wallpaper dinding

Following on from yesterday's post, what does a logic of multiple expectations in music look like?

Katherine Hayles has a wonderful definition of reflexivity:

"Reflexivity is that moment by which that has been made to generate a system is made, by a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates." (in "How we became Posthuman", p8)

I found myself having to re-read this a couple of times intuiting the truth in it without being entirely clear on its implications. After reflection (so my 'system' has incorporated into itself the system that generated it!), I would say "spot on!" (I think...)

As with any powerful idea I encounter, I immediately take it to my laboratory where I can subject it to the most rigorous testing I know. In my case, this is musical experience.

The 'system' she is talking about is a system of 'anticipations' or 'expectations'. Anticipation is the lifeblood of music (as it is all the arts). It may be the lifeblood of everything - but I don't want to go there right now. Just concentrate on music - it's difficult enough!

The system which generates anticipations of sound must work with established norms at some level or other: no piece of music is experienced in isolation from the experience of any other. Western tonal harmony, plainchant, chromaticism, atonality, bebop and hip-hop all have established norms. Our 'virgin ears' are in the far distance behind us.

The normative horizon may provide the resources for the construction of one kind of reflexive system: anticipations may be generated against known patterns. Redundancies across swathes of repertoire help to carve out the broad expectations of a genre. The system which gives rise to that anticipatory system may also be generated. But what of individual experience here? How is it constituted?

What needs to be understood is what is 'understood' as we listen. If we feel moved to tap our feet, to sing along, or to get up and dance... what is going on there? What if we merely think of singing along - where we perhaps have found a moment to pitch a note, or we feel the phrasing and gently tense our muscles in a caressing gesture through the air? I think all of these are moments of what Boris Asavief calls 'intonation': they are moments of acknowledgment of some universal expectation. It is a moment of acknowledgement of shared biology.

When we watch classical musicians play we see this kind of 'intonation' written all over their faces. In ensemble, they act as one, breathing with the music, communicating with each what the other feels, knowing that what they feel the other feels. It is the mother knowing the baby knowing the mother.

There is my experience of the music and your experience of the music, and there is my idea of your experience of the music. (There are my anticipations and your anticipations and there is my idea of your anticipations.) We breath together when out expectations overlap: where there is mutual redundancy in our expectations. As my wonderful music professor told me once, "basically, it's all about sex!"

So, you might say, "I'm listening on my own but I still react in the same way...". But there is always more than one. The norms which shape my expectations are collective, supra-individual. I still maintain the idea of the other as I listen on my own. Music really is the food of love - particularly when we are alone!

A norm represents a multiplicity of expectations and a multiplicity of systems that generate those expectations. We may glimpse the multiplicity through the various analytical lenses through which we view music. Schenker's levels are a good example. There are moments where we know what to expect. That is when the multiplicities overlap. It is when rhythm and harmony and tonality and melody all converge in one moment - a climax or a cadence. These moments may be analytically tractable to us: particularly as we have the computing tools to analyse corpuses of music from many perspectives.

What we experience on hearing music or playing it is a regulatory process of coordinating multiplicities of expectation.

Ivan Illich has been the godfather of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). It was Illich who, in 'Deschooling Society', described the pathologies of the education system and appealed for a needs-based, self-organising approach (of 'learning webs' as he called them in 1972) as opposed to the institutionalising, dissempowering status-quo. But his argument was really another salvo in a lifelong commitment to a reawakening of human dignity in the modern world. Illich's Catholicism never left him.

I've written many times about what Illich would make of current developments of the internet and education (he died in 2002) and our discourse on the Personal Learning Environment. The deep issue about the PLE, which is continually forgotten as e-learning academics get carried away with utopian visions which are in the end little more than apologetics for the status quo, is the human condition in a world of technology. I wrote about this here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10494820701772652#.UpKYQNLIZCc

What we have seen in the discourse around the PLE is a mess and I wonder what Illich would make of it. I've been partly guilty here: woolly schemes and bandwaggons have rolled in wizzing people off to e-learning utopia via Facebook and Twitter - in many ways, much more troubling and less accountable institutions than your local University!

