I go online and change into a handful of pixels, digitised letters and graphics, frayed codes of scripting stored in multiple accounts of googles, twitters, facebooks and alike. I go online and interact with others, often people I haven’t met, other professionals, hobbyists, experts, encapsulated similarly in dozens of usernames and passwords. Sometimes I catch myself doubting their existence; just last week I thought the whole IDEL course is a hoax – my tutor turns up at the real-time session as a dragon, my coursemates look like cartoon characters and we examine if in our mind’s eye we see each other as real people glued to computer screens or avies sprawled on comfy cushions round the virtual bonfire (I see the latter although an awareness of people behind the avies lingers at the back of my head). Does that look like a serious post-grad course at a reputable educational institution? This question comes up every so often ... ... also in conversations with others – my partner has just come in and over my shoulder glimpsed the heading from the text I am reading - ‘Fragmented bodies’ (Bayne, 2010: 9). Thoughts challenging my sanity seem to be forming in the recesses of his mind ...

Ghostliness and death (Are my online personae ghosts of myself or is it me who becomes spectralised due to the online multiplication of my identities [*]? Whose karma is to die? Who is to remain immortal? k-punk is talking about ‘fragility of analogue’ and ‘infinite replicability of digital’), animation, automation and insanity (The way my av moves, gently sways to sides or hangs her head when left ‘unattended’; the mechanised loop of the deadly dance with a sword I got trapped into when exploring the Macbeth project in SL [*]; even the little restless pencils in the skype chat which signify somebody is in the process of writing a response or the mad emoticon frenzy in the first chat make me shudder at the thought that my online self is live, animate, independent which seems like a scary prospect ), the double (self looking glass, threatening and enticing at the same time, see the picture of The Uncanny Valley by Graham Caldwell at G Fine Art by vincentgallegos) and lastly the intellectual uncertainty which arises when the real and unreal start penetrating each other, blending, thus erasing the ‘exit’ and ‘entry’ points, making one rhizomate into a complex identity construct residing in a number of temporally and spatially synchronous digital spaces beyond the frail material body with its constraints due to time and location. This might be further complicated when such complex ontological constructs come into interaction on the web (see another photo from the same source as above).

This blurring of the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar,  material and digital, human and automatised is possible due to the fact that the sign, being it an avatar or an online nick, no longer merely represents the user’s selfhood but uncannily becomes the signified, that is the person behind it (Kristeva 1991 in Bayne 2008:202). This ontological shift understandably might lead to ‘a crisis of the natural’, where nature stands for ‘one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of the reality and the world’ (Royle 2003 in Bayne 2008).

This sounds troublesome if not hysterical and insane, potentially creating havoc in any reputable institution: destabilised classrooms full of disoriented students and tutors being a blow to the established order of universities. Bayne (2010:6) states that the issue can be approached in two ways. She briefly mentions the possibility of quickly bridging the gap by neutralising the uncanniness and refers to an example of children embracing a digital text in order to absorb it into the repertoire of familiar learning practices (Carrington 2005 in Bayne 2010:6). However, you wouldn’t try to neutralise something that is positive, important or enriching, would you? To me this seemingly pedagogically sound move looks like trying to make the technology as transparent as possible so that it does not distract from the ‘real’ purpose of learning which is acquisition of a particular skill, literacy in this case; doesn’t it resemble Dreyfus and his acquisition model? It seems like technology is pushed to an subservient position, subordinate, purely instrumental, something that Cousin (2005) talks about at length. It smells a bit of universities introducing technology in form of various virtual platforms but transferring the traditional methods of instruction to normalise the novelty and minimise any related disquietude either on part of the students or professors.

