PhD Blog (dot) Net

SmartMobs describes a report from the China Digital Times on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up by KulturProjekte to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using the twitter hashtag #FOTW, Chinese ‘netizens’ have bombarded the site with calls to end State censorship of the Web.

Which I wonder (should the latter happen) would have the greater historical significance; the fall of the Beriln Wall or that of the Great Firewall of China?

I picked up on another interesting comment by Dave White during the webinar discussed in my previous post. He suggests academic reputation, status or kudos is not automatically transferable to social media environments, but has to be ‘re-earned’ through new modes of participatory engagement. If this is the case, why is it some academics (e.g., Etienne Wenger) have accrued hundreds of followers in twitter despite little or no output. This is almost akin to sitting at the feet of a prophet waiting for him to speak – not much re-earning necessary here.

Academic hierarchies (either perceived or real) are culturally and historically stratified and persistent. I suggest social media has the ability to ‘skew’ rather than nullify this stratification. True, the cultural heritage and technological infrastructure of social media lends itself to a more open and accessible academic discourse than that provided by traditional platforms, and enables greater movement and interaction between academic strata, but only up to a point.

In an entertaining webinar, Dave White of the Department for Continued Learning at Oxford University, enjoys a beer while he presents findings from Isthmus, a JISC-funded project. He describes how Marc Presky’s outmoded pre-Web 2.0 concept of digital natives and immigrants became largely interpreted in generational terms, and offers an updated concept for the social web; suggesting learners engaging in social media fall into two distinct groups – visitors and residents.

• Residents see the web as a space, in which they develop a visible social presence, creating digital profiles as a form of personal branding.
• Visitors may use the web in sophisticated ways but remain largely invisible. They see web as a toolbox to dip into and use without leaving a digital footprint.

In reality, these two groups exist on a continuum, which White subsequently maps onto a professional-private axis.

Motivation to use social media is not related to competences, age, or experience, but is rather influenced by learning ecologies. Visitors, it would seem, are goal-orientated; viewing learning as content delivery, and valuing the role of the expert. Residents see learning as a social activity, in which identity propagation plays a key role.

White suggests we are entering a postdigital era – in which tools are becoming culturally normalised – and argues the tools and applications themselves can be seen as either residential or visitor orientated.

A video based on White’s ALT-C 2009 presentation is also available.

It’s several months now since I started using twitter. It’s usefulness as a research tool became increasingly apparent as my following and followers matured. For me, the tipping point was the introduction of the integrated tweet feature in delicious. Now, nearly all my new bookmarks are automatically twittered. Whilst my delicious is long established as an effective personal management resource, I have never really engaged with the ‘social-ness’ of social bookmarking. My attempts at using delicious networking facilities – and with it the potential to extend bookmark annotation to a participatory activity – have been largely unsuccessful. Twitter’s 140 word limit restricts any annotation (or indeed, critical discourse in general) to that of the soundbite – which is why blogging remains important – yet its value in broadcasting web links in a timely and socially constructive environment is a powerful process which delicious never really capitalised on.

* I am aware that this phrase (without the !) has been adopted as a name for several mashup tools, but you just can’t think up anything these days without someone getting there first.

Howard Gardner – well-known for his multiple intelligences theory – discusses his new book, 5 Minds for the Future, in a lecture at the RSA. Shifting from the purely cognitive, towards a social policy response to globalisation and technological innovation. he argues today’s learners need to adopt to flexible, inter-disciplinary ‘outside-the-box’ thinking by cultivating five key mental capacities:

• The Disciplinary Mind
• The Synthesizing Mind
• The Creating Mind
• The Respectful Mind
• The Ethical Mind

The Disciplinary Mind

Here, Gardner refers primarily to the academic disciplines. Whilst acknowledging the necessity to achieve mastery in one discipline (which usually takes a minimum of 10 years), he stresses the need to recognise the distinctive (and essentially unnatural) ways of thinking in other major schools of thought.

