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The spoken word is crucial to understanding.
The spoken word is crucial to understanding.
Fig.1. Meeting face to face to talk about e-learning – sometimes a webinar wont’t do, though more often you have no choice.
‘I don’t know what I mean until I have heard myself say it, Said Irish author and satirist Jonathan Swift
Conversation plays a crucial element of socialised learning.
Courtesy of a Google Hangout we can record and share such interactions such as in this conversation on and around ‘personal knowledge management’. Here we can both see and hear why the spoken word is so important.
Trying to understand the historical nature of this, how and when the written word, or other symbols began to impinge on the spoken word requires investigating the earliest forms of the written word and trying to extrapolate the evidence of this important oral tradition, the impact it had on society and the transition that occurred, after all, it is this transition that fascinates us today as we embrace the Internet.
Humans have been around for between 100,000 and 200,000 years. (Encyclopedia Britannica).
There are pigments and cave painting have been found that are 350,000 years old. (Barham 2013), while here are cave paintings as old as 40,000 years (New Scientist).
Stone Age man’s first forays into art were taking place at the same time as the development of more efficient hunting equipment, including tools that combined both wooden handles and stone implements. (BBC, 2012). Art and technology therefore go hand in hand – implying that the new tools of the Internet will spawn flourishing new wave of creation, which I believe to be the case. This era will be as remarkable for the development of the Web into every aspect of our lives as it will be for a epoch identifying renaissance – a new way of seeing things.
We’ve been seeking ways to communicate beyond the transience of the spoken word for millennia.
McLuhan takes us to the spoken word memorised in song and poetry (Lord, 1960 p. 3) while a contemporary writer, Viktor Mayer-Schonbeger, (2009. p. 25) also talks about how rhyme and meter facilitated remembering. McLuhan draws on 1950s scholarship on Shakespeare and asks us to understand that Lear tells us of shifting political views in the Tudor era as a consequence of a burgeoning mechanical age and the growth of print publishing. (Cruttwell, 1955) McLuhan suggests that the left-wing Machiavellianism in Lear who submits to ‘a darker purpose’ to subdivide of his kingdom is indicative of how society say itself developing at a time of change in Tudor times. Was Shakespeare clairvoyant? Did audiences hang on his words as other generations harken the thoughts of H G Wells and Karl Popper, perhaps as we do with the likes Alan de Bouton and Malcolm Gladwell?
‘The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through electrical engineering’.xii. Wrote Prof. Harry Levin to the preface of The Singer of Tales.
Was a revolution caused by the development of and use of the phonetic alphabet?
Or from the use of barter to the use of money?
Was the ‘technological revolution’ of which McLuhan speaks quoting Peter Drucker, the product of a change in society or did society change because of the ‘technological revolution’? (Drucker, 1961) Was it ever a revolution?
We need to be careful in our choice of words – a development in the way cave paintings are done may be called a ‘revolution’ but something that took thousands of years to come about is hardly that.
Similarly periods in modern history are rarely so revolutionary when we stand back and plot the diffusion of an innovation (Rogers, 2005) which Rogers defines as “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption. (Rogers, 2005. p. 12). To my thinking, ‘diffusion’ appears to be a better way to consider what has been occurring over the last few decades in relation to ‘technology enhanced communications’, the Internet and the World Wide Web. But to my ears ‘diffusion’ sounds like ‘transfusion’ or ‘infusion’ – something that melts into the fabric of our existence. If we think of society as a complex tapestry of interwoven systems then the Web is a phenomenon that has been absorbed into what already exists – this sounds like an evolving process rather than any revolution. In context of course, this is a ‘revolution’ that is only apparent as such by those who have lived through the change; just as baby boomers grew up with television and may not relate to the perspective that McLuhan gives it and those born in the last decade or so take mobile phones and the Internet as part of their reality with no sense of what came before.
Clay tablets, papyri and the printing press evolved. We are often surprised at just how long the transition took.
To use socio-political terms that evoke conflict and battle is a mistake. Neither the printing press, nor radio, nor television, nor the Internet have been ‘revolutions’ with events to spark them akin to the storming of the Bastille in 1789 or the February Revolution in Russia in 1917 – they have been evolutionary.