I think Illich would have been the last person to have sanctioned this cross between hippie laissez-faire education, technological determinism and personal ambition on the part of the academics that promoted it. Indeed, he said it quite explicitly:

"Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries."

The third sentence sticks out: what is a MOOC if it is not a "proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom)"?

This passage also reveals what really drove Illich - the "heightening of the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his  living into one of learning, sharing and caring" This doesn't sound to me like an 'online community'. It is a real, everyday community. Illich here is quite close to other Catholic thinkers - particularly Jean Vanier and his Communite de l'Arche (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Vanier)

I've been recently talking to education academics at a University in the US who are running a thriving programme of 'Service Learning' among their middle class students. Service Learning is hard work - but it is important and and can be highly rewarding. The experiences of students on this programme are often transformative. The students entering the programme have an expectation of success wired into them by the expectations of their parents. The Service Learning situation challenges presuppositions: whilst the students may embark on the programme with ambitions to change the world (that the communities should be so lucky to have them!) the reality quickly hits them. Many good people have gone before them, trying to make a difference - and these new students will join them in trying to make a difference: engaging in the hard business of trying to do good things in difficult circumstances; acting out of care and compassion, not zeal and ambition.

This is what Illich meant by learning webs. It isn't about technology. It's about the interface between social needs and learning needs. This is not to deny technology a role, for technology forms an ever increasing part of the social fabric. However, the pathologies of technology must be properly understood. Of the pathologies one which I've been thinking most about is "the labour of learning is not to be saved".

What I mean by this is that as technologists we are tempted to reduce repetition of things  through the use of technology. So we video things, we put up web pages, etc. Sometimes these are appropriate things to do. But when they really work, they turn one form of labour into another; sometimes they increase rather than 'save' labour. For example, I video feedback to my students regularly. I do this because I think students will take more time to watch my videos than they will to read some comment at the bottom of their work. It takes me longer to do this, but I feel it is more meaningful to me and to them. Technology here isn't saving labour, it's increasing it. For their part, students will listen and play through the video more carefully. They will listen to things more than once, where they might have chosen to ignore a written comment. In short, their labour has increased too!

If, as a teacher working with a child who can't do their tables, I have to go through the basics over and over again, that repetition, effort and time really matters. If the child gets bored with one approach, I can find different ways to do the same thing - even ways involving technology (I did this with my daughter a few years ago - hilarious! http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2010/10/crazy-tables.html) - but there is no taking away from carefully constructed forms of repetition. (Actually, isn't most of education is some kind of varied repetition?)

What I'm saying is that it is the routine which does the work in education: the routine of practice, commitment and perseverance. There are no magic bullets: magic bullets take away the routine in the name of 'efficiency'. The education system, which Illich tagetted in his critique, believes it is a magic bullet (our politicians and managers want to make it ever more efficient!) We now mistakenly believe technology is a magic bullet. We need to reconnect with the day-to-day routine of life. We need to get 'stuck in' and become part of it. We need our learners to do this too. That is what 'learning webs' are really about. Service Learning isn't a magic bullet. But it may be part of the project that Illich was looking for.

I'm having some powerful conversations at the moment. These are the conversations which open doors, not just to new external opportunities (although this can happen) but also which open doors on new areas of the imagination (which leads to new opportunities). A powerful conversation is where one can feel free to utter something which one has long thought about but not felt able to say; and having uttered it, it is recognised, validated and expanded  by the person one has the conversation with. You don't need to have read hundreds of books to have a powerful conversation. In fact it helps not to (Michel de Montaigne advised 'Read a lot, forget most of what you read and be slow-witted'). But what you do need is the deep honesty that only comes from the emptying of ego. It may be your expression of some deeply traumatic event: a bereavement or a divorce. It's that delving into the deepest recesses of the self where the conversations can start. Events like death and divorce can be the most powerful spurs to intellectual development - not reading books or attending lectures. They invite that unequivocal emptiness which is the necessary ingredient to the powerful conversations: powerful conversations happen between empty people.