Bayne (2010), however, also comes up with a different proposition, according to which digitisation and virtualisation of learning might be perceived in positive terms, as a learning experience that truly carries transformative and generative potential, at least in certain educational contexts. The destabilisation, not only in terms of time and space but also identity, presence and nature, as mentioned at the beginning, can prove fertile in a sense that the student has to reconstruct themselves in the relation to notions of time and space – ‘distance modes re-position the ‘thereness’ of learners and teachers rendering us in a sense ghost-like, spectres (Bayne, 2010: 7) ‘hovering between presence and absence and making established uncertainties vacillitate (Davis 2005: 376 in Bayne, 2010: 7). As to the related ‘ontological stammering’ (Lather 1998 in Meyer & Land, 2005: 379), the student learns how to deal with anxiety and uncertainty on a very cognitively abstract level, either by resolving the arising conflicts or accepting them, in any case learning to ‘live purposefully with them’ (Bayne, 2008: 203). Such negotiations require that the student (and the teacher too) engages deeply with the concepts, reflecting on the changes their selfhood undergoes alongside and how these transformations might be reflected in academic practice, which is what high-quality and ‘genuine’ education is (‘must be’ in Bayne’s words) about. Since ontological transformation might be an ultimate learning experience as one learner stressed in her weblog – ‘Philosophically, I think finding ourselves or who we really are, is the ultimate learning experience’ (in Bayne, 2008:201) - digital pedagogies could be perceived as a ‘privileged mode [..] in which [..] new dispositions toward teaching and toward knowledge might be explored and delighted in’ (Bayne 2010: 11).

This phantomenological approach would position itself in the direct opposition to Dreyfus’ model of education and his insistence that face-to-face settings are the only ones where learning can flourish. As he dismisses the online as the educationally rich and sound environment, in his view, the online could be at most the second best. In light of Bayne’s understanding, this does not have to be the case, at least in certain context with certain students (and my learning on the IDEL course illustrates that for me very well).

It is also interesting to examine how this approach relate to Gee’s theory of three identities where the projective identity is an interplay between the actual and virtual selfs. The gap has to be bridged so that the learner feels enticed to acquire new skills and knowledge (more can be found here). I think this could be perceived in two ways. If the relationship between the online and actual identities is imagined as ‘linked separation’ with links being loose threads simply mapping one’s online wander where the distinctions between nodes are the prerequisite for learning as sources of anxiety and ferment, Bayne’s approach would challenge Gee’s game-based learning. However, the links being the blurred boundaries between real and unreal and thus instigating ferment, then these ‘no man’s lands’ could be compared to the projective identity. It would be this stage in between, the liminal space from Meyer and Land (2005) where by reflecting on ‘me AS a learner’, ‘me AS a human being’, ‘me AS part of the world’, ‘me AS part of the virtuality’ we learn deeply and undergo transformative and irreversible changes.

POST SCRIPTUM

To finish off, a few loosely related thoughts:

I thought I was a forward-thinking and very pro-technology professional. However, I used to believe that tech is a wonderful TOOL  that can be used to enhance learning. Since pedagogy is most important, the tool should be as transparent as possible, flattened, sitting quiet and doing what is supposed to do. I think I have made it clear on a few occasions here and on the wiki (for example here) that pedagogy comes first. Having read the few texts: Bayne (2008 and 2010), Cousin (2005) as well as Meyer and Land (2005), I have understood that this is not the only and certainly not the best way of fostering e-learning and learning in general. Strangely making things simpler doesn’t accelerate learning while complexity could prove more successful in this respect (although the learner might end up learning other things than the course designer has planned). On this course, or rather an anti-course, on several occasions I have experienced a truly empowering  feeling I am touching on fundamental issues  of what is learning and what is being, things that perhaps do not feature among the course aims but essentially provide deep satisfaction even though I still don’t know who/what I am! I haven’t been to the library once, or a lecture or a seminar, I haven’t even participated in the discussions but I am aware of the shift happening.

Now, how do I translate that into my professional context, what do I do to help my learners undergo similar transformation? How do I open up liminal spaces for them in which they open up as learners and human beings. Are they ready for that? Are they willing to do so?

I’ve attended an online panel discussion recently where a few mobile learning providers were showcasing fancy apps helping learn vocab and grammar, drill pronunciation and check comprehension. It all looked fab but what it boiled down to was stripping down the language and compartmentalising it into digestible bitesizes of language, making it as simple as possible. But is learning the language about acquiring little packages of knowledge or is it rather about expressing oneself, expressing who you are, what you are, where you are coming from, where you’re heading, and other questions starting with ‘why’ and ‘how’? One of the gurus in the field threw in a thought-provoking comment: We're not being transformative, we're being reactive, we react in a trad way to what the responses were varied, including head nodding but also grumbles of disagreement. His comment resonates with me, especially now when I am a learner myself. The question how still arises though ...

