Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

While looking at the list of 50 web-based story telling tools, I came across Gnomz.com, an online tool for creating simple comics. I played with it a bit and here’s the result: “So many tools, so little time” by yours truly. Excuse the occasional typo and let me know if you like it.

We’ve entered Block 2 and our subject is Virtual Communities. I read in Howard Rheingold’s introductory chapter to The Virtual Community that the first BBSs opened in the USA in 1979. My own first experience was the Greek BBS I joined around 1992 using a 9.6K modem and an analogue line. Slow as hell. But I still remember how exhilarating it was.

Whether online or not, we can’t help but join some community or other and this points to a human need for communion. It’s no surprise then that a lot of my activity this week revolved around the issue of the virtual community and around my efforts to understand what exactly constitutes a virtual community and which ingredients do you need in order to make this recipe work. I am intrigued by the idea that the sense of a community might just be a collective hallucination shared by its members and I intend to explore this in my ethnographic study. Could it be that our notion of virtual communities is just the result of auto-suggestion, of our deep-seated need to associate and belong?

At the same time, I tried to fuel my –admittedly waning– interest for Twitter by following some of the Top-100 educators that use this service (well, “top” according to this list) and decided to catalogue all my Social Media / Digital Culture / Education 2.0 / Web Studies books in Library Thing. It struck me that although the notion of Digital Culture isn’t exactly new, it is still evolving. This idea that our object of study is in a creative, almost orgasmic state of flux is one of the things I love most about this course.

Our task for the next two weeks is rather paradoxical: we are supposed to conduct an ethnographic study of an online community. Problem is, it’s very hard to find two cyberculture theorists who agree on what an online community is; In “Community and Cyberculture” (a chapter off An Introduction to CyberCultures) David Bell gives an overview of the multitude of views available for consideration. Some theorists see online communities as an expression of our need to associate and belong (a need amplified by modern disembeding, detraditionalisation and globalization), an effort to reclaim a virtual gemeinschaft. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who claim that the notion of an online community is in essence a consensual collective fantasy or hallucination, conjured specifically for sheltering its members from the contamination of pluralism found in real life. And let’s not forget those who think that the term itself suffers from increased conceptual meaninglessness, as –whether we intend to or not– we cannot fail to belong to some form of online community or other.

In light of this apparent inability to agree on what a community actually is, I thought it might be useful to collect various characteristics of an online community as proposed by various theorists in Bell’s and Rheingold’s texts.

* Bell, D. (2001) “Community and cyberculture”, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge.
* Rheingold, H. (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press.

A rather poor week for my lifestream seeing as I focused on creating my visual artefact and commenting on as many other artefacts as I could. It wouldn’t look so poor had I thought to feed my comments; my bad. I was amazed by the multitude of angles from which my fellow course members approached various aspects of digital culture in their artefacts as well as by the plethora of tools used. I think I am becoming a bit of a Web 2.0 tool junkie, as evidenced by my huge list of user ids and passwords for my various Web 2.0 accounts. I wondered briefly if registering with every single Web 2.0 tool and service and feeding all of my activity in a lifestream would automatically turn the lifestream into a Web 2.0 version of my consciousness. And then I came across the image above…

As for my artefact, it is about modality alright, but I also wanted to touch upon something that always comes up when I train translators to use computer assisted translation tools: if you want to become good at computers, you have to understand how they think; you have to understand that computers are dumb, that they speak a language devoid of meaning and consisting of just two words (0 and 1), a language that cannot describe beauty or love or fear. If you manage to see things the way a computer does, you’re half way there.

Well, not exactly a week, but a 4-day celebration of everything that’s digital, the Athens Digital Week exhibition took place in Technopolis, Athens’ old gaslight factory, a very steampunk setting in itself.

Each of the nine buildings of Technopolis had been devoted to a particular area of digital culture:

* Robotics (with the undisputable highlight being the football match between robots)

* Space Technology (featuring an inflatable planetarium)

* Gaming (LAN parties and lots of X-Box and PS3 units with the latest hot titles)

* Social Networking Tools (with lots of PCs you could use to log on to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc.)

