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The communismization of knowledge and Open Educational Resources
Fig.1. I like spirals. Thirty years ago this was just a photo. For me it is an expression of what learning looks like. (I think this is St.John’s College, Boat House – or is it Balliol?)
At the base are the undergraduates, the first years, as you climb the steps you find the second and third years, then the middle common room the MA and D.Phil students while at the top are the lecturers, senior lecturers and professors.
And when you die they raise a flag.
In 1983 (or was in 1982?) this was the epitome of ‘closed learning’ – the Oxford College boat house.
Not so much ‘dreaming spires’ as ‘dreaming spirals’.
- It was a privilege, but like many of these I’ve been either in denial or trying to shake them off for the best part of 25 years.
- ‘Je suis comme je suis, je suis faite comme ca’ (Jacques Prevert)
- And there’s no going back.
I was up at 4.03am. Back to bed at 6.15am. Then up again 20 minutes ago.
- My body was tired, my head continued to buzz.
Regarding ‘Open Learn’ what’s all this fretting about process for?
Have we all forgotten the purpose of research????
Not ‘how?’ but ‘why?’
Why? Why? Why?
We are seeking answers, not trying to construct a bridge across the English Channel with chopsticks and bendy-straws.
Not to get the process right, but to get answers to problems, to find better ways, to understand and share what is going on so that we can act, or not act on it?
Sometimes I read an academic paper and it is all about the process.
Too often I write an assignment and it has to be written to be marked – not to generate ideas. In fact, my finest few hours, a total End of Module Assignment rewrite was a disaster for a set of marks but is my theory and philosophy of what learning is. It was the culmination of months of work, years even. Expressed somewhere like the School of Communication Arts I would have had the attention of eyes and ears.
Fig.2. Submitted as the hypothesis for an End of Module Assignment the grade was catastrophic – it is of the module, but the examiners didn’t have a grid filled with the appropriate crumbs that would permit them to ‘tick the boxes’. (I did submit more than the image, 6ft high and drawn on a sheet of backing wallpaper).
Creativity doesn’t fair well in a process driven system, either in research or in marking assignments.
This isn’t an excuse regarding a grade or the need and value of process drive, guideline controlled, parameter set research, but rather a cry for some ‘free thinking’ the ‘parcours’ of mental agility and expression.
Fig.3 The cliffs below Roche de Mio, La Plagne
There is value in going off piste.
It isn’t even the democratisation of education and knowledge either, it is the Tim Berners-Lee rather than the Google approach to knowledge – i.e. give it away for free.
It is ‘communismization’ – which is a word, however horrible it sounds, I just looked it up.
This moves me onto dwelling on Creative Commons.
If the idea of openness is to give it away for free what is the reward for the author? Recognition as the author. However, I get the feeling that unless it is published some readers think they can help themselves to the ideas and words of others and claim them as their own.
There will always be theft, but as children aren’t we told that for someone to copy your ideas is a compliment?
We need to behave like the children we still are.
But does even that matter in an open society – theft of intellectual property I mean?
If the spreading of the word is all important should any of us give a fig?
If we have a roof over our heads, food and water, electricity to charge the iPad, the BBC … a health service like the NHS what more can we want?
- Better schools.
- Better roads.
- Better weather.
‘Peace on earth and good will to humankind’.
A better word needs to be found for what is meant by ‘communismization’.
Is is just ‘communization’?
- Is it simply ‘open’?!
- ‘Open’ might do.
- Free
- Open
As the air we breathe …
P.S. I worked the season in Val d’Isere in my gap year and returned a decade later and stayed in La Plagne from December to May researching a book and a couple of documentaries for Oxford Scientific Films. None saw the light of day, though after several weeks thinking about it I came down that cliff face. I made a big mistake by slowing down at the edge and nearly didn’t have enough distance to clear the rocks. I no longer have a death wish. And it wasn’t even fun. It focused the mind though. In fact, the best way to stop yourself thinking about other stuff is to take such risks. Racing Fireballs in the English Channel has its appeal – I have a tendency to end up in the spinnaker or under the hull though.
