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The myth of the online community

Posted by dasfseegdse Jumat, 17 Februari 2012 0 komentar

The subject that has dominated discussion in the e-learning world in the last few years is the idea of an 'online community': the e-learning world has fashioned itself as such a community, where messages are shared on Twitter and Facebook amongst a group of people who meet each other at conferences. However, when we think of the broader sense of the word 'community', the sharing of messages through text is only a tiny subset of its constituent aspects.

The communities studied by anthropologists are much richer in their means of communication and collective action. From the Inuit Indians who shared the 'potlatch' gifts studied by Mauss, to the Eastern Samoan tribes of Mead, to the communité de l'arche established by the catholic priest Jean Vanier.. there is much more to their 'communitas' than what appears online.

But for the online community, online-ness is the validation of an ideal around which they themselves have organised. To deny the 'community-ness' of the online community is to deny the ideal around which so many have established their personal identities. And yet, the deficiencies of the online community as a community in an anthropological sense are obvious.

The conflation of the word 'community' to create equivalence between the online community and the 'face-to-face community' is particularly suspect. So much more happens when people are together: the life-and-death realities of existence are encountered in direct and practically ineffable ways. Online, and the nature of 'community' is reduced to text messages made in a strategic way by individuals seeking to maintain their position within the 'online' (and face-to-face) community.

I think it's a mistake to think of such a thing as an online 'community'. What happens online is strictly 'strategic'. My tweeting of this blog entry is a classic example: I seek to gain the attention of those I know, and I wouldn't be so bothered unless I could see some strategic advantage in it for me. I don't believe I am alone in this egomania!

But that strategic drive for recognition and feeding the ego is not (or at least only partly) what happens in real-life communities. There, issues of recognition, empathy, care and concern for each other are paramount. There, the radical dependence of one individual on everyone else is directly confronted through gestures and glances which have profound meaning for all.

We would like to think of technology as providing a 'virtual community', but I think this is mistaken not just because what is created online is not strictly a 'community', but it is also mistaken because the picture that is adopted of technology is one which always assumes that individual experience of face-to-face can be replaced by online experience. It can't. They are fundamentally different entities.

But this is not to say that technology doesn't have something to offer real communities. But it is not in replacing the 'community-ness' of the communities, but rather in enhancing community-ness by addressing directly the problem of 'fractured meanings' in the lives of individuals. Clearly the making of strategic communications online has become part of daily life. But equally, people still live in families, go to school, sit in lectures, etc. Those are convivial situations within which real communities might develop. The challenge however, is always to find a link between the meaningfulness of the 'real' communities and the meaning of strategic exchanges of text messages online.

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Creepy creativity

Posted by dasfseegdse Senin, 13 Februari 2012 0 komentar

'Creativity' is in fashion at the moment. It has a warm glow to it as we think (even if we don't intend to) of when we were perhaps most creative - when we were children.. safe... with playdough, lego and crayons and with a deep sense of security. Beware of words bearing warm glows... particularly when they become fashionable. Those same feelings of security were cultivated by the Nazis with the 'back to nature' movement. And I fear they are being cultivated by some unpleasant people at the moment who seek to hide their true motivations (and their past) in education. A warm word like 'creativity' is a cloak... watch out for the dagger.

There are a number of things we can do to protect ourselves. The first is to ask awkward questions:

"What do you actually mean by creativity? What do you want?"
"Stop telling me how important it is, and tell me what you would actually do in schools and universities"

That's a good start. Because even the likes of (St.) Ken Robinson has been rather heavy on telling us how terrible education is and how bored the kids are (aren't we bored of hearing it?), but rather short on the details of what he would actually do about it. But he's got away with it! Nobody asks him! And after the TED talk, and the book, and the global profile, he's not going to have to run a school (phew!) so he won't be able show us how wonderful he could make things.