Are we living in ‘two forms of contrasted forms of society and experience’ as Marshall McLuhan suggested occurred in the Elizabethan Age between the typographical and the mechanical ages? Then occurred between in the 1960s between the industrial and electrical ages? ‘Rendering individualism obsolete’. (McLuhan 1962. p. 1)
Individualism requires definition. Did it come with the universal adult suffrage?
Was it bestowed on people, or is it a personality trait? Are we not all at some point alone and individual, as well as part of a family, community or wider culture and society? We are surely both a part and part of humanity at the same time?
Edward Hall (1959), tells us that ‘all man–made material things can be treated asextensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body. The Internet can therefore become and is already an extension of our minds. A diarist since 1975 I have blogged since 1999 and have put portions of the handwritten diary online too – tagging it so that it can be searched by theme and incident, often charting my progress through subjects as diverse as English Literature, British History, Geography, Anthropology and Remote Sensing from Space, Sports Coaching (swimming, water-polo and sailing). This aide memoire has a new level of sophistication when I can refer to and even read text books I had to use in my teens. It is an extension of my mind as the moments I write about are from my personal experience – there is already a record in my mind.
What is the Internet doing to society? What role has it played in the ‘Arab Spring’? McLuhan considered the work of Karl Popper on the detribalization of Greece in the ancient world). Was an oral tradition manifesting itself in the written word the cause of conflict between Athens and Sparta? McLuhan talks of ‘the Open Society’ in the era of television the way we do with the Internet. We talked about the ‘Global Village’ in the 1980s and 1990s so what do we have now? Karl Popper developed an idea that from closed societies (1965) through speech, drum and ear we came to our open societies functioning by way of abstract relations such as exchange or co–operation. – to the entire human family into a single global tribe.
The Global kitchen counter (where I work, on my feet, all day), or the global ‘desk’ if we are sharing from a workspace …
or even the ‘global pocket’ when I think of how an Open University Business School MBA student described doing an MBA using an iPad and a smartphone as a ‘university in my pocket’. You join a webinar or Google Hangout and find yourself in another person’s kitchen, study or even their bed. (Enjoying one such hangout with a group of postgraduate students of the Open University’s Masters in Open and Distance Education – MAODE – we agreed for one session to treat it as a pyjama party. Odd, but representative of the age we live in – fellow students were joining from the UK, Germany, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates). I have been part of such a group with people in New Zealand and California – with people half asleep because it is either very late at night, or very early in the morning.
McLuhan (1965. p. 7) concludes that the ‘open society’ was affected by phonetic literacy …
and is now threatened with eradication by electric media. Writing fifty years ago is it not time we re-appraised McLuhan’s work and put it in context. We need to take his thesis of its pedestal. Whilst it drew attention at the time it is wrong to suggest that what he had to say in relation to the mass media (radio and TV) if even correct then, others insight in the era of the Internet. This process of creating an open society has a far broader brief and with a far finer grain today – , the TV of the sitting room viewed by a family, is now a smart device in your pocket that goes with you to the lavatory, to bed, as you commute between work and in coffee and lunch breaks. It will soon be wearable, not only always on, but always attached as goggles, glasses, ear-piece, strap or badge.
If ‘technology extended senses’ McLuhan, 1965. p.8 then the technology we hold, pocket and wear today, are a prosthesis to our senses and to the manner in which the product of these senses is stored, labelled, interpreted, shared, re-lived, and reflected upon.
If Mercators maps and cartography altered 16th century mentality what do Google Maps and Street View do for ours?
Did the world of sound gives way to the world of vision? (McLuhan, 1965 p.19). What could we learn from anthropologists who looked at non–literate natives with literate natives, the non–literate man with the Western man.
Synchronous conversation online is bringing us back to the power and value of the spoken word – even if it can be recorded, visualised with video and transcripted to form text. The power, nuance and understanding from an interchange is clear.
REFERENCE
Barham, L (2013) From Hand to Handle: The First Industrial Revolution
Carpenter, E and H M McLuhan (19xx) ‘Explorations in communications’. Acoustic Space
Cruttwell, P (1955) The Shakespearean Moment (New York; Columbia) New York. Random House.