For some time now I was thinking of a cross-cultural storytelling project in which students of one nationality recreate a story, a folk tale, a national legend (it would be nice if the story somehow reflected their country realia, national character, beliefs, etc) as a hypertext on a wiki.  This is then retold by a group of a different nationality, taking the theme and tweaking it, mashing it up so that it fits a different set of realia (spatially or temporally). That was inspired by Cannongate book series in which writers around the world research a selected myth and retell it. What I hope the project would give the students is increased awareness of their origins as well as another culture and naturally means of creative expression of their own and national identity and nationality. Could that be the first step?

Starcraft is a computer game where you can choose to play as one of 3 races; Terran, Protoss, or Zerg. It’s a strategy game where you build an economy, and create an army. Only the Terran race is human, the Zerg are strange disgusting insect like creatures, and the Protoss are some kind of cybernetic humanoid alien race. I noticed when I first started playing this game that when playing as the Terran (Human) race, I was subconsciously much more concerned for the wellbeing of my troops than I was when playing the other 2 alien races.

When choosing to play as a Zerg or Protoss, I would play much more aggressively without having much concern for the troops I was sending into battle. As Terran on the other hand I was much more careful with the army, and tried not to lose any units. Even though it is just a computer game, I was empathising with the human characters as though they were real! As I got immersed in each game, I had some kind of personal connection with the human soldiers I was controlling on the battle field.

This is a feeling that many beginners have when playing games such as Starcraft. Statistically most beginners choose to learn to play with the Terran race first when they are first introduced to this game:

“There is a path most novice players take when selecting their race. They start with Terran, simply because the Terrans are us, humans.”

http://starcraftlictor.com/terran-protoss-or-zerg-which-race-to-choose/

Not only this, but when playing with beginners that prefer the Terran race, I notice how reluctant they are to send their troops into battle, preferring very defensive postures, and crawling forward very slowly as if loosing too many troops would result in Vietnam or Iraq like outrage back home ! (This is a recipe for disaster by the way because the winners in games such as these are almost always aggressive attack minded players).   

So what makes a computer game like Starcraft so immersing? Why did I and others reach a level where we would have empathy with the digital human characters?

There are many appealing factors in games like these, such as problem solving (balancing the size of the economy with the size of the army, choosing the right army units in response to what the enemy is doing, choosing the correct battle strategies, etc.), team play (It is a collaborative multiplayer game ), speed and multitasking (Also known as APM=Actions Per Minute, the ability to manage an economy, scout the enemy, and lead an army simultaneously as quickly as possible using a mouse and a keyboard).

All these factors lead to a game where the player is fully immersed in the game. My vision is wholly fixated by the fast paced action on screen, my hearing is consumed by the sounds coming through my headphones, and my brain is fully engaged working hard to synchronise with allies, and to reach the ultimate objective; beating the other team. My nervous system is essentially swamped, and the real outside world is blocked out. My body is still physically located at my desk at home, but my mind’s presence is now elsewhere, it is in the game.

Presence, Black and White?

Lombard, M. and Ditton, T. (1997) defined presence as “the perceptual illusion of nonmediation”. They go on to say that presence “does not occur in degrees but either does or does not occur at any instant during media use; The subjective feeling that a medium or media-use experience produces a greater or lesser sense of presence is attributable to there being a greater or lesser number of instants during the experience in which the illusion of nonmediation occurs”

I’m no authority on the question of presence but I’m not sure I agree with this statement. Because I do believe that presence can occur in degrees. I feel that the degree to which my mind is present somewhere depends on how swamped my nervous system is by that location. If I switch of the volume in Starcraft and listen to some music while playing a game, doesn’t that mean that I am present in the game to a lesser degree than I would be if I had the volume switched on?

I used to feel anxious during military computer games because I wanted to avoid the conflict and violence involved. But I’ve learnt to differentiate between reality and computer games. Therefore can’t I argue that the degree to which I am present in these games has changed? It is very similar in a way to how some people hate watching horror films. Some are easily fooled by their senses, and others are better at maintaining a perspective on what is real and what is not (This is assuming of course that people who like horror movies aren’t at heart aggressive people who in a lawless society would likely be evil criminals, but that is an entirely different subject …)

Therefore my presence within this game and others has fluctuated as my experience has changed. I no longer concentrate so hard so that I don’t make mistakes, and can easily talk to someone in the room as I play a game. When I first passed my driving test for fear of causing an accident, I preferred not to speak when driving, I was fully immersed in the driving experience, my mind was totally present on the road, but as my experience increased, much of my actions have moved to the reflexive parts of the brain, and I can now listen to music and talk while driving without any difficulty.