The problem I have with this is the latent assumption that "if only you did it my way, it would all be easy!"... which sounds pretty silly. Particularly silly to teachers who know how difficult school life can be... and more particularly to those teachers who've been the victim of the deranged headteacher who actually believes "if you did it my way, it would be easy!". What they usually mean is, "if you don't do it my way, I'll sack you!". Education is no more straightforward than family life. There are saints and tyrants and muddlers-through, but on the whole, individual human beings have a talent for screwing up. Most of them, however, mean well. A few don't.

Yet we survive. For children, after all, it's only 5 or 6 years of their lives in secondary school. For teachers, it can be 30 or more (although few these days manage to stick it that long - which tells a lot in itself). Families sort out the deficiencies of school; and a good school rarely compensates for a poor family (and then it probably is not the school as an institution, but a special individual). And the survival and success that is born from this messy swamp can often surprise us... (I'd put money on some future famous clever child who currently attends Downhills Primary School passing judgement on the ill-chosen comments of the current secretary of state for education in 20 years time!)

But the creepiness of the bad person with a hidden agenda trumpeting 'creativity' is hard to defend against. With developments like 'Free Schools', private universities, new educational businesses, corporate vice-chancellors, etc... we should be on our guard. In each case, look beyond the warm words - which will always look appealing - and ask:

"Who are these people?"
"How have they got to where they are?"
"Who have they trampled on to get there?"

Because for all the warm words, what they actually do in the name of 'creativity' is likely to be closely related to what they have done in the past. And their high profiles trumpeting 'creativity' have not come from nowhere... There has been enough time for cold experience and cynicism to recognise the opportunity that the creativity fetish brings. It would be better to listen not to their words, but to those of their victims (and there will be some in each case, because education in reality is always very messy, very political and sometimes nasty).

But most troubling of all is that technology coupled with warm words like 'creativity' can make an even more effective cloak for the dagger. In the world of the web and social software, words tend to count above deeds. Words get 'retweeted' and 'liked' and as they do reputations are built and reinforced. Often even when the web itself can reveal more of the truth of character of individuals, the momentum of discourse can blind itself to the difficult and dark aspects of character it doesn't want to (or can't) discuss.

The mechanism is an old one.. well-described by Friedrich Hayek in "The road to Serfdom". There, he blamed the well-meaning but ultimately confused 'left' whose failed idealism left a vacuum for the bad people. I don't think there's anything wrong with being idealistic. But we mustn't be confused. And so, asking "What do we mean by creativity?", "What would we do in education to foster it?"... and... "Who are you?" are a good start in building a defence against some rather creepy forces, whose existence we may not wish to think about, but would be foolish to deny.

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Melody

Posted by dasfseegdse Jumat, 10 Februari 2012 0 komentar

In Shannon and Weaver's "Mathematical Theory of Communication", Weaver gives a wonderful quote from Arthur Eddington from "The nature of the physical world":

"Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories - distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody. I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody, and not with the first three. Entropy is only found when the parts are viewed in association, and it is by viewing or hearing the parts in association that beauty and melody are discerned. All three are features of arrangement."

Weaver then comments that he believes Eddington would also allow the inclusion of "meaning" along with beauty and melody (this is particularly interesting since Shannon - in the main part of the book - explicitly excludes discussion about meaning, only concentrating on information).

Both meaning and melody are interesting me at the moment. This morning I heard this very famous melody of Mozart. It is captivating - and I found myself asking "why?"

D'Indy has a similar attitude to melody as he does to tonality (which I blogged about here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2012/01/vincent-dindy-and-breath-of-music.html). D'Indy highlights the relationships between melody, rhythm and harmony, but he generally sees in melodic phrasing a tightening - a making of effort - and a relaxing movement (repos), much in the same way as the ascent up the cycle of 5ths and descent down it produces a 'lightening' and 'darkening'. I think there's something in this, but I don't find it as satisfactory an explanation as his thoughts about tonality.

My feeling on hearing the melody from the Mozart piano concerto is clearly one of 'effort making' and 'repose', but more fundamentally than that, it grabs my attention. It is this 'attention grabbing' - that melody acts as a thread by which the music can be traced, both as it happens and in my mind, which fascinates me most. I am wondering whether this is an aspect of 'attachment'.

