The voices of the crowd as an oracle of salvation: Participatory media though the eyes of Dewey’s view of Democracy and Popkewitz’s notion of Cosmopolitanism

Like the formative years of the printing press in Germany, the early World Wide Web was often a resource for enterprise. Both also have taken on the greater roles of becoming also an agent of epistemic revolution. Many of the first books to be printed en masse were titles that would guarantee readership as the first large web sites would generate large profits, but as the cost to make these materials in each media were reduced, their authorship became more distributed. This, however, is where the web page continues along a trajectory where the book never will travel, individual access to contribute to global discourse. The simple cost of producing material in an electronic media is near zero, providing a mechanism for writing to be as inexpensive as reading.

This fact may be a causative agent behind the contemporary trends within education to involve new medias in their pedagogy. It may also be that educators see media creation technologies creating the possibility to instantiate previously unobtainable pedagogies and theories. As educational technologists trumpet recent phenomena such as the success of Wikipedia as proof of educational constructivism, communities of practice as an example of group cognition and massively online multiplayer videogames as a window into Vygotsky’s scaffolding theories, much of the rest of the world also sees democratic participation in media as the path to their view of salvation. The interests of the educators are only part of a larger fascination with participatory media in general. Examples exist in all fields from art to politics.
I believe that Dewey’s writings on democracy and the notion of cosmopolitanism help explain the endearment our society has with participating. It may be that by examining the chain of philosophies have led us to this point in time that we can understand why think the way we think and these two notions have a vast history within themselves. Though a description of the cosmopolitism metonym may be in vain, let me begin there nonetheless.

Cosmopolitism is a pervasive social norm that is commonly traced back to ancient Greece. The Greek term itself, kosmopolitês, can be translated “citizen of the world,” and marks a radical change from the notion that a citizen was either part of the Greek State or the other notion, a member of the Hellenistic made of thinking. As a citizen of the world, there is an individual role for each person within the society made of humankind and the notion that such a thing exists in the first place.

In The Age of School Reform, Popkewitz investigates the makeup of the notion of cosmopolitism and where it intersects with education reform. One of these elements, according to Popkewitz, is that the modern notion of time (past, present and future) is combined with a belief in human agency (demonstrated in the protestant revolution) synthesizes to form a societal belief that we have the capacity to change our future for the better.

Another component of cosmopolitism is the enlightenment’s faith in science and reason as a path and tool for an improved society. Gone are the confusions brought by religious belief and mysticism. The cosmopolitan society uses the tools of statistics to improve poverty and technology to release liberty, an idea we see continued in Dewey’s essay, Christianity and Democracy.

 

Dewey begins his writing defining Christianity not as a dogma or as a religious cult, but as freedom itself. “Jesus had no special doctrine to impose, no special set of truths labeled religious,” he says, followed by the assertion that the purpose of the Christian religion is revelation, and that must result in something tangible, experienced and discovered by the believer about the Truth of the universe and freedom within. For Dewey, this means “democracy [itself] is a spiritual fact and not a mere piece of governmental machinery.”

Where Dewey’s understanding of democracy and Christianity’s intersection becomes the most pronounced is when he states that by removing restrictions, the truth that is available is given a chance to become apparent. It is by giving a mechanism for all people to speak that we will be able to receive revelation.

By noticing these notions of cosmopolitanism and the new religion of democracy, it is easy to see why the fascination the world has with Web 2.0 goes far beyond the love of shiny new gadgets and technology. These views are more deeply rooted in the assumption that human reasoning (which is demonstrated in the creation technology) when put within context of the world stage (like the internet) is actually a cult in and of itself with the end being the ability for the individual to curate and display truth in a way that will “save” the world. By this interpretation, access to and participation in the creation of media is the means by with the citizen is made cosmopolitan.

What is “real” conversation anyway?

For the last few months I have been meeting exclusively in IM sessions for my class on online learning theory. Every wednesday, we all make sure to log in to a javascript based chat window in a moodle system to discuss the readings and continue the conversation that has been taking place inside of a few discussion forums.

This last two weeks, I was the designated facilitator for the class and we were concentrating on articles that related to the use of WIKIs for collaborative knowledge construction. In addition, we were trying to establish the purpose and scope of an actual wiki site were will build with the rest of the semester that could possibly be published.

The first time I “led” a synchronous discussion with 9 or so folks, it didn’t go all that well. The second time was even more stressful. As I would throw out questions to the chat, they always seemed a bit off topic. When we would ask questions like: what should the topic be? A swarm of ideas would come in with very little real conversation taking place (IMHO). For the last 15 minutes of the chat I found myself wanting to get a smaller group face to face, where I would be much more comfortable.