As I became more experienced in Starcraft, and after analysing my own play, I gradually learnt to lose the empathy I had for my virtual human troops. If anything I’ve become more aggressive with the Terrans than the other races because the graphics are so good, and blood splattered everywhere looks so cool ….. I’m joking; I lower the graphics so I don’t have to see any gory details.

So interestingly, perhaps, as we grow accustomed to different online and offline environments, and the more experienced we become with their workings, the less present we need to be there. The work load on the brain is at its greatest at the beginning when the brain is learning about the new experience, but as the brain gradually becomes used to the new environment, it learns to function sufficiently within the environment without the need to be fully transported to it or immersed in it.  

An example of a starcraft game:

References:  

Lombard, M. and Ditton, T. (1997). At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. JCMC 3 (2).   

The etymology of the word ‘uncanny’ could be linked to the phrase ‘beyond one’s ken’, where ‘ken’ comes from ‘can’, meaning ‘know how to’. Thus the uncanny is not only creepy and supernatural as it is commonly believed but also or even more so ‘unfamiliar’ (Freud’s ‘unheimliche’ – not homely), thus stretching one’s cognitive comfort zone and even crossing one’s perceptive horizons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny).

Freud’s uncanny takes us to the personal archaeological site where one excavates wanted and unwanted splinters of our past selves, which can have a disruptive effect on our sense of identity. The technological and digital take the uncanny further into the realm of the rhizomatic web where the splinters, ‘remnants of animistic mental activity’ change into ‘bodies scattered online’ (Bayne, 2010:9), traces of our online selves and half-selves (after all, to what extent can we express our full self assuming that the self is not a homogenous whole entity but a multifaceted construct?) imprinted whenever we sign up for a particular online service, in vein with Bayne (2008: 201): ‘If one wants to explore virtuality (I take the word in its broader meaning here, social web in general not only virtual worlds like Second Life), it does not seem appropriate to commit oneself to being one thing’.

So this is me online:

First, how MIT perceives me (any time I attempt to use the application the result is different, which makes me question the reliability of the visualisation but nevertheless I like it and find it strangely comforting to see how I am being reduced to a colourful bar code) can be seen here.

Now my very private take on the notion of online presence, inspired by readings about hauntology and the uncanny (Bayne, 2008 and 2010) can be found here.

These various selves shown in the vids and discussed by Bayne in her papers can of course be overlapping but also discrepant. And it is not only about us operating in different domains, let’s say professional and private (e.g. in the recent SL tutorial you admitted to having several accounts and switching between the avatars depending on the nature of your visit to the inworld; similarly, I’m thinking of having two facebook accounts, one private and another professional) but also within these domains we uncover various facets of our self (‘uncover’ not necessarily being the opposite of ‘conceal’ but rather ‘accentuate’ and ‘emphasise’ as well as ‘embellish’ and ‘distort’ – ‘Online identity constructs contain both truth and artifice, they are fractured, confused reflection of a person, never wholly unreal but never wholly real, a seeming half truth’ (Bayne, 2010: 9). The constant self-multiplication might create a kind of dissonance or ‘a crisis of the natural’, where nature stands for ‘one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of the reality and the world’ (Royle 2003 in Bayne 2008; Bayne, 2010). I’d like to focus on the selfhood here, leaving the rest of ‘ontological stammering’ (Meyer and Land, 2005) as well the consequences of such doubts and crises for education to be dissected in a separate post (Entry 19).

