/meta-semiotic).

Perhaps we could say that "meaning is made in the world, knowledge is made in (abstraction) alongside it", and both are circulated and connected through the web"?

2011-08-02T10:19:00.001Z

Fractal Narratives?

Reading Mark Frazier's discussion in Quora on fractals and narrative ...

It is interesting to treat narrative structure as generative fractals rather than as structure.

I work in 'enabled' narratives, in which the fractals (if they are fractals) do not emerge on a linear sequential vector, but rather on a tangenital, depth vector. To wit, the 'enabler' asks the narrator whether there is a sub-narrative ('nested narrative') embedded in the orginal narrative. This is iterated, to produce layers of tangenital, 'deeper' nested narratives, at various points in the main narrative.

This process of teasing out tangenital nested narratives strikes me as 'fractal', although I have not woked explicitly with the notion of fractals before. What interests me in terms of the next step in analysis of nested narratives is to develop some way of describing the emerging 'tangenital patterns' that occur in the engagement between narrator and enabler. I had in mind something like Social Network Analysis, transcribed across to nested narratives as, perhaps, Sense-making Node Analysis (SmNA?). Any thoughts?

And ...

I share an interest in linking meaning to ontogenesis and phylogenesis, and from my semiotic background I generate flow charts from time to time, to try to make sense of these things.

See here: http://k-m-etaphors.wikispaces.com/Dis+-+embedded+Knowledge

(cross posted to http://learning-affordances.wikispaces.com/, and to k-m-etaphors wiki).

2011-08-01T11:42:00.002Z

Is all good education emergent?

Partly in response to Osberg and Biesta's paper, and partly of interest the next paper on Emergent learning, the question arises as to whether education should include 'passing on commoditised knowledge', or does it always have to be new and emergent?

My problem is that as someone who uses the products of science everyday, I am deeply indebted to the commoditisation of knowledge in science. Science is like money - commoditised, and you sometimes feel that "you can't live with it, and can't live without it". And education has to include science. The question for constructivists and emergentists is whether all this commoditised knowledge should be 'rediscovered' and learnt from scratch, or whether we should encourage 'rediscovery' only when appropriate and interesting, and allow for engagement with current ideas as givens, where that is more appropriate?

This is one of the main reasons why we had to included prescriptive learning alongside emergent learning in the paper on Emergent learning and learning ecologies in web2.0 +. We need both; as a colleague once remarked: "I believe in post-modernism, but that doesn't mean I'm about to give up my mobile phone".

This is not to say that exploration cannot apply to prescriptive, commoditised knowledge, but there are limits.

The example of Montessori mathematics is a case in point - the Pink Tower (a series of 10 pink block, varying from 1cm cube to 10 cm cubed) is a given - it is the basis for relationships in number, within the prescribed counting system that we use, i.e. base 10. Nevertheless, children are asked to build the pink tower from its blocks, to let them explore (in embodied learning) the relationships between numbers, in three dimensions, in base 10. It is a remarkably simple piece of equipment, yet it remains a favourite of most Montessori graduates, as well as Montessori observers and researchers (like me).

Strategic knowledge / capability (see previous post) ...
This is just the best way I have got to define 'meaning', as distinct from knowledge. 'Knowledge' is such a leaky concept - incontinent you might even say. Which is why I started writing (in the JKM article) about a distinction between informal or 'ante-formal knowledge', 'formal knowledge', and 'strategic knowledge'. Currently I am shifting across to words like 'capability' as a replacement for 'strategic knowledge', to try to get away from the problems of 'knowledge'.

So I would 'translate' Osberg and Biesta's concept of 'meaning' into 'capability', which includes the (hard) natural science knowledge about how things work, the social science (soft) knowledge about where you want them to work, and for whom, and with what resources.

2011-07-29T12:14:00.001Z

Unpacking Knowledge ...

Read Osberg and Biesta (2008) on Emergent Curriculum (Journal of Curriculum Studies, 40:3, 313-328).

Great article, and I fully support the thrust of the argument against commoditised subjectivity, and the move towards an emergent epistemology.

However ...

One of the problems (that haunts much of the debate in knowledge management) is that 'knowledge' covers too much (better in French, apparently, where there are more words for it), and I think this paper hits up against a similar problem.

I need more distinctions, if I am going to make sense of 'emergent epistemology/ies' ...

1. Educational enculturation, which I need to separate into

... social enculturation
... epistemological enculturation

They are separate, and can succeed and fail separately. Its a long story, but there is an interesting example of this in the failure of the early HIV/AIDS campaigns in Botswana, in which schooling achieved (traditional) social enculturation in broad terms, but didnt seem to achive much at all in terms of epistemological enculturation. (No sign of emergent epistemologies, but that's another issue).

2. Strategic knowledge (at an organisational level), or Capability (at an individual level)

I define this (in an article in Journal of Knowledge Management: 12 (4) 72 - 85) by splitting it up as follows:

Strategic knowledge is the fit between:

... formal knowledge (similar to Popper's World 3, abstract knowledge - which they quote), and
... formal contextual analysis (much of social science), and
... available resources.

... all of which is informed by informal knolwedge, experience, and community.

And that is the basis for meaning (at an individual level) and culture/discourse (at a CoP/social level).

3. Acquiring and circulating 'it'
I also need to distinguish between acquiring and circulating meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge on the other.

I think it is useful to frame

....Meaning as strategic knowledge/capability - as in #2, above, and
... Formal knowledge as, precisely, commoditised information, which is, simply, information deliberately and systematically stripped of all context and subjectivity, expressly for the purposes of circulation, exchange, and the accumulation of intellectual capital. This is a process that is homologous to the process of creating money, or financial 'capital', which is similarly stripped (as far as the exchange rates allow it to be) of context and subjectivity, (and can be read straight off Capital Vol 1).

If we accept this distinction, it follows that we can 'exchange' formal knowledge/information, but that we can only 'share' meaning (depending on what we have in common - individually and culturally). And Complexity theory helps us with the 'sharing meaning' part of the equation.

Cross posted here ...

2011-07-28T10:53:00.003Z

Culture and Strategy

I read Jenny's blog on Culture and Context and had a quick scan through the Balogan article that she references, and although it is a bit alarming, I tend to agree, in broad terms, with the statement towards the end of the Balogan article that 'culture always trumps strategy' - unless of course you can merge the two, which means that its not 'strategic change' but 'culture change'. My only empirical experience of that, in an organisation that I used to head up, was through Appreciative Enquiry, which I love, despite the fact that it is time consuming.

In terms of analysis, I think cultural change can be both achieved and analysed in and appreciative enquiry framework, but my own preference is to break it down into sub-cultures, using critical discourse theory.

To wit - I did a management evaluation of a primary health care system in South Africa some time back, and what I found was that there were several 'professional silos', clustered around different 'professions' - you could call these micro-cultures, I saw them as professional discourses.

The critical discourse methodology is at first blush quite simple: you ask people:

• What do you think the crucial events/ problems are that you have to deal with [in your profession, job, department]?

• What is the typical prognosis for these problems?

• What resources do you have to apply to the resolution of these problems?

• What do you get rewarded for, and how, when you resolve these problems?

This gives you ample data for discourse analysis. And a discourse is defined as "a set of texts, practices and alliances that orders bodies, animate and inanimate, to create/ maintain/ defend a particular discourse community" (or CoP).

What I found was that:

1. The tails wag the dogs - i.e. point 4, rewards, determines everything else to an alarming degree.

2. That being the case, everyone chases different resources (or scarce resources); they are only interested in a narrow spectrum of prognoses; and they have no (material or other) interest in any perspective other than the one that will serve their own rewards (even if that is just an annual appraisal, and keeping their job). They literally 'dont see it the same way' - they are not paid to do so, to put it crudely. This is mostly not because they are nasty people, but simply because they are busy people, and nowadays also overloaded and under-resourced!

3. The Culture of the organisation is not in fact a culture, but a negotiated set of balances and compromises between the different (and mostly clashing) discourses that are the foundations for the professional and departmental 'silos', which is often flatteringly referred to as a 'strategy'. It is of course possible that the different micro-discourses resonate and harmonise, but the usual suspects (finance, marketing, product design, production, administration, human resources, PR, etc) are generally not that compatible.

4. Unless there is someone in place (a CEO, preferably with some charisma or charm, or both) who can pull it all together, the centrifugal forces of clashing discourses are never resolved, unless it is by cynicism, i.e. the most likely outcome is: "we all know that the CEO really only cares about ...... (fill in the blank), and we'll just have to live with that".

2011-07-15T12:34:00.000Z

Hypo-media

It turns out that trees (and other members of the forrest community) form networks, which are key to cross-species ecologies. So they are not so stupid after all, and got into "hypo-media" before we did (sorry, couldnt resit it)

See here

2011-07-14T10:24:00.000Z

Benchmarking and Mastery

Some affordances are sought out, and even designed. Some fall into your lap / onto your desk.

The affordances for benchmarking and mastery, in e-assessment at Portsmouth University are a case in point. We set up a new version of the first year mathematics courses in calculus and linear algebra about a year ago, and found, as we proceeded, that the software allowed us to set in-class exams in which students could repeat individual questions three times (with new values each time), instead of repeating whole assessments three times.

As we monitored their progress, we noticed that they were shifting from 'collecting grades' to 'accumulating competencies' - quite a different set of affordances and behaviour.

This raises the intriguing possibility that it might be possible to relegate assessment to certifying benchmarking and mastery that the students have already achieved - i.e. to transform externally dirven 'summative assessment' into internally motivated benchmarking and mastery. And get the 'learning tail to wagy the assessment dog' for a change. That has a nice ring to it too!

See the presentation slides (with a brief narrative) on the (copied) wiki page here:

2011-07-11T13:44:00.000Z

Myths Debunked

Nice take-off of Adam Curtis here

2011-05-31T09:48:00.002Z

The Ecosystem Myth???

Having read Adam Curtis's article in the Guardian (29 May) and watched the second programme in his mini-series on BBC2, I just had to respond.

The article is full of cheap shots, and bad science.

He is patronisingly dismissive of several better minds than his own, such as the SA Prime Minister and erstwhile Chancellor of Oxford, Jan Smuts. While Smuts may indeed have been thoroughly immersed in the values of the British Empire, his ideas on wholism and ecology were not just apologies for Empire (he foght two wars against the Empire). His ideas on ecology were very sound, very practical (he got a bill through parliament declaring the Kruger Park and the whole of Table Mountain national monuments/ parks at a time when no-one else in that kind of position (of power) was even thinking of it. He was head and shoulders above any other politician of his generation on ecology, and his house outside Pretoria/Tshwane was testament to that. He also had a very strong scientific interest, and classified numerous grasses, for instance, apart from a serious interest in snakes, etc.

And … the idea that ‘ecology’ and ‘ecological’ systems originated with some crackpot is just beyond belief. Ecologies have been around since Darwin’s time, at least in principle. Curtis is, I’m afraid, quite out to lunch on ecologies, and on the biosphere experiment – the ants in the biosphere that he cites in support of his argument are a prime example of self-organising behaviour in complex adaptive systems theory, both in biology and in mathematics (see the classic study in the book “Godel, Escher, Bach” on artificial intelligence and systems, and a delightful thought experiment about talking to an anthill).

Further, having (just) watched Curtis's second programme on bbc2, I am even more incensed.

To conflate the Club of Rome and the commune movement with behaviourism, let alone to conflate ecologists and cybeneticists, is illiterate, and bordering on the perverse. Moreover, to accuse everyone in sight (conveniently in old film clips, so that they cant respond to the accusations) of believing in a naïve version of the ‘balance of nature’ is simplistic nonsense.

Darwin can only be read in one of two ways: i) incorrectly, as saying that nature favours the strongest and most powerful, or ii) correctly, as saying that nature favours the most adaptive. In both cases, change is central to evolution.

A kind of mushy, everything-stays-the-same-notion of ecology is bunkum – even the title of Darwin’s book is the Origen of the Species – his argument centred around ‘speciation’ – the creation of new species, and, inevitably, the decline of some older ones. To read Darwin (or Smuts, who read Darwin) as supporters of a notion of ecology-as-balance-and-therefore-as-status-quo beggars belief.

I don’t know where the Gardian, or the BBC, got this joker from. Fortunately there is an antidote available. Have a look at:

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

Curtis’s politics is suspect too. Self-organising networks are key parts of what is going on in the world today, and if you want a rigorous academic overview of the matter, have a look at Knorr-Cetina’s work, on ‘global micro-structures’ (in Theory, Culture and Society, 2005). Knorr-Cetina applies complexity theory to global finance and global terrorism, and argues for ‘post-Weberian’ systems of social organization.

Against these good people (which, intellectually includes Smuts) Curtis comes across as illiterate. He also completely confuses self-organising systems and self-organising agents. Cant be much kinder than that.

2011-05-23T11:48:00.000Z

Emergence and Micro-agents

One of the key aspects of emergence is: frequent communication between micro-agents (think of ants establishing a ‘route’ to a new food supply, and communicating with each other repeatedly along the line).

There are two aspects to this: (i) There have to be lotttttts of them, communicating often, and without anyone of them being able to see the full picture. (ii) There has to be some mechanism to track, aggregate, resonate, between all these snippets of communication.

So ... a workshop of 20-30 people is fine, as lots (not all) of what is going on circulates quickly and efficiently, given some basic workshop techniques (no technology in sight).

Or ... a Community of Tweeters/Bloggers/Forum posters will do the same. The bottom line is ‘recorded conversations’ – although that does not have to be literally the case – what we need is ‘conversations that leave traces’, or ‘residues’ or ‘resonances’. If these traces can be articulated in a ‘text’ of some sort that can be circulated, reworked (mashed up), transcribed into other media, this opens up the affordances for emergence.

And ... if these texts are digital, that means they can potentially be circulated and ‘worked with’ by any number of people and at virtually no cost. That provides potentially ‘exponential’ (= ‘scale free’) increases in the possibilities for emergence. Or ... if the communication is inspirational, preferably from personal ‘contact’, it might circulate exponentially in much the same way, although that happens less frequently.

2011-05-03T11:17:00.002Z

Sound bites ...

Norm Friesen's blog post on lectures is so refreshing. It makes the case for bringing back the (good) lecture, as a separate mode that has merit in its own right, and on its own terms.

The point is (I paraphrase) that oral presentations are grounded in presence, the ephemeral, informal, and performativity (see elsewhere on in this blog on performativity). This resonates with my own work in nested narratives, which uses oral stories, and story fragments, to explore, articulate, capture and share tacit knowledge and experience. In nested narratives we have moved 'beyond' (written) text and transcripts as far as possible.

