I’ve been going on about the power of dialogic reflection for some time now, without really thinking it through properly. In my university teaching I’ve been trying to develop learning spaces that promote reflection. There’s this workon connected learning spaces that attempts to make sense of how dialogue in virtual spaces can help (I like the idea of learning ecosystems), and this article is quite helpful in this respect. But Rupert Wegerif’s piece in the current edition of BERJ is very helpful, both in reminding me of what has influenced my own thinking, and also in doing a really good job of separating out the ideas of Vygotsky from those of Bakhtin.... and in so doing bringing back Bakhtin.
With the virtual world phenomenon I keep on coming back to the same question: how does online avatar-based interaction change our sense of who we are and how we relate to others? And that’s essentially a question about identity. The more I think about this, the less comfortable I feel with both the Giddens idea of the ongoing narrative of the self and the Goffman thing about identity performance. Both imply an essential self and neither really account for how identity is differently structured and formed (re-formed) in contextualised interactions. In this passage, from Issue 100 of Granta, Salman Rushdie seems to capture how identity as a discursive practice is subject to social and historical forces: As Popeye the Sailor Man so succinctly put it, I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam. These days, however, we have a slipperier, more fragmented sense of what character actually is. We argue a good deal about how much of our behaviour is externally determined and how much comes from within. We are by no means certain of the existence of a soul, and we know that we are very different people in different circumstances: we are one way with our families and another way in the workplace. We are more fluid and metamorphic than our forefathers believed they were; we know that within the ‘I’ there is a bustling crowd of different ‘I’s jostling for space, coming to the fore, being pushed back again, growing, shrinking, even disappearing entirely, while new ‘I’s grow. We can change, in the course of a life, so profoundly that we no longer recognise our younger selves [...]the nature of the self and the extent to which it determines our actions are more problematic subjects than they used to be. (Heraclitus - Rushdie in: Granta Winter 2007)
Brown Eyes 1 Technology has a key role to play in the history of music performance, recording and distribution. Within our own lifetime we have seen a massive expansion of radio-based music broadcasting (including the rather troubled emergence of the DAB format), rapid changes in music storage (from vinyl and reel-to-reel tape and on to eight-track, audio cassettes, mini disks, CDs and MP3 files) and changes in how live music is produced. All these changes have contributed to new ways of hearing music, and have transformed the role that music plays in our lives. Listening to our favourite tunes on an MP3 player or mobile phone allows us to take our music with us and this compares rather unfavourably to the idea of lugging a carrier-bag full of vinyl LPs around with us to share with our friends! It's an aspect of networked individualism - our music is delivered to us regardless of place, it has become highly portable. And so I think the way we use music in our everyday lives has had a sort of backwash effect on how we view live performance.
at SP 4 I’ve been trying to compile a useful list of virtual worlds for children. I hear a total of 150 mentioned, but I’ve found it tricky to get past 10. This blog gives a listing(for youth, boomers, retired and beyond (that’s probably the dwellers in the great virtual world in the sky!). So in no particular order here is stardoll, and then moshimonsters, and then goaudition, and then nicktropolis, and clubpenguin (of course!). Then there’s buildabear, and mytinyplanet (ah!), not to mention chamberofchat, and whyville. Of course we won’t forget webkinz or weeworld or the rather different gaiaonline. And if you’re thinking that I’ve just done this to make up for not linking in my last two posts, you’re wrong. I guess the really useful thing would be to include a commentary on each virtual world. Well, I hope to do that later, with a little help from my friends!
refreshments It was great to get some fan mail from Islamabad, today! But more seriously it illustrates the power and potential of blogging. I quote, i have had great fun reading your vedana site on a weekly basis - as not much educational talk happens in staffrooms! and being overseas we dont have as much exposure to courses and training, so people plod on doing their own work and not discussing or scrutinising the education they provide....and so on. Thank you!
Roses In writing about Flickr, I have become more aware of its sophisticated design. Decisions about levels of participation are placed firmly in the hands of the user. At the most basic entry level, you can simply use Flickr as a private online archive of photographs. There is no pressure or obligation to do any more than this. However, images that are public on a photostream soon begin to attract some interest, particularly if they are seen as interesting by others and even more so if they are carefully titled and tagged. Others in the Flickr community may leave a comment or invite you to be a contact. But again you are free to accept or decline as you build up your list of contacts. There is no pushing or poking. You are in control of your level of particpation from the very onset. That's what distinguishes Flickr as a quality social networking site.