As said earlier, the duplicates of myself get strewn across the online landscape. What is worth considering is that they might prove hard to control or obliterate. You, or rather yous, join a powerful network and, as Bayne (2010: 9) puts it, ‘gain a kind of independence as nodes of commentary, connection and appropriation by others into new networks and new configurations’. For instance, even if you delete your facebook account, parts of your identity might be still living in other users’ accounts. Your online identity is subject to constant fluctuation, fragmentation and dissemination, no matter how persistent or non-persistent your actual presence is. In fact, your absence/inactivity can paradoxically lead to your presence too (Bayne, 2010:9, talks about ‘embodied absence’ ). To illustrate this, recently while googling my name I discovered I am 126436th in the ranking of tweetwasters, a dubious honour (and it unnerved me at first to see how my ‘I’ is meddled with) but to me indicative of how little control we have over our online footprints (or clickprints?). Once I took part in a webinar on online tutoring and in one of the slides, to my total surprise I saw a picture of my desk (the presenter was from the company I had taken a course with earlier), another time on some blog written by a person who doesn’t know me I came across my name, used in association with a particular ELT approach (at the time I was putting together an online workshop on it but I was keeping that knowledge to myself so obviously somebody else must have dropped my name in that context). Even though on these two occasions I wasn’t subjected to any ridicule, I felt a bit of discomfort, possibly because these ‘mes’ although seemingly just mere representations of the real me somehow gained importance of their own. It’s like being face-to-face with your clone, your lookalike, which somehow can replace you, obliterate you, make you redundant,  something the uncanny both in Freud’s and Bayne’s writing is related to. This way coming across our online doppelganger in the least expected moment might disrupt  our sense of being, integrity (in a sense that all these smithereens of id which constitute ‘me’ somehow hang together), wholeness, sovereignty, simultaneously, however, inducing enticing attraction, also raising questions to what extent I am and can be responsible for that ‘other being’ and to what extent I (can/should) associate myself with it, especially in a situation when our identity becomes an object/commodity and as such undergoes mashing-up, repurposing and unfortunately sometimes misuse.

As said in the section ‘SL_Selfhood’ of my wiki, there is something symbiotic about the relationship with the online ‘mes’, especially at the beginning when we need to ‘feed’ the avatar in SL or other online representations, this connection potentially being subverted later. To disclose or not disclose information and which information to disclose is a dilemma we all face when getting re-embodied online. To what extent can I reveal myself and in what ways can and do these glimpses of my soul (used metaphorically) live or even outlive me online? In order to express myself on this blog, I’ve made a couple of videos, e.g. one on liminal spaces, which aim to present my take on the academic issues covered on the course. The take is quite personal and perhaps simplistic (not to mention my amateur attempts at drawing, animation, photo-, video- and sound-processing – I have no pretence to be an expert in this matter and actually the constraints my lack of skills in this respect imposes on me are quite frustrating) – I’ve had to make the vids public to be able to embed them in my blog, a decision that was not easy. Would others, random strangers, who come across my youtube channel show ‘thumbs up’, ridicule or just shrug their shoulders? Yes, the decision to come out and publish something and thus leave a tangible trace has been disquieting but also exhilarating. I am trying to reason with myself in order to suppress the anxiety – there are conduct codes online, that if even the harshest criticism won’t matter because the critic doesn’t know me (actual me), doesn’t have access to the full me, my motives, my intentions so how would their opinion be objective (on the other hand, I am aware of those motives and intentions so I am ‘clean’ in front of myself). Then there is also a simplistic argument that I wouldn’t poke fun at anybody so perhaps I won’t be laughed at either. Perhaps naively, I have a notion of the community as complying with the conventions, giving assistance to members in maintaining their face in the event of a blunder. So maybe you are right, Clara, suggesting that we are trying to bridge the gap between the uncanny and the familiarity by filling it in with our notions of what we are and what the community is (the question however is whether such a gap exists?).

Now, this is yet again my very personal interpretation of the uncanny – my postings are very self-oriented, which I find partly therapeutic (as I have my little epiphanies on the way helping me understand myself better)but partly stifling. Being a bit of pragmatist too, I would like to see how I could apply this in a wider educational context – on to the next posting then!

 This is a follow up on the earlier discussion initiated by the analysis of the emotions that occur during my participation or lack thereof in the course online spaces and activities. Having compared the comfort zone (blog and my wiki) and a ‘danger’ zone (skype, discussion board, Second Life) – see my comment to entry seven - I have noticed that while entering the latter spaces I am trying to transfer my real life habits, which might prevent me from embracing the potential of the  online diversity. Being a perfectionist that hurts a lot so I suffer greatly, caught in the fit of emotions as illustrated in the past post. It seems I need to change then, at least when it comes down to my online presence (at the moment I am not unhappy about my passivity in face-to-face contexts and besides the course focus is on the online).

The problems I experience while communicating and socialising online resulting from my persistence to be ‘real’ (superreal, one could say) could be likened to the threshold concept. Meyer and Land (2005) stipulate the existence of such ‘gateways’ in certain disciplines and give examples of entropy from physics or depreciation from accounting so I hope I am not violating their theory by trying to link it to something seemingly trivial and describe the experiences as transformative, integrative, irreversible and often troublesome. ‘Threshold’ can be imagined as a point, opening up a space where new understanding of the subject matter and, what is more, oneself might (or might not) be gained. This stage between not knowing and knowing, not understanding and understanding, this ‘the betwixt and between’ (Meyer & Land, 2005: 375-376) has been named by the two researchers a ‘liminal space’ (my attempt to visually grapple with the concept below).