Shannon talks of the statistical variances of signals and the importance of Markov processes.. he uses melody as an example. But seeing it as a Markov process doesn't account for the fact that the melody would have no coherence if each successive signal didn't become meaningful to me. And in being meaningful, I believe that it may be a manifestation of a sensual process which becomes fundamental to my viability as I listen: I have a stake in what happens. Mozart knows what it is to have a stake in what happens, and knows what to make happen in order for us to have a stake in it.

But then I think about this short piece by Webern:

There is a melody there too. But for many people listening to it, the experience of 'attachment' that I described for the Mozart will not be the same. There is something about the sensual productions here which may indeed repel. But for others (perhaps those who know the music), this is equally beautiful. Just as with the Mozart, we hang on every note, every articulation - a performance is special and meaningful.

The question in all this is "what is the difference between the listeners that the attachment to the melody is different?" That's a question for which I feel myself tentatively edging towards a proposal.

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The technoflattening of education

Posted by dasfseegdse Senin, 06 Februari 2012 0 komentar

What is it to be techno-flattened? My definition is:

"to have the variety of human experience attenuated in the name of functional equivalence and labour-saving."

What does that mean? It means that the experience of 'doing everything with a computer' is less rich than the variety of experiences that one would have were you not to use a computer: writing and sending a letter is a richer experience than writing and sending an email; face-to-face meetings are richer than online meetings, and so on. Of course, sending an email is labour-saving, and much of the experience of writing a letter which is 'attenuated' might be regarded as a 'waste of time' (queuing at the post office, pen not working, etc). But nevertheless, something is clearly lost in terms of the richness of experience.

Is this a problem? I'm wondering if it may be. Much of the richness of experience is drawn from the variety of activities which we undertake. Even now, email co-exists with the telephone - and often face-to-face contact. But increasingly, the computer is at the centre of things. And the experience of the computer, importantly, is the same whatever we happen to be doing. It is basically:

Screen
Keyboard
Mouse/trackpad/touch

That is what we directly perceive, and all we have to do is manage the purpose to which we wish to coordinate our actions with the computer. All we see is that THE SCREEN CHANGES! I have wrestled over whether this single point of coordination is a good thing. Certainly, when we did work on the Personal Learning Environment, the idea of a single point of coordination under the control of the user was seen as a good thing, avoiding the cognitive overload involved in having to coordinate too many types of action with too many types of tools.

But now I'm not so sure, and I'm certainly sure that the homogenizing of educational experience through the computer is not a good thing.

I've been thinking about this particularly with regard to the iTEC project, which has sought to make technical interventions in education around the construction of 'innovative technological scenarios'. Each of these involves technology in one form or another. But the most revealing result of this process of scenario creation is the fact that all the scenarios appear to be the same. Because the computer is introduced in various guises (as a homework collaboration tool; as a data collection tool; as a means of engaging with outside experts; etc) in situations which would not normally require a computer, the richness of the experience of the not-with-computer homework task, or the not-with-computer data collection task is attenuated with the experience of "screen, keyboard, mouse". And no matter how much one attempts to be innovative with the scenarios, the inevitable branding of "screen, keyboard, mouse" has an inevitable (and rather dull) ring to it.

This I think is a problem, and it raises the deeper issue of the place for technology in education. Variety of experience is a fundamental component of education. But in our current conception of technology which is very user-focused, where the technology directly serves the learning process, the variety of experience is under threat. One might hope that teachers with iTEC scenarios will have the ingenuity to create rich experiences, although there is a risk that the scenarios themselves (and the technology) might get in the way of this.

But technology is with us. It is part of the environment within which we try to educate our children. Its effects are highly complex, but one of the principal effects has been to challenge the meaningfulness of what happens in the classroom over what happens online (my daughter constantly complains that she could learn more from Wikipedia). There is nothing new in this. Education has always tried to justify the meaningfulness of what happens in the classroom in comparison to daily life.

But schools are more like families than Wikipedia. They are not primarily instruments for information transfer - Wikipedia can, as my daughter knows, do that much better. They are instead social microcosms - safe places where human attachments can be explored against the context of norms and rules. We might think that even those processes can happen online in Facebook - but Facebook is no more similar to school life than to family life.