And ...
It struck me that 'sound bites' rather than 'oral texts' is a much more appropriate way to refer to these bits of oral performativity, because they are much more like food than inedible things (such as written texts, or screen texts). The metaphor of eating is so much more personal, ephemeral, and performative, so it works on many more (synaesthetic) levels, no?

2011-04-04T09:40:00.001Z

HE footprints/ radiograms?

In a discussion of a post by Stephen Downes on OLD, here, some ideas came up about how HE might get its act together more effectively. Part of this discussion was a suggestion by myself that perhaps publications should be restricted to one per year, forcing academics to publish quality rather than quantity. Stephen's reply was that this might be interesting, but it might just revert to 'counting citations' instead of counting publications.

My response ...

Indeed, and citations are i) bluint instruments, and ii) open to some abuse.

What if ...

Social network analysis profiles or footprints could be used instead, and coded in some way to make different domains of networking clearly evident? Could this differentiate visually, and clearly, between academic citations by others/ academic citations by self/ RSS feeds/ responses to postings/ links to postings, etc, etc?

For instance, what would one do with the data from OLD 'citations', would it be one category, on several distinct ones?

Then the academic could be asked to attend a conversation (in person, online, open, restricted ...) to discuss their footprint/ radiogram/ profile, preferably across an interactive, live, timeline. That could be a useful investment in HE 'knowledge infrastructure', no?

2011-03-28T11:55:00.002Z

Emergent Learning
Affordances are, I think, inherently part of ecological psychology, learning ecologies, etc. That makes them part of Complex Adaptive Systems, which are also 'ecological' systems. After some years, and some months of collaborative work, here is a paper (finally) that draws many of these things together:

Emergent Learning in the Learning Ecologies of Web 2.0

I would preferred to refer to 'Web2+' as we have already got 3.0 (augmented reality) and 4.0 (the internet of things), but 'simple' is inherently good, no?

2011-03-17T12:12:00.001Z

Socialising Affordances

Alan Costall (1995) says that while Gibson’s theory of affordances bridged the gap between the material and the individual actor, he only started to bridge the gap between the individual and the social, and at times seemed to be equivocal about whether affordances are social or not.

Affordances are inherently ecological, so they are based on variation and adaptability, and the interaction between individuals. The social world that we live in (and which Latour says we have to continually re-assemble) contains givens, established uses and memes – the cultural genotype, if you like.

The part of the social world that we carve out for ourselves, in our individual social niches and identities is made up of these existing practices, as well as the adaptations that we explore, benchmark, master, and perhaps establish as wider social practices and memes – our individual phenotypes, if you like.

These (‘phenotypical) affordances might or might not become embedded in the wider social, in which case they become available as ‘givens’ for the next generation.

However, even in our personal explorations and creation of new affordances, we are always interacting within the given social (of memes) and the current social (of other individuals). So affordances are both a means to the end of a unique (and possibly new) individual identity, and a resource which may contribute to a new shared set of social resources.

And the ‘raw’ material that we use to explore, create, and establish new affordances is deeply embedded in the social, and in our interaction with other people. So affordances are both individual and on the cusp of the (next) social.

2011-03-14T11:02:00.001Z

New uses ?

(This is cross-posted from the learning-affordances.wikispaces.com blog:)

In a presentation for a workshop on affordances recently, it struck me that it is really not helpful to call everything an 'affordance'. there are some plain old uses, so in the interests of plain language, and common sense, it might be useful to sketch out the relationship between affordances and uses.

Here is the first diagram (the paper is being revised for publication later this year, and will include considerably more detail).

2011-03-07T15:19:00.000Z

Learning Analytics?

Thanks Heli and David Wiley for the blogs on Learning Analytics: I love the expression "physics envy", although I think its rather sad, as a social phenomenon, and rather limited it its view of physics (see the last sentence of this comment).

To the point. I would love to know how learning analytics works (i.e. without the physics envy). I am in principle enthusiastic about Social Network Analysis, but haven't been able to take the time to get into it, yet. From what I have seen so far, there is much to be gained, but there is still something at the centre of it all that keeps worrying me, like a pebble in my shoe, namely:

The network analyses I have seen all look so 2 dimensional (and three dimensional versions dont necessarily help). I dont think it is the 'flatness' that worries me really, but rather the reduction to neat, 'one-dimensional' nodes (rather like 'points' which have position by 'no' dimensionalilty!)

In my own earlier work on media and political analyis, I quickly realised that I had to adopt a 'post-modernist' theoretical framework, to accommodate 'dispersed subjects', etc, etc. In more recent work, on Affordances for Learning, I took a much simpler approach, and just asked people to tell me stories about how they had learnt something that was important to them.

The result was very 'rich descriptions' of what was actually happening, in which learning and identity were so intermingled as to be almost 'one' thing. (Etienne Wenger says it so much better, of course). Further, none of these stories were dealing with one identity, but rather many identities, and lots of crises, negotiations, re-alignments, etc between the identities that they were exploring and adopting, and the consequences of buying in to discourses, communities, professions, organisational politics, families, social groups, etc, that the particular 'identiies' implied.

So ... I long for a method of describing and analysing networks of learning in which each node is a mini-ecology of 'identities' and 'learnings'. Single, static, sutured nodes look so, well, Newtonian?

2011-02-24T11:36:00.008Z

Theories ... scribble scribble scribble ...

On Ailsa's blog I came across a link to the recent flame-wars on connectivism, on wikipedia.

I added the following, in an attempt to move the debate on a bit:

This debate is instructive. But more so about wikipedia and the threshold , or boundaries of what is and what is not appropriate for wikipedia than about learning (unfortunately). Connectivism is a useful description of a social phenomenon - it pulls together things like crowd sourcing, networked learning, distributed learning, etc. But it is not a theory of learning - maybe a framework for conduction, designing, or even managing learning - but theory of learning, no.

So ...
Surely wikipedia should include useful (yes) and new descriptions of social phenomena? In which case, the more interesting debate is about whether connectivism can be defined much more broadly than just 'learning'. It might be useful to talk of a 'connectivist society' or a 'connectivist social/ political/ 'revolutionary' movement'. This might in or might not include activities which are centred around 'learning'.

However ... if the wikipedia entry takes the form of "x is a theory of ...", the then criteria are more rigorous, so why not change the entry to: "Connectivism: Connectivism is a concept that describes a set of social activities which are characterised by a, b and c ..."

Its the theoretical aspirations (unwarrented and unjustified in my view) that stick in the craw, and muddy the water in an otherwise very interesting debate about how we can best describe what is going on out there.

... This does not come up to the exacting standards of 'Foucault's dream' (see Ailsa's blog) but it might be moving in that direction.

2011-02-04T12:41:00.004Z

The Complexity Elephant

I have just spend a very interesting few days at a workshop on affordances. Quite a bit of agreement for the point of view that I put forward (for the first time, for me), i.e that 'affordances' needs a bit of 'paring down' as it is sometimes used for just about everything, in which case, of course, it means close to nothing.

As someone said, "OK, I've got the bit about affordances being a relationship between agent and the environment, but does it go anywhere from there?" It does go on, as it is part of 'ecological psychology, and ecologies are best understood in terms of complexity theory.

But it seems to be incredibly difficult to get people to understand the 'one world/two domains' paradox, i.e. that there is one domain in which things are predictable (or can be forcibly dealt with as predictable) and another domain in which things are not predictable (but they are nevertheless 'ordered'). Most people respond by saying "Yes, but aren't you just saying that its just a matter of probability and the length of the error bars?" to which the answer is, NO.

This might be the 'elephant in the room' when you try to get people to understand what affordances and emergence is all about. People just don't see the elephant, let alone engage with it enough to understand it.

2010-12-03T21:24:00.004Z

Would you like it on the table, or under the table?

Politics. Like someone said, its like sex, its only really good when its dirty.

But Qatar defies this cynicism, and puts it straight up, on the table. Thank you.

The Sunday Time investigation into 'incentives' for FIFA votes dealt with a few small gifts to one or two developing nations (some equipment and facilities), and resulted in bans for the members concerned.

Qatar is not doing any such thing. No incentives behind closed doors, or under any tables, but right up front, on the table, on the telly: Lots of brand new, thousands-of-seats, fully green-air-conditioned (its a micro-climate speciality in the Gulf, apparently), will be given away, free (no incentives here) to developing countries as one-owner only gifts, as soon as the World Cup is over.

Now that is attractive to developing countries. Thank the lord its not an incentive for votes.

You gotta love them!

2010-11-30T18:20:00.010Z

Why Define Knowledge?

Do we need to define knowledge in order to ‘do’ knowledge management’? The answer is probably not, and the answer may even be that defining knowledge is counter-productive to ‘doing’ KM. There is of also the question of whether we need to theorise ‘knowledge’ in order to theoretically inform our practices of knowledge management, but that is another matter, and will not concern us here.

Simply, the reason why we do not need to define knowledge is that epistemology is not necessarily the primary (or any) concern of the practice of KM. The concern is for ‘capacity for effective action’, not for epistemological analysis.

Snowden provides an interesting framework for KM, which although it is not explicitly concerned with epistemology, it does lead stakeholders on to epistemologically informed distinctions, of what he calls his four “contexts” but which might more usefully be called ‘states’ and specifically, ‘operational states’, in my own interpretation of the issue, as follows …

Operational states can be defined in terms of both perception and action. A complex state is one in which variables are self-organising and, therefore, the events are ordered but unpredictable. A prescriptive state is one in which the variables follow rigid external laws, and the events are predictable. (There is a subset of prescriptive states, routine states, in which events are not only predictable, but stable and well known and well established. And there is a fourth state, the chaotic or disordered state).

The question of how we might go about dealing with these four states, in practice, must be resolved, foremostly, at the resolution of variables, not events. And at the level of variables, the question is two-fold: epistemological and political.

Epistemologically, the issue is whether the variables are in principle at least self-organising, possibly self-reproducing, and possibly also maintain, themselves, an identity of self [or, alternatively], is the behaviour of the variables determined entirely by laws external to them-‘selves’, and are they therefore amenable to manipulation and command and control?

Politically, the issue is whether the variables are permitted to exercise ‘self-organisation’ at these three levels. ‘Political’ in this sense incorporates many aspects of Bruno Latour’s recent definition of ‘politics’, i.e. a politics which is inclusive of the animate and the inanimate (see here for an account and a critique of his position).

So the four states (complex, predictable, routine and chaotic) are a function of both epistemology and politics – or perception and action. In other words, on the one hand there is residual level of possible interaction between variables, and on the other hand there is the permissible, actual, level of interaction within a political context. Variables which are capable of self-organising may or may not be permitted to exercise such a capability, and this applies to variables (and thus events) within both ecological and social systems.

This provides a framework for the practical matter of ‘doing’ knowledge management. To wit, you (individually or as a group of stakeholders) need to be aware of the four operational states, both in terms of what is possible in principle, and in terms of what is permissible in practice – within the political context of which you are a large or small part. And the ‘permissible’ is dynamic, it changes, and therefore, ‘you’ (individually or collectively) can shift variables and events from one ‘contextual quadrant’, or one of the four ‘operational states’ to another. You might find that difficult, but it depends on what you are ‘capable’ of – i.e. how much or how little you are prepared to permit or restrict the actions of variables within an event, and how far you are capable of ‘going’ to ensure what you want.

(cross posted to here)

2010-11-12T18:17:00.006Z

Self-transcendence

Jeffrey Goldstein’s introduction to Henle’s classic (1942) text on emergence put ‘self-transcendence’ at the heart of the ‘hard’ part of the problem of emergence. They both ask: “How is ‘emergent novelty’ possible?” or how can emergence be both continuous and discontinuous with what it has emerged from?

Goldstein also says that part of the problem is that the tension between epistemology and ontology (or causation and emergence) is not really resolved, hinting perhaps that if it were, emergence would become a lot clearer. He also says that the ‘self’ in ‘self-transcendence’ is not the same as the ‘self’ in ‘self-organising’. That might just be where we need to dig a little deeper.

Take another look at the ‘self’, it might yield up some interesting possibilities. The nature of self-transcendence in complex adaptive systems, and evolution, depends on what Blackmore so vividly illustrates as ‘diversity’ which, as it happens, McGillivray (in her review of Wenger et al’s new book, Digital Habitats) also highlights as key to emergence. This notion of diversity must be prodded a little more too, and if we do that, we see that this is ‘diversity of a special kind’ – its not just more as ‘varied’, but remarkably, more as in ‘more of the same’ – to wit, redundancy.

A ‘self’ with built-in redundancy is a self with an open ontology. It generates ‘surplus’ material, which, at the most primordial level (RNA onwards), is the most startling example of the first ‘material semiotic’. The material semiotic is a huge ontological paradox. It is far more than a catalyst, as a catalyst, although it might play a vital role in particular interactions, remains separate, and ‘untouched’ by what happens. RNA is programmatic, instructive, recursive material, which acts as pure information, the constituent parts of RNA have, somehow, ‘lost’ or ‘yielded’ their materiality, to become semiotic.

This is the most fundamental level of self-transcendence: the bases that form the code, the five lettered ‘alphabet’ within RNA and DNA.

And DNA persists, as a material semiotic, only by risking all, in the ubiquitous 1 in a million mutation rate that produces not, primarily, ‘diversity’, but rather redundancy. Redundancy: more of just about the same, the excess of capacity, the foundation for the ontological space for change, the enemy of ‘efficiency’.

We find this in genes, in promiscuous bacteria, in social networking ‘chatter’, in Hofstadter’s hypothetical anthills. Self-transcendence is based on mutation, risk, redundancy, and interaction and communication among a myriad of micro-agents, across a quite remarkable range of biological and social life.

2010-11-02T09:26:00.010Z

Reflection 02/10/2010

Interesting things, blogs. They provide affordances for me to lay out the 'capillaries' of thought - the micro-musings in which, hopefully, some progress can be made,for instance, better ways to define 'emergent learning' - see the post on Emergent Learning, below.

These micro-sites of thought don't have a place in academic writing now, they are embedded asides, at best, hypertext commentaries that used to have a place in footnotes, which were often the most interesting parts of a book. Now we seem to be more 'efficient', and journal and book editors will allow end notes, at best, but not footnotes.

So efficiency becomes a dis-fordance.

2010-11-01T13:13:00.014Z

Emergent Learning?

[See here for details of an online workshop on emergent learning: 17-02-2011]

I was recently asked whether "the definition of emergent learning as self-organised learning means that emergent learning can't happen if the learning is organised by someone else, as emergent learning [is] learning that cannot be predicted or planned for - but for which we might be able to create optimum conditions”.

The perils of simplification! Of course, it's more complicated than that.