So what might happen when you enter a liminal space?

However, the transition is often problematic and troubling and often involves ‘humbling’. This happens because in the process similarly to the snake skin the old identity gets shed (illustrated somewhat in my ‘autoethnography’ where I stripped myself in front of myself). The process does not happen overnight and there might be a great deal of going back and forth, representing the state of internal struggle and uncertainty, which, however, is pedagogically, intellectually and ontologically fertile. Meyer and Land (2005) claim it might be impossible to achieve the new transformed state. Getting stuck in the liminal space might mean the incapability of overcoming epistemological obstacles but does not exclude ontological ferment. ‘Praxis of stuck places [which] might tolerate discrepancies, repetitions, hesitations, uncertainties, always beginning again’ and refuses ‘the privileging of containment over excess, thought over affect, structure over speed, linear causality over complexity, intention over aggregate capabilities’ (2005:379).

So, a liminal place is actually somewhere ‘nice’ to get stuck in. Meyer and Land describe it as less predictable and fluid. I see it as limitless silkiness and smoothness, yet perpetually pulsating and undulating, provoking things to happen. It’s about the process, the wander during which you reach out and branch out if need be in order to explore the unknown and the uncertain, the affective, the contextual and the local. While doing so, other threshold concepts might emerge, opening up more liminal spaces.

 From http://www.eastonhome.co.uk/Photoshop/flag/silk.jpg

I’ve spent the last two weeks exploring how using web 2.0 technologies (wikis) for writing, affects our understanding of ways in which academic writing can change. Pbworks is the tool that we used to enrich a wiki document entitled: “History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward” by David Silver. I also created my own experimentation playground, and very creatively gave it the title: “Ellis’s Play Ground”!

One of the questions that arose while we edited and enhanced David Silver’s blog was whether we could go beyond adding links, references, pictures,  etc., and change what the original author wrote.

I came, I read, I re-wrote:

When an author publishes an article on a collaborative site, doesn’t that imply that the author expects people to add to and alter the content? Also we must remember that the author didn’t actually place his article on the wiki. It was originally a blog that was transferred by us onto the wiki, and therefore Mr David Silver has no real say in how the article progresses from this point forward.

I can see two points to consider here, first the legality and morality of taking someone else’s work and modifying it to suit ones needs, and who decides at what point the text becomes modified substantially enough that it no longer belongs to the original author? The second point is that it certainly seems to be more interesting and useful for any reader to be able to take a piece of text, and decide its meaning for him or herself. In “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes (1977), he argues:

"To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”

Also interesting as was pointed out during board discussions is Reader Response Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism

“Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance.”

“each reader creates his or her own…”: What if a number of people are collaborating on a piece of text?, with each having differing opinions regarding its meaning? How can we fit a number of different interpretations into a single piece of text?  Is it not best to leave collaborative works to articles of science and fact, and leave pieces of opinion and art to individuals so that personal expression can come out? Or is there a way for the ideas of individuals to shine through a compromise created by committee?  

The good old days:

Editing hypertext documents reminded me of those adventure books (Choose your own adventure) I read as a teenager. At the end of each page the reader is given a number of options on how the story can progress, and based on the choice is instructed to go to a particular page in order to continue the story. The entire adventure including all options for progression is contained within the pages of one book, and I can imagine those “choices” as a very early form of hyperlinking long before the internet started to make its mark in business and education.

Using wiki’s, and hyperlinking, stories can also be created intentionally this way. Or even non-intentionally where any online article together with the documents that it links to can be considered to be one story (as long as the hypertexts link to content that is relevant to the general narrative of the original text).

But current technology also gives us the ability to introduce ideas, and empower the reader and the writer in ways which weren’t possible in the “good old days”. Some interesting ideas and examples of what can be done include Editing Stretchfilm by Anders Fagerjord which offers an insight into Landow’s view of how hypertext can be used, enabling readers to select from the content of an article depending on their own needs.