Related articles
- Web Inventor Tim Berners Lee Shares £1m Prize (news.sky.com)
- Fostering Creativity – The Use of Open Educational Resources (classroom-aid.com)
- Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher’s still not cool. (boingboing.net)
- Tim Berners-Lee: ‘You can do anything with a computer that you can imagine’ (venturebeat.com)
- Inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee says web neutrality crucial (radionz.co.nz)
- What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM (guardian.co.uk)
What’s going on in there? This apparently!
New Scientist 9 February 2013 Mind Maths by Colin Barras
Openness in Education WK1 MOOC
Get comfortable with the technology
Look around
Set up a blog if you don’t have one and use the Blog Aggregator with #H817open tag
There are badges in Cloudworks if you like this kind of thing
Think about the priorities.
This is how I start a post in my Open University Student blog which I have posted to most days since 6th February 2010. I put in bullet points and notes. I just get the thing started then add to it. My own private wiki. It isn’t a fixed thing. Months even years later I may add to it – there are no rules on blogging, no guidelines worth following. Anything goes today as it did in the 1990s.
Learning Objects: Resources for distance education worldwide
Need
Theoretical
Practice
Shared education as courses
Traditionally through text books, wall maps and charts, videos and DVDs.
Save money, improve content.
Objects and object–orientated design
Hand rolled bread or a supermarket loaf? Are you a connoisseur or simply hungry?
Open scholar – shaped by digital and networked.
Positive feedback loop between openness and creativity.
Alongside more learning at uni, lifelong and flexible learning.
I may try to write a piece that is journalistic, or more like an academic paper, or just record an event, jot down an idea. Rough rather than smooth, where other can tread and find traction, if only to correct, add to or develop the thinking here and take it somewhere esle.
After a paper and a SlideShare and generally following the conversation asynchronously as it occurs I then do the first activity. I should originate a mind map or spider map, but having dwelt on this so often over the last few years in particular I find myself recreating the same kinds of things: the water cycle, Engestroms fungi as an ecosystem, swirling ink or Catherine-wheel like fireworks all in an effort to visualise what open learning looks like.
I use Picasa Web Albums and have some 135 folders.
Each folder tops out at 1000 images. I am onto e-learning II and have 1250 images across the two – this is my e-learning world as much as 1500+ blog posts here and perhaps 2000+ in my OU student blog. When I get a good scanner and Mac in a few weeks time I will digitize some thirty years of diaries and fiction writing too – and ‘stick it out there’ so that it can compost in cyberspace rather than a lock-up garage.
For now here are a set of images that I have used in the past to describe or illustrate e-learning and for the purposes of this activity ‘Open Learning’ as a subset, or overlapping beast of e-learning, contained by the universe of ‘Learning’.
This last one from Dion Hinchcliffe
Related articles
- Openness in Education WK1 MOOC (mymindbursts.com)
- Martin Weller and the MOOCers (mymindbursts.com)
- Me, openness and education (egrommet.net)
- Olds Mooc Narratives (mymindbursts.com)
- Who Needs Harvard When There Is Always a MOOC? (clarissasblog.com)
- Lost in the clouds in an OLDS MOOC 2013 (mymindbursts.com)
Could blogging be seen as a scholarly activity?
This are me thoughts from reading:
An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging for digital scholarship
Heap & Minocha (2012),
Fig.1. Digital Scholarship with a nod to Martin Weller‘s book of the same name. (Created in 2011)
By stripping back the paper what do I learn from this paper:
- about blogging and digital scholarship
- about devising the research question(s) and method of research.
This quote from Axcel Bruns is wrong in relation to blogging.
‘Were originally more popular amongst journalism and business context’ Bruns (2007)
In fact, from my experience from 1999 onwards, journalists were highly dismissive and didn’t cotton on to blogging as a valid way to share their opinions for several years. The exception being financial journalism where breaking views on markets were fed, blog like, to subscribers,
Fig.2. An excerpt from my own early blog.
I was reading blogs in 1998, did some Dreamweaver training and if I’d got my head around FTP uploads I may have been up an away in 98 rather than 99 when I heard of Diaryland and joined the platform soon after it started.
Fig.3. An excerpt from a blog created by Claire Z Warnes in 1998
Over the next 4 to 5 years I saw a massive growth and influx of what by modern terms would have been described as journals, creative writing, fantasy, role play and social networking.