Hall, E.T. (1959) The Silent Langauge
Lord, A.A. (1960) The Singer of the Tales (Cambridge. M.A. Harvard University Press)
Drucker, Peter F. “The technological revolution: notes on the relationship of technology, science, and culture.” Technology and Culture 2.4 (1961): 342-351.
Mayer-Schönberger, V (2009) Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Popper, K. (1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One. Routledge (1945, reprint 2006)
Rogers, E.E. (1962) The Diffusion of Innovations.
Related articles
- Marshall McLuhan Was At Least Half Right (mayo615.com)
- The Gutenberg Galaxy – first thoughts, from the first pages (mymindbursts.com)
- Power to the people! (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
- Understanding Online Social Media – 50 years later (lindentweaks.com)
100 Novels – personally recommended
100 Books (mostly FICTION)
The non-fiction choice, Book 101, is ‘The magnificent Mrs Tennant by David Waller’.
Having kept a diary since my early teens in which I recorded what I was reading (including school text books), I have an extraordinary insight into what was being put in front of my mind. What I find remarkable is how, if courtesty of the Internet and Ebay I dig out these books how quickly my mind can pick up where it left off 30+ years ago. This ‘window’ is a short one, at this level. In a few years I abandoned the set format of the ‘Five Year Diary’ with its specific pages to complete. On the other hand, are there not blog and social media platforms that go out of their way to encourage you to reveal something of yourself through what you read, watch and do?
This list is fluid and understandably incomplete. I have not put in Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci’ for example, as I feel it would have to come with a caveat – I read it to find out what the fuss was about. I felt as if I’d been made to play a game of snakes and ladders through an alternative and ridiculous world. It may also have put me off ever believing I could compete as a commercial author if this is what it requires. My excuse might be quaified by the French Movie Director Francois Truffaut who argued that you had to read everything, especially the ‘trash mags’ – indeed, the trashier the book the easier it is to turn into a film?
What attracts us to lists?
I should create a list of the books I’ve tried to read but could not: Ulysseys, War and Peace, Enid Blyton … any other Dan Brown! (Actually, Michael Crichton, even Stephen King, can be as daft and crass).
I see too there are still a few non-fiction works in here; I’ll filter these out in due course as I build my 100 Non-Fiction list.
I am also electing to leave out books that had to be read at school, so I ought not to have Thomas Hardy, T S Elliot or Shakespeare. Nor do I include a book if all I’ve done is see the film, which is how I suspect the ‘popular’ lists compiled by the likes of the BBC are created.
As an exercise, you make a list and immediately start to change it, indeed, I’ve just thought of a very important piece of ficton I read based on recommendation; these often turn out to be the best reads, from people who know you. All my reading of Haruki Murakimi is the product of being part of a writer’s group for a while.
As I edit I will be seeking to keep books in that matter to me, that I could discuss and defend and that I’d like others to read.
Some choices are informed by a friend who read English at Oxford; others from the Guardian’s ‘Thousands Books’ you must read before you die, which, where the library could supply them I would follow, though often having to read something else by the same author (or getting distracted by something else on the shelf).
I will also extract children’s books, those I recall reading as a child, but also those I have read to my children.
Now I’m starting to sound like a bookstore 😦
1 Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
4 Foundation Series – Isaac Asimov
5 Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
6 Tides of War – Steven Pressfield
7 Gates of War – Steven Pressfield
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 Return to Arms – Ernest Hemmingway
10 Fatherland – Robert Harris
11 The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
12 Harlot’s Ghost – Norman Mailer
13 The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
14 Engelby – Sebastian Faulk
15 The Birds and other stories – Daphne Du Maurrier
16 Sunset Song – Lewis Grassick Gibbon
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Regeneration Series – Pat Barker
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Life Drawing – Pat Barker
21 One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 The Gulgag Archipelago- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
29 Vox – Nicholas Baker
30 The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
31 How the Dead Live – Will Self
32 Time Enough for Love – Robert Heinlein
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 The Foundation of Paradise – Arthur.C.Clarke
35 Enigma – Robert Harris
36 The Ghost – Robert Harris
37 Pompeii – Robert Harris
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Orlando – Virginia Woolf
40 Girl in a Coma – Douglas Coupland
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Space Trilogy series – C .S.Lewis
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
45 A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
46 The Wind-up Bird Chronicles – Haruki Murakami
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 The Time Machine – H.G.Wells
52The War of the Worlds – H.G.Wells
53 The Invisible Man – H.G.Wells
54 Tono-Bungay – H.G.Wells
55 The Last Kingdom – Bernard Cornwell
56 The Lords of the North – Bernard Cornwell
57 The Island – Victoria Hislop
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 The Lost Continent. Travels in small town America – Bill Bryson
61 Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
65 Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
66 Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
67 Sexus, Plexus & Nexus – Henry Miller
68 Quiet Days in Clichy – Henry Miller
69 The Crimson Petal and The White – Michel Faber
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Under a Glass Bell – Anais Nin
72 House of Incest – Anais Nin
73 The Diary of Anais Nin (7 volumes) – Anais Nin
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson.