To put it in plain language, its when someone 'goes off chasing their own learning trail', which may or may not be related to, or even derived from planned outcomes (on their part, or on the part of the provider). So 'self-organised' is a necessary but not sufficient condition! Aaagh!

'Self-organised' per se can be just a matter of the learner not having access to the tutor, for some reason, and deciding to organise their own leaning, but entirely within predictable and controlled outcomes. No emergence there.

So ... self-organised/emergent actually requires more, i.e it requires:
i) self-organisation of aims, interests, outcomes, over and above self-organisation of process, which is laudable, but not that material.

ii) self-organisation within a network of communicating micro-agents (can just be students talking to each other on the bus, they don’t have to do it on social software). Its not, inherently, and individual thing.

So, perhaps ...

Emergent Learning is learning which arises out of the interaction between a number of micro-agents, within a network in which the learning process and the learning destination (aims, objectives, competencies, Sen's capabilities, etc. don't quite do it, no?) are both self-organised and unpredictable. The network (or learning ecology) is in many senses open, but it nevertheless requires some constraints.

OR

Emergent Learning ...
is learning which arises out of the interaction between a number of micro-agents, within a network in which the learners organise and determine both the learning process and to some extent the learning destination/s, both of which are unpredictable. The network is in many senses self-organised, but it nevertheless requires some constraints and structure.

We could make it even plainer by changing 'micro-agents' to 'people and resources', thus:

Emergent Learning...
is learning which arises out of the interaction between a number of people and resources, within a network in which the learners organise and determine both the learning process and to some extent the learning destination/s, both of which are unpredictable. The network is in many senses self-organised, but it nevertheless requires some constraint and structure.

It includes the notion that the "agent and system co-evolve" implicitly.

This also makes a fine (print) distinction between 'self-organised learners' and 'self-organised networks', and it is actually the latter that matters most! So it's consistent with Wenger's 'social learning' model, and is not an individualistic model at all. This aligns it quite closely with 'social constructivism' rather than just 'constructivism' (in which the individual/social balance is left hanging).

Affordances ... mmm.
Defining affordances could be as tricky:

An Affordance...
is the product of interactions between a person and their environment, each of which potentially alters their knowledge, competencies and identity, and potentially alters the (micro-) environment; [and]

Learning is ...
the process of exploring, benchmarking and mastering new affordances.

I take the point (from the same ‘conversation’, above) that ‘affordances’ are sometimes rather too fashionable to be useful.

However, there is a certain implicit rigour at the heart of this definition of affordances, which is a 'relational logic' that is the same as the relation between signifier and signified in semiotics; so for instance the meaning of the sign 'dog' resides neither in the collection of cute furry animals (the signifieds), not in the sequence of letters 'd' 'o' 'g' (the signifiers), but rather in the conventional relation between the two.

In the same way, an affordance resides neither in the person identifying, creating, or exploiting the affordance, nor in the tools and context in which the affordances is operationalised, but in the relation between the two. Affordances are, precisely, the product of an interaction – so they do have ‘histories’ and ‘legacies’, and are related to contexts.

[ Cross posted to here

2010-10-15T13:04:00.007Z

(Steve Bell 13.10.2010)

Nimbs

Another sleight of hand, another new term to deconstruct it ...

Politicians are illusionists. But recently they seem to have taken it to new depths. The public-private-partnerships so beloved of the B&B government were quite spectacular examples of 'NIMBS' (not on my balance sheet), a variant of that other polical acronym, NIMBY.

Seems the expertise and innovations of Enron and sub-prime mortgages were not wasted on B&B. And now it looks like the millionares-in-kort-broeke (millionaires-in-short-pants) goverment has quickly learnt the tricks too.

To wit, the new raid on university funding is an impressive example of NIMBS - looks like all they are doing is 'downloading' the debt from the government to the muddle class (with apologies to James Joyce).

So we'll change from a country in debt to an electorate in debt. That's progress, no? (Don't forget: "We're all in this together")

2010-08-27T13:30:00.008Z

Deleted ...

Here are two inscriptions that are being deleted from what used to be a community space, and is now a building site in Mitte - central Berlin, covered in scaffolding and torn netting ...

and ...

Cross-posted to here ...

2010-08-25T09:40:00.028Z

Re-inscribing Berlin / and / homage to the Boyle's ...

Berlin is getting rewritten (again!), re-inscribed, getting a new skin, new things to walk on, new food for feet.

Israeli comics added this to the pavement outside the Jewish Museum

An artist has added bronze squares to the pavement outside houses, where Jewish people once lived, who were 'deported' from the German race, and murdered in the concentration camps.

And a whole city block has been covered in tombstones.

... to walk through, and to watch people disappearing, for no particular reason.

Other cities have started to write on their pavements too, as in these reproduced examples from a South American exhibition at the Jewish museum, about people who 'disappeared' there ...

In one of Daniel Liebeskind's 'voids' in the Jewish Museum, an Israeli artist has strewn a sea of dinner plate sized metal faces, which you are invited to walk across. We didn't.

Along the River Spree, a statue 20 meters tall stands on the water ...

And the East German telecoms tower is not only written across every skyscape, it's written into the pavements too ...

Ready to walk ...

2010-07-11T12:01:00.005Z

Karl's Conundrum

Went to an interesting seminar in Oxford yesterday, where one of the questions posed was whether 'we' need to understand Africa or change it - a point raised some time ago by Marx.

It struck me that there is another take on it. The seminar was hard at work understanding Africa, but it looked like a bit of an 'enclave' (to use the one of the key tools of neo-Weberian analysis?) in which everyone was, precisely hard at work understanding Africa, while simultaneously wondering if it was ever going to change, for the 'better'?

It also struck me that there is another enclave of people busy changing Africa, presumably also for the 'better', but that the understanding enclave and the change enclave seem to have established an arms length relationship, if not a gentleman's agreement not to throw too many stones over the fence that separates them from each other.

So maybe the point is not to understand or to change Africa, but to try to get those in the 'understanding' enclave and those in the 'change' enclave to engage with each other. Maybe its all become just a little bit too 'English'.

There is also another issue, namely that it looks like those in the 'enclaves of the right' (the understanding and the change ones) don't seem to have the same problem, and they are happily in bed together, although in the true spirit of the 'right', their understandings are both privatised and private, and don't get into the public domain as much.

2010-06-25T12:59:00.001Z

Core Principles = Threshold Concepts?

Reading Jeffrey Keefer's blog of 11 June,it struck me that:

1. All earning includes both instrumental and emergent learning, but PhD work is definitely at the predominantly 'emergent' end of the spectrum.

2. One of the issues we are looking at in the emergence paper is: can learning be structured and managed to enable and recognise more 'emergent' learning, and one of the (draft) ideas is as follows:

"It is possible to open up learning to emergence, in a number of ways. For instance, by defining core capacity in terms of core principles, rather than core outcomes. In other words, a shift to ensuing that learners master core principles, and can demonstrate this be applying them in a choice of different contexts. It makes learning more flexible, and increases learner motivation (see Wenger 2006 on the 'passion’ of the learner). This does not diminish the importance of core competencies, it just makes the outcomes serve learning, instead of the other way round".

3. So the question arises: if 'core principles' have some equivalence to 'threshold concepts' (which I think they do), can we manage learning to include more 'emergence' by reducing (in the culinary sense, of 'reducing a wine sauce') the curriculum to core principles / threshold concepts, and not only at PhD level. (See Seymour Papert's 'powerful ideas' in Mindstorms).

2010-06-16T11:18:00.001Z

The Ideals and the Reality of Open Courses

There must be a place for completely open intellectual engagement, but I wonder if this is not at the ‘'luxury' end of the market - which includes me, I'm privileged enough to be able to participate in CCK08/09, and even put in a few minutes on the current Critical Literacies course?

But I don't think the model is generalise-able. Our work with part-time work-based students, on narratives of learning and identity opened up my eyes to just how little time they have for intellectual engagement, and how precious it is.

So the paradox of an ‘open course’ remains interesting and unresolved, no?

2010-06-01T14:24:00.006Z

Listening to Learners’ Voices
I presented some ideas on Listening to Learners’ Voices at the ELESIG webinar recently.The recording is available at this forum thread, at the section starting at 52:45, and going through to 1:02:00.

The crux of the matter is that in slide 3, below, the top half of the slide, the narrator is only present for a short time, and as soon as they have produced an audio file, their involvement is no longer relevant. That's a typical research scenario. Alternatively, in the bottom half of the slide, the narrator becomes a sense-maker, and their sense-making continues for as long as it is of value to them. The researcher becomes a facilitator and an observer, of the narrator's sense-making.

A number of queries came up, particularly about the notion of gifting – the idea that for the audio stories in particular, it is vital to place control of access and sharing in the ‘gift’ of the narrator or, if it is a collaborative exercise, in the gift of the collaborators.

Here are some responses to the issues …

The Gift Economy
One of the things I find interesting about 'gifts' is that within a 'gift economy' (as opposed to a contractual or financial economy) mutual obligation is a crucial part of what is happening, and it is built on trust and community, not 'exchange'.

There are a number of issues that need to be distinguished, across three different areas: Transcribed Research Issues, Sense-making Issues, and Collaborative Sense-making Issues:

1. Transcribed Research Issues
Anonymous transcript mode
In this mode, the narrator has contractually agreed to provide the researcher with rights of access and anonymous text publication.That is not always explicit, and (see below) maybe it should, rather be:"I agree that anonymous TEXT use of the audio is granted for research and publication purposes". This still leaves a obligation on the researcher to be sensitive to whether the narrator has said 'too much' or not, but I won’t go into that here.

Audio mode
It is now possible to publish in multimedia mode, including text and audio, if we publish in electronic journals.This is different …

Audio is (always, in my experience) much richer, and carries lots more information. A 'rich' analysis and discussion should try to capture this in some way.The 'unprocessed' or 'raw' audio is one of the best ways to do this. Capturing it in descriptive text is difficult, and always somewhat unsatisfactory, and too interpretative.

Question: if the 'data' that supports and analysis or argument is already substantially 'processed', what does that do for the veracity of the argument? What do we have to do in order to 'respect the presence' of the narrator in the text in which the narrator's voice had just been stripped out? Its perfectly possible, but not without difficulties.

The speaker is clearly identifiable in audio (that's pretty obvious), but it wipes out most anonymity. So, if the 'contract' was for anonymous publication, audio cannot be included (except by exceptional agreement).

Gifts
First, it is not in the 'gift' of the narrator to rescind permission for circulation of text.

However, if we move across the fuzzy boundary between text publications and electronic journal publications, which are starting to accept multimedia inputs, if not full multimedia texts, things change.In practical terms, what do we do?
Default to permission to publish anonymised text.And treat any circulation of audio text as an exception, requiring additional permission.

This is more difficult than it seems though, as the kind of 'blanket' permissions that we regularly 'contract' for text are unlikely to apply to audio. Audio can vary much more, in terms of the degree of presence, emotional loading, and attitude to the event (or worse, person) concerned.

2.Sense-making Issues
If we shift to a sense making frame, we make life for ourselves more difficult, and also more interesting. The narrator becomes a sense maker. The researcher becomes an observer (and facilitator) of the narrator's sense-making.This generates different data (horses for courses: this is different, not necessarily better - it depends on what you have in mind).

If sharing of sense-making artefacts is in the gift of the narrator, the artefacts are substantially richer, and disclose substantially more about how the narrator goes about their learning, and goes about negotiating meaning, identity, and membership of a range of communities.Under a default regime of sharing and publication of audio/multimedia,, this is not going to happen.

This has a number of layers:

* Anon text mode: this remains open for the researcher to do what researchers normally do.
* Audio mode: this is reserved, and remains in the gift of the narrator, for all circulation purposes.
* Multimedia mode: i.e. audio, with additional multimedia commentary, associative texts, etc, added by the narrator.This is definitely reserved within the gift of the narrator.

3.Collaborative Sense Making
Research that gathers, facilitates, constructs audio stories can generate a number of outputs:

Transcribed, anonymised, texts, analysis, etc (see default mode above)
It often yields rich audio stories, in their own right,in the process (in nested narratives, audio diaries, video diaries, etc).These can, in principle, be circulated to great effect, not primarily as 'research artefacts' but as 'narrative artefacts'. Narrative artefacts, however you construct them (incorporating lots of multimedia, or minimal multimedia, just interactive navigation) can be used in further learning, individually or collaboratively.

One of the criteria for a good story is that a good story elicits other stories in the mind of the listener, even before the story has ended: i.e. transference, metaphor, resonance are the hallmarks of good stories.

This does not necessarily have to alter the way the artefact is created in the first place, beyond the addition of basic, interactive, navigational affordances. But such an artefact is, precisely, loaded with additional information, association, emotional, relational and contextual values, colour, personal style, etc, not to mention additional tacit, personal information.If this is done collaboratively, the artefact is similarly loaded, but at a collaborative rather than individual level.
This rich data, beyond text, and beyond the (merely) cognitive, must be within the gift of the creator (individually) or creators (collaboratively) to share.

The researcher now has more dilemmas, and more choices. The learner, to put it plainly, can just be the source of a research input, or they can be a sense-maker. The researcher can be the collector of research data, or they can be a facilitator and/or collaborator in the learner's sense-making, in collaborative sense-making, and in creating artefacts for other learners' sense making via shared (gifted) narratives artefacts.

These choices are technical, methodological, epistemological, ontological, and political, not to mention ethical.

2010-05-11T10:28:00.006Z

CANs - Complex-adaptive networks?

The Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg in May 2010 provided, to coin a phrase, wonderful affordance for discussing the affordances of networks.

Etienne Wenger did a great presentation and raised a number of issues in terms of Communities of Practice. I wrote a response to some of the issues in his paper, and in his paper Learning for a Small Planet, as well as to the conference in general, which you can find in "CANs, communities and learning" on the wiki page linked at the bottom of this post.

Its an attempt to pull together a range of ideas across networked learning, in what looks to me to be an emerging field of CANs - complex-adaptive networks.

The question for me is whether we need the framework, language and discourse of complexity theory to describe, understand, and analyse the 'augmented reality' of web3 social networks, and learning that might make use of them, or even be embedded in them. For me the answer is yes - not necessarily to all the jargon, although it is attractive (no pun intended) and specific to the field. Wenger in many ways says many of the same things, in plain language.

So its the conceptual framwork, as a design, management and heuristic device that interests me, first and foremost.

Cross linked to this wiki.

2010-04-29T10:02:00.007Z

Life in the Clouds?

The issue of embeddednes, and embodiedness continues to interest me.

This goes far beyond the rather restricted notion of 'connectivism', or the more sophisticated notions of the networked society (Castells) and complex-adaptive systems theory (CAST).