The significance of this is that within families, schools and the online world communications are exchanged and different kinds of meaning are established. When my daughter complains about what happens in school it is because she cannot reconcile the meaning of what happens in the classroom with what happens online. In some ways, technology could serve to make that reconciliation of meanings even more difficult by being forced inappropriately on education - just as well-intentioned attempts to teach ICT actually led to one of the most disastrously boring subjects on the curriculum!

Technology is clearly tied-up in the process of meaning-making. But Facebook may feel more meaningful because the coordination mechanisms within Facebook work better than the coordination mechanisms within the classroom. And those coordination mechanisms in the classroom (classroom management by teachers, curriculum, timetable, etc) appear less effective in the light of the effectiveness of technology. I believe the key is to see the link between meaning-making and coordination. Seeing that would mean that we wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that we have to put Facebook into the classroom (because that would confuse the coordination situation, not strengthen it), but rather we have to use technology to establish more effective coordination mechanisms in the classroom which can also serve to create conduits of meaning between the form of life in the school and the form of life online.

In short, the problem lies in the dissonance between different domains of meaning. The challenge is to help resolve the dissonance whilst maintaining the richness of the variety of experience in school.

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Technology, Beauty and Music

Posted by dasfseegdse Minggu, 05 Februari 2012 0 komentar

Technology isn't beautiful. It may be exciting, it may sometimes fill us with hope, it may invigorate and shake us out of despair (much needed at the moment)... but it is not beautiful; it is not transcendent; it is not a vessel for the human spirit. It is very much of-the-world, not of-the-spirit. It enframes, enslaves, conditions, forces, sets-upon (I'm thinking of Heidegger who says technology is the "setting-upon that sets upon man"). Seen in this way, the world of technology is ugly.

People, on the other hand, are beautiful. And I think they are more beautiful in their using technology, in their individual struggle between the enframed life of technology and their search for the transcendent and spritual essence of their being. They are beautiful in their struggle against death and against nothingness. They are beautiful in their clutching at tools to cling to life. Seen in this way, the world with technology is beautiful.

I'm thinking about this as I've been playing with the Socket.io (https://github.com/LearnBoost/Socket.IO) library in NodeJS. I've managed to get it do something quite interesting (two web-socket servers talking to each other and triggering real-world events in the process). It's a frustrating and time-consuming process. I'm driven by my desire to realise an idea.. a possibility which I allow myself to believe will be perceived as valuable by others. It's like rehearsing some 'clever performance' which, in my mind - when I show my friends - will make them go "wow! that's clever!".

Is it simply that I want that adulation? Is it simply that I need some recognition that my being, my action is meaningful? It's the meaningfulness which interests me most. I am thinking that my own technological innovations are in fact continual searches for meaning. The (terrible!) lines of code I write are performative acts, intended to evoke communicative responses from those around me. There is nothing intrinsic in the technology itself. The tools, the software, the 'advances' are merely vestiges of the searching of human spirit for meaning.

But there is something unsatisfying about the meaning arising from technology. Its rationality, its enframedness, its ugliness leaves me with the impression that something's missing (and it's not just my rubbish code).

Heidegger, of course, ended up with writing a kind of poetry (and certainly writing about poetry). In poetry he found 'dwelling'. I've been thinking about this as I go back on music I have written in the past. The video below it a piece of music I wrote on an abortive MA in composition at Manchester University. The score is below.

In many ways, the motivation for doing this is the same as writing software (or indeed, writing papers): "how clever! How meaningful your existence is!". But deep down, I believe there is a difference. Music, as all art, strives for beauty. It is of the spirit; it has access to the transcendent; it can address issues of meaning not only from the perspective of the rational, but from the perspective of the irrational.

But music is technological too (no other art is more so!). The pianos, drums and marimba in my piece are technical innovations. At some point someone said "Oh! How clever!" as some innovation of piano engineering that made possible some new performance technique, and no doubt the innovator gained a brief sense of meaningfulness of their endeavour. But ultimately, only in the hands of the skilled artist could something beautiful emerge.