The academics I admire most are the ones with whom I have the most powerful conversations. I am deeply grateful for these friendships. They exhibit profound intellectual generosity, which even given the pressures on their time, still make room for those who want to struggle to be honest. These people are rare - even in powerful institutions. Many academics (even 'successful' or (worse) 'powerful' ones) really ought to know better. The mean spirit of Richard Dawkins has set a very bad example. There's vast variation in ways academics position others in conversation.

Powerful institutions, on the whole, set out to gather together great academics. They are the window dressing that lures in students. But academia is not about celebrity; it is truth and honesty. Managers of institutions of all sizes like to sell institutions on the basis of celebrity because it seems to work: it gives them something to brag about; the students want to come to be near the stars. But this gloss is really a shadow world. What matters to those who matter is truth. And the way to truth is powerful conversations.

This is really why we have Universities. They are places to talk and to think. Their functional role in running courses and awarding degrees is related to thinking: the best teaching is also a process of emptying and empathy. But what if you just want to have the powerful conversation and not the degree? This can be a problem because the degree (at whatever level) is the means by which institutions earn their money. So No degree = no money = no conversation? Well, that's not true in my experience. In the end, the discourse rules, not the institution. Any institution which tries to disrupt discursive flow risks ridicule (although there may be some cases where institutions have stepped in to distort discursive representations - particularly in health care: things can get nasty)

Thinking about powerful conversations is important when we think about efforts to create open education. There are many wonderful things on YouTube. The emptying of an academic is quite visible on video. Karen Armstrong's talk on "Compassion" at TED a few years ago is one of the best examples of this. But  YouTube isn't a conversation, and its power will depend on the state of the individual watching it. Emptying is much less easy to convey in writing, although not impossible. The most effective way of self-emptying is to invite people into an activity: a discursive response, a game, group creativity, etc. This can be done through technology; although it seems qualitatively different if its done in real-time rather than asynchronously. But with things like MOOCs, real-time is tricky and asynchronous appears to lead to homogeneity and depersonalisation. However, I do think that it is possible to create the conditions for people to have powerful conversations in an online environment. But we need to have experiments where we explicitly try to do this.

Currently online education provision (not just MOOCs) positions learners as consumers of knowledge. This may be because the most natural affordance of internet technologies is the provision of information. But the internet can do so much more in terms of coordinating mass-scale activities, rendering virtual worlds (even in VR), delivering real-time data (audio, video, text), and so on. Yet pedagogical designs are largely unambitious. Instead of focusing on pedagogical innovation and exploration, they focus on academic celebrity (come and hear Prof. X's lecture of data analytics... blah... blah...) or institutional status (you too can study at Stanford for FREE!).

The problem is that MOOCs are seen not as a pedagogical and technological experiment. They have got off the ground as a marketing opportunity in an increasingly marketised education system. Only when Universities realise that their real function is not the selling of courses but the enabling of powerful conversations will there be a genuinely exploratory and experimental effort to create those opportunities for everyone online. 

I find myself in a curious paradoxical situation - more about that in a minute. But first, I'm thinking we're currently in an "it's all been done" moment in technology: we've got the internet! social software! big data! mobile apps!... what more could we want? It's been done. Let's settle down and get used to it!

But we've been here so many times before, as I pointed out here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2013/10/towards-2023-education-rediscovered.html. It's the '1992' moment: then people said: Hey, we've got Windows! and Macs! and MS Office!... what more could we need? Patterns repeat. But they repeat in a way that whatever is next is going to be completely unlike whatever was 'next' last time.