The core of the problem as I see it is that its all a variation on the age-old epistemological and ontological issue: How are we embedded in language (for starters) &/or, how is language embedded in us? (Which in turn relates to Susan Blackmore's ideas on genes/memes/temes).

Its a difficult but interesting question. To make sense of where we are and where we are going, we need to extrapolate this question through to all other media, networks, and now to clouds.

So the next question is: How are we embedded in clouds and/or how are clouds embedded in us? And is the more/less comfortable, and more/less interesting, exiting or dangerous? (Refer back to Adam, Eve and the Snake for early answers to this problem, and forward to Bayne's work on the uncanny nature of 2L)

2010-04-14T10:52:00.009Z

Performative Analysis / Learning anyone?

I think the performative/analytic heuristic works neatly when it comes to written text v. experience (the 'cognitive' v. 'expressive' self), but not so neatly when it comes to analogue / digital in other domains, like computerisation, where it's much more messy.

Maybe what I am thinking about on 'performativity' is the dilemma (and affordance) that I think is central to what we are trying to do in the Nested Narrative interface: to wit, can we capture the audio traces of a narrative, in mid-air (yes) and can we spin out a web (in virtual mid-air, and in 3D, please, for the next version) of the audio traces, so that anyone can 'pick up the traces' and listen to them, and link to associative and reflective traces, in virtual mid-air? And can we add 'performative' (audio) responses as commentators/ researchers to all this? Yes, all of this is possible, and most of it is 'almost done'.

[Of course what we need to do is to add an iPhone-type app. so that we can 'turn over' and 'open up' the traces kinaesthetically, not by mouse or finger 'click'].

And, if we get this right, will we still need to do the analysis? Maybe, we all have day jobs that involve writing and publishing, which is a useful discipline, its just a bit of a pain.

This makes Nested Narratives a fusion medium where we write in mid-air with 'performative objects', no? And even do 'performative analysis' ???

Perhaps a seemless 'mashup spectrum' from the purely performative /to/ augmented performative /to/ performative analysis /to/ analysis is the goal. (See also the more general discussion in the wiki).

And ...

I go back to the experience of Montessori classrooms a lot, and I wonder if she (or Piaget, who she worked with) ever thought about the 'materiality' of language - not only in kinaesthetic terms (which she must have done, in spades) but also in synaesthetic terms? Montessori's 'sensory materials' provide an embodiedment of language, mathematics, and simple machines - not, actually, in the materials themselves, but in the embodied interaction with them.

So the Montessori classroom might/not be an early site of 'performative analysis', but its a site of 'performative learning' for sure, which often takes place in a silent ('inner') space, no? The Montessori classroom also has some (silent) 'performative teaching', which is another fascinating set of affordances.

2010-04-13T10:09:00.003Z

Resonant Gestalts?

I got sent a link to Ann C. Albright's stuff on Loie Fuller . It is
stunning.

In my own attempt to work through traces, and traces of traces, and some idea of performativity ...

I suppose my semiotic roots are showing, but I am sticking (for now) with (interactive) sense-making, rather than with more established concepts like 'liveness' or 'presence' - I suppose what I find fascinating about Ann's stuff is that she is working with / she gets her hands on/ ephemeral traces, which she re/traces in many media (including her body/light/costumery), leaving new traces (for us to view). She is literally 'picking up the traces'.

Many years ago I tried to formulate the idea of traces (borrowing from Latour and his ideas on description, transcription, inscription, etc) as broadly as possible: "A text is a series of signs that leaves traces - in media, in the mind, in the body, in memory, in the air, etc". And more recently I finally got some of it into a short poem.

So, although I am very interested in what people are 'doing', and whether there is some 'intimate stuff' going on in 'shared/private spaces', I probably focus more on the texts, the texture, the synaesthesia, and in the end, back to the meeting of two/too/true embodied subjects/gestalts - which is about collaborative sense-making.

I guess the integrity of the subject is now more and more coincident (for me) with the integrity of the dynamic, embodied, gestalt, as it is resonant with other dynamic, embodied gestalts (whether they are present, or even live, or not!!!!)

2010-04-12T10:36:00.020Z

Stories from Inner Space?

So what is performativity? Or performative sense-making?

After an interesting discussion with a colleague on all of this, some thoughts ...

I think performativity its a paradox, in which the sense-maker is on the one hand 'wrapped up' in their own inner space, their own sense-making gestalt, but on the other hand they are also communicating the performance of sense-making. So its 'shared private (inner) space'. Interesting.

At a recent seminar Lynn Monrouxe presented some interesting material from her research, using audio diaries. In my mind there was a picture of a person in a comfortable, private almost 'inner' space, with in one sense an audience of one (themselves), although in another sense a different audience of one (the absent researcher, who would listen to the diary entry when it was sent to her).

In seminars on the Nested Narratives research, we try to create and convey the experience of listening, and participating in, nested narratives, and we do this by playing excerpts from the audio stories to the audience while they have their eyes closed. One member of the audience asked: do the narrators close their eyes while they tell their stories? And I replied that although I had not thought of it before in those terms, yes, they do indeed 'close their eyes', metaphorically, although not necessarily literally.

So ...

It looks like there are two scenarios here of the paradox of 'communicating inner space' or, perhaps more accurately, 'communicating sense-making from inner space'.

The interesting question that follows from this is: are performers in the performing arts (and installations) also performative sense-makers? (Although in an installation you become the site of both, paradoxical, inner spaces - i.e. as proxy narrator and as audience).

And ...

Is the link, the resonance, between all these scenarios perhaps the embeddedness and embodiedment of the performance, and is that why 'voice' - particularly physical, literal, voice, and by extension bodily presence, musical presence, light presence, spatial presence, various mode of absence, etc - is so important?

And is that, in turn, precisely the case because it provides wonderful, rich, synaesthetic affordances to respond as one embodied sense maker, to another?

And further ...

There is a whole lot of 'intimacy' - or at least resonance - going on here, between private inner spaces. The meeting of two/true subjects, perhaps? Whatever it is, it's not an exchange of 'objective' texts, but the collaborative sense-making is rich, if not richer?

Let me not to the marriage of true embodiedments admit impediments then ... (with apologies, it doesnt scan, although its got a nice upbeat, no?).

2010-03-29T12:52:00.009Z

Performing or Ontologising? - the semiotics of narrative ‘texts’

Textual Analysis
I realise now why I found textual analysis inadequate, many years ago, and why I moved on and started looking for something else – firstly critical discourse analysis, which progressed naturally into ecological psychology and complexity theory, and then into narrative, and nested narratives. What this lead to is a shift somewhat beyond the distinction between instrumental and ontological reflection, to the distinction between performative and analytic narratives, and sense-making.

Textual v. Material
Textual analysis is interesting and useful up to a point. It can help the researcher to see what tools, structures, archetypes, etc the narrator is using in a text, to position, situate and construct him- or her-self in that text. However, this is often limited to what the narrator is using – which tools, characters, prototypes, grammatical forms, modes, etc are being used to situate the narrator, within a textual and conceptual domain.

This can yield a very smart analysis, confined within the domain of texts and concepts. The more important question is: what are they using all these things for? What material contexts, or domains, are they positioning themselves in, and how is this being done? And what impact does their positioning, their ‘inserting themselves into particular social narratives, in particular ways’ have, in turn, on those narratives – does it reinforce, strengthen, contest, challenge, cover up, or even justify … those narratives, as they are practiced in the material world? See for instance Primo Levi’s narrative “If this is a man”.

To find out what all this narrative stuff is being used for, the researchers have to leave their texts and their desks, and go out into the material world to find out what these narrators and narratives are actually doing in material, as opposed to textual, space.

Performative v. Analytical sense-making
One of the most powerful affordances of written texts is that they accentuate the digital, discrete, cognitive aspects of language, and strip out the analogue, continuous, synaesthetic and textured aspects of speech. The affordances of computers and word processing accentuate this process even further. Written texts are very powerful conceptual and narrative commodity incubators, as well as commodities.

Analytical Sense-making
Analytical sense-making is the hegemonic trope (or metasemiotics) of academic analysis and writing, which reduces, above all else. It disembodies, dismembers, dissects, categorises, pulls apart, isolates, and slices things up: events and people, into ever smaller and more precise pieces: units of analysis and variables. In the process, the narrator is, for all intents and purposes, suspended, set aside, or at the least, frozen stiff, in a snap shot, a transverse slice, a cut through time (which is also analysed into tiny, discrete, discontinuous units: – seconds, minutes, etc). Analysis is a ‘paring’ activity – progressively cutting down, cutting off, ‘down’ to the ‘essence’, the functional/skeletal.

The way that we say “write that down” is precisely the point. It’s like pinning down a butterfly, a specimen, changing it from interactive speech to silent text, so that it can be displayed to others, most often in the absence of the original narrator. [Aside: the other metaphor/collocation on this topic: “written in stone” is completely different – it’s an extreme form of suture, and closure, i.e. its not the circulation and mobility of texts, but the rather the physical fixing, and immobility of texts]

Performative sense-making
Performative Sense-making on the other hand elaborates, extrapolates, and engages and expands, above all else. It links, associates, resonates, describes, celebrates, articulates, reflects. The narrator is, and remains, an active performer: live, creative, finding surprising connections, a key actor and inter-actor in the continuing process.

Analytic sense-making is dis-embodied, broken up, abstract, fractured. It is always ethically questionable if performed on people, and not much better when performed on other organisms in the biosphere, because it violates the integrity of the self, by definition. It is inevitably done by experts, who have a privileged position relative to the narrator, both in terms of analytic ‘insight’ and in terms of the language they use, relative to the narrator, who is most often an analytic and linguistic novice.

Performative sense-making on the other hand is embedded, embodied, rich, integrated. It can, unlike the analytic sense-making of the expert, be placed under the control of, and in the hands of, the narrator, on their own terms, in a language they understand, and it can be kept within their own gestalt.

This highlights a range of hard, and even cruel choices:

The Narrator’s Sense-making
If the overriding purpose of the exercise is to enhance and enable sense-making for the narrator, performative sense-making needs to be the primary mode of sense-making, and needs to be substantially and securely established, first.

The purpose of performative sense-making is to create affordances for interaction with and between humans.

There is no reason why the narrator cannot engage in analytic sense-making, later, much later. Nor, for that matter, is there any reason why links cannot be made between, and across, performative and analytic sense-making, and why texts cannot be transcribed, in various ways, between these two modes. The key issue is rather that, particularly within formal education, the hegemonic and distorting trope of analytic sense-making needs to be kept firmly at arms length while the original performative sense-making is taking place .

The researcher’s Sense-making
If the overriding purpose of the exercise is to enhance and enable sense-making for the analytic researcher, performative sense-making has no status or use apart from its production of raw materials, in service to the analytic. From an analytic point of view, the quicker a text-only transcript can be generated the better, (and this might even include complex and elaborate notations, of conversational analysis, indicating pauses, changes in tone, etc, etc).

The purpose of analytical sense-making is to produce commodities for exchange, and to create affordances for interaction with and between texts.

Collaborative Sense-making
If the overriding purpose of the exercise is to enable and enhance collaborative sense-making for the narrator and researcher, then a two stage process is required, in which the performative sense-making of the narrator is given priority, and is fenced off from analytic sense-making, which comes later. Both the narrator and the researcher should be able to collaboratively engage in both modes of sense-making – in principle at least. What is important is that the performative sense-making happens first, in a ‘protected space’.

These choices have specific implications for the nature of the sense-making, and for the power dynamics within sense-making, for both the narratives and for the narrating. Performative and analytic sense-making can ‘talk to each other’ but they are not easy or natural bed-fellows. Analytic sense-making on its own inevitably takes place within ‘expert’ discourse, and always tends to dis-empower and marginalise (or even erase) the narrator’s agency, by commodifying speech into text, which in turn has implications for several of the key issues in learning and professional development, like confidence, integrity, identity, community, and ethics.

Performing, or Ontologising? This might all be far more about the semiotics, and the embeddedness of narratives and texts. It’s partly a response to an issue that arose a while back, in conversations with a colleague about her students' aversion to computers, and their insistence on 'real' materials, which I had some sympathy with, but couldn't quite resolve, either way, and certainly felt quite uneasy about at the time.

I think I am beginning to get to grips with the issues, and I think there are 'things' which are performative narratives, and there are things which are analytic texts. The issue, in nested narratives, is not to trash the analytic, but to establish prior space for the 'performative' (it’s in many ways a much more appropriate term than 'ontological', which is itself far too analytic).

So in a sense the essence of the performing arts is raw, textured materiality, as opposed to transcribed, processed, sampled, flat, code. Kapoor's recent work at the Royal Academy, including a blood-cannon, is a case in point, where even what might be classified as conceptual art is performative, and even violent. I love it!

And the dialectics …
Of course the dialectics of written text, in word processing, emails, txt and tweets, takes this to another level, and in a sense liberates the sutured text from it’s materiality, and unstitches it, so that it can engage, remix, mashup, across the planet. Text once again becomes parole, rather than langue, no?

Which is why conservative academics hate it so much – they are perfectly right, it does threaten their communicative and economic trope, their hegemonic craft and domain: formal written, commodified, text.

2010-03-16T13:48:00.009Z

Is dis-embodied rationality uncanny?

Torture
The changes in the regimes of torture tell us something about the rationalising project of modernism. Torture is now limited to psychological 'interrogation', if you ignore some recent Bush-ist throwbacks. This can be seen as a process of the so-called ‘civilization’ of power, or the power of ‘civilization’ /imperialism. (See also the discourses of totalitarianism, in Discourse and Text, under the 'counting' heading, here.

This strikes me as an extension of the hegemony of Descartian cognitivism, but far more pervasive (a la Foucault). It was part of a wholesale shift to rationalist discourses of power, in which rational/cognitive/scientific/absent becomes equated with civilized, and physical/emotional/present is equated with barbaric.

It’s also the divide between desire and rationality, and subjective and objective. This forms the underpinnings of modernism (see also Zygmunt Baumann on modernism, Nazism, and some of its roots in European euthenasia, an eminently 'scientific' project early in the 20th Century). Scientific domination and repression, in other words, as pre-eminently rational (Apartheid was also conceived as a rational, scientific, Christian-National, civilizing force, based on an ‘anthropological’ scientism).

Such power is exercised untainted (unpolluted) by desire, its ‘pure’, and purified, cleansed, noble even. The inscriptions on the body of the condemned criminal are no longer personal, there is no physical violation or contact, it’s no more than a pin/needle prick, which operates internally, invisibly, from the inside out, and scientifically (and even from another room, as a colleague pointed out - the etherial/absent as rational, and therefore 'just').