That's what's missing with learning technology. We have no artists to fashion something beautiful from the tools that are available. Worse, technologists and businessmen (they are closely related!) believe the artistry to be irrelevant: the technology alone is sufficient. And so the uglification of education begins. We need to understand this process. We need to understand the existential roots of technical innovation and find ways of realising the meaning that is searched for by technologists in ways which foster the realisation of the deeper meanings that only artists can access.

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Education and the real-time web: Nodejs everywhere?

Posted by dasfseegdse Kamis, 02 Februari 2012 0 komentar

I'm doing some work with Nodejs and Websockets for the iTEC (http://itec.eun.org) project at the moment. The plan is to create something which will enable us to create widget-driven activities which animate lessons by giving the children controllers which can affect physical things in the environment of the classroom (integrating widgets and physical stuff is a requirement of the project).

Doing physical things is fairly straightforward - we're experimenting with a number of things including Arduino and its clones (including JeeNode - see http://jeelabs.org/). But the real challenge is the communication between widget-based controllers and the hardware.

Of course, the first question might be, "why use widgets?". I think the answer to this is that whatever we do which is really cool (or not!), there must be a simple to-hand way of reproducing what has been done. Widgets situated in an AppStore can provide a way in which teachers can easily distribute controllers to the children - no software installation, no worries about privileges, or security and anything else. Just drop them into the environment and they will work.

Well.. sort of.

But to do really interesting things, the teacher has to do something different. Their controller must have more functionality - indeed, the richer its functionality, the better. And here, widgets won't help us entirely. Teachers may have to install something - the software they want to demonstrate, the devices they want to play with. There is something to do there - but at least it's only one machine, rather that 30!

And it could be a laptop which is simply plugged into the network to do the job. Fundamentally then, the approach is one of trying to increase the range of things people can do, whilst alleviating the organisational problems, but at the same time dealing with problems of classroom management (because the teacher controls their service which they offer to the kids who access it through their controllers).

But then there have been the issues of implementation. WebSockets are still quite new, and are undergoing rapid development. That means that different versions proliferate, and usually they are incompatible. More significantly, different web browsers support different versions, or offer no support. A number of solutions have been offered, and my initial prototypes used the Java-WebSocket library by TooTallNate (see https://github.com/TooTallNate/Java-WebSocket). This worked ok in Chrome and Firefox, but struggled with other browsers. It seemed like the best option because it presented a way in which web activity (like chat) could trigger real events on a particular machine (for example, controlling a robot) - because the library was basically a Java library, and a Java application could be written to integrate with it.

And this was my problem. I wanted something that happened on the web (in a widget) to trigger something on a client machine. But the web is it's own domain, and there are good security reasons why this sort of behaviour is not allowed. However, in this case it was a requirement.

The solution I'm playing with is making me think about broader issues. It is to use NodeJS as a native client application. In other words, the thing that the teacher installs to offer their service is NodeJS. That means that I can use the more stable Socket.io libraries to handle the communication. But it also raises the issue of whether NodeJS should be just restricted to web-based applications.

The fact is that there is so much more that we can do with computers than is possible within a web browser. Even Google acknowledge this, and Chromium approaches the challenge by offering a way to bridge system libraries with web functionality. But that seems the wrong way round.

The value of the web is that it's available ready-to-hand everywhere with no need to install things. But I want to use the real-time web to create new services from my PC which can bridge into the online space where everyone can interact with them to do interesting things together.

This seems to me to be the space for the next generation (or maybe iteration) of the web. I found this diagram from http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/1/4/brain-dump-of-real-time-web-rtw-and-websocket which I think sums up a fast emerging reality for the (re)organisation of our technology.