Fig.4. How I saw blogging in 1999/2000
I question why bloggers are defined by the institution they are at – the blog is more personal, like the noticeboard at someone’s desk in the bedroom or study, or a diary or journal they carry about with them, whether electronic or paper.
Fig. 5. We should stop seeing blogging in isolation – forms of ‘keeping a journa’, for whatever purposes, is as old a writing itself.
Little is ever mention of a history of keeping diaries, a writer’s journal or other kind of daily record for reflection or in scholarly circles to record the iterative process of a learning journey or a piece of research. John Evelyn was a diarist. Was he scholarly? What about Pepy’s he was keeping an historic record? For whom did Lady Anne Clifford keep a diary if not for an historic, even a legal record, of her rights to her father’s estates? (Lady Anne Clifford kept at a diary late 1500s into the 17th century).
Was Virginia Woolf using herself as the subject of an internal discussion?
What did Anais Nin learn and share about her writing as well as her personal journey, a journey that was shared with Henry Miller and that a couple of decades was taken by the filmmaker Francois Truffaut. As someone who had kept a diary since he was thirteen and had been typing it up and putting on disc for nearly a decade, the move to the web was a natural one.
- for personal reflection (e.g. Xie, Fengfeng, and Sharma 2008)
- collaborative working (e.g. McLoughlin and Lee 2008)
- developing writing skills (e.g. Warschauer 2010)
- flexible usage of blogs to suit the individual blogger’s needs, such as
- a space for reflection, to seek peer support, or both (e.g. Kerawalla et al. 2008).
I read blogs and corresponded with writers who were using the format to try out chapters of fantasy novels, to share poetry, to test webdesigns even to meet and indulge in intimate chat, role play and even cybersex. (Early blogs were the forerunners of a lot to come).
Whilst some of this activity isn’t within the parameters of ‘scholarly’ practice, certainly from a creative writing point of view self-publishing was.
From personal experience there were those exploring their personality, who were lonely, depressed or bi-polar. Most studies in English speaking countries … yet it was presumably going on elsewhere. And where does someone who is using writing in English in a blog to learn English stand in terms of being a student and a scholar?
Defining scholarship in the digital age
Boyer (1990) developed a conceptual framework which defines ‘‘scholarship’’ as a combination of teaching and research activities. In particular, he suggests four dimensions to define scholarship: discovery, integration, application and teaching.
Fig.6. Another excerpt from a blog for young writers created by Claire Z Warnes in 1998 when she was 17 herself. (I think she went off to study Computer Sciences)
The earliest bloggers played a teaching role, for example Claire Z Warnes set up a series of web pages to encourage and support young writers in 1998. She was teaching, they were exploring through reading, writing and sharing just as if they were meeting face to face in a classroom.
Boyer’s dimensions constitute an appropriate starting point for researching digital scholarship (Weller 2011).
Pearce et al. (2010) elaborated on Boyer’s (1990) model to theorise a form of digital/open scholarship, arguing that it is:
- more than just using information and communication technologies to research,
- teach and collaborate,
- embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society.
Which is exactly what Claire Z Warnes (1998) was doing, indeed, as some remaining posts that can be viewed show, it was as if she were becoming the Dean of one of the first online creative writing classes.
In relation to the research here’s the problem that needs to be addressed:
There is a lack of empirical evidence on how the openness and sharing manifested in blogging can influence academia, research and scholarship. (Minocha, p. 178. 2012)
Discussion
‘We have found that blogs seem to occupy an intermediate space among established writing forms such as peer-reviewed academic papers, newspaper articles, diaries, blurring the private public and formal informal divide ‘. (Heap and Minocha 2011).
There is a growing awareness of blogging as a writing or communicative genre in academia and research and as a new form of scholarship (e.g. Halavais 2007).
- to ensure validity of work through established forms of publishing,
- to integrate blogs so that research findings reach more readers
- to enable sharing information without time lags involved in formal publications.
The next steps in our research (according to the authors of this paper) are to validate the effectiveness of the framework (they developed) as a thinking tool about digital scholarship, and for guiding the practice of blogging in academia and research.