75 Boy – Roald Dahl
76 The Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle
77 State of Fear – Michael Crichton
78 The Last Juror – John Grisham
79 A Painted House – John Grisham
80 The Testament – John Grisham
81 A Time to Kill – John Grisham
82 Duma Key – Stephen King
83 Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
84 Stranger in Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
85 Going Solo – Roald Dahl
86 Crash – J.G.Ballard
87 Timeline – Stephen King
88 Super-Cannes – J.G.Ballard
89 Atomised – Michel Houellbecq
90 Platform – Michel Houellbecq
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 Steve Jobs: The Authorised Biography – Walter Isaacson
93 The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 Macbeth – William Shakespeare
96 I, Claudius – Robert Graves
97 Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl.
100 Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sandak
12 metaphors visualised to aid thinking about the brilliance of blogging
Why blog?
- Old ways vs. New ways
- Isolated vs. Connected
- Visible vs. Invisible or rather
- Silent or a presence or sphere of influence
____________________________________________________________
What do you think?
- As an academic
- As an author (or wannabe writer)
- As a journalist or ‘citizen journalist’
- You have something to say
- You want to be heard
- It’s your job
_____________________________________________________________
You need the social media skills
- Reputation
- CV
- Google your name
- Interview on Skype
You want:
- To be heard
- To engage
- To influence
- To compete
_____________________________________________________________
Beware:
A) the limitations of the metaphor
B) imposing old constructs onto new such as:
- a website as a brochure
- a blog as a diary, journal or log
It is everything and anything online:
- A digital ocean
- A digital water-cycle
- An ecosystem
- Swim Lanes as a metaphor for learning design
- Overwhelming volumes of stuff
- It matters
____________________________________________________________
Distance Learning to Nearness Learning
No longer ‘broadcasting’ but ‘peer-to-peer’, ‘one-to-one’ or ‘group’ influencing
The value lies in the influence of the personal relationship
- rarely synchronous
- even more rare to be face to face
- but as a presence or voice,
- it is vital.
______________________________________________________________
Analogies make us think, express ideas and through simplification the clarify
- Ring of blogs (max, ma, min and micro)
- Ring of Social Media Activities (Linkedin, Facebook and Xing)
- Saturn’s rings and moons
A metaphor for collection of webpages, a vibrant, dense, sharp, insightful blogs with a mix of Social Media Networking activity in Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.INSERT RINGS SKETCH
The pattern that matters to me is between people.
Which I tried to bring to life with a set of chess pieces. I need to work on this, perhaps lay the relationships out on the floor of a conference hall?
Activity systems illustrate how people solve problems are innovation and generate influence through interaction
_________________________________________________________________________
Who reads, who comments who creates?
__________________________________________________________________________
Conversations between people, content fed in, discussed, shared, informing the website or informed by it.
BLOGGING
Individual or group/team enterprise
Author or contributor
(Guest writers)
Effort, patience, time …
- Listen
- Comment
- Create
WHAT TYPE OF BLOG?
‘Everything and anything goes. You cannot do it wrong. There are no mistakes. At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include, or the audience you write to. You can misspell, write ungrammatically, enter incorrect dates, exaggerate, curse, pray, write poetically, eloquently, angrily, lovingly. You can past in photographs, newspaper clippings, cancelled checks, letters, quotes, drawings, doodles, dried flowers, business cards, or labels. You can write on lined paper or blank paper, violet paper or yellow, expensive bond or newsprint.’