* Open Source (where everybody a DVD full of open source software for every conceivable purpose, with versions for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, courtesy of ΕΛΛΑΚ, the Greek Open Source Software Society)

* Visual Art (where visitors could help synthesize 3D totems, courtesy of the good people of CharacterSynthesis Labs)
http://www.vimeo.com/7071156

* Modding (basically a competition of case modifications; I voted for the aquarium pc, a fully working pc submerged in a non-conductive liquid, with fish swimming around it!)

* Telecom (mobile apps, mobile games, mobile TV, pretty much everything mobile)

* Digital Music (a fully equipped studio where visitors could sample, tweak and record!)

The organizers expected a total of 40,000 visitors; demographics wise, the average visitor was in his/her late 20s/early 30s, with 2-3 times more men than women. Is digital culture more easily embraced by men than women? Is digital technology predominantly a male field?

I went on a sunny Sunday morning and the exhibition was packed with people. While visiting building after building, it occurred to me that digital culture is now not just touching our lives but symbiotically connected to them. What would we do without it? How would our lives be without the Internet, without computers or digital games or mobile phones or digital music? It’s a scary thought. I for one wouldn’t be doing this MSc and you wouldn’t be reading this blog. So here’s a different dystopia: the total absence of digital technology from our lives.

Then again, I might find the thought of a life without digital technology scary because I’m already a tech-junkie. Upon leaving I took a look at my complimentary open source DVD and remembered that proponents of cyber dystopias criticise open source software as a free fix the cyber-drug dealers are handling us in order to keep as many people as possible hooked to the Matrix.

I left the Technopolis complex and walked to Gazi Square, which was bustling with life. The cafés were full, everybody was enjoying the sun and there wasn’t a single netbook in sight. It’s clear there’s a very interesting life inside the Matrix but let’s not forget there’s an equally rewarding one outside the Matrix. So perhaps the issue of digital culture and the utopic/dystopic future it’s shaping for us is solely a matter of maintaining a balance.

Here’s what my visual artefact is all about: I wanted to create something about the modes we use to represent and perceive reality. Obviously the human eye (slide 2) is seeing a beautiful statue (slide 3) in the same way all of us can see this same image. For humans, the extraction of meaning relies heavily on sensory information; when we start doubting our senses, everything becomes slightly unreal. The “cyborg”-eye (slide 4) is “seeing” the same image by reading its source code and synthesising each and every one of its thousands of pixels (slide 5 is just a small part of the image code you’d get if you opened the image file in Notepad or a similar ASCII editor). For computers, there is no meaning; just endless strings of binary information. Semantic tagging might change this, to some effect, but reading a “Beautiful statue” tag is information processing and not sensory experience. The photomosaic eye (slide 6) is an image made of images and it’s watching the same image of a statue, only this time the image is constructed by text characters (slide 7, an example of what is called “ASCII-art”). These last two slides were meant to show that the boundaries between modes are not strict and that experiments with multimodal representation might be useful in our effort to understand how we make sense of the world. Furthermore, Gunther Kress thinks there are gains and losses in the shift from text to image; perhaps multimodal means are a way to retain the gains while minimizing the losses.

As for Andy (and anybody else) who saw the outline of a fourth eye hidden within the source code in slide 5, I’m afraid that was just the after-image of the cyborg-eye and not a stereogram!

A busy week with lots of reading (Kress, Thomas & Carpenter) as we prepared for the Skype chats. The concepts of genre boundaries, transliteracy and (multi)modality kept spinning around in my head all week long, especially with regard to their impact on near future pedagogical design. At the same time –and as evidenced by my lifestream activity– I explored various aspects of digital/cyber culture, from cybernetic posthumans and cyperspace theories (I revisited Mark Dery’s excellent book Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century) to the impact of social media on dating and the use of virtual social worlds for learning. I also applied for a Google Wave invitation (probably along with tens of thousands of other people) in order to see what sort of spin Google is about to give to social media aggregation.

All in all, a week that provided various stimuli for reflection and learning. Next week: Athens Digital Week – the biggest digital culture expo in Greece. I hope to post a report via the Lifestream.

I always approach text chat sessions with apprehension but in the end I always find the experience rewarding. Or almost always. When our Thursday session finished, I was left with a lot of questions that time didn’t allow to be asked. We discussed the crumbling barrier between academic writing and pop culture, modes of representation and multimodality, transliteracy, linearity in relation to subjectivity and more, but we left out an important question: What are the implications of all the above for teaching and learning?