This forms the semiotic basis for a discourse of just and justified power in a 'rational' society, in which rationality and cognition = civilized, and emotional and physical = barbaric. The rational mind even gets associated with the soul, via concepts like ‘the purity of the soul’ and ‘pure reason’.

Relics
Much the same applies to the general disuse of the relics (body parts) of saints, which used to be taken out for the faithful to touch at all important festivals, and were displayed behind glass in churches in the interim. This used to be the norm, but I understand it’s now quite rare. I think the same shift applies – away from the embodied to the rational. Christianity of course is about embodiment and physical transcendence, so a ‘rational Christianity’ is in one sense a paradox - the unity of the body and soul is so central to it.

Advertising
Advertising commodifies desire, most specifically the (erotic) desire to touch, to be in touch. The discourse is ‘drool, but don’t touch, just die from desire’. So all advertising (particularly the visual) is, to the rationalist, pornographic, no?

The question is: does web2.0 transgress and mashup the rational and the embodied, and could that be a route to recover an 'embodied rationality'?

And ...
What does this tell us about Sian Bayne's disembodied uncanny in 2nd Life? Is there another disembodied ontology that is not (just) rationalist? Is the uncannily disembodied different?

2010-03-09T10:33:00.008Z

HIV or AIDS?

Its always been an unusual, fascinating and paradoxical thing: 'HIV/AIDS' or 'HIV-AIDS'. What's so special about it that it needs two names, and what's the relationship indicated by the forward slash or hyphen in the middle? I think it is necessarily complicated, but also confusingly complicated.

Perhaps some recent initiatives might clarify matters ...

There are some new trials in the air, in SA and the USA, targeting people to get Anti-retrovirals (ARVs) in the earliest (HIV) stages of infection. The idea of targeting people in the earliest stages of infection makes sense, but it also changes the way you make sense of the epidemic in very interesting ways.

1. The new trials take a systemic, long-term perspective, and shift the focus from the people who have AIDS to the people who will (next) get HIV. That's an epidemiological 'no brainer', but it changes the social semiotic (translation: the way it is presented in the media, in popular conversations, and in most government discourse).

2. The change is from our assumption that 'we' (society, Dept. of Health, governments, the WHO, the donors, etc) must target people who are sick. After all, they are suffering, and need expensive medical intervention. Ja/nee, definitely.

And the change is to an assumption that 'we' must first of all target our attention, our resources and our Anti-retrovirals on people who are infectious (but healthy). Another epidemiological no brainer, but one which the non-scientific media still haven't grasped, after 30 years of the epidemic.

3. Paradox (if you're unscientific): prioritise the intervention at the healthy (with HIV) not the sick (with AIDS). [Hints: 1. ARV's reduce viral load, and therefore infectiousness. 2. Healthy people feel friskier].

Most media are predominantly 'human-interest' media, rather than 'scientific' media -it's the hegemonic social semiotic [see above]. Science doesnt sell (newspapers) :(

2010-03-09T10:06:00.005Z

Self-organising or what?

Open is as open does, no?

We can play around with some distinctions:

1. "PLE" model: Self-organising means the way I organise my self, my own resources, my own learning (first person singular). In this case I (singular) need my own tools, space, etc, even if I may use lots of 'social' software.

2. "PLN" model:: Self-organising means all the actors in the network organise themselves, collaboratively, in a community of some sort - a community of practice, of inquiry, of practitioners, etc. In this case we (first person plural) need trust, respect, mutually constructed common understandings, common aims, and mutual support.

And ...
'PLE' is comfortably singular. 'PLN' cries out for pluralisation ('PLNs) , and the decentering of the subject (to go back to my post-modernist roots).

Both can be viewed as 'ecologies', because in both cases there are many actors, communicating and interacting very frequently, with lots of degrees of freedom, which gives rise to change (both e-volution and de-volution).

The difference between the two models is the difference between a zero-sum ecology (an 'objective' ecology, in which a fight to the death is just part of the deal), or a collaborative ecology, in which conservation, balance, particular notions of sustainability, etc also play key roles.

So the term 'self-organising' might not be as self-evident as we think (forgive the pun). A more specific definition of 'self' is required, and it might best be defined within a new, and rather paradoxical notion, of a collaborative ecology.

2010-03-09T09:44:00.002Z

Complex or what?

The CCK08 course/network was set up as an autonomous, open, diverse and connected course. This looks like a complex-adpative duck to me.

So ...
If it was a complex-adaptive network, in principle, it should not have been allowed to 'flame out', or slip over the edge into 'chaos' (In Dave Snowden's terms)and vituperation at any time. If people become afraid of communicating and interacting, complex-adaptive goes by the board, and it just becomes a fight to the death. Collaborative learning is incompatible with alpha-primate behaviour.

CCK08 was set up very much as a complex-adaptive system - ie. one which is not just complex or adaptive, but both. The term 'choatic' is a bit of a distraction, as it is used by many theorists in a sense which is similar if not equivalent to 'complex-adaptive'! Complex-adaptive networks need constraints, preferably light touch, but where absolutely necessary, backed up by real sanctions, like excluding people from the network. This was not possible in CCK08, as the course had been set up as 'open', with no constraints beyond and appeal to 'good netiquette', and no immediate sanctions for bad behaviour.

The crucial point, however, is the difference complicated systems and complex systems. Both of them are multi-variate, both of them can take an enormous amount of effort to understand and manage. I am pretty sure both could be described a 'wicked'.

So ... if you have more things, more kinds of things, more interacting things, and even more feedback loops between things (a la Peter Senge's work) that is not enough. You cross the threshold from complicated to complex-adaptive when you introduce self-organising things, more so when they are self-reproducing things, even more so when they are continuously interacting with each other, and still more so when they create their own tools and media for interacting with each other, and develop and articulate a strong sense of self, which becomes a crucial variable in its own right.

So the examples range from some physical systems which are barely self-organising (I am not too clear or too convinced about this category) to biological things, from viruses upwards, which are self-reproducing (but not self-organising in the sense of having a sense of 'self'), to purely instinctual communicating organisms, to communicating organisms that creative their own language, to ICT linked organisms, to internet linked organisms which not only self-organise and self-reproduce, but continually re-create and re-shaper the environment in which they interact, self-organise, and self-reproduce, and their virtual 'selves'.

In terms of research methodology, I use the term 'variables with attitude' to distinguish those kinds of things that populate, and propagate in, complex-adaptive systems. These variables with attitude are variables that shift, re-arrange, and re-constitute themselves and their 'selves', on their own terms. That is why it is difficult if not impossible to treat them as predicable and amenable to control - it just depends how coercive and brutal you are prepared to be. And its why identity, presence, self, reflection, ontology, etc are all so crucial to learning in a complex-adaptive global society. And its why the sense of the potentially fragile self-as-learner (in Barnett's sense), is central to learning in general, and absolutely critical to open learning.

So you can set up a course in which the only outcomes that will be recognised and accredited are totally predictable ones, and where all the participants are only allowed to behave according to fixed, tightly constrained, norms. That's a valid (closed) course with entirely predictable outcomes. Or you can set up a course that has very few positively defined outcomes, and in which you leave most things totally open to negotiation. But you have to define the negative constraints, the borderlines, even though you might spend a lot of effort on creating an environment in which it is unlikely that you will ever need to put those constraints into effect. That's a valid (open) course.

Or you can set up a course in which you hope that (implicitly) modelled good behaviour, or even bad behaviour if you must (which was done late into CCK08), but without putting any constraints in place, which means tht when things get pulled off balance, you have no recourse. That for me is the point at which the experimental becomes questionable, quite apart from being dumb/struck, which is really a secondary issue.

A complex-adaptive learning environment is also one in which the facilitator actively seeks out and amplifies weak signals and weak ties (the aggregated blogs, for instance in CCK08, and one in which the facilitator celebrates the emergent and unexpected, and captures 'frozen accidents'. Little or none of that is possible if the model is a wholly self-organising network.

To put it another way, the antidote to providing all the answers is not to "let the kids take over the classroom", but rather to shift from providing good answers to providing good questions - it's much harder, and takes much more skill, and on engaged online persona.

2010-02-23T09:53:00.006Z

Never-ending narratives

Sara Ohrvall writes that we are "increasingly overwhelmed by the way in which we have built media in the digtal world. ... People consume media in places where they just happen to end up. This leaves consumers uncertain about whether they have read/listened to/ viewed what's relevant to them or not"(quoted by Peter Kirwan in Wired [March 10, p42]).

Kirwan goes on to say: "The fundamental problem ... is the absence of closure in most digital narratives. On the web you 'always link somewhere else; the story never ends. No sense of completion".

This is interesting, but is it a problem? Someone spoke recently about 'awareness of other rhythms' in his life - the rhythm of blogs, twitters, different time zones, members of his family's waking/sleeping rhythms, etc.

It's more than just being 'untethered' (Gilly Salmon's phrase), i.e. not just untethered (from fixed, wired, situated media), rather re-embedded in a symphony of rhythms. You dont, crucially, 'see' where you are, you 'feel' where you are, in relation to all these other rhythms, no? And hopefully the symphony does not flip over into cacophony too often.

Do we need to find new language for 'open narratives', or do we perhaps need to recognise that all narratives are open, and have always been so, its just that during a particular phase (the Gutenberg, suturing-text phase) of history, discourses of power seized on the affordances of closed (or at the least teleological) narratives, and made merry while they could.

Darwin executed the first major skirmishes in the battle to shift out of closed narratives, Lyotard and Derrida helped it on its way, and the Internet is providing the global infrastructure for the new figuration, which we could call 'ecological narratives' (written retropectively), no?

2010-02-22T09:50:00.007Z

Blogging your way out of Hegemony

In response to a debate in Matthias’s blog

I agree with a lot of what Matthias says, but I would perhaps go further, as I think Prof. Schulmeister misses the point again and again.

As Matthias points out, the blog itself is often a comment or a response. I am writing this here, but it is typical of the kind of response I would write in my own blog – and in fact it is likely to find its way into one of my blogs (like this one!)or wikis. What really struck me in our recent research into the use of blogs and forums (forthcoming: Networked Learning Conference), right at the end, in the final draft, was Alm’s formulation of blogs as interactive spaces with 'asymmetrical communication rights': i.e. only the blogger has rights to continue the train of thought, or divert from it, in the next blog post. The reader/commentator does not have these ‘change of direction’ rights, their rights are restricted to ‘add on’ rights.

That is so important in academic discourse - particularly in face-2-face modes, or in proxy face-2-face modes (i.e. forums), because it is one of the crucial points of articulation of power in academic discourse, and a basic building block of ‘turn-taking’ analysis in conversational analysis in linguistics. In my previous life as a discourse analyst (a la Foucault) this would always be my focus – the way particular modes of discourse articulate power, and create and maintain affordances for particular people /groups/ discourse communities to exercise power.

In this case, Alm’s "protected-spaces-blogs" provide a space into which you can retreat, where you can exercise control over turn-taking and agenda-setting. So maybe there is a much more nuanced point to be made in the blogs/forums research, namely that there is a continuum (and some resonance) between bloggers as ‘refugees from the forums’ (which is a response to two extraordinary ‘events’ in CCK08) on the one hand and bloggers as ‘masters of their own discursive space’, (which is an ordinary part of blog-discourse) on the other hand.

This is one of the key affordances of web 2.0: it is a discourse in which the ‘contestation’ and (even aggressive) deconstruction of modernist and post-modernist discourse is replaced by just ignoring the hegemonic discourses of Schulmeister's sequential arguments, and getting on with networked interaction instead. That is just the kind of response that is guaranteed to infuriate an old style school-meister!

But this is not really (as Schulmeister seems to think) a challenge to argumentation and science per se, or even a circumvention of formal argumentation and science, its just another route to arrive at knowledge, some of which will, eventually, end up being codified in formal ‘scientific’ knowledge, and some of which will continue to circulate as informal (or ante-formal) knowledge. This is certainly true of what I do – I write emails, responses like this one, copy them into blogs, etc, all as ‘thoughts in progress’ within the spaces of my own ‘asymmetric communication rights’ (and I might also post them in some bazaar-ish free-for-all forums), and at a later stage I go and ‘mine’ all of this, and use some of it to write formal academic papers. (I wrote a paper along these lines in JKM a year or two ago, on the Epistemology of Knowledge, using the concept of ‘ante-formal’ knowledge). This relates directly to what you call ‘in-between’ techniques, or what could be called liminal spaces – spaces in which thresholds can be crossed.

So I think what also irks the schul-meister is the fact that web 2.0 violates the hegemonic circulation rights that formal scientific genres, registers, professors, and cartels have exercised for so long over intellectual conversation. When he objects to the ‘non-threaded’ nature of blogs, it looks like he is using ‘threaded’ as a proxy for ‘formalised-scientific’.

But this misses the point too, as there is a third element to the hegemony that is being circumvented by the new kids on the block, playing new games: namely, that one of the key characteristics (and requirements) of formal-scientific discourse is that it is the basis for intellectual ‘currency’, which means that it has to obey the rules of exchange value, (or metasemiotics, in my terms), i.e. that it is decontextualised, and only engages the top 1 or 2 centimeters of the brain, to the exclusion of context, emotion, bodily and social embeddedness, etc. It is entirely possible, as the inclusion of poems and image-metaphors in CCK09 demonstrated, to broaden intellectual engagement beyond the restrictions of cognitivist discourse.
And there is a fourth hegemony, if you follow my argument, namely the hegemony of not only internal formalization (within a scientific argument) but also the formalization between arguments, or blogs or forum posts, (the weak ties) which possibly overlaps with the point about rights of circulation.

And ... Schulmeister seems to have missed the considerable affordances of hypertext - quite literally, text with hyperlinks, as a new way of networking arguments, which in fact complements the affordances of earlier historical modes of 'structuring' arguments. Its a 'live and immediate link' rather than a 'long and cumbersome reference' mode of structuring arguments. It links argument to argument, i.e. live site of argument to live site of argument, which is core to peer-2-peer conversations, which are still the richest mode in which to conduct a community of inquiry. It allows for hyper-space jumps between live sites, which is also a new ontology of argument space - much like a jump in SecondLife from one site to another.

The internet offers radically new affordances for the production and exchange of intellectual debate, news, and much else besides (see Knor-Cetina's work), and in particular, it offers affordances for a peer-to-peer community of inquiry which, I think, invigorates the best traditions of the university.

Corss posted to Affordances

2010-02-11T09:37:00.018Z

Clouds 2 - Spring Cleaning

Time to call a spade a spade ...

The edublend debate on learning environments could do with some spring cleaning, to get rid of some of the most insidious euphemisms, and some confusions too - this is based in part on Martin King's post ...