The Synthesizing Mind

Quoting physicist Murray Gell-Man – who proposed the synthesizing mind will be the most important in the 21st century – Gardner suggests this is the most urgently required of the five minds, yet remains the least supported in formal education. Synthesis requires the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines into a coherent whole that is communicable to others. Gardner argues the best synthesizers are those who can cultivate and master synthesizing methods or strategies using a range of formats – maps, taxonomies, narrative etc., – which are best developed through goal-driven and feedback processes.

The Creating Mind

The capacity to identify new problems, questions and phenomena. Creativity is not just a cognitive process, but is reliant on personality traits of temperament and attitude, and on feedback from others in the field.

The Respectful Mind

The ability to empathize; to acknowledge, understand and eventually contest the views of others.

The Ethical Mind

The fulfillment of one’s professional responsibilities and moral obligations as a citizen.

Gardner acknowledges integration of the five minds is prone to tensions, and that most individuals will have a tendency towards some over others, He concludes by emphasizing the need to expose students to communities and societies in which the qualities derived from these minds are both encouraged and prevalent.

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 in an attempt to unite the world’s bloggers in posting about an issue of global importance on the same day. This year’s issue is climate change, and it falls on the day as it was revealed that the Arctic Ocean will be almost entirely free from ice within a decade.

The Catlin Arctic Survey, completed earlier this year by a team led by explorer Pen Hadow, represents the most current research into the condition of Arctic ice. Peter Wadhams of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, who analysed the data added “the summer ice cover in the Arctic will completely vanish in 20 to 30 years time. There won’t be any sea ice there at all.”

My blog is one year old today! Despite a few early teething problems and the occasional mishap, it’s been erm… a piece of cake.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed.

Norm Friesen’s recent draft essay recalls Marshall Mcluhan’s pedagogical perspective based on the effects of media on the human senses. Mcluhan argued that the sensory impression of a medium (i.e that asociated with it’s production or output) does not necessarily equate to the sensory effect (or impact on the receiver). Radio, for example has an auditory impression, yet it’s effect – through the imaginative processing of the listener – is frequently visual. In other words, media affects senses other than those with which it communicates.

In fact, Mcluhan suggested any media affects all the senses to a degree, and that an individual’s ‘sensorium’ is ideally in a state of balance or equilibrium.  The media process is described as a ‘translation’ of the senses, which can distort this equilibrium or ratio of senses by amplifying some and attenuating others. These processes not only affect the aesthaetics of the media but potentially the consciousness and rationality of the receiver, leading Mcluhan to define pedagogy as a ‘training of senses.’

As our learning content and interactions become increasingly diverse and complex, how might this perspective affect our understanding of multimodality and cognitive overload?

I had assumed there was only one model of distributed cognition; that which is largely associated with the work of Edward Hutchins and which describes how individual human knowledge can be distributed across a group or network of people, tools or environments. So I was somewhat taken aback when Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University introduced four more in her lecture “How We Think” at the University of Nottingham earlier this evening. She outlined the embodied, extended, autonomous, and appropriated perspectives alongside the embedded model to which I am familiar. She then went on to explain how these are used to varying degrees by writers, artists and designers working in the digital domain; highlighting the print-based work of authors Mark Z Danielewski (‘House of Leaves’), and Steven Hall (‘Raw Shark Texts’), the electronic and interactive texts of Deena Larsen and Steve Tomasula, and an algorithmic engine from multimedia artist Talan Memmott. She discussed the roles of narrrative and spaciality (of texts / images etc.), and the temporality of embodied reading, and concluded by referring to Lev Manovich’s notion that narrative is in direct conflict with what he terms ‘database’ (i.e. that which is relational, spatial or conceptual).

I’ve started a private war on web pages and blogs with white / pale text on black / dark backgrounds. I’m sure the temporary blindness you get from jumping back to a ‘normal’ web page (i.e. one with a light background) is not healthy. Most times I come across one, I click straight out again, no matter how good the content is. I’d like a browser that forewarns me when I’m opening such a page, or better still one that automatically inverts the colours (wouldn’t that be cool!). In the right context, ‘light-on-dark’ design can be great – particularly on visual sites with little text – but in most cases, it is used indiscriminately and unnecessarily. Unless you’re a goth, I can’t think of many reasons why you should even consider it – it’s not good design, it does not promote web accessibility, and it’s not good for my health.