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The history of the education industry: 2020 - 2050

Posted by dasfseegdse Rabu, 01 Februari 2012 0 komentar

The exact moment when 'education' was generally seen as a 'profit-making industry' rather than a 'service to society' is difficult to pinpoint. What can be witnessed is a process whereby the economy adjusted itself to the inevitable consequences of the vertiginous growth driven by the consumerism of the 20th century to a fundamentally different model driven by inter-human relationships, care, attachment and the cultivation of children. At some point, available individual resources were channeled away from the ownership of commodities and more towards the establishment of stable environments. However, with this shift came new kinds of inequality and social fracturing whose consequences were not realised until the second half of the 21st century.

For convenience however, we might place the beginning of the education industry with the emergence of the large multinational educorps, which started to swallow up individual universities between 2015 and 2020. There were a number of important factors that led to this process. Internet communications had increased the transparency of the operation of individual universities (this was one spin-off of the early - and rather idealistic - attempts at 'open educational resources' between 2010 and 2012). Transparency revealed similarity and opportunities for consolidation, both around educational content and around assessment processes. At the same time, transparency and accessibility presented an opportunity to academic publishers to present ready-made content solutions (which were initially offered at low cost) to individual institutions to offer their own certification services around. Sometimes institutions, uncomfortable with the loss of autonomy represented by the adoption of ready-made solutions, even commissioned publishers to produce tailor-made content (at huge cost). Little did these institutions know what they were letting themselves in for, for such moves were often followed by aggressive take-overs by the same publishers a few years later.

But the educorps would not have thrived without a market, and the market for education was a function of a more general social order. The possession of a degree was a prerequisite for finding a job. Not that anyone really believed that a degree made individuals fit for a job, but throughout the whole society, it was accepted that this was the passport for professional success. It was so embedded in the social psyche that no-one really questioned it. Yet, this mentality was relatively new. It's roots lay in the 'widening participation' movement of the late 1990s, which in the light of history may be seen to be an elaborate 'pump priming' of the educational industry to come. As more got degrees, more needed to have them. In the absence of the traditional engines of economy and employment in the form of industrial production, the education industry fitted the bill in terms of providing a form of occupation for students and teachers, where everyone would at some point in their lives either pay for or be paid by the system. By 2020, this new economic system, which might reasonably be called an 'education economy' had clearly established itself.

The believe in the efficacy of a degree generated many other social activities (which were themselves also forms of employment). For example, commissions for identifying competencies and coordinating the provision of educorps, professional bodies representing groups of workers (increasingly backed by trades unions, who also profitted from the education industry) all took part in complex (and often intractable) bureaucracies to support what amounted to a belief.

In this way, the education industry resembled not so much the previous era of industrial production and consumerism, but more the feudal economies of the middle ages, which too were dominated by belief, and where most of the economic activity gravitated around the church as the guardian of those beliefs. The whole economy worked on the principle of blind faith in the efficacy of education. The more education was produced and consumed, the more difficult it was to critique this faith.

But as history has shown us many times before, ultimately this wasn't sustainable. The fault-line lay between families and institutions. The industrialisation of education that was the principle mode of operation of the educorps could not address the deep care needs of individuals. For those individuals who came from close and loving families, this was not a problem. But for those that didn't, much of the practice of the educorps only served to increase feelings of alienation and disillusionment. Some early attempts were made to deal with this problem (which many could see many years before it became a crisis). The Family reform act of 2020 sought to bring the principles of transparency and equality to the conduct of family life just as it had done to universities so as to benefit those from more dysfunctional families. But it was fiercely resisted by the middle classes.

That the bloody riots of 2049 didn't occur sooner is perhaps surprising. But it took that long for those at the bottom of the pile to deal with the emotional damage that had been done to them and organise themselves into a force (initially a rabble) from which began to emerge some clearer distinctions about the nature of their complaint. Prior to this, the system seemed fair - but deep down it wasn't. More people had degrees, from all kinds of backgrounds. But the distribution of risks borne by individuals was not in any way equal. The emotionally damaged struggled with the increasingly complexification of daily life, finding themselves ripped-off at every point from finding the best bargains for food and travel to general taxation (and of course, the repayment of their educational loans!). The gap between themselves and the middle classes was flexibility. And only in 2045 was the direct link between individual flexibility and the environment of the education industry established. After that, a new phase was begun.