In broad terms it comes down to just two things:

1. CIS's: Coporate Information Systems.
This is a Weberian, bureaucratic, business information system (now computerised, previously on paper files), often seen masquerading as a learning system (LMS) or even a learning environment (VLE).

Its just a CIS or BIS: a corporate platform for formal data management to manage and support the business of providing professional credit, in the form of promissory notes, called 'degrees', which certified graduates can take to the market, backed up by the reputation of national ('British') and institutional (e.g 'Oxford') knowledge-currrency systems.

Prior to the Internet, these CIS's were the effective platforms on which the Higher Education Institutions (HEI's) managed a global cartel not only of professional credit notes, but also on Higher Education and learning. For a while the internet was used to shore up and even strengthen the cartels, in fenced-off content management systems. But now the learning cartels are finally being broken up, and in their place, we find ...

2. DLE's: Digital Learning Ecologies
These are the emerging, complex-adaptive, global ecologies created by the interaction between participants in a miriad of global communities of inquiry - see Knorr-Cetina (2005)for an incisive analyis of what she calls 'micro-global structures'.

These digital ecologies include 'teachers' and 'students' and many others besides, as peer learners, although, to paraphrase George Orwell, some peers have a larger peer-presence than others.

The DLE's include clouds, PLE's, Web2.0, etc. It's interoperable in part, and internavigable throughout. It links to CIS's (that's where the currency, or the 'money' is), and to the remants of so-called VLE's.

Collaboration
Edublend (aka Manish) raises the issue of where collaborative peer learning and work should be situated. It looks like the best solution (currently) might be to use the cloud tools he suggests, but the HEI's are going to have to ensure interoperability back to their CIS's. The alternative, of course, which Manish seems to be suggesting, is that HEI's actively promote these cloud tools, if they have the courage of Manish's convictions (which in principle I share), and if they are prepared to embrace and accommodate openness in some form or another.

2010-02-10T23:57:00.001Z

Clouds?

Would I rather have a PLE, VLE or CLE? And who would control it and own it? I don’t think its an either/or question, much as I agree with the general thrust of the argument towards Clouds. I think we need aspects of all three of them.

But I think we need to move the debate away from the technologies, to the functions we want , and then return to the utilities that might be able to provide what we want.

It might also be useful to disengage a little from the question of ‘control’, and look instead at notions of agency, initiative, creativity, etc. Although it is true that control is still an issue, I think it is already being circumvented by events, and it’s a very ‘zero-sum’ kind of discourse. A more constructive approach would be to revisit the whole issue of how the community of peers, which is at the heart of intellectual inquiry, is being transformed.

See here for a more detailed analysis, and here for some of the fundamental underlying issues.

2010-02-09T09:08:00.003Z

Integrity and Utilities

Costall and Dreier's book on Things has a fascinating chapter by Forchhammer on the woman who used her walking stick as a telephone, which accounts for 'agency' in interesting and new ways, using: "integrity and autonomy".

Integrity-and-autonomy (collocative integration added) takes into account strategies (banging a walking stick on the ceiling to make the equivalent of a phone call) that a person with mobility problems develops as part of their 'integrity' - integrity is thus dynamic, and is not confined to the normative.

Individuality on the other hand, is deeply embedded in normative, rights, and objective (meta-semiotic) discourses.

I sense an emerging discourse here, of affordances, integrity-and-autonomy, and Forchhammer's notion of utility, defines as: "technologies - strategies or objects - that are, intentionally or unintentionally, used in practice by different parties in order to alleviate a problem that has arisen"), which transcends the outmoded, Weberian notion of 'individuality'.

2010-02-05T10:48:00.013Z

Singularities R US - not!

A few days ago (see the post of 17 January) I wrote a post which included a dscussion of 'social singularities', and now, by a remarkable coincidence, New Scientist has just published an article on what I would call the issue of biological singularity, or quite simply what are we? In what sense can we (as species) claim 'individuality', how special are we (whether made by evolution or by an intelligent designer)?

It turns out that we are a 'text' of multiple collisions, just as our planet is the 'text' of multiple collisions, both over millions of years.

To wit: retroviruses (e.g. HIV) work via a process called endogenisation - they copy themselves into our DNA, where our cells then happily reproduce them as part of our 'own' DNA. Wicked.

However, "if the virus happens to get incorporated into a chromosome in the host's germ line (sperm or egg) it can become part of the genome of future generations. [now for the punch line] ... the human genome contains thousands of these Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERV's), believed to be the legacy of epidemics throughout our evolutionary history" (p34: 30 Jan 2010).

So ...

Just as we are shifting the way we act and think about our interactive and communicative (IACT)identities away from the singularity of a Descartian cognitivist 'individual', with indidual rights, identity, property, etc, etc, the biologists on the other side of the campus, as it were, are shifting our notion of our genetic and physical (phylogenetic and ontogenetic) identities away from the singularity of the uniquely created H. Sapiens.

Two myths killed at the same time, now that's progress. It turns out then that we are a bilogical mashup or remix, a veritable bricolage of viral bytes, stiched together in a massive resource/database, as the result of a multitude of collisions with viruses.

For me this also solves one of the dilemmas in my own thinking: I could never imagine how all the 'new' material for evolution ever got created, never mind incorporated into the next upgrade of our genome, and how changes in ontogenesis bridged into changes in phylogenesis.

The answer is simple: we have been invaded (over and over again). Should we hug a retro-virus or two then? Its a dangerous game, and it undelines Blackmore's point about the dangers of replicators, and the exponential danger of moving from genes to memes to temes.

2010-02-04T11:28:00.001Z

Intentional and Functional Affordances
In Costall and Dreier's new book (2008), Doing things with Things, there is a neat distinction drawn between intentional and functional affordances.

Functional affordances are affordances which arise out of the properties of the object, event, interaction, whereas intentional affordances are affordances which arise primarily out of the intentions of the user, the person interacting with the object, event, etc.

This provides a useful spectrum for description and analysis, and I suppose one could envisage 'purely' functional affordances at one end of the spectrum, and 'purely' intentional ones at the other end.

2010-01-28T13:46:00.001Z

Language Policy

If you wish to comment, you are most welcome, but please comment in English

2010-01-17T19:35:00.004Z

The Uncanny Affordances of Digital Pedagogies?

“The university … is being rendered uncanny by the workings of digital technologies”, which disrupt place, time, body, text and ontologies.
(Sian Bayne: forthcoming article in London Review of Education, March 2010)

Q: Is this a productive disruption, and If so, how? In what way is the uncanny an affordance or a disfordance?

A few thoughts:

1. Bodies
Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds are sites for the exploration of ontologies, within the peculiar experience of dis- and re- embodiment, and embodiment as an elastic mode of presence/ absence. Embodied avatars are the final stake in the body of modernism; avatars are a powerful and playful manifestation, and a dialectical turning point, of the dissipated and dispersed subjects of postmodernism, because of the (paradoxical) ‘materiality’ of their virtual embodiment.

Spectres
The return of the spectre? H. Sapiens has always (with the minor exception of one or two centuries of modernism) integrated the spectral in the social, together with all the creative affordances of embodiment, possession, exorcism, etc, as vital elements in its collective imagination/ unconscious. Christianity took this to an ideal and extreme level, placing embodied divinity and spiritual infusion of the body at its core, not to mention the numinous relics of the body parts of its saints that are dispersed across the globe, which are still used as talismans of divine transformation in the material world, providing bizarre opportunities to ‘touch’ the divine.

Subjects
However … surely all subjectivity and subjects are by definition spectral? Just as cyberspace is a mutual illusion, (or as William Gibson said, a “consensual hallucination”) so too is subjectivity. The unstable sign of the ‘I’ is a paradigm of the spectre, a disembodied ghost moving continuously back and forth across reversible linguistic and discursive space, inhabiting and speaking for particular bodies and ‘subjects’, only fleetingly, before moving on to the next one, a truly restless sign.

But then … surely all signs are spectres, hovering over the material like shadowy g/hosts?

Singularity
The ‘real myth’, then, to turn the social science notion of myth on its head, is the modernist singularity of the ‘individual’, the ego as the self-evident and self-contained ‘vessel’ of cultural capital, both in the sense of being the site and container of accumulated value, and in the sense of being the capital, the head, the teleological pinnacle of evolution, and the cornerstone of the legal subject in liberal discourse and practice, the American Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The deconfiguration and reconfiguration of the subject disperses the subject, but also, paradoxically, makes it fashionable – able to be fashioned into a multitude of material spectres of itself, each responding to ‘new’ contexts.

Commodities
The celebrity, the supremely fashionable and incestuous sign (famously famous for being famous) is an alienated doppelganger of its-self, and is thus by definition a commodity – an object of exchange value split from its use value (see Marx’s truly original conceptualisation of the realm of exchange as an alienated ‘second life’).

To get back to the celebrity: the celebrity is a cousin to the avatar (and the dollar bill), and avatars can of course be celebrities too – the ‘market/meerkat’ of Comparethemarket.com is a loveable example of this hybrid – but who knows if s/he'll take up a more sinister role in a new Twilight movie sometime soon – will the dark allure of Hollywood be irresistible?

2010-01-11T12:00:00.004Z

Soft knowledge anyone?

I am more convinced than ever that synaesthesia is the way into a whole range of affordances that we would previously have discarded, and that the age of the (rehabilitated) nerd is about to be followed by the age of the (rehabilitated) polymath, a la Csikszentmihalyi, including a large dose of creativity. It conjures up a JFK-type image (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH6nQhss4Yc) of someone standing at the doors of the sanitarium, announcing to the patients and to the media that "We are all synaesthetes now".

And this must include not only left brain / right brain, but also top brain / bottom brain (see below). The world of knowledge, which was continuously boiled down (reduced) to a hard, unforgiving, skeletal alphanumeric 'text' is becoming soft (as in software). Or to put it another way, the post-McLuhan world offers a new dialectical synthesis that is neither hot nor cold, but soft, so it can be 'cool' as well as 'hot'.

This doesnt mean you throw out the black-&-white texts, but it does means you can add colour, sound, pics - things that your body and your cerebellum respond to, not only things that the top 10mm of your brain responds to. So the written text becomes a side-show, a back-channel, to interactivity - a kind of 'stock-repository' if you continue the cooking metaphor of 'reducing' sources and skeletons of knowledge.

The strategy in Nested Narratives of building it all around the rich audio text, and setting aside the transcripts makes more and more sense.

The skeleton as text, or the text as skeleton?

The internet as the soft machine?

2009-10-28T11:22:00.001Z

Connectivism – what’s missing?

Snowden's work on complexity is highly practical (e.g. the work at that Slavery Museum in Liverpool) and really innovative. There are two important aspects to it:

1. A unique, [near]real-time-client-feedback system, with great GUI facilities.

2. His four-state framework (I paraphrase, and he actually uses five - see here if you are interested in the detail). Four or five is neither here nor there for me. The important thing is that it cuts across everything else: Wenger, Connectivism, Constructivism, Senge's dynamic feedback loops, Checkland's soft systems, Open/closed systems, etc etc - all of them. I would apply it in most contexts, for instance within a CoP task, and Snowden applies it everywhere.

It's at heart a different epistemology or ontology. A different 'stage 0'. It simply asks "first, do you know what you're looking at?".

What it does it is it requires people faced with a problem, task or strategy to fist of all decide what kind of thing or problem state it is: chaotic, routine, complicated, or complex? It places an ontological decision making process at the start of all executive planning and management (and yes, it can be done in a simple workshop format, without mentioning the word complexity). Unless you do that, you get into all sorts of problems, most of which come down to confusing predictable with emergent events and variables (complex v. complicated). And that's not good enough anymore.
However, If you do go through that process, you can then proceed with a number of management and workshop approaches. You can also move things from one quadrant to another, but that's more complicated, and more contentious. Simply getting your problem identification and problem formulation right is the best foundation for doing most things in life.

One of the problems with connectivism is that it doesn't really take any of this theory or practice into account, and it tries to replace existing approaches rather than to build on them. You have to keep both - as someone said a while back at a conference: "I believe in post-modernism, but don’t think I'm going to give up my cell-phone" - in other words, complexity is fine, but lets keep the benefits of positivist science.

This applies to connectivists too - without the formalised, commodified, repositories and exchanges of positivist science (where scientific knowledge is created and stored - and no, its NOT in the connections, its to be found at the end of connections, its what we leave behind in libraries, computer memory, etc when we switch off the connections) - without all this, the connectivists would not have an internet to play in.

2009-10-04T22:05:00.002Z

Connectivism and Networkds

redundancy is a necessary condition for networks

networks allow for emergence /mutations

therefore:

redundancy is necessary for 'life'

see also:

"Life is irreducibly fashionable" at:

http://roys-discourse-typologies.blogspot.com/search?q=alterity+

2009-09-02T14:25:00.006Z

Murdoch v. BBC

This debate, in late August 2009 was the most bizarre I have seen for a long time. The idea that unfettered capitalism is the answer to the world's problems, and particularly to protecting the independence of journalism, coming from Murdoch Junior, beggars belief.

But that's not the point. The debate, particularly as carried on by Newsnight (Dyke et al) was even more bizarre. It was a conversation amongst news managers, about 'journalist' - you know, the type that appeared in 1930's Hollywood movies, with a notebook, and probably a pencil stuck in the headband of their hat - really classic stuff, even if they know what a 'webpage' is nowadays.

They seem to have missed all the 'journalism' about the Iranian elections, in which the most exiting news sources, and the ones getting all the scoops, were mobile phone users on the streets, sending video clips in by phone, (surely accompanied by twitter posts, which scooped all the news on the Mumbai massacre earlier).

The centre of gravity of news discourse has bolted out of Fleet St (which Mudoch senior destroyed, if I remember rightly), and is running around the streets with a mobile phone, with low res. video capability in its hands. The debate should be about 'independence' in that sense, and how to support it and accommodate it in news feeds, preferably free. Sun systems announced a while back that 'the network is the computer', perhaps now is the time to announce that 'the mobile network is the news'.

The independence of the institutions is one thing. The independence of the BBC is great, as far as it goes, its pretty centre-of-centre, but that's fine. But the independence of the news, itself, now that's another story, it's street-punk production, and challenges the media megaliths now, just as the original punk rock groups did almost 30 years ago. Punk rules OK?

2009-08-16T18:37:00.003Z

Formalisation and Commodification

An interesting issue was raised in a recent draft article, which addresses an important, current issue - the increasing commodification of knowledge and knowledge management in HEI (Higher Education Institutions).

The article raises a widespread, if difficult issue, which is the need for coordination and communication between authors of courses and tutors of those courses, as well as the issue of the problems of communicating and sharing tacit components of course management in HEI.