Now the funny thing is that we did meet face to face and a wonderful discussion arose. I had a conversation with one of the students that was also struggling with hte format. We were wondering if it was even possible to study online tools while only living “inside” of them. We both felt that the quality of the discourse that happens when people are in the same room was somehow more natural and productive. We also expressed frustration with the lack of non verbal conversation that is provided by gesture and tone during a conversation when you can both see and hear someone while they are talking.

These concerns were raised in our face to face time and I was surprised that few of the other students couldn’t disagree more. On student in particular spends quite a bit of time online. I believe she even made the statement that she actually prefers text chat over f2f because it moves along faster (more conversations at once), it cant be reviewed (scrolling up in the chat window) and so forth.

My sister in law also seems to agree. She has friends all over the world that she chats with using IM on a dialy basis. For a time, I would even say that she spent more time online chatting than in “real” conversation.

IM style chat does have a number of advantages:

It is non-geographical

It records the conversation

It works wonderfully when you want to include text/links/images

My question is therefore, can a person’s communication skills improve over this medium so they can communicate non-verbally? The evidence of communication device history seems to see so. Have you ever seen someone who is stil getting used to the idea of a telephone? I know that is rare these days, but I know that for people that saw this technology come into use after they had already learned how to communicate, it was a real adjustment. Closer to home, I still encounter people that don’t understand the social norms of email. It is as though they are writing letters with a fountain pen that will be carried by horse!

In a conversation I had with a group over at Wisconsin Public TV, one participant kept saying that despite the new technology, we all need to learn how to work in “real” conversation. So I asked, what is real conversation anyway? Why is face to face any more real than any other format?

I am beginning to understand that each mode of communication requires the development of skills in the use of that mode.

The scary part is that you might be an expert on the podium talking to thousands, but unable to hold a decent diner conversation.

As McLuhan said, new media not only changes how we communicate, but it changes us as well.

Social Agendas in Education

This week my online learning class read a number of papers that addressed the idea of decentralized organizations, social agendas and the group theory that emerges.

I once had a conversation with an educator, Katherine Dang, about the consequences that result from schools becoming political. In summery, her view is that this is a dangerous endevour. For starters, most of us have realized by now that politics has the ability to politicize everything around itself. When a school becomes the platform for political views, the students can become indoctrinated without knowing. They may begin voicing the positions of the local school board as their own, simply because it is the only opinion they have every heard. The fact of the matter is that many of the current political topics such as health care, abortion and Iraq do not have simple answers. That is exactly why they are debated. However when the teacher or school takes a stance these options are perceived as fact. When the same person who teaches 2+2=4 begins embedding their views about religion, economics, etc. the students will naturally be swayed.

I’m not sure why this frightens me so. I guess I’m scared that government makes a lousy moral compass. I fear that the pursuit of political correctness might not lead our children in the best way, science may not contain all the answers, and that the loudest voices in politics may not be the wisest.

Case in point: I was with some 7th grade girls this summer who were doing an after-school program with my wife, Sarah. We had about 20 wonderful young ladies over for a BBQ at our house to celebrate the closing of the program where they learned about some of the “old arts” of handmade goods. During the night, some of the girls were talking about how they had recently had a day of silence to honor the closet homosexuals among them that were forced to remain silent about their sexual orientation in school. The girls explained this topic to me with convincing emotion, using well crafted sentences and examples that obviously did not come from their own reasoning. I listened and asked them questions, concluding that for most of these girls, sex was about the last thing on their minds. So why is it that they had already formed views on paticular sexual issues?

I know this is a complicated subject. That is why the last person I would like to have involved is a teacher that will only know one of these girls as a single student in a single class period of a single year. The real investment of the teacher to deal personally with any of them is just too shallow to discuss topics as important as these. I love that the school has taken it upon themselves to promote equality and the value of all people, but when does it simply become political?

In the worse case, the government will celebrate the knowledge of humankind to the point of being not only the end but the means to all things. The current state of science will become the absolute truth in all things and individuals will exist solely to serve the state. My time visiting auschwitz in Germany and the killing fields of Cambodia have taught me that politics do not always hold the answer.

So how do we give to our student the best of what we have without creating a feedback loop of knowledge that may backfire?

Who is able to aid in teaching how to reason about moral dilemmas when we all have different opinions?

Whose epistemology will win when the state is the source of moral reasoning?

I’m starting to think that it would have been better just to talk about decentralized organization theory.

Progress in Online Learning

This week I had three readings about Activity Theory from Wolf-Michael Roth, Bonnie A. Nardi and Sasha Barab. The theory has its original roots in Karl Marx and as you can see from the Wikipedia article, many of it’s roots seem to be in Moscow.

The theory as applied by the mentioned authors allows for a framework of analyzing the nature of actions within a community of focus, such as an online learning community. Everyone seems to agree that there are three AT components: subjects, objects and tools. Sasha was able to use these interactions to tune an online collaboration website for teachers and Nardi adds the element of passion to ask the question of why.