The Mystery web essay is an example of the adventure stories mentioned earlier where the reader can go in different directions depending on chosen hyperlinks. Also going back to the question of author ownership, and reader-response theory, while exploring this essay we notice that the author follows different ideas depending on the paths chosen. Some paths are circular leading back to previous pages. The content is non-deterministic, vague, with statements, media and images that can be interpreted in different ways.

I enjoy mystery, and found this essay fun and interesting to explore. Perhaps the author’s intention is for different endless perspectives to coexist, stretching the imagination of the reader to offer his or her own interpretations of the content.   

But going back to “History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward” I found it difficult to modify the text itself. It didn’t seem right to do so, and my thinking was that if I have my own ideas and perspectives then I should offer them in a different wiki or blog. I’m sure some would disagree with that, and feel it is ok to modify the content of someone else’s work even if it is opinion, but regardless, web 2.0 offers so many more ways to enrich and enhance works such as these by adding images, hyperlinks, video’s, comments, etc.

Sometimes just a picture, and a few colours, can make an article more appealing to read than one long slab of text.

References:

Roland Barthes,(1977) The Death of the Author: 

http://www.deathoftheauthor.com/

David Silver, (2008): History, Hope, and Afterward:

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2143/1950

Landow, G (2006) Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) extracts: 278-291 and 302-309.

While reading works by authors in the area of social media, hypertext writing and academic literacies, I have come across words, and terms not used very often in mainstream English. I will present some of these terms here while reflecting on questions that academic institutions and education as a whole need to address while incorporating new collaborative digital technology.

Hypertext and social media

Inchoate: Landlow comments that well organised, and well formulated websites (Not inchoate), websites such as “The Victorian Web”, permit students to find what they need quickly. These websites for example provide students with a local site map that makes it easy for them to find the information they need. 

Impinge: Well-designed hypertext encourages students to make connections among learning material they encounter. This creates the habit of discovering how various causes have an impact on single phenomenon or event. Developing this habit is major component of critical thinking.

Inculcate: Hypertext, has the ability to teach and instil the novice student with the unique culture of a particular discipline. This is because hypertext “provides a means of experiencing the way a subject expert makes connections and formulates inquiries”. Also students have the opportunity to follow their curiosities as far as they wish.

Phonocentrism:  One of the factors that can negatively affect group discussion is the social influence of the more dominant group members on the rest of the group.  This social influence can inhibit the quantity of original and creative ideas generated by the group as a whole.  Hypertext can be a tool for additional forms of discussion that can address this problem. Thus using hypertext, team members are able to contribute ideas in writing if they find group discussions inhibiting. As Landlow states, Hypertext can shift the balance of creative debate from speaking to writing.

Autodidact: Hypertext provides the individualistic self-taught learner with the perfect tool for exploring a particular area of study. It enables the learner to move between some familiar and some not so familiar related areas of study, and in the process instilling the important habit of making connections, an essential habit for many professions.

Corollary: Texts in a hypertext environment exist in relation to other documents on the system in a way that printed document and books cannot. From this Landow deduces that any document electronically linked to any other document collaborates with it. This connective quality of hypertext environments creates a medium that encourages collaboration.

Docuverse:  Hypertext places each document in the virtual presence of all previously created document and their creators. This transforms individual documents in to a collective that could have been produced by several people working collaboratively and at the same time.

Incorporating technology into educational practice:

Sophomores: Students in their educational experiences will usually study different courses at the same time such as maths, biology, business studies, etc. And there is nothing usually that connects the various knowledge they gain from these different courses. This contributes to the sense of a fragmented education as students have a series of unrelated educational experiences when they read different works.

Dissonance:

“A central dilemma that schools must address in the consideration of e-safety and Web 2.0 activity is how they can support children to engage in productive and creative social learning while protecting them from undue harm”. (Sharples et al. 2009, p. 70)

Clark et al. (2009) introduce the term Digital Dissonance. The authors use the term to describe the tension related to whether learners can use popular Web 2.0 social technologies in formal school settings.

Epistemology: Ravenscroft reflects on the research needed for evaluating how Web 2.0 technology as social utilities, affect knowledge production.  He points to the need for conceptualization of learning that follows more social, participative, and collaborative understanding of knowledge, and how it is acquired. He goes on to ask, what are the new pedagogical frameworks for implementing social software for learning? What if we rethink learning to account for this new online social way of acquiring knowledge?