REFERENCE
Heap, Tania and Minocha, Shailey (2012). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging for digital scholarship. Research in Learning Technology, 20(Supp.), pp. 176–188. (Accessed 28th February 2013 http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/19195 )
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar
Related articles
- All you need to know about blogging that you can’t be bothered to research for yourself because you’re too busy blogging … (mymindbursts.com)
- Scholarly Blogging (malmsy.net)
- What my pink highlighter taught me. (dfbierbrauer.wordpress.com)
- Essay on placing academic work in the right scholarly context (insidehighered.com)
- Driving learning through blogging: Students’ perceptions of a reading journal blog assessment task. (mymindbursts.com)
- Exploring students’ understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education (mymindbursts.com)
- Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works XHTML Version (digital-scholarship.org)
- Blogging Inspiration, Where Does it Come From? (prefs.zemanta.com)
Dreams in the digital ocean
Breaking Waves and Pelican (Photo credit: Bill Gracey)
I’ve described it as a digital ocean often enough so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found myself in it. That was a couple of nights ago.
Writing to a colleague with a mixture of excitement and concern I told them why they had to take an interest in Web 2.0. I explained that there would be an impact on the Pharmaceutical industry – she works in medical market research interviewing then analysing qualitative data and writing reports. I had written the sentence, ‘do you want to get on your surf board or get washed out in the ripe tide?’ when I visualised myself back in this dream.
I can use lucid dreams deliberately to help me dwell on matters, or just for the fun of it.
I remember being able to go back into dreams having woken up age 11 or so at boarding school: Beamish Dormitory, Mowden Hall School. I may have only been 10. I was in a three musketeers sword fight, three against one. I was killed. I woke and returned in the dream behind the three attackers. In my teens I found a book on it and learnt a few tricks to ‘find’ a dream or two from the night before and then some decades later I found a list of some 27 questions I could subject myself too if I really wished to get a sense of what was going on.
Today it is usually swift and automatic; I know that the dream, its location and events, are a projection of how I feel about an issue. After a couple of months of total immersion in Web 2.0 (Open University Masters in Open & Distance Education, OLDs MOOC) reading and coursework and trying to plan a long term future in this environment I started to find myself in the water.
The beach at Mawgan Porth, Cornwall seems to the spot, probably because for the first time ever in my life I got caught in the rip last summer. Had I not taken a pull-buoy out as a precaution I would have certainly been in trouble as my stomach and back cramped. (I’m a former competitive swimmer gone to seed – its ten years since I did a triathlon). It was a shock to find myself heading down the coast and looking inland for all intense and purposes as if from a bus window that was on its way.
In the dream though, I had a sense of both nerves and excitement at being in the waves just before they broke – my preference however was to get out beyond them.
What I take from this is the need to be adequately prepared – fit for the water and armed with a surf-board (if only to sit on it), even to have something to wave to get the lifeguards’ attention. An observer, and player, beyond the waves, suggests to me research.
This is my digital landscape visualised.
The flotsam and jetsam of old practices get washed away or left on the shore. The ‘players’ creating content in e-learning agencies and departments are on this breaking edge, where the oceans makes landfall.
Related articles
- Anyone else dreaming about the ocean? (lunaticoutpost.com)
- Flotsam and Jetsam (platypiphotography.wordpress.com)
- Carl Jung: objective and subjective dreaming (immanence.net)
- I’ve long visualised digitization as creating an ocean of content. With Web 2.0 this ocean developed currents, weather systems and a water-cycle. (mymindbursts.com)
- Dream Recording (blogyourpassion.wordpress.com)
- Ocean Tides (melancholybeauty.wordpress.com)
Inter-life, Young People and Activity systems
“The Inter-Life Project: Inter-cultural Spaces for Young People to Use Creative Practices and Research to Assist with Life Changes and Transition.” (Lally and Sclater, 2012)
This paper considers the experiences of two groups of young people from quite constrasting backgrounds in their use of the online virtual world ‘Inter-life’ in which you take the name and form of an avator and role play through a game, or through reconstructions of real life. The authors, over a three year period, consider how the virtual world, mirrors, mimics, supports and even prepares the participants for the real world.
My fascination and interest is more than simply someone curious about the effectivess of such enterprises – at a web agency in 2000 these were conversations we had when and where budgets, a fraction of what was required, were made available to thinkabout, mockup and trial immersive, role-playing games in language learnign and for ‘youth awareness’ (well being, career decissions, life choices).
