From Posts

Reflections and notes during the week. Note this category includes post with images but excludes weekly summaries.

Notes on Wk3 hangout

One of the things discussed at the Google hangout last night was the idea of learner autonomy in relation to Sian’s critique of TEL.

This is a short post to capture my notes on the hangout:
– Learnification tends to reduce learning as a market transaction, a commodity.
– Learnification talks about the role of learners but ignores the role of teachers and tutors. These two cannot be separated, nor can the power dynamics inherent in this relationship be ignored.

As I mentioned in the session, corporate training seems to value learner independence over collaboration. This can be seen in the prevalence of corporate self-paced e-learning courses. The idea of lifelong learning is sometimes misconstrued to mean that learning is the sole responsibility of the employee. The corresponding role of the organization and of managers in particular is often not discussed.

This came up as we talked about nanopills, how one day, all we’ll need is a pill, an implant or a plug to transfer learning from one container to another. While all this sounds futuristic, similar ideas already happen in different forms. Returning to corporate training, I often see (and have also been involved) in projects related to training the trainers, the goal of which is to reach a large number of trainees. Training other trainers is supposed to solve this problem through a multiplier effect.

As I write this, I realize I used to think about how introducing elearning courses helps solves this problem by providing consistent learning experiences, directly from a single source. In this sense, technology helps improve efficiency and reduces cost. The tricky part is how to make it not just efficient, but also effective: how to make corporate elearning courses sensitive to learners’ contexts and needs.

Artefact: Danbo’s day out

A crossover tale. In a world of familiar and strange illusions, a robot dreams some of his own.

The defining feature of virtual reality is not the sophistication of its underlying technology but the quality of presence it creates. This broader meaning is the take off point for this video, a nudge towards a more imaginative design of online courses, which in themselves are virtual environments. Far too many online courses, I think, are as desolate as the sprawling server farms which host them. They are hollow places of learning.

What is real and what is virtual? Rooted in neither, the robot straddles both, mimicking the blurring of boundaries that Haraway celebrates in the Cyborg Manifesto. This sense of dislocation is positive, offering possibility and opportunity, rekindling imagination to plant seeds of wonder and delight in learning online.

Some tenuous links

I find the films included in the film festival and the readings for Block 1 do not explicitly link to learning. This post is an attempt to make some admittedly tenuous links, using some of the themes as stepping stones for issues related to digital education.

The stop motion video “Address is Approximate” features a robot who takes a virtual journey across the world as captured by Google Street view. The journey that the robot takes, the lights of the computer screen flashing across its face, can be read as both liberating and escapist. Liberating in the way it allows the robot to see places he otherwise wouldn’t view, and escapist in the sense that it’s a type of mobility that doesn’t change his being in an office room still, allowed only to travel when the human is away. The movie allows an ambiguous reading that recalls the blurring of boundaries that Haraway celebrates in the Cyborg Manifesto. The robot is simultaneously mobile and immobile, animate and inanimate, the journey real and virtual.

While ostensibly about virtual reality, the video also offers some starting points for thinking about learning in the digital age. In the film festival, “Address is Approximate” is grouped under the heading of “Machine sentience”. Sentience as a synonym for awareness of the environment but not necessarily of consciousness or awareness of the self. It is a distinction that is crucial. Sentient machines, I believe, are able to, for example, record and respond to stimulus, to process data and learn from it. What does this remind one of? Automated assessments, especially when there is a large learner population; data tracking tools that give feedback that allow learners to set goals and monitor their progress; or perhaps surveillance tools that can help identify learners who are at risk of failing.

Another interesting in the video is how the robots are supported by other toys and objects: the lamps twirl, a toy figure clicks the mouse. This suggests that a range of agents can collaborate to achieve goals, reminding me of badges and digital portfolios.

I think the depiction of virtual reality in the video is somewhat passive. If we are to imagine the robot as a metaphor for learners, and the robot’s virtual journey as learning journey (a course within a virtual learning environment), then it becomes apparent how the robot quite literally stood in front of the computer screen. I think there’s a case for depicting the robot as taking a more active role in the road trip, as should learners about their learning paths.

And finally, the big screen where the journey happens. One of the things I remember from the IDEL course is that while virtual reality is still often crude in terms of providing immersive experiences, much progress has been made in making immersive psychological experiences. One can lose oneself in a book, in a movie or a song and even in video games. This is because the defining aspect of virtuality is not the technology itself but the experience it creates.

While doing some online research for this Block 1, I came across Burbles (2006) who proposes four qualities that are useful in understanding the potential of virtuality in learning contexts:

  • Interesting: complexity that allow new elements to be viewed, or viewed differently in different encounters
  • Involving: when there is a reason to care about the experience, achieved by showing relevance to the individual
  • Imaginative: allowing for the extrapolation of new details
  • Interactive: participatory

Reference:
Burbules, N. C. (2006). Rethinking the virtual. In The international handbook of virtual learning environments (pp. 37-58). Springer Netherlands.

The future of wearable technology

I have been thinking about human’s ongoing affair with technology. With the Miller (2011) chapter in my mind, it is quite a surprise to discover transhumanist ideals everywhere.

While it may not be a big surprise to find transhumanist references in a video about wearable technology, it is a bit of a jolt to find how they match the points that Miller made so clearly. Here are a couple of key quotations from the video:

"Ultimately we are going to be combinations of man and machine...

"If we don't accept those (technological changes), we are going to be left behind."

The wearable heart monitors discussed in the video are examples of what Miller describes as the virtualisation of the body. Heart rate data is captured by sensors on the watch and then uploaded to computer networks where they are then recorded and shared among a community — pretty much like Facebook for athletes.