And what's next?? I would call it 'emotional computing', 'the feeling computer', 'aesthetic computing', and so on. It's a moment of convergence between the arts and the sciences: where the information systems by which we come to know the world are indistinguishable for the world we wish to come to know. Practically, this means a different kind of symbolic encoding of what we expect. Currently, expectations are encoded in transactions online in the form of simple transactions like "I order a book from Amazon... the book arrives in a couple of days". Financial transactions have always worked like this "I promise to pay the bearer...". However, in most human contact these kind of simplistic transactions are in the minority. Trust builds between individuals because of deep reflexive knowledge about each other. Trust breaks down where expectations are not met.

Individuals to whom we are attached are people we know deeply: the baby knows the mother and the mother knows the baby knowing the mother. The extent to which our own identity is constituted by these networks of attachment which themselves are the product of deep reflexive processes is something which an individualistic psychology alone cannot fathom. It's the patterns of communication which constitute individuals. It is this realisation that will drive a new kind of symbolic encoding of expectations, and a new kind of technology.

The basic issue is that increasingly rich pictures of communications are available for analysis. It's as if, without really knowing it, we are all walking around with MRI scanners examining the context of our brains. Except that the neuroscientists may have needed look no further than the deep analysis of communications to understand the many mysteries of the psyche (MRI pictures are in fact a kind of communication - although I think visualised bowel movements rather than brains would tell us much more!). There is enough that is revealed through communicative action which can tell us about structures of expectations in individuals. There is enough that is revealed that tells us about departures from norms of behaviour which will be associated with particular feelings. The mass data that is collected about everyone gives those who have the tools to manipulate it the means to understand (and predict!) the behaviour of individuals in ways which we never imagined would be possible.

Think about it. Imagine that every character I type on this blog is fed to Google. Not only each word and phrase, but the rhythm of my typing, the pause between words as I think, the corrections I make, and so on. How much does that reveal about me? Well, imagine that the database of every single other post I have made is similarly recorded in miniscule detail and can be compared and contrasted in nanoseconds in immediate response to what I do. It can see patterns where I have done things before; it can see where I deviate from something before. Most importantly, it can see not the unique and imaginative things I might do (occasionally!) but gets a grasp of the routine and mundane things. Those are the things that really matter, because they are the ground upon which innovation arises.

Could a machine work out how to respond to stimulate my creativity? Could a machine work out novelties that I might have missed? Could it imagine what I'm thinking? Could it read my mind? Or could it appear to read my mind?

When the first AI pioneers imagined 'intelligent machines' they were countered by sensible people who argued that a brain isn't a computer, that the Cartesian view which privileged thinking over being was short-sighted and based on what C.S. Lewis called "Men with empty chests". Computers were communication machines as Winograd and Flores, and many others, have insisted. And indeed they were right. But here's the twist. The AI pioneers were indeed wrong to think of brains as computers, but the communication-oriented people were wrong to think that communications were not constitutive of what we assumed to be "brains". They may have been the proper AI specialists!

Of course, right now we're not there yet. Things are still slow. But they will get quicker. And quicker. And faster is different, never only just faster.

So what's the paradox?? Well, how do we research and develop this technology? Answer: you go to a University. How does a University organise itself for the conduct of this research? Answer: through rigid institutional structures, evaluations, PhD programmes, etc. Why does the institution do this? Answer: to keep itself economically viable in its provision of educational products. Why can't/won't it deploy the radical technologies and practices it researches to make the research process flexible and adaptable? Answer: because it fears radical change to its operations will threaten its viability.

So once again, here's the future of technology. And you will find it everywhere in the next 5 years I reckon. Except (not for the first time) in your University!

The question I ask myself is "How the hell do we fix this?"

In the 1960s an optimistic spirit of exploration in the "white heat of technology" caught the imagination of British architects as they sought to imagine how we might live in the future.  One of the most iconic results of this was the collective of British architects who went by the name of "Archigram". Archigram created visually impressive designs of cities of the future... from cities that 'walk':
To cities which do not contain buildings as such, but are simply frameworks within which buildings can be 'plugged in' as needed.