Fig. 1. Val Desire. My Avatar. Leaving her to be safeguard by my more able 13 year old son he decided it was perfectly OK to sell her clothes to raise some cash!!!
As a parent with two teenagers it has been a constant, tangential observation of their use of computers, games and the internet.
Born in 1996 and 1998 they have been on my knee or in front of their own screens before they could talk and have been able to touch type since they were 4/6. Until recently, the day long bable, interaction, negotiation and sharing of roles in various games has been the background to my own efforts to work online – until the age of 14 we kept computers in a communal space – a reasonable effort at parental supervision.
Is my son mentor or pupil, leader or lead in the real world as in the virtual, where he may tutor friends through battle and football scenarios, or on other occasions be the learner – with people I’ve heard, from amongst others, Germany and North America. The conversations do sometimes sound exactly as if these young people are on an exchange visit – between the ‘action’ sharing insights on language, rephrasing jokes and surely gaining insights and life-skills that they can and must apply in the real world.
Both worlds are of course ‘real’. Both are having an affect.
Were it measured activity would be recognised in the brain. Memories are being formed.
They are changed by these experiences. The mind translater or transmogrifies what goes on … even translates or superimposes virtual experiences into the real, just as one superimposes the unconscious. (I need to add a psychology degree to the others at some stage).
To understand how Activity Theory (AT) is used I personally need to see the diagrams, each separate activity system and the interaction in the ‘third generation’.
I find annotated notes at each of the nodes (see above) , or explaining problems within the activity system enlightening.
I may try and recreate the above from your paper, either on a scroll of wallpaper backing paper, or with chess pieces on a very large (door sized) piece of MDF with some marker pens. Ideally I might even want to see an Activity System in an historic form, so have five or six in an animation ‘movie’ to show that it is a ‘snap shot’, a kind of audit of a moment in a live, shifting, potentially volatile scenario. This can reveal itself in video and transcripts of meetings.
I’ve toyed with Engestrom’s imagery (OU Student Blog Post) of this all being some kind of living organism a lichen – Mycorrhizea – but assume that to be a metaphor.
Diagrams for me start to bring the model out of the abstract.
To see tools, object, subject and division of labour etc: as people, concepts, guidelines, artefacts and so on. I find case studies that use Activity Theory very readable, so enjoy ‘From Teams to Knots’ (Engestrom, 2007) for descriptions of AT used in management consultancy like scenarios. Where there is a fit I would certainly see myself using AT for the reasons given in this paper.
In H809 are currently questioning the validity of words. What about graphs, charts and diagrams?
There is often bias, even a cultural position on these. For example, I’m curious to understand ‘our’ obsession with triangle and pyramids. I’ve tried other shapes with AT, putting the triangle on its side, even visualising it in 3d … and, as Web 2.0 is doing it, deconstructing the model and adding additional points of interaction … as Web 2.0 is allowing interaction of all nodes with each other, not simply via each other. i.e. the complex is winning.
Is there a case for research to provide a substantial part of the research finding for others to work on?
Or would it have to be redacted? Or are there practical, ethical and legal reasons why such data isn’t offered? i.e. the research team say, this is what we did, this is what we found, here are our conclusions … and if you’d like to analyse all the original data yourself … here it is.
I’ve followed up one or two further links, alternatives to AT.
Bardram looks interesting and I will be reading more from the likes of Kuutti and Nardi.
I have applied AT, most recently in understanding the flow of activity between the Institute of Swimming and a large, 1,000 member, swimming club, in relation to e-learning provision/accommodation for swimmers or coaches with disabilities. (ECA for H810)
I can think of many situations where I would apply AT from a consultancy perspective in order to better understand what is going on.
- Between e-learning, web agency, L&D department of multinational and learners.
- Across the GP Clinic, Local Hospital and Regional Hospital
- In Swimming, to include the IoS and ASA, and regional organisations, large as well as small and niche swimming clubs and the various players – online tools, tutors, amateur teachers, local authorities and leisure centres.
- On a film set, or in live TV.
Having the time/budget to ‘indulge’ AT would be an theory worth using with any of the corporate L&D projects I have worked on recently.
Turn round is quick, budgets tight and whilst they want you to think about the issues they don’t want me to come along and ‘over think it’.
I liked this quote in relation to the value of and use of theories.