Yes it is (I think) Copyright laws are supposed to protect property and income. But with the increasing number of ways that you can copy and disseminate material in new media they’re becoming harder and harder to enforce. Is the media future unregulated, or should it be regulated by users rather than owners? Project YouTomb monitors alleged copyright infringement on YouTube by looking at the videos that get taken down. I think it's interesting that YouTube owners are not as concerned about appropriacy and ethics as they are about getting sued (see this post). Not surprising, really. If you want to read more about YouTomb read the Henry Jenkins commentary.
five and twenty two I was pleased to see that all the presentations from the Children in Virtual Worlds conference at the University of Westminster are now up – that’s a useful resource that I'll be referring to I'm sure. I’ve also been looking for a good virtual world review site, but since the demise of this one , not updated since 2006, there’s nothing. However, I did come across this site that provides a useful overview of references to virtual worlds in the Byron Report. And, of course, as one does I also found a report that I missed this from last August’s Guardian!
clematis again At the faculty research day we did an interdisciplinary symposium on 'Identity and personal development: the place of electronically-mediated relationships in academic and social life' . Four key themes came out of our various studies of SNS and professional dialogue. They were the salience of identity - particularly the idea of performativity and the person in dialogue; the interweaving of different kinds of online and online space; issues of trust and emotional closeness in the development of social networks; and the different kinds of learning (learning about oneself, each other, about stuff and about academic/ professional knowledge) that can take place.
ukulele renaissance Writing about photosharing is helping me to think more clearly about the Flickr experience. One thing that I realise is that I've built up a lot of knowledge about how Flickr works over a period of time. It has been an incremental approach in which I've learnt just what I need to know when I need to know it. Another thing I've realised is that the intelligent way in which it is structured leaves you in control of your own level of use. It's a very different experience to entering the somewhat anarchic world of YouTube. And finally, when you compare Flickr photosharing with blogging, you realise the difference in social interaction. Flickr allows for comments, notes, tagging and mail - so there are multiple options. By way of contrast, blogs will only display comments (and these are often hidden away). In Flickr they're right up there next to your picture. Blogging is much more about having your place on the net, personalising your page and performing your identity. Although you have your own portal in Flickr it looks more or less the same as someone else's. That seems to create the feel of a more continuous shared space.
more rain I'm currently writing about Flickr, and just wanted an excuse to rehearse Engestrom's idea about social objects. In the case of Flickr, the social object is the digital photograph; for Amazon it is the book, and for YouTube, the video. The social object is the focus of user generated content and the resultant interaction that takes place. As objects become of particular interest to individuals, then a social network can develop around them. This is not particularly different to the formation of traditional interest groups - apart from in two aspects. Firstly, because the interaction is online, social networks are often dispersed (time and location are no obstacles to communication), and secondly, because social networking sites allow for varying degrees of engagement, they lend themselves to lightweight engagement and multiple group membership. The idea of the social object not only allows us to predict the likely success of a Web 2.0 app, but also helps us to provide an account for how networking gets organised. Interestingly, though, when pre-existing networks exist, such as friends and family on Flickr, the social tie is primary and the social object secondary.
I’ve now discovered that Voicethread takes text well, allowing voice comments (that’s a very useful feature). It also does a reasonable job with video, too and similarly you can comment by voice or in writing. This looks like quite an idyllic scene, but actually it’s just off the main road. The brass band is a legacy of the Victorian industrial era – seen as a wholesome pursuit for the working classes of pit, mill and factory workers. Here, the Holymoorside Brass Band plays in front of the Revolution House (built sometime in the 1600s). So we have all sorts of layers of meaning in a single event.
I was quite impressed by the sort of techniques that David Gauntlet’s been using to model identity. He sounds a bit like the Jools Holland of academia - but the video does more than simply advertise his book Creative Explorations. He shows some examples of his work and talks about its possible applications. I guess I’m linking this up with the sort of reflections I’ve been writing about with respect to the Pandorama and Theatro del Oprimido.
badge There is something a little too simplistic about Goffman’s dramaturgical account of identity (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Although I like the notion of performance, the influence of the other is somewhat problematic. “…when the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of society.” (1969:45); but also in here there is the notion of an essential self that does the performance, and this is unconvincing. Better is Butler’s notion of interpellation in which others call us into being. Moreover Butler does not suggest that we perform a script or enact a discursive practice, but rather that the individual, or the self, is a result of discursive practices. There is no prior entity. Herein lies the distinction between performativity and performance. What we refer to as our identity, then, is the story supplied by the manipulation and re-combination of available resources, mediated through text, called into being through our interaction with others.