A few years ago, I was part of a project which sought to redesign learning in the context of the Personal Learning Environment. We used Alexander's technique to identify the 'services' through patterns that would be required and could be reprovisioned through technology. My colleague Scott Wilson created this schematic diagram of the ways in which the different services that would meet the needs of learners might relate to each other:
Thinking about Archigram has made me think about the ways in which our thinking operated when we did this work. The JISC PLE project was one of the best E-learning projects I worked on, but looking back I think our thinking was blinkered in a number of ways. Although we tried to represent as rich a picture as we could about 'personal learning', our focus was ultimately on an analysis of the affordances of emerging Service Oriented Archicture. Using this as a starting point, we then tried to imagine how the experience of learning might map onto these services. The mapping was done with reference to another analytical framework: Beer's Viable System Model and (to a lesser extent) to Heidegger's phenomenology. Not that there was anything inherently wrong with this, but the approaches were all fundamentally 'analytical' in orientation. There was little deep consideration of the phenomenology of teaching and learning (which Heidegger, for all his talk about 'denken', seemed strangely blind to) or the real experiences that real learners have as they struggle to get on with their lives. To be fair to us, I don't think we then had the intellectual equipment to do it, and neither did anyone else.

But now the situation might be different. It turned out that the deep experience of learners revealed flaws in our analytical enthusiasm. I had another JISC project called SPLICE which was able to look at this. But by the time SPLICE was coming to an end, so was e-learning as a well-funded government research effort: it was now mainstream and government funding was increasingly deemed unnecessary. The initial enthusiasm for analysis and then the kick-back from understanding real learners' experiences felt like a circular journey. But the whole thing was part of a three-dimensional dynamic, not two. The 'collapse' of funding for e-learning was part of the picture too.

This third element was a kind of critical-rationalising movement which examined the impasse between architects dreams and real experience and concluded that no progress could be made through government funding and maybe institutions should just get on with it themselves. The credit crunch was a perfect excuse for shaking things up. But this critical movement was the shallowest of all of them. Where its role ought to have been to steer a politically responsible research effort, it took a back seat while the money was easy, and when the money wasn't there, it simply backed away arguing the market competition (MOOCs anyone?) would deliver the goods.

The need for a properly functioning critical voice in e-learning is essential. The critic is the one that looks deeper at the motivations of both those whose passion is for designing the future world and determining its analytical components and those concerned with individual experiences. So often the passion for analytic schemes stems from childhood, with particular personality types drawn to energetic schemes which are ultimately doomed (not just the geeks). The critic also sees those whose focus is not on realising analytical schemas but understanding experience deeply. The critic knows that this too is important, but whilst its vaguaries are hard to operationalise, reflection on its outcomes are valuable in avoiding analytical excess.

The critic asks "why are we doing this?", "who will lose out?", "what's missing?", "what do we want?", "who is we?". It is the role of government (and possibly institutional management) to do this - but it is a professional job. It is not something that dilettante managers ought to engage in - they are more likely to belong to the naive operationalism of the analysts! The most important aspect of the critic is that the critic is aware of the way that they think and understands the ways (and the causes of the ways) that others think.

We are not short of clever analytical ways of thinking about the world. In some parts of the world (particularly the US) there are many fantastically energetic reimaginings of the future going on (what's Google working on?) One of the most interesting developments in this work is how it is shedding new light on human experience, reflexivity and emotion (I'm in Duke university at the moment where they are taking this development very seriously indeed). These things are coming and they are very important. But when they come there will be losers as well as winners. There are 'elephants in the room' everywhere - the biggest one being the education system itself. Only the critic can see these, and (I think Alain Badiou is right here) if we have a single need for development in intellectual life, it is the growing-up of a coherent politically-oriented critique which can connect with the most exciting analytical developments and the depth of phenomenology so as to challenge each and to continually challenge itself.