However, the view that the body and its processes can be reduced to information codes and patterns is only one side of the story. The other side is that its purpose is to transform the body itself. Athletes can refer to their heart rate data to improve their performance.

A couple of questions I would like to further explore but are not fully discussed in the Miller chapter:

  • How do commercial interests influence the virtualization of the body? After all, the development of these devices, their marketing and the maintenance of the data they capture require huge financial investments that business would need to recover.
  • In the same way that numbers on a weighing scale can influence body perception, how does biometric data (their own and those from their network) influence the athletes’ sense of self?

Learning transfer

Learning transfer, the application of knowledge and skills learned in a training course into the workplace, is a recurring and unresolved issue in corporate training. And the end of week 1 of the course, I am beginning to see how the idea of transfer appears in different and often troubling variations. The term transfer nows seem dangerously misleading.

transferSetting aside the idea of transfer as learning application, there is the idea of transfer as disembodied knowledge. Hence, knowledge can be transferred from trainer to trainee, and that to to improve work performance, it is enough that trainees attend a course. Designing courses that that are based on memorization of facts and repetition (both useful in some contexts but not all) assume that knowledge can be decontextualized, or that knowledge decontextualized has value.

Bayne (2014) points out more subtle variations in her critique of technology-enhanced learning, citing the unquestioned use of productivity tools to improve teaching and learning. I believe that these are related to learning transfer because they both lead to a tendency to ignore the contexts and purposes of learning.

I think that transfer, in the sense of decontextualised knowledge, is synonymous with copy-pasting files. Hence, there is the more crude idea but equally troubling idea that face-to-face training courses can be transferred online — all it requires is uploading learning materials to a server, and making them available anytime, anywhere.

Transfer, in the sense of implantable memories, is one of the themes of the short film, Memory 2.0. In the film, the protagonist frequents a local shop in order to relive memories of a previous relationship. (Incidentally, purchasing for memories–and by extension, knowledge and learning–reminds me of off-the shelf e-learning courses.) Learning transfer is also more explicitly mentioned in the Matrix movies, especially the scenes where Neo learns martial arts and helipcoter driving as fast as the operator can flip a switch.

Hayles (1999) traces these ideas in the history of cybernetics. Viewing the physical world as built on some kind of informational code allowed the separation of the material world from the information that underlies it. Information then becomes disembodied, separate from the flesh that contains it. Returning to pop culture references, this is the basis of teleportation as popularised in Star Trek movies.

Screen captures
I know Kung Fu
I need to get back
Beam me up Scotty

References
Bayne, S. (2014) What’s the matter with ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’? Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine, How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Visualizing the posthuman

The image below shows how my views have changed after the readings.

This is a reaction to a previous post, Tech in ‘modern times’ which contains vintage photos of the relationship between humans and technology. The photos are of white Western male adults.

In constrast, the above photo of an African mother and baby’s hands highlights the feminist critique of the liberal humanist view of technology which was often visualised with depictions of white European males. According to Hayles (1996), such images promoted a universality that subdued women’s voices.

In addition, the lack of a gadget, tool or prosthesis in the photo reflects my changing views that technology is part, not separate from being human. As between mother and child, this relationship is intimate and generative.

Image source
BBC News

Reference
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine, How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Human – technology relations

posted on Flickr via IFTT

These icons are a more sober update to a set I had previously posted. It is prompted by Sian’s question about how I might visually represent how technology limits (instead of extends) human abilities. In the original, the colors distracted from the comparisons I tried to make, and the text put interpretation in a straightjacket. I think removing the original colors and text allows nuances of meaning to emerge, or at least gave them space. This approach better suits the complicated relationship between bodies and technology as discussed by Miller (2011).

Tools R Us
To begin with, Miller views technology as part of being human. Borne of the desire and ability to overcome the limits imposed by the body and the environment, technology is inseparable from humans. Humans without tools is an abstraction because humans evolved along with technology, “from flint tools and fire through steam engines and the Internet” (Stiegler, 1998, pp 113 cited in Zylinksa 2013).

The use of tools is what distinguishes us from other species. Hence, Homo faber: tool-making man. “For to make use of his hands, no longer to have paws, is to manipulate–and what hands manipulate are tools and instruments.” (Stiegler, 1998, pp 113 cited in Zylinksa 2013).

Miller also talks about how we relate to technology. For sure technology extends human senses, but to view technology solely in this way ignores how they affect us and our culture. Citing mobile phones as an example, Miller says technology alters the way we perceive and act. The mobile phone allows us to talk across distances but simultaneously changes how we behave in our immediate surrounding, blurring the boundaries of what we consider as near and far.

References
Miller, V. (2011) Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology, in Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine, How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

Zylinksa, J. (2013). Translator’s Introduction. In Summa Technologiae. (Lem, S., Translation) Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. (Originally published in Polish in 1964)

Tech in ‘modern times’

With the coming of modernity came the possibility of the idea of technology corrupting culture, says Ted Striphas in an interview posted at Medium.com. The time period is what struck me. By illustrating one paragraph from the interview with historical photos from from the Old Pics Archive Twitter feed, I would like to look at how our relationship with technology goes back far longer than Striphas seems to suggest in the interview. The jarring juxtaposition of text and images, of old and new associations below is a useful reminder.

oldpics_glass

“The face is one of the most culturally-charged aspects of the human body, so it’s little wonder why turning it into a computer would raise difficult questions.

oldpics_robot

The future will involve not only sophisticated engineering, then, but also efforts to redefine how people make sense our bodies and the specific parts to which we decide to attach computational tools.

oldpics_twomen

That’s largely a social question, however much it may overlap with the technical.”