‘From this point of view, theories are more like a pair of dark glasses. We put them on and the world is tinted. The change brings some objects into sharper contrast, while others fade into obscurity’. Halverson (2002)
FURTHER READING
Wilks, Y (2010) (ed)Close Engagements with Artificial Companions. Volume 8. Key social, psychological, ethical and design issues. Natural Language Processing. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
REFERENCES
Bardram, J. (1998): Designing for the Dynamics of Cooperative Work Activities. Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle,WA, ACM.
Engeström.Y (2008) From Teams to Knots: Activity-theoretical studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work. Learning in doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Series Editor Emeritus. John Seely Brown.
Halverson, CA (2002), ‘Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition: Or What Does CSCW Need to DO with Theories?’,Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11, 1/2, pp. 243-267, British Library Document Supply Centre Inside Serials & Conference Proceedings, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 February 2013.
Lally, V and Sclater, M (2012). “The Inter-Life Project: Inter-cultural Spaces for Young People to Use Creative Practices and Research to Assist with Life Changes and Transition.” Research in Comparative and International Education 7, no. 4 (2012): doi:10.2304/rcie.2012.7.4.480
Related articles
- OLD MOOC 2013 – Why Activity Theory needs to be seen, not itemised, to have any chance of being understood (mymindbursts.com)
- Who would you invite to an e-learning dinner party? (mymindbursts.com)
- The Gutenberg Galaxy – first thoughts, from the first pages (mymindbursts.com)
- I Have An Affliction – Models and Relationships (interactioncultureclass.wordpress.com)
- Reddit (2ndselves.wordpress.com)
- Analyzing Computer-Mediated Communication in Professional Environments: An Activity Theory Approach (tc.eserver.org)
The Digital Brain – envisaged at the Design Museum
Fig. 1. A mash-up in Picasa of a 3D laser generated image generated at the Design Museum during their ‘Digital Crystal’ exhibition.
The image exists and is transformed by the presence of the observer in front of a Kinex device making this a one-off and an expression or interpretation of that exact moment.
‘Working with dreams’ and ‘Keeping a dream journal’ are taught creative problem solving techniques at the Open University Business School. I did B822 ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’ in 2012 (Henry et al 2010). I have the problem solving toolkit. I even got a hardback copy of VanGundy’s book on creative problem solving.
Using your unconscious isn’t difficult. Just go to bed early with a ‘work’ related book and be prepared to write it down when you stir.
I woke soon after 4.00am.
I’d nodded off between 9.30 and 11.30 so feel I’ve had my sleep.
Virtual bodies for first year medical students to work on, an automated mash-up of your ‘lifelog’ to stimulate new thinking and the traditional class, lecture and university as a hub for millions – for every student you have in a lecture hall you have 1000 online.
Making it happen is another matter.
I’m writing letters and with far greater consideration working on a topic or too for research.
“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” — C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
How to work with a dream or metaphorical image:
- Enter the dream
- Study the dream
- Become the images
- Integrate the viewpoints
- Rework the dream
Appreciating, reflecting, looking forward and emerging
REFERENCE
Glouberman, D. (1989) Life Choices and Life Changes Through Imagework, London, Unwin, pp. 232-6
Henry, J., Mayle, D., Bell, R., Carlisle, Y. Managing Problems Creatively (3rd edn) 2010. The Open University.
Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little Brown.
VanGundy, A.B. (1988) Techniques of structured problem solving (2nd edn), New York: Van Nostran Reinhold.
“Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.”
Fig.1. Steve Jobs in Isaacson (2011).
‘If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away’.
Apple haven’t created a Steve Jacobs APP to bring him back to life virtually, rather they have created a University within Apple to teach the Apple Way as a management and leadership programme akin to an MBA and run by the former Dean of Yale Business School. Joel Podolny
Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s maxim, “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” Isaacson (2011).
“Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’” Jobs said. Isaacson Isaacson (2011. p. 387).
Bell and Gemmel get it wrong on lectures. (2009. p 117-118) They make assumptions about the value or otherwise of watching a live lecture in favour of a recorded one.
Whilst this might replace sitting in a class it doesn’t mean that by replaying the video repeatedly the student will be any the wiser or even recall what has been viewed.