There appears to be general consensus that experiences within the Virtual Reality of the Oculus Rift are something new. The thing that stood out for me was the fact that this was a technologically-enhanced experience which felt relaxed, unhurried, stress-free - it genuinely felt like 'dwelling' - that key category that Heidegger created as the antithesis of technology. I wonder if he would have agreed with me. For Heidegger, there is something poetic about dwelling. And there is something more poetic about the VR experience in the Rift than with any computer technology I've experienced.

What is going on? Can we analyse it?

I think the simple fact is that the VR conforms to expectations about experience of reality in ways that conventional technology doesn't. When we move our heads, we expect our perspective on the world to change. In the Rift, it does. Because of this, it may present us with a way of understanding our ordinary experience of reality.

One way of approaching an analysis is to consider the aspects of experience which are not represented. The Rift is a different kind of experience in many ways, but one obvious way is the fact that you cannot see your own hands. It may seem like a small point, but up to now, all our technology has worked on the basis of hand-eye coordination. I've recently been reading David Sudnow's "The ways of the hand" which is a phenomenological account of jazz piano playing (quite brilliant) and a reminder that looking at one's hands and coordinating what they are doing with awareness of the tools they engage with has been a fundamental characteristic of all tool usage up to this point. Not being able to see one's hands may be a big deal.

In VR, the neck and the eyes are the most important things. These movements we do not associate with technologies in the real world at all. We instead associate them with exploration, discovery, wonder, gaze, etc. So the combination of neck movements and visual stimulation in VR which conforms to the expectations of real-world neck movements may stimulate similar emotions. This is interesting because hand-eye coordination is associated with goal-oriented technological practice; neck-eye coordination is associated with exploration. And then there is the sound environment too. This begins to explain some aspects of my experiences in the Rift.

But then, what of expectations? What of reflexivity as I explore my virtual world? Is there something worth looking at in Gibson's affordance theory, because he put particular emphasis on the movements of the neck and body in ascertaining affordances of objects? What information is flowing as we look around us? How are our expectations changed?

The question here is "What shapes expectations?" The answer, I think, is redundancies. It's a useful answer because redundancies are measurable. The technique for analysing expectations in the Oculus Rift is very similar to the technique for analysing the experiences of music. Redundancies occur at a variety of levels of experience. These levels of experience are not 'modes' (as "multimodal" experience) - but they are effectively different levels of expectation. In music, we might have an expectation of an overall tonality, whilst also entertaining expectations of particular motifs, phrasing or particular rhythms. These are not on the same level, but they co-exist, and are mutually dependent. What matters in musical experience is where levels of redundancy shift over each other. This shifting over each other is key to understanding experience in the Rift.

Imagine a physical action which is repeated such as moving one's neck left. This action produces a set of visual stimulations which also change as the neck moves. These are overlapping redundancies. If I move towards an object and repeat my neck movement, the pattern of redundancies shifts because my perspective shifts: some things will be the same and some things will be different. It may be that meaningful information will exist in the overlapping of redundancies from one moment to the next because one level of experience gains access to the constraints operating on another level of experience.

Overlapping redundancies constrain expectations because they represent things which we do not notice but are causal on the experience of the things we do notice. Wallpaper is a classic example of a redundancy which frames experience. I suspect that when two redundancies overlap, each redundancy becomes noticeable to the other layer: in other words, what was absent becomes present, or at least some new 'presence' arises through the awareness of what each layer of experience misses. New presences drive new ideas and new action. In this way, we can characterise within Virtual Worlds as "intrinsic motivation" as a dynamic of "presencing" absence at different levels of experience.

But that is all theory. What is measurable are the patterns of redundancy. And we can compare the overlapping of the patterns of redundancy with the experiences of people within the Rift. To begin with, that would be a useful exercise as a way of investigating whether the idea of overlapping redundancies at different levels of experience maps on to the emotional experiences of VR.