Reading Kress one would think that text is a monolithic medium that is destined to die, but I beg to differ. Text can be more dynamic than what Kress claims, and a couple of examples come to mind: the multilinear “choose the story path as you go along” fiction novels of the ‘80s (a primitive version of hyper-links?) and post-modern type-setting offering multiple points of entry on a page, such as the one in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

But even if Kress is right, will tomorrow’s textbooks rely on video? Is YouTube tomorrow’s classroom? If image is open to interpretation, doesn’t this mean that all information we will be making available to our students is subjective by nature? If subjectivity cancels out authority, can formal teaching and learning take place outside the realm of authority?

And what about transliteracy, this 6th sense of the digital era that “produces a sense of the transliterated lifeworld in constant process”? Educational systems around the world are still trying to bridge the digital divide and now it seems there’s also a “literacy divide” to take into consideration. Active participation in the realm of digital culture means the ever increasing translation of ourselves into facts and figures; we are virtually (honestly, pun not intended) uploading all sorts of information about ourselves every minute, from generic contact details and tagging likes and dislikes in Facebook to complex biometric and exercise data in the case of Nike+ users (read the excellent Wired article). Does this mean, as Thomas says, that we might be moving towards the “technological extension of consciousness”? And what sort of instructional design changes does this call for?

Too many questions. Must. Stop. Before. Brain. Explodes.

* Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: new forms of texts, knowledge and learning. Computers and Composition. 22(1), 5-22.

* Thomas, S. et al (2007). Transliteracy: crossing divides. First Monday. 12(12).

Most of my activity was devoted to commenting on the short films via Twitter. Judging by the number of lifestream posts, this was a week that really worked for me reflection wise and learning wise; as Andy said in our Skype chat, it was like visiting a gallery, standing in front of paintings and eavesdropping on the comments of all the other visitors that stood close by. I reread my tweets and a couple of interesting points stood out:

a) Efforts to foresee how our cyber future will be haven’t really progressed a lot in the past few decades (at least as far as pop culture is concerned) and lack originality. Some of the key issues come straight from Philip K. Dick novels of the 60’s and Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Also, in the age of wireless communications, we probably need a more up-to-date, less stereotyped visualisation of cyberspace, be it dystopic or utopic.

b) Technology is giving robots and machines human traits (synthesized voices, anthropomorphic appearance, intelligence, existential blues etc.) and slowly turning humans into “robots”. Could it be that in all those “rise of the machines” dystopic cyber futures, we are the machines that revolt?

* this post was written while listening to “We Are the Robots” by Kraftwerk.

I don’t think I am on my way to becoming a huge Twitter fan. I’ve been twitting for 2.5 weeks and I already miss the DB.

First of all, the 140 characters limit reminds me of subtitling, where you get about 40 characters per line and if your brilliant translation doesn’t fit, well, too bad, you’ll have to come up with a new one.

The end product of a Twitter discussion is too disorganised for me. Take a look at the archive of our #mscdystopia twittorial. It contains 198 tweets but the chronological order does not necessarily guarantee a linear reading sequence*. There is no way to thread sub-discussions within a particular #hashtag discussion and if you post 3-4 tweets within a short period of time and someone replies, you can’t always be sure to which tweet s/he is referring.

As Jen points out (EASE login required), making “substantive points within the constraints of the medium” is not easy; in fact it is a daunting, almost Sisyphean task that takes more time than it should and leaves less time for reflection.

Jen also mentioned that “people were starting to link off to longer blog posts when they felt their points demanded it, which added a richness to the discussion”. I, on the other hand, see this as an indication that Twitter was already not working for them as a medium and that they needed more space to express their views.

I am more inclined to agree with Henry regarding the value of Twitter as a teaching/learning tool and I see it more as a combination of a brainstorming and a bookmarking tool. I wouldn’t necessarily do away with it but I’d certainly urge students to carry out course discussions on the DB and use Twitter for lighter discussions, URL posting and new blog posts announcements.

* In this respect, one can claim that according to Kress a twittorial archive shares quite a few common properties with an image.