Viewing video is a passive exercise, ‘sit back’ rather than ‘sit forward’, Far better that the video is offered as an e-learning module, broken into a dozen pieces, each one different, each one challenging the student in different ways, obliging them to think, to construct, to research, to discuss with others, to answer questions.
I’d like to read this research, understand the way it was undertaken, and how the conclusions were drawn. I’d like to know what other research has been done in this area to get the fullest picture.
On p119 we are given the story of a 7th grade field trip in which students identify leaves of different plants in a forest and we then are asked to imaging 40 years later this 50 year old needing to call upon a digital recording of that event in order to show it to his child. His child, far preferring the psychologically better and warm lesson from her father would feel rejected if made to watch the video.
What is more, the learning, through communication isn’t purely as a result of looking at an object and hearing or being told what it is – the lesson is largely recalled for the emotional impact of delivery from the teacher – how they speech and their body language – were the enthusiastic or bored by the information they had to impart?
My biggest concern about the assumptions of Bell’s lifelogging is that if I take a self-drive car from A to B, a 45 minute journey, will I ever, if called upon be able to drive this route myself
- if I have never driven myself
- if I’ve never made the choices that would take me this way?
A lifelogging device is akin to driving on autopilot, there is no need to concentrate and without that there is no memory creation – so yes, you would need a recall device. And if you are behaving as if you are not there, why be there? Indeed, to fake it college students might hand their lifelogging devices to one student who would then attend the lecture on everyone else’s behalf.
REFERENCE
Bell, G., and Gemmel. J (2009) Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
Isaacson, Walter (2011). Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (Kindle Locations 3421-3422). Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.
Mayer-Schönberger, V (2009) Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Related articles
- Why lifelogging as total capture has less value that selective capture and recall. (mymindbursts.com)
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Digital content, like its liquid equivalent in a digital ocean, has an extraordinary ability to leak out.
Gordon Bell (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Fig.1. Gordon Bell, ready for action – lifelogging for a decade
The biggest problem with lifelogging as it is conceived of by Gordon Bell (2009) is that the camera points away from the protagonist rather than at them.
Far better the record of the person’s facial expressions as they go about their daily business as an indication of what is going on their minds – which is otherwise impossible to suggest unless a running commentary is offered. Though of course, the contribution of the running commentary, let alone the wearing of the device and its being on changes the record. This cannot therefore be an objective documentary record, as if a zoological research study. And then, what do you legally do with images you get not just outside, but inside the someone’s house.
This content is implicitly for private and singular consumption only, but it would pick up images that others could use in illicit ways.
Fig. 2. The Point, Beadnell. A memory forever for my encounters with nature on this stick of rock pointing into the North Sea.
Digital content, like its liquid equivalent in a digital ocean, has an extraordinary ability to leak out.
I don’t believe Bell’s attitudes regarding privacy are headed for extinction, but some people will choose to keep as much as possible private while others will go to great lengths to expose and disclose everything – in both situations there is for better and for worse. (Bell and Gemmel, 2009 p. 213)
If 10,000 asthmatics revealed their health related lifelog in real time how soon would researchers be able to act on this? If alcoholics wore a lifelog would their drinking stop and certainly drink-driving be over forever? What a field day psychologists would have and what they would learn about all kinds of things such as depression, bipolar or ADHD.
Bell introduces us to a Speechome where a couple have turned their house in the set of the TV show Big Brother, with cameras everywhere. (Bell and Gemmel 2006. p. 114)
Their son hasn’t had a choice – there is a ‘total record’ of his development over this period. Is it right to use your own child in this way? And can a record such as this be called a ‘corpus’ ? It isn’t a scientific study, just a CCTV record. This is where Bell’s language is, throughout, skewed in favour of the system and methodologies he is expounding. He would do far greater justice to his actions if his record where the subject of academic study, the publication of peer review and therefore the release to academics of the record he has kept. Someone will volunteer this if he won’t.
Part of our era is the sharing and connectivity of information and the way it is transformed through collective experience and comment … even trailblasing many others to do the same.
Fig. 3 Stephen Gough the bloke who refused to put any clothes on – anywhere, ever. A form of obsession.
There is a character from Scotland who insists on living his life naked.
He is consequently arrested repeatedly. It strikes me, I’m afraid that Gordon Bell might be evangelical about being naked … but will keep his clothes on. Like an omnivore selling the virtues of veganism, while eating everything under the sun. Or will Bells 10/15 year lifelog be released to researchers on his death?