I also have a few observations from the student side about online learning that I would like to mention:

Online learning takes more time that you think. To really participate in the asynchronous discussion, you have to read the incoming messages as they are happening and respond right then. For the last two weeks, I have waitied for a scheduled time, read all the posts and made a few replies. I can tell that I am missing something by using this approach.

Synchronous Chats benefit greatly from ground rules. This week’s chat was much easier to follow simply because we had a bit of structure (we knew what the main topic of the chat was going to be) and some conventions such as a trailing “…” meant that more text is coming from someone so wait before typing something new.

Emerging Media Seminar

 

This week I spent six hours with the producers and designers at WPT facilitating for a discussion about some of the trends in media. We walked through subjects such as:

Audio/Video Formats and DRM

Blogs

WIKIs

Social Networks

Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Video Games as New Media

Next time around I hope to spend more time on games and the upcoming trends like mashups, portable media devices, crowdsourcing, etc.

Here is the PDF of the presentation if you are interested.

Online Learning – A student perspective

It has been almost three years that I have been advocating the use of Moodle as an opensource course management system, though for only a week have I been on the other side of that recommendation.

My overall impressions have been good, especially in the ease of establishing an online profile. After logging in the first time, I was taken to the profile page and uploaded a photo I had lying around from the last conference I was speaking at, put in a bio and set up a blog in a few clicks. Beautiful.

The course I am in is being led by Sharon Derry, a member of the great league of learning scientists. (is that safe to say Sharon?) We are looking to study and hopefully create an online community and have spent our first week reading up on some of the foundational literature on group cognition, effectiveness and communication.

In Stahl, “Communicating with Technology” the topic of groupware came up in an academic setting, directly following a historical chart outlining the move from individual to social education theory. I took great interest in this article due to my history of working with the Microsoft Exchange groupware product and my daily dependence on things like oracle calendar here at the University. Unfortunately, I am still at a loss on how exactly to communicate the benefits of such a system so that it is adopted.

We also read an article, Kozlowski & Ilgen, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups & Teams” that outlines some of the scholarship on team dynamics that lead to task fulfilling, viable workgroups and a paper by Akkerman et al., “Reconsidering Group Cognition” which illuminates the transition into a social-cultural perspective.

Moodle does a fantastic job for this format of class. The articles are easily found and the forums couldn’t be nicer. However, the synchronous chat that we used for our hour class time was not very effective. There was a lag time of at least 10 seconds for every statement I wrote (in iChat you actually see the others typing in real-time) and I didn’t see the ability to do any private chatting. In addition, there was no spell checking which of course revealed exactly how ignorant I really am.

Technology aside, I am curious to see how to properly facilitate for a group of this size (8 or so students) in a text chat. I personally found myself struggling to keep up with the often divergent conversation. It felt as though by the time I had something to say it was no longer relevant. I also noticed a tendency to create acronyms on the fly to reduce typing speed at the cost of confusion. With certainty I can say that a traditional discussion around a table is a much more natural form of discourse, though I hope that I will adapt to this mode of communication the way I have adapted to all the others.

Has anyone seen any best practices for facilitating for online chat?

The Art of Contested Spaces

In the Contested Spaces article from Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire, games are viewed as a spacial art in contrast to seeing them through the lens of narrative art or interactive cinema.

Looking at games such as Deux Ex and Grim Fandago, the space inside games is explored, then a series of parallels are drawn between art and game design:

Romanticism – Example:Sacrifice

Many game designers are recruited from art schools and many
continue to paint and to scan through art books searching for
inspiration. As a consequence, a close consideration of game space
reveals a broad range of aesthetic influences, including
expressionism (which maps emotions onto physical space) and
romanticism (which endows landscapes with moral qualities). As
game designers dig deeper into these artistic traditions, they may
develop more emotionally evocative and meaningful spaces.

Surrealism – Example:American McGee’s Alice

Surrealism is another modern art movement that has influenced
game design. The surrealists created dream-like images which
nevertheless followed many conventions of representational art, often
deploying familiar stories (such as those in the Bible) as a basis for
psychologically complex, symbolically-laden environments. Game
designers, similarly, exploit the graphic possibilities of 3d modeling to
create immersive environments that are vivid and tangible and yet
totally imaginary.

Atmospheric Design – Examples:Shenmue, Myst

Game designers increasingly focus on the overall “mood” or
emotional color of their projects. Hoping to produce games which can
provide a broader range of emotional experiences, they are drawing
inspiration from classic melodrama, where elements of mise-en-
scene become emotional correlatives for their protagonist’s woes.