But there is also an additional issue, which is the issue of the distinction between codification and commodification, or in other words the distinction between knowledge which can be captured in a formal format and discourse, as opposed to knowledge which can ALSO be further formalised into 'knowledge commodities'. The distinction could be seen as the distinction between knowledge which can be formalised by abstracting it from all contexts (i.e. 100% commodifiable), as opposed to knowledge which although it can be formalised, still needs to be embedded in particular contexts and perspectives (i.e. formalisable, but still embedded in some specific material and institutional contexts).
This is about more than just the role of the tacit. Its about the extent to which some kinds of knowledge can be commoditised to such an extent that they can be transferred without regard to context, and provide predictable outcomes at a very high degree of certainty, while other kinds of knowledge can be transferred only if they take into account the context in both domains: that of the author/course designer and that of the tutor.

Context in this sense includes the tacit, but is not limited to it - important material, historical, perceptual and institutional factors, for example, are also relevant.

2009-08-10T17:28:00.003Z

Discourses of Paradox?

George Siemens' plea for a more nuanced language, to enable us to "move from understanding novelty of form to understanding implications of form" raises an important issue about connectivism, or what I call digital learning ecologies (DLE).

This issue cannot be addressed via a taxonomic description of the 'characteristics' of connectivism or DLE's for that matter. We have to move into what may be called a 'discourse of complexity and paradox', in which, for instance, the more 'open' a course is, the more barriers are likely to emerge which discourage or even prevent participants from communicating with more than a small 'group' or perhaps a micro-network.

2009-08-04T12:56:00.002Z

Dialectics of Digital Learning Ecologies

The wonderful new affordances of Digital Learning Ecologies also, of course, have their own dialectics, like everything in ecologies: To start with:

i)Teaching people to connect is easy, trivial and of little consequence. Teaching them to organize how they do so is what is more important, and it’s a very different skill to learn.

ii)Not everybody wants to be a self-organising learner.
Becoming a self-organising learner is not a learning curve everyone wants to climb, and even if they are assisted in setting up their PLE, they don’t all want to manage it (I am pretty eclectic in my blogs and wikis, but I sometimes loose track, and ignore some or even most of my blogs and wikis for a few months or more). This goes back to the point that becoming an online participant doesn’t just ‘happen’, there are skills to be learnt, to which I would add: and there are ontological changes to be made too. Baumann’s ‘liquid life’ and ‘liquid love’ books highlight some of the issues, albeit a bit OTT.

iv) The question is: do we all have to become ‘managers’ in an already ‘over-managed’ society? (the UK, already a ‘Nanny State’, with Elf and Safely being added by the day, is a case in point). Or is self-management self-evidently liberating?

2009-08-04T11:15:00.003Z

Digital Ecologies

George Siemens recently highlighted the importance of the shift from focusing on connection to focusing on interaction to focusing on quality of interaction. A giant step etc...

In networked learning the important thing is not which link/ page/ connection is open, but which mind is open and engaged with which other mind/s.

One way of understanding the implications of the novelty of form, particularly of integrated digital neworks, is by looking at the affordances they make possible. To start with, they allow people to create new spaces, and reconfigure some of the fundamentals about the divisions and borders of public/private space and individual/ social space. Sociologically, this changes everything.

Secondly, the affordances of autonomy are transformed: the possibilities for self-organisation, and self-initiated interaction, virtual/ avatar/ anonymous/ interaction, speed, range, and diversity.

In complexity terms the conceptual attractor for all this is "adaptation", i.e. intergrated digital networks (or digital ecologies) enable people to create and adapt (and 'learn'?) within these networks in substantially new ways - as individuals, members of communities, avatars, etc, etc.

It’s not the connections that make a difference, or the aggregation of connections, it’s the fun, organization and quality of the networks.

But affordances inevitably bring about ecological shifts. The fun clearly gets out of hand very easily, with 'sexting' for instance. And the tasks of organisation and self-organisation, particularly of mult-tasking, dynamic, weak links, although it feels completely 'natural' to some of us, is a burden, or at the very least a long and rather painful learning curve for others.

The dialectic of self-organised learning has progressed far enough to make the downside visible, and I for one had never previously asked whether "we all want to be self-organised learners" until I recently heard a reseach report about a blind software students who managed her learning very comfortably (with a host of technical and human aids), but really struggled with managing all the people (7 of them) and resources. Its and extreme case, but a useful one.

2009-07-28T13:24:00.008Z

What's in a moon?

Its probably heretical, but I really think we need to move on from Apollo, and dont even think about sending a little H. Sapiens to Mars, its really laughable, and if there are any ET's out there, I sure they would call it 'vanity travel'.

Apollo was really impressive politics, a once in a lifetime media opportunity, but with no science in sight - certainly from today's perspective. But that's almost a caricature of where we are now, no? Do you think we can focus on the planet in hand, for a while?

History tells us (unwilling learners) that politicians' worst characteristic is projecting attention as far away from themselves as possible, in times of crisis - it used to be wars - on foreign soil, if at all possible, now its space, and 'planets', but what's changed?

2009-07-20T09:21:00.002Z

Cool is as cool does

Ezra Pound has a wonderful opening line in one of his Cantos:

"They will come no more, those old gentlemen with beautiful manners".

This reminds me of my grandfather, who was an Edwardian gentleman.

I think there is a fascinating connnection, though, from my grandfather with his beautiful manners to McCluhan's cool: in both cases there is 'stepping back' to make space for the other person - with the emphasis on person, not 'other'.

The question is: what happens to 'cool' in the process of moving from 'beautiful manners' to 'media cool' to 'cool dudes'?

2009-07-20T09:15:00.003Z

Instrumental and Ontological Learning

Summarised from a previous post, we can say that:

The purpose of academic writing is: to evaluate, revise, develop,and create ontologies and heuristics.

Note: 'ontologies' is used in the computing sense, i.e. as a set of concepts which is sufficient to map out a particular domain, and not in the philosophical sense. i.e. as a mode of social and intellectual 'being'.

This includes learning and knowledge creation in the instrumental sense.

However, the purpose of learning and scholarship in the broader, holistic sense, is also to evaluate, revise, develop and create ontologies in the philosophical sense, which therefore includes ethics and personal, professional and social identities, and the identities of specific communities of practice.

If we put this together, we might get a concise and comprehensive summary of learning and knowledge, including both of what I have elsewhere referred to as 'instrumental reflection' and 'ontological reflection'.

2009-05-27T12:16:00.002Z

Medium is the Massage
a touch of punk reverse engineering

The duality between medium and message, or pipes and bytes is rejected on the basis of complexity theory and ecological psychology. There is a distinction, but the two are ‘entangled’, to borrow a metaphor from quantum physics. McCluhan famously said “ the medium is the massage”, which is an ironic play on “the medium is the message”, and deliberately so. The point he is making is that if the medium is invidious and subliminal enough, (which applies particularly to television), it ‘massages’ the viewer into a state of comfort, in which critical faculties are often suspended (because it looks so ‘cool’ – in McCluhan’s sense of ‘cool’ versus ‘hot’ media – television versus text, as well as in the more general sense of ‘cool’ as appealing and comfortable, which derives of course, from McCluhan’s innovative use of the term).

The task of punk multimodality is to turn around this invidious massaging, and suspension of critical faculties, but in the ‘coolest’ way: not by confronting and rejecting the massaging media (and the subliminal messages within them) but by embracing them, mashing them up together, and putting them back into circulation in punk mass media such as social software.

Nester Narratives can contribute to punk multimodality, by creating the ‘facility’ and ‘facilities’ for people to explore, articulate, reflect, mash-up, explore, articulate (etc) their own tacit, implicit, subliminal learning, feelings, emerging identities, and to put them back (if they wish to) into circulation in social software. So Nested Narratives could be seen as a modest innovation in this kind of post-McCluhan facilitative software.

2009-05-12T11:36:00.006Z

Are Affordances Impressive?

A colleague recently asked a very interesting question:

“Do Affordances radiate from you, are they impressed on you by the environment or something you pull from the environment, or is it a synchronous interaction?”

Here are some rough ideas:

1. You im-press the environment, by your actions (glance, gesture, sound, text, bombs, flowers, etc). This leaves an impression and possibly traces, if the impression is durable (and it alters the micro-ecology) [see the picture of gravity as space-time at: http://k-m-etaphors.wikispaces.com/Mind+the+CAN)] .

2. If you are satisfied with the inter-action, you might try it again, and if that is still satisfactory, it will start to consolidate a path and memories in your brain, muscles, bones, etc. That becomes an affordance, and over time it recedes into your subconscious, and becomes tacit, leaving space in your conscious mind for exploring new affordances.

The contrary is that unsatisfactory interaction becomes similarly impressed as a disfordance, if I can coin such a term. Disfordances are likely to impress, or embed, deeper into the tacit than affordances.

[A parallel process occurs in the environment, of course, as just as you create a tacit comfort - or discomfort - zone, so too corresponding zones are created in your immediate environment - both built and social].

3. A text = a series of signs that leaves traces [or a series of traces that leaves signs] - in the environment, in bodies, in media, in memory, dreams etc.

4. You can transcribe (not transfer) the traces of these affordances from yourself (see body parts inventory, above) into gestures, signs, media, and pass them on to other people, who will still need to be able to 'read' them.

5. Other people can also 'read' traces that you and your affordances leave lying around, intentionally and unintentionally, and try them out for themselves, and re-use them, create mashups, etc.

6. If they find these affordances amenable, they will add them to their repertoires of their own affordances (and identities), most likely with some variation or amendment, not least because each affordance has to leave traces within each particular person, and these traces will therefore be 'captured' or 'impressed' slightly differently in different people.

Example: Art is powerful when its a lasting impression, and it becomes an important affordance. (See the Stockhausen link, on 'diabolical' art at: http://roys-discourse-typologies.blogspot.com/search?q=stockhausen+ if you want the converse, and see also Ezra Pound's definition of poetry, which is "news that stays news").

But like many of the most powerful and durable affordances, great art doesnt always 'hit you in the face', it often creeps up on you over time.

2009-04-27T09:52:00.001Z

Sudoku?
If it is the case that …
0. Accurate and Precise Description is the foundation for empirical data, to provide the raw materials for ontologies as well as for testing theories, and
1. Heuristics and ontologies are the basis for academic discourse (as explanations of the past, strategic tools for planning the future, and intellectual commodities for exchange and capital formation), and
2. The process of refining, developing, or creating new heuristics and ontologies, are if you like the competence indicators for Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral studies.

Then …
We need to integrate skills into the model as well, and both Sudoku and LOGO provide interesting case studies into how heuristics, ontologies, and skills are integrated, and how a learner can use, contribute, construct, and test ontologies and heuristics while building up a skills base.

2009-04-21T19:55:00.002Z

What's the question?

The task of academic writing is to provide an answer to the question: 'how do you see topic xyz?' or even better, 'how do you think about topic xyz?' (there's a kaleidoscope / neural kaleidoscope metaphor in there somewhere), and the answer is: a) to provide an evaluation of other people's heuristics &/or ontologies (undergraduate) or b) to revise and add on to other people's heuristics &/or ontologies (Masters?), or c) to start adding substantially new aspects to other people's heuristics &/or ontologies (PhD +). This means that the set of concepts and conceptual relations that are provided in the course resources for any particular course is the 'raw material' for an ontology (or heuristic), which is in a sense the basis of the curriculum. In an open online (or networked) course, because the resources are potentially limitless, the open course tends to become a course that is based on an 'open' (-ish) curriculum.

In a sense then, there is no such thing as a purely 'empirical' piece of academic writing, it has to have something to say about ontologies &/or heuristics as well. Likewise every theoretical piece has to link back to the empirical, as it has to be based on an ontology (which is both semiotic and material, no?).

(Note: 'ontologies' is used in the computing sense, i.e. as a set of concepts which is sufficient to map out a particular domain, and not in the philosophical sense. i.e. as a mode of social and intellectual 'being')

2009-03-13T21:01:00.002Z

The Second European Holocaust Memorial

There is an appeal for donations
for the second European Holocaust Memorial.

It is an attempt to learn a little
from the first Holocaust,
where Europe ate itself up
in the gas chambers
the firebombings
and in the mighty tank and naval battles
of the second world slaughter.

Europe is about to eat itself up again
in the self inflicted plagues of flooding and desertification
that will result from global warming.

Donations will go to recording stories and pictures
of Europe as it is at the start of the 21st Century
before it is lost in the sands
for future generations.

These pre-emptive archives will be housed
in a secure twin-Holocaust Memorial and Study centre
just inside the Arctic Circle
linking the documents from the Spielberg project
on the first 20th Century holocaust
with these documents from its 21st Century twin.

Daniel Liebeskind, the architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin
will be asked to chair a commissioning panel for the Centre.

It is probably too late
to turn around the ravages
of the global climate disaster
but at least we might be able to secure
a record of what Europe was like
for those who follow us
who might otherwise be incredulous
as to how we could allow two Holocausts
to happen in Europe within less than 100 years.

2009-02-26T23:44:00.003Z

Text Eagles and Crowd-Sourcing in the Knowledge-Economy
The transcriptions of distributed cognition and commerce

Social, economic and communications ecologies continue to change rapidly, as more and more services, people, and in short ‘agents’, animate and inanimate become part of global digital networks, and reconfigure them in the process.

What we need is a sound analytical framework for effective action, as well as name, a model, a metaphor, or what in complexity theory could be called a conceptual attractor or two to anchor the debate.

George Siemens and Stephen Downes have advocated the term connectivism as a candidate for the conceptual attractor role, and recently hosted a virtual mega-conversation on this topic (link …….), with a sequel scheduled for 2009. Bruno Latour takes a slightly different line, advocating the concept of actor-networks within in actor-network theory, which emphasises the need for an inclusive concept, including both animate and inanimate actors, as well as the continuous process of dis-assembly and re-assembly of the social: i.e. continuous dissolution and constitution of networks rather than connections per se, which one might (erroneously) infer from the term connectivism, which is actually much broader than that, and incorporates many aspects of networks.

The case of txteagle (Ananthaswamy 2009: 20-21) is instructive. It has a simple and effective business model, which “allows rural Kenyans to earn airtime and money by performing small tasks such as translation and transcription using their cellphones”. Txteagle develops audio interfaces for cellphones (or mobile phones) in local dialects by asking local people to translate short phrases and “if a high percentage of people return the same answer, it is accepted by the system … the service rewards those who are correct more often than not by paying them at a higher rate.” This is also applied to the translation of longer texts, as well as for training speech-recognition engines, which has commercial and surveillance applications.