‘Most of us are well along the path to outsourcing our brains to some form or e-memory’. Bell says (2009. p 119).
Should we scrutinise this for some scientific value? ‘Most of us …’ meaning?
From a study of 1000, or 2000 people.
Who, where do they live, what is their educational background?
Their access to digital kit and networks? Are they representative of the 6 billion on the planet, or just a community of Silicon Valley Computer engineers? ‘Most of us … ‘ implies that this could be the self-selecting readership of the book. Who would read it if they could empathise? ‘Well along the path’ implies that already there is a groundswell, a desired adoption of these kinds of technologies.
On what basis is this to be believed?
Are there are number of ‘diffusion of innovation’ studies current in order to measure this? What is the benchmark? What are the parameters of the path?
‘Our brains’ – by what definition either ‘ours’ or even ‘brains’.
A living organ cannot be outsourced can it? This isn’t like making a donation to a sperm bank. There is no means to store any component of our brains nor has anything more that a gallery of images or a storage space for documents yet been developed. There is no electronic memory. Even if you want to call a relational database on a hard drive an e-memory it cannot be – no amount of juggling the electronic pack of cards will turn an audio file, a still image or video into the memory. Indeed, the only possible association with a memory is when someone looks at them and a memory forms in their mind – and what is more, anyone at all, looking at or hearing or viewing these records will also form memories. i.e. they are the enablers of memory recall, or thought creation, they are a catalyst, but they can never be the memory.
Related articles
- Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People (mymindbursts.com)
- My Self-Portrait. Now I get Van Gogh. (grandmaeileensvintage.wordpress.com)
- Can Lifelogging Devices Augment Our Memories? (techonomy.com)
- Lifelogging and Self Quantization : the good and the bad (gelnior.wordpress.com)
- “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” (mymindbursts.com)
- The reality is that our digital world long ago washed over the concept of a e-memory. (mymindbursts.com)
- The memory is the mind process happening in your brain, it can never be the artefact that plays back footage of an experience. (mymindbursts.com)
The idea of a ‘world brain’ that acts as a perfect memory prosthesis to humans is not new.
Fig. 1 H G Wells
In the late 1930s, British science fiction writer H. G. Wells wrote about a “world brain” through which “the whole human memory can be [ . . . ] made accessible to every individual.” Mayer-Schönberger (2011. p. 51)
I think to keep a lifelog is to invite sharing. It’s so Web 2.0.
It may be extreme, but some will do it, just as people keep a blog, or post of a picture taken every day for a year or more. The value and fears of such ‘exposure’ on the web have been discussed since the outset. There are new ways of doing things, new degrees of intimacy.
‘Obliterating the traditional distinction between information seekers and information providers, between readers and authors, has been a much-discussed quality since the early days of the Internet’. Mayer-Schönberger (2011. p. 83)
‘By using digital memory, our thoughts, emotions, and experiences may not be lost once we pass away but remain to be used by posterity. Through them we live on, and escape being forgotten’. Mayer-Schönberger (2011. p. 91)
At a faculty level I have twice created blogs for the recently deceased.
Fig. Jack Wilson MM 1938
It was with greater sadness that I did so with my own parents with my father in 2001 and my mother in 2012. While, by recording interviews with my late grandfather I moved close to the conception of a digital expression of a person. It doesn’t take much to imagine a life substantially ‘lifelogged’ and made available in various forms – a great tutor who continues to teach, a move loved grandparent or partner to whom you may still turn …
Source: wikihow.com via Peter on Pinterest
Fig. 3. Bell and Gemmel imagines lifelogs of thousands of patients used to in epidemiological survey. (Bell and Gemmell, 2009. p. 111)
This has legs. It ties in with a need. It related to technologies being used to managed patients with chronic illnesses. It ties in to the training of clinicians too.
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- The memory is the mind process happening in your brain, it can never be the artefact that plays back footage of an experience. (mymindbursts.com)
- Bianca Bosker: In Defense Of Forgetting To Forget (huffingtonpost.com)
- The idea of gathering a substantial part of one’s life experience fascinates me, as it has often inspired others (mymindbursts.com)
Mind Bursts 