Dotmasters I was at the Children in Virtual Worlds conference on Thursday (here). It was a bit of a mixed bag. Each time a really interesting topic came up, it tended to get left unexplored. A constant theme was the issue of interactivity and the regulation and surveillance of interaction. I realized, not for the first time, that the concept of interaction has quite range of interpretations. You could perhaps identify five possibilities. 1.o nline content encourages you to make a reponse (you think, learn, go and get something, phone in); 2. you perform an action and it is logged (you vote; rate or rank); 3. you communicate verbally or otherwise with others (comment; chat; tag etc.); 4. your actions change the screen environment (you post or personalize your page or portal, or adapt your pov); 5. Your collaborative endeavours result in a transformation of the environment you’re in (you co-construct). From this you arrive at some nuances of interactivity. They are: not all interactivity directly involves other human subjects; not all interactivity promotes social interaction; not all interactivity involves collaboration. Web 2.0 apps and SNS allow for different kinds of interactivity.
With only one slide and 156 comments this voicethread illustrates the wisdom of crowds effect of Web 2.0. I suppose we need to ask about the benefits here, and whether or not this fulfills a useful purpose. It's great to have all those voices, but frankly I got bored. Maybe it would be different if I'd initiated it, because there's something much more attractive about the comments I get as opposed to the comments others get! When I'm reading blogs, I usually tend to skip the comments unless, of course, I've left a comment and go to check to see if there's a reply. There's a sort of self-presentation thing going on here. I wonder if that's why learning blogs tend to work better than bulletin boards, the sense of ownership, of it being my space in which I perform my identity, and then later, check to see how it went down?
It feels a bit like arriving late at the party, but I’m just looking at the learning potential of voicethreads. This is because I'm getting interested in how visual images can help us to reflect, help us to see things differently, to make the familiar strange and to capture or frame our experience in new ways. On Saturday we had a ball, taking still images and recording and writing comments. I got the sense that you begin to move beyond your own particular idea by building on the perspectives of others. OK, I suppose we were just messing about with the affordances of the technology, but there’s more here than meets the eye!
blurrings In a tantalizingly brief post, Torill Mortensen comments that in the late modern world, time and space are the only real values. I wished there had been more. I was reminded of Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (1985) in which he argues that with new media: what is happening almost anywhere can be happening wherever we are (p.125). Recently Meyrowitz has turned his attention to the blurrings of time and space that come with mobile technologies. In this essay (pdf) he describes how: electronic information seeps through walls and leaps across vast distances. While we still often think of electronic media as simply connecting one place to another more quickly, our forms of communication have been subtly but significantly altering the environments we live in, transforming them into social places in which we are becoming new people. (p.97) This comes from the essay Global Nomads in this book. This reminds us of Ito and Okabe’s technosocial spaces. But Meyrowitz makes some other useful observations, too. For instance literacy he suggests: encourages the splintering of identities based on levels of reading ability and sets and subsets of literatures (p.93). And later he approaches that idea of linear development from a different perspective: the old, year-by-year, staggered access to information, where children of each age and reading level were exposed to entirely different sets of information, is largely bypassed (p.95). What a massive challenge for models of education!
It is time Is there such a term as hypermodification? If not then linguists should coin it, because I reckon I've noted a trend in the use of additional modifying prefixes. I first spotted it on a news bulletin in which one politician was accusing another of over-hyping a new initiative. Now I thought hyping already suggested a sort of inflation of claims, an exageration, so where does that leave hyping? As a normal state? Anyway here I found that it is defined as: To promote or publicize to excess. So the second example is from Hannah who pre-warned me about the heat in London. I loved this idea of being pre-warned, implying, as it does, that you've been given notice that you will be warned. However, on checking, this has more of a provenance - to warn beforehand faetures in Webster's 1913 dictionary. You could say that pre-warn is alternative to forewarn. Pre-warn reminded me of pre-hear which is becoming quite popular too. Logic is always a difficult thing to apply to language, but my initial thought was that pre-hear made no sense at all - you either heard something or you didn't. You couldn't hear it before you've heard it. But then I've recently seen it compared to previewing, in other words it's about listening to a something (eg music) before it's actually released. That makes sense. OK, well if there are other examples of hypermodification, let's hear them.
Revolution House The urban environment has been saturated by images from Grand Theft Auto 4, to coincide with jubilant reports about the games media conquest and record-breaking sales. Video-gaming challenges Hollywood, or so the stories go. It’s interesting to think how non-gamers could hardly fail to notice the invasion of GTA 4. So where does 1688 come in? Well I just wanted to point out some similarities against the more obvious differences. In 1688, in the lead up to the Glorious Revolution, William of Orange exploited the potential of what was then the new media, by having thousands of copies of his pamphlets stashed away in secret locations, embargoed until the precise time of the invasion. Here’s the link. First the technology of mass production for creating billboard posters, handbills and so on. Second the strategic release and distribution to key sites and third, appealing and available content. They work together. So that’s the recipe for a fairly painless invasion. Now do you want to play the game?