Social Spaces – Example: Star Wars Galaxies

Multiplayer games, such as
Asheron’sCall, are borrowing lessons from urban planners to create
opportunities for sociability, becoming the center of vast “virtual
communities” and other news games, such as the Sims, are
encouraging players to actively create content and share it amongst
the fan community, designing clothes, objects, and buildings that
constitute these virtual worlds.

In each of these styles of art, it seems that this new high fidelity media allows us to push the limits of the previous authors and discover what happens when interaction is given to these fundamental aesthetics.

Media, Schema, and learning though emotional manipulation?

Richard Clark and Robert Kozma have had a long standing debate over the whether different forms of media have effect on pedagogical outcomes. In brief, Clark has published a series of articles such as Clark – Media will never influence learning that state that the teaching method is always the reason for learning to take place, distinct from the media used to employ those methods. Kozma, on the other hand, replies with articles such as Kozma – Will media influence learning which state that different medias have affordances that other do not. While Clark states that the role of the instructional designer is to use the most economic method of teaching methodology, Kozma defends that paticular medias are unique in their abilities.

That said, the question of the definition of learning needs to be addressed. This is where most of the research on the Clark/Kozma debate becomes too challenging to execute. To “know” a paticular fact or piece of content might be different than to “know how” to apply that content to a paticular context. One thing that many people agree on however, is that “knowing” has something to do with the formation of Widmayer – Schema Theory in our brains. Cognitive learning theory would then say that one role of instruction is to create the connection of new material into the existing schema. I am curious about other documented methods for the formation of new schema.

Today I found an interesting article, Cognitive neuroscience of emotional memory, that studies why emotional events often “attain a privileged status in memory.” From a behaviorist standpoint, instruction can solicit positive or negative feedback in order to cement requested behavior into memory. My question continues here because I believe that well designed game experiences have a paticular ability to create an emotional response and therefore create a teachable moment.

Is there any evidence for this theory? I am not sure and I have been unable to find any research that would begin to ask the right questions. However, I have seen a number of references [1][2] [3] that study the emotional responses during play to various types of games. Most of these studies were done from the perspective of self-assessment, though some did various neuroimagining tests to monitor brain activity. Here are some of the interesting summary points:

Games are able to solicit motional responses

Different games invoked different emotions (James Bond 007 invokes fear and anger, Monkey ball invoked “fun”)

Games with Narrative seemed to invoke the most memorable experience

That said, the next thing to look at is what kinds of emotions may benefit learning and how effictive are games at packaging a learning event with an emotional one.

Web 3.0

For the last few months, I have been part of a grant program with the University of Wisconsin to explore the uses and application of video games and simulations to learning. In addition, I am also studying with Kurt Squire, a participant in the discussion as well as one of the organizers for the GLS (Games Learning Society).

During this time exploring educational environments, a great interest has been formed around the Second Life environment. To explain it simply, Second Life looks like a 3-d video game, except everyone is a real person, also connected to Second Life. Unlike a game, there is not a narrative or a reason for participating. Instead, the purpose of spending time in second life is based more around the community. Communication takes place by walking up to another person in Second Life and typing. This creates a text based chat session with anyone within a close distance. Objects in the world can be edited collaboratively as well, so a number of people could work on a document or a building. Video and Audio streaming is also possible which has led to the popularity of live music events inside of Second life where you watch a virtual character or band on the screen while hearing the live audio from their performance somewhere completely different.

There was something about seeing a hundred people gathered around the stage, moving around and talking to one another that made the show seem more “real” and personal than a simple web-cast.

Now what makes second life different that some of the online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft is that the players also are the creators of the world. Other than a few specific places, everywhere you go has been created by another user. This leads to a virtual economy.

Since users can build and own things such as buildings, environments, vehicles, dance move programs, clothing, etc, clever ideas create a demand and therefore a price. Virtual goods in Second Life can be bought and sold for Linden Dollars (L$) with an exchange rate to US$ at about 270 L$ to 1 US $. The market is large. Millions of real dollars change hands each year in a currency that is virtual but can be exchanged for real money.

Instead of concentrating on the economy however, many of us are interested in the way a 3-d social space like Second Life may influence the field of Education. I thought these two videos would explain what some people are working on:

This video is from Ohio Universtiy

The New Media Center Campus

The University of Wisconsin is interested in creating a Second Life island, which will be a private space where researchers and teachers can build their own educational environments and a number of professors are already building spaces on their own.

Personally, I think Second Life is interesting because it is a shadow of a world to come. It is the Virtual Reality that we read about in the 80′s starting to take on a real life. SL as it is right now is an infant, but the same way Web 2.0 brought a voice to the people to birth to things like wikipedia and flickr, The 3-d web will allow people to communicate and create even more amazing things.

Using Wiki’s for Education

Scott Prader, a fellow Academic Technology staffer, passed this great PDF article on to us recently. The topic is how a WIKI can be used to transform teaching and learning. Check it out.

Using Wikis in Education