Tristine Rainer, ‘The New Diary’ 1976.
CREATE
______________________________________________________________________________
RECOMMEND
- Niche (person or team)
- Comprehensive (an extension of the website)
Also personal, unique even quirky … Has a point of view, voice.
N.b. Consistent … Pace can change, but at least like a fire that never goes out … Or it will.
Beating writer’s block – controlled stimulation to get you going
SOCIAL MEDIA as the ‘Water-Cooler’
Two words:
‘Be Sociable’
Why the groundswell?
And why now?
Serendipity – best behaviour for a fruitful online experience in a word
MAODE H800 wk23 Activity 2 Stepping over the edge
‘A key characteristic of these new technologies is “learning by doing” – users need to be immersed in and “play with” the affordances that these new digital environments offer, and hence over time get a sense of how they can change practice.’ Conole (20xx:403)
Whilst I may highlight and annotate, doing so on paper isn’t the easiest way to share; using a screen reader is worse because I find myself not enjoying having the obvious affordances, such as cut and paste, disabled.
I have an iPad to learn from it and to share what I discover. It is both the angle and the devil on my shoulder. Does it super-size my mind? It thrills and engages it, indulges and expands, but also risks loosing me in its labyrinthine tangles. Saved for now by a To Do list that I refresh and follow.
But then I find an idea from Conole (see above) that is key. The internet is a trip to the sea, it is somewhere to play and discover. We may require Lifeguards and laneropes but it remains largely an environment that can only be understood through engagement. You will get your face wet, you may get bitten by a crab.
To share this thinking I must go online, and cannot help myself.
For the last three months I click through Linkedin, reading and responding. For the next three it may be Stumbleupon, which through tricks and traits I find increasingly insightful, feeding me like a favourite aunt or uncle , the weirdness of the http://www.
Serendipity would be a better word for it.
I am rewarded by 25 minutes of browsing with ‘new finds’ that becomes stuff that I recommend which in turn obliges me to update my profile, might I even say ‘brand tag’ the finds as ‘mymindbursts’.
(I need two days off to take stock and write up some ten ore more blog entries. Draft I know will do, from my experience as a diarist, just enough to trigger a more expansive and reflecive entry)”.
To remind myself:
Monday 11th Livestream on Social Media Metrics from IET. Five presenters. All to write up from my notes and screengrabs, cushioned or suffocated by the ‘official’ word and slides that have since gone up.
Tuesday 12th Picklejar Social Media for HE in which Tracy Payle shares insights from a number of Universites and through activities tips my thinking upside down and shakes it out onto the conference room table. I come away enlightened and as I had wanted, more confident if mot emboldened.
Thursday 20th Faculty discussion on VLE and my experiences of The OU VLE to date. I take a look at the poster in the Post Room and discover a ‘common room’ I had been unaware of.
The History of English in Ten minutes Reviewed
The story so far:
- 250,000 on YouTube views
- 25,000 on iTunes
Picked up by News Week in the US sent ‘History of English’ higher especially as it is so easily picked up by blogs.
The view is that he hasn’t gone viral yet.
I asked via Twitter during a livestreamed conference this morning if the response in the US was important to make the series viral. I learned that:
- 70% of our user base is not in UK.
- Half of that is likely to be in the US.
Four of the videos are currently featured on the main YouTube home page under ‘Recommended by You’ and ‘Shakespeare’ is currently the top download on iTunes U.
Eight of the current Top Ten downloads on iTunes U are from the History of English collection
On News sites
The Guardian Guide/Technology
‘What We Learned on The Web This Week’
The Washington Post
Educational sites:
‘The best free cultural and educational media on the web’
Also tweeted it -and resulted in 134 retweets
The book is dead, so is the e-book, long live conversation
We’re discussing Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 only because formal academic research takes so long and nothing will change a module within 7 years of it being written.
Weller talking last week is a world beyond Weller of the MAODE, yet systems aren’t in place to adapt responsively, and contact between tutors or profs and keen students is discouraged.
We’ll get this new book this year yet it is out of date already.
We have to move on from the book as a constriction in the stream of knowledge to a living, pre-print vibrant thing.
Mind Bursts 