This view is mirrored in (Hemmi, Bayne, Land, 2009):

Anachronistic:

“Their tendency is to attempt to render the online learning space familiar through a conservative dependence on pre-digital metaphors, signs and practices which are increasingly anachronistic as digital modes gain in social and cultural significance.”

Instead of trying to force-fit these new exciting ways of acquiring knowledge, interactivity, and collaboration into old pedagogical frameworks, why not change and expand our pedagogical frameworks? And why not change the way we do academic learning to exploit these powerful emerging social software, and new online social habits? 

References:

Clark W., Logan K., Luckin R., Mee A. & Oliver M. (2009) Beyond Web 2.0: mapping the technology landscapes of young learners. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 25, 56–69.

A. Hemmi, S. Bayne and R. Land (2009). The appropriation and repurposing of social technologies in higher education (pages 19–30)

Landow, G (2006) Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) extracts: 278-291 and 302-309.

Landow, G (2006) Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) extracts: 278-291 and 302-309.

Sharples M., Graber R., Harrison C. & Logan K. (2009) E-safety and Web 2.0 for children aged 11–16. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 25, 70–84.

A version of "Hypertext Into Practice" can be found on Ellis's Play Ground at the Holyroodpark wiki. 

According to the Educause publication, 7 things you should know about personal learning environments, PLEs:

• comprise the tools, communities, and services (not necessarily restricted to the online) that constitute the individual platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals
• and thus illustrate how individuals approach the task of learning
• because of what has been said above, PLSs are learner-centric
• as they put the learner in charge of their own learning processes
• and also promote authentic learning by incorporating expert feedback into learning activities and resource
• PLEs allow students to draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organise and thus become an extension of the historical model of individual research
• this way they require students to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organise and grow their learning environments (this is the stage I am at and which is illustrated by my iGoogle pages)
• but, what is more important, PLEs constitute an environment where ideas are generated, problems queried, and content created and where feedback becomes the combined output of peers, colleagues, and friends as well as experts and critics
• what I have learnt about PLEs and what I consider to be a task for me now is that my PLE should integrate the resources that include the work and voice of others as readily as a my own critical reflection and scholarly work

I hope the image below reflects what my ePLE looks like now and what changes I am planning to introduce to address the fact that I should move from just listening in and reading to actively contributing to the communities, sharing and collaborating. That would be in vein of learning by doing and teaching others in order to maximise your own learning.

You can see a PDF version here. 

A visual evaluation of my wiki migration experiment, its benefits and drawbacks plus a host of questions:

A link to a live map can be found here. There are notes explaining the features of the map (an icon next to the central bubble of the mindmap).

How I acquired a virtual life in Second Life.

Click on the image below to read on about

• my personal reflections and impressions 
• more academic implications in the areas of selfhood, co-presence and implications for education

This is what Clara wrote in her mid-course feedback:

* Reflection - Does the weblog demonstrate sustained reflection on the course

content and its application for the participant’s professional practice?

You are impressively demonstrating sustained reflection. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing how you relate the course materials and environments to your own learning experiences, practice and areas of interest.

* Regularity -  Are entries into the weblog frequent and substantial enough to

demonstrate such sustained reflection? Are they spread throughout the duration of the course?

Your postings are regular and substantial demonstrating the sustained reflection required for the weblog.

* Knowledge and understanding - Does the weblog demonstrate a good understanding of the technologies and ideas introduced?  Does it show a critical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of a range of technologies and pedagogical approaches?

You are meeting this criterion very well.  I’m left in no doubt as to the intelligent, thoughtful engagement with the concepts and technologies and am impressed with the way you draw readings together to create your own frame for understanding.  I have enjoyed your exploration of ideas beyond the strict focus on the course materials – since this course is about exploring digital environments in relation to learning, I see these as ‘variations on a theme’ rather than being off-track.  :)  I would encourage you to delve into the course readings a little more, but having seeing where you are going with this in the ‘Prenksyan polemics’ part of your wiki, I have no doubt you are on track for this.

* Communication style and multimodality -  Is the style of the weblog vivid and personal? Are the ideas discussed well-structured and well-argued? Does it make creative use of the weblog form via inclusion of image, media and linkage?

The weblog (and now wiki!) are clearly expressing a vivid and engaging personal style.  The play with creativity and visuality makes for a thought-provoking as well as aesthetically pleasing ‘read’.  I can only continue to encourage you in this vein and look forward to seeing what you will do next!  :)