Payment is in airtime, credited to the user’s mobile phone, and one company set up a facility for airtime to be used as currency, by paying contributors in airtime, and then letting them pay for goods at the market place by transferring airtime from their phone to the seller’s mobile phone. This developed into a mobile-2-mobile (M2M?) money transfer facility, with the option of cashing in the credit at post offices. The mobile company, Safaricom, “became one of the largest banks in east Africa, and txteagle was then able to pay contributors in ‘cash’ or airtime.
Other similar facilities that have been set up include Mechanical Turk (Amazon), Wattzon and Wesabe.

In these developments mobile phones become virtual ATMs, virtual hotdesks for the development of audio interfaces, surveillance tools. translation and language services, para-currencies like airtime, and virtual banking. Mobile users become users and suppliers of services – intersumers rather than consumers, just as Green houses, which generate more energy than they consume, become users and suppliers of energy.

A number of interesting things are happening here, creating an ecology of networked affordances, or meta-networks, including ecologies of:

Knowledge
The mobile actors and intersumer access, use and supply unique contextual linguistic knowledge.

The software actors in the network aggregate and normalise linguistic bytes, and re-configure the relative value of linguistic items and mobile actors, interfacing and transcribing knowledge, service credit and commercial credit into a meta-network which is a knowledge-communications-economy.

Transparency
The knowledge harvesters, as actors, gather speech-recognition ‘knowledge’ which provides transparency, and speech to text transcription, which links into commercial and surveillance functions and services. This raises a number of ethical issues of course, from the legal issues of the level of contractual non/disclosure by the speech recognition company to the mobile supplier of speech recognition bytes. Do the mobile users who are selling speech recognition data know who and where that their data is being sold on to, and whether this will impact on their linguistic community: are they contributing to their own surveillance? Probably yes.

Digital ecologies of networks
The digitalisation of credit (in money), communication (in binary-coded networks) and knowledge (in ASCII, XML and related codes) intersects in the mobile phone which becomes an impressive node and multi-transcription device, seamlessly integrating bytes of knowledge, communication and credit.

Actors
There are a range of actors and nodes within this knowledge-communications-credit-surveillance ecology: mobile phone users, linguistic communities, dialect communities, commercial communications companies, surveillance organisations (in commercial and security varieties), marketplace buyers and sellers, banks (virtual and bricks and mortar, or ‘bricks and clicks’), software programmes, networks and ecologies of all of these networks, and (possibly by their absence) regulators in all the above fields.

Crowd-sourcing and Distributed Cognition
Txteagle is an interesting example of crowd-sourcing (in commerce) and of distributed cognition (in knowledge management). In political theory it also takes forward the post/ post-modern debate on distributed subjects, or dispersed subjects, as opposed to the earlier paradigms (and ideologies) of individualism.

What it adds to distributed subjects is distributed crowds, as a sociological and as an economic concept; in other words, as a different take on communities and communities of practice, as they now become a potential economic ‘resource’ to be exploited in the market place just like any other resource. This raises questions of ownership, control and privacy (from the individual and the community’s point of view) and regulation (politically and economically, nationally, regionally and globally).

It also raises issues specific ecological issues in ecological psychology, such as the interaction between mobile phone owners as part of the crowd-as-resource, and the same mobile phone owner as a self-organising element within a complex adaptive system, which self-organises not only its actions but also its identity – jointly and severally, so to speak. This raises questions about how decisions are made on a selection of competing criteria: commercial, ethical, individual, social and cultural.

Conceptual Attractors
To return to the question of conceptual attractors …

We need a term that is broader than the inter-nodal connectivism, and networks carry too much baggage from fields like telecommunications and computing. Digital ecologies is coming into use, as is knowledge ecologies, and although these are useful, they too reference other fields too heavily. Complex adaptive networks probably comes closest, but it still leaves out the organic, dynamic, self-organising and self-reproducing elements of biology that are included in the term ecology. So the best conceptual attractor for the field is probably: complex adaptive ecologies, with digital ecologies as a reasonably acceptable shorthand for it.

References
Ananthaswamy, Anil (2009) Mobilising the minds of the masses New Scientist 14-02-2009: 20-21.

2009-02-02T19:17:00.003Z

Activity based Learning Design

In response to a request for clarification form Mike Caufield (see previous post but one), the following:

Mike, it might be a matter of emphasis,but I think its more than that. I suppose I am turning learning design 'on its head' to some extent, but this approach is (I hope) built on the now secure foundation of the hyper-(linked)-text environment that external (Internet) and 'internal' (both Intranet and private web-based wikis, etc) resources provide.

It strikes me that rather than ‘turning learning design on its head, this might actually be the way to turn learning design ‘right way up’ after all these years of chasing content for its own sake.

Two considerations:

Topic/ content

I work across Engineering, Computing, Education, Environmental Management, and it is possible in all these fields to define a series of topics, each one in 50/100 words, and for each topic to specify an activity: design, construct, research, compare, change, apply, calculate, plan, analyse, etc, or combinations of these.

Each activity requires access to content. But here you can offer a number of choices - self-managed choices:

0. The learner might already know enough to complete the activity, or know where to find it, so they dont need to access any content in the course - on the contrary, you might get them to contribute their content TO the course.

1. The learner might need to check the basic content that you, as course designer, regard as relevant to the activity - which they can decide to explore and check to see that they are on the right track.

2. The learner might need much more than the basic content, either at a more elementary level or, if they are determined to excel, at a more advanced level.

Layered Self-managed Resources

The way this is operationalised is to provide layered content at three or four levels: basic, more detailed, more elementary, more advanced, and make it all available for the learner to link to, and use. Only the most basic content is 'up front' in the text, or described and linked to in the main text.

Students have to decide how much content they need, and at what level, for each activity. This forces them to self-manage their resource requirements for each activity, and within a single, navigable web-page structure, they do it very largely without instruction.

The interesting thing for me is that what emerges from the use of this approach for designing 'learning objects' (topic + activity + layered resources) is a series of web-pages each of which is aimed, at first glance, at an above average student - i.e. someone who may or may not need the content resources that have been provided, but certainly will not need all of them.

The average or struggling student, as well as the student who really wants to excel, will need to explore the content in more depth, and 'drill down'/out to further layers.

There is a published article on this approach: "Flexible Learning for Engineering" in: Innovations and Research in Engineering Education special edition, Fall, 2007

2009-02-02T13:19:00.008Z

The First Printed Koran

A key historical affordance resulted from the interaction between movable type and business. In the UK and Europe, it resulted in the Gutenberg revolution. It was not only a media revolution, but perhaps also the first modern production line, a model which Henry Ford only picked up on some centuries later.

To wit - moveable type takes apart the process of writing, and creates an operational unit which is discreet and recombine-able. Digital, modular production.

More interesting - a recent TV programme on the history of Venice showed the first (?) printed Koran, which was printed in Venice, presumably because the Venetians - at that time trading extensively in the Arab world - saw it as a business opportunity: they could supply the Koran at a fraction of the price to a huge market.

Here the affordances came unstuck. It seems, from the account in this programme, that the Arabic type face that was designed for this venture was "childish" and lacked both precision and elegance. It would, according to a commentator in the programme, have been quite unacceptable to Muslim scholars.

Even more interesting, the Muslim world / Arabic scholarly community seemed to have rejected not this particular version of this particular book, but they seem to have rejected 'printing' per se.

This in turn, if we are to follow the argument, led to the transfer of the Mediterranean world's science, maths, and astonomical data from Arabic (which is where it was all happening) to European languages (presumably Latin or Italian), from which it was happily printed in moveable type, and spread, eventually, across Europe.

The rest, as they say, was the Renaissance.

Its a fascinating argument, and a fascinating example of the impact that something as minute as type face design might have had on the shift in the balance of intellectual capital from Arabia to Europe, which paved the way for the shifts in power in Mediterranean and later global dominance.

So in Europe, the affordance that was created by the interaction of the fist modularised production line and business was the affordance of mass media publishing, which in turn provided the foundation for widespread intellectual and scientific capital formation. If 'science' has to be tested and proved across a wide range of contexts, it first has to be widely circulated. Modern 'science' is public in a fundamental sense that wasn't possible before moveable type.

We might, then, have the clumsiness/ ineptitude of the Venetian publishers to thank for the dominance of 'Western' science. Of course we don't even know (do we?) if the Venetians ever got to the bottom of this spectacular lack of market research, or whether they just moved on to the next market.

There are two issues here.

Historically, it would be interesting to see if this narrative holds water - you cant trust everything you see on television, even British television, can you?

As a thought experiment, backed up at least by the fact that there was a printed Koran with an unacceptable typeface, which didnt sell, and there was a transfer of science, maths and astronomical data to Northern Italy, which was used by Gallileo, and later Newton, etc, this is an interesting example of the way the 'capillaries of articulation' work within affordances (to paraphrase Foucault).

2009-01-21T13:01:00.001Z

Consumers or Contributors
Mike Caulfield recently wrote an interesting piece about a class-less society. He means of course school ‘class’, and he advocates for the use of ‘cohort’ instead, because of its associations with “’generational cohort’ … a group of people that experience a certain set of events simultaneously together.

He references John Seely Brown: too, and Stanley Fish:
“Together, members construct and negotiate a shared meaning, bringing the group along collectively rather than individually. In the process, they became what the literary critic Stanley Fish calls a “community of interpretation” working toward a shared understanding of the matter under discussion,” and what Tony Hirst calls OCW content delivered serially:.

Caulfield says …
“What you would need, ala Hirst, is a serialization mechanism (and here, again, talking in terms of the original meaning of serialization, not it’s specialized meaning). You and your friends sign up to watch the mid-90s series Earth 2. and it delivers you an episode a week.

“In other words, you become a cohort, moving through this series in sync so that everyone shares a similar interpretative environment. …The “class” is dead, as is the “audience”. Long live the cohort”.

From the perspective of my own practice, this is an interesting idea, however …

1. “Cohort” sounds too formal and too constrained, but what's in a name? My personal choice is Community of Inquiry.

2. Much more fundamental though: In designing "digital ecologies"/ "virtual adaptive networks" for learning, the crucial shift is to move completely away from content-driven events to activity-driven events.

This gets us to the starting blocks for connectivist / inquiry-based / problem-based / activity-based learning /networked / CoP or workshop -based learning. Pick a term and an approach to suit your needs, but this is the threshold for learning now, surely?

So the serialisation mechanism is often required - it is a key driver for community, and learning is social and contextual, in many ways, no?

But ...
Focus serialisation on what the 'community' / cohort will DO, not what they CONSUME - sorry to put it so starkly, but I am not sure there is that much 'grey' left in this issue.

2008-02-26T10:48:00.001Z

Affordances and The Ecological Turn

The important point is simply that the term affordances (which is based on Gibson) gives us a framework to analyse the interaction between the learner and the resources they interact with (people, materials, media), as a 'micro-ecology'. These micro-ecologies in turn interact with larger social, cultural and professional ecologies (or 'discourses', a la Foucault). Put all this together, and you have a fairly comprehensive framework for analysing the ongoing dynamic of the way in which the learner creates, manages and presents their own identity/identities.

There is a full paper on this, which is available on request.

2008-01-24T14:07:00.000Z

Einstein, Ramachandran and Elegant Articulations

On the subject of Science as 'extreme writing' and Maths as 'extreme science'…

A friend recently wrote: “I once had a rather heated argument with a friend about the issue of 'truth' in science. She maintained that science does approach an absolute truth (even if it never quite gets there) while I much prefer Einstein's aphorism that 'As a matter of fact, I am convinced that even much more is to be asserted: the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expression are all ... when viewed logically ... the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences.' ['Remarks on Bertrand Russell's theory of knowledge' in Ideas and Opinions (Bonanza Books, New York, MCMLIV) p. 22.]

“The essence of her argument was simply that everyone agrees that given Euclid's axioms pi = 3.1459 etc and the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. But all we are really saying that (in this case) mathematics is stuff that we can agree on.
This means that science is very limited (because we exclude everything that we don't agree on) but also very powerful (because we can be pretty confident about things that everyone does agree on); when I press this little button I will wipe out several hundred thousand people in Hiroshima. I press the button and indeed it all happens.

“Perhaps best summed up in another observation by Einstein: 'How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things? In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this: as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.' [From 'Geometry and Experience' Lecture before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, January 27, 1921. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (Bonanza Books, New York, MCMLIV) p. 233.]”

So …
After ruminating on the subjects of science and language etc for many years, and even making a living of sorts out of it, I finally came to the conclusion that sociogenesis (the event horizon of H. Sapiens) was simply the point at which we (primates) stepped back from our rather crude pre-linguistic social discourses in bipedal primate culture: greetings, grooming, pecking order, alpha males, clips around the ear-holes, etc, and delved down to the finer granularities of speech, discovered that we could articulate differences in sound at a much finer resolution than grunts; that we could use these articulations of sound/speech to communicate finer distinctions between things, people, events, etc; and that we could use the distinctions/ articulations between sounds to communicate and share the distinctions between things out 'there'. In no time at all we were sharing 'thoughts' (‘in here') about things and events (‘out there'), and had started a linguistic community, or human culture.

Ramachandran adds another interesting element to it, as he says - (I paraphrase, with some licence) - that at about the same time as we discovered the joys of the finer articulations of sounds (our communicative proto-tools), we also looked down at our physical proto-tools, and noticed that they too embodied finer articulations: the mechanism of the axe handle and the object of the axe head, for instance, and started to put two and two together, and said to ourselves: “mmm, 'mechanism' and 'object', well now, that might be a useful model for mechanisms and objects in other tools, like language for instance: why not ‘verbs’ (mechanism) and ‘nouns’ (objects)?

And we started to make the articulations in sound work for us in combinations of ‘mechanisms’ and ‘objects’, that would later be called 'sentences', then syllogisms, then algorithms, then mathematical formulae etc. This took about 3-4 million years, but we eventually got the hang of it!

The fact that language articulates sound in (discrete) digital code makes it possible to articulate, in principle, an unlimited number of combinations, and create new symbols, with which we can 'conjure up' (in Einstein's terms) whatever distinctions and algorithms we like. Whether these 'mean' anything of course depends on the rigour with which we formulate and articulate them in specialist (= controlled and constrained) terminology, and test them and share them against empirical experience, in ways that others can duplicate and test too.

Science is then just an extremely formalised articulation of language, and maths is an extremely formalised articulation of science. In which case scientists are just specialist primates after all, with a predeliction for extreme language, and too much time on their hands!

Or rather than saying that Science is ‘extreme language’ and maths is then ‘extreme science’ you might say science is highly elegant language, and maths is highly elegant science. In which case maths is a crucial component of culture.