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.

Digital Storytelling

I just presented at the Digital Storytelling conference here in Madison, WI. In short, I made a case for a new way to look at learning, based in experiences rather than information transfer. 

Along the way, I told some stories myself: The pastor who worked with a neuroscientist to show that we live the lessons of your experiences not the facts we have learned, the sadu teaching content beyond facts and figures by telling stories in India and the programmer who could tell a tale about how they came to a solution.

We also talked a bit about the ARIS project and how we are building a tool to situate stories into spaces. I haven’t had much time to blog about ARIS, but I’ve presented on it four times in the last 6 weeks.

 Long story short, Chris Blakesley, Kevin Harris, Peter Debbink, Seann Dikkers and I have been working the last year and a half to design an iPhone game engine so that teachers can write mobile learning games. We are just getting out way to a “feature complete” version that we can begin sharing.

I hear the session was recorded, I’ll post the link when I find it.

Augmented Reality

The OAR Platform for building AR games

At MIT, a PocketPC based platform has been made to author AR games. They use the terms light AR and heavy AR defining how much R is really added. For example, heavy AR involves a complete replacement of reality whereas light AR augments in smaller ways. Our ARIS project is defiantly trying to reuse as much of the physical world as possible.

The OAR platform is much for science process oriented than ARIS

Kurt Squire’s reflections on Mobile Media

Existing portable devices: clickers, ar, etc.
Not very good computers: small screen, input sux, poor storage
Mobile media does some things well: portable, social, context
Approaching Ubiquity : They are becoming more common

Emerging Mobile Practices: Cocooning, GeoCaching, Flash Mobs, Citizen Journalism, Unsanctioned Info, Co presence like Daily Cos

Remediating of Place: Augmented, Leveraging Space, Students as Artifics

Like it or not, Kids are going to be online. (What are we going to do?)

Principles:

• Collective Intelligence
• Designing a new solution FOR REAL. example: saving lake wingra. The students go a play a game about the green bush neighborhood, have a class time to redevelop a new city development plan, then had a resolution passed to have “green bush” day to tell the story of what happened there.

Reflection: Heck yeah. lets be designing our games to enable folks to change their world. Where do we start?

The Zoo Game in the OAR engine

Tensions: looking down at computer screen vs the roaring lion, not much time (in school), filed trips=day off mentality, need chaperones, better if free standing without prep/followup.

Prototype 1: Too much text (ESL students) , Too Many decision (cognitive load), Only one player has info

Prototype 2: Tutorial needed to be smoother

Comment: Mobile Documentation – Group in Amazon documented , NPR maps- like activity to understand space.

Madison AR Games

As high tech as things get, you are still sitting in front of a computer. Outside is a great place to create stories. You know, the place where our bodies actually are. Many of the games that have come out of the local games lab have been outside in the wild.

The space of education is changing

C. Ondrejka

Things are getting smaller faster better in every way. There are some trends that are a bit intersting:

• People are wearing tech
• The web is getting better (despite identit, offline access)
• Everything is connecting to PLACE

 What else can we collect to make data more interesting? Emotion…

For virtual worlds, its all about browsers and portable devices.

What do we use them for?

• Presence – Where are you, are you moving, etc
• Life Logging – Its comming! Should the default be to stream everything?
• How do we wanange multiple identities (second life, second life work, personal, etc)

But interfaces are the same! Mouse plus keyboard

There are a lot of things converging, should it be a feild? 

• Establish common vocab
• Preserve knowledge
• etc.

This whole thing is really encouraging. I’m seeing someone tell me that our work to utilize the portable devices is indeed interesting. Will ARIS be the gateway into this new field for our team? 

The Halversons

Redefinition of GLS society into participatory media experiences. 

Fan practice tries to retrace the primary activities (for example a baseball player trade), but fantasy games feed this back. This model of previous knowledge and reinterpreted primary actions combining into fantasy play can be reused for any data rich environment.

Mr Jim Gee

Linguistics, Education, Video Games.

We need to make a choice about paradigms. Many complex systems are interacting and biting us in the butt. We are on the cusp of this stuff being unsolvable (see book: plan b). Food, water, oil, etc, they are all interconnected.

21st century skills are all about thinking about complex systems.

Passion communities:

• recruit
• manage
• find solutions

The passion communities with (amateur knowledge) often come up with better solutions! So why are we leaving the hard stuff to politicians? There are passion communities around everything (sims, modding wow, etc) and have/create experts in that field who are very unlikely. Ex: the failure girl who learns photoshop at an expert level to design clothes for the sims and has 400 people downloading her designs.)

These people are PROSUMERS

Producing, but not for money. They get social status, control, fun

 Same girl, still no good at school, now moved into second life. When interviewed, she doesn’t want to be a fashion designer. She wants to work with computers because they give you power.

The future of education is not to design games, but game like systems. 

Let’s talk about Portal. The whole game has you running around in a bunch of labs using the portal gun, but the last phase puts you in a real world, with sno suggestions. You have to transfer to succeeded. The game wants to give you a tool that let’s you see the world in a new way. It let’s you see the (my word) AFFORDANCES OF THE KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM.

Empathy for a complex system.

Example: Modding – Experts theorizing their play and building a tool to support that theory. Better than the designers!

Portable Augmented Reality

I am not alone in the dream to see portable internet connected devices change the way we interact with our world. This is a fantastic example of some folks who have brought strong AR to a smaller screen.

3rd Spaces, Games and Online Learning Community

This afternoon I attended the third (or possibly forth) ENGAGE lunch this semester. At these lunches we gather the faculty that have received grants to build games with our group as well as all the ENGAGE support staff. Demos are done, design challenges are discussed and sometimes small talks are done by one of our staff or an outside voice. Today the main speaker was Constance Steinkuehler.

There were a couple of interesting topics that came up in her presentation about social learning spaces that are manifested in video games. The thing that most inspired me was the discussion about 3rd Spaces.

3rd Spaces are informal social gathering grounds that are not work or home (1st and 2nd spaces). A number of years back, the catacombs coffee shop on Library mall was a place like this to me. I would drop in between classes and chat with people I knew as well as have chit chat with people I didn’t know at all. These days, I’m not quite sure if I frequent a place that falls in this category.

Constance’s stance was that MMOGs are a third space in our contemporary culture. In games like WoW, players gather together and meet one another. They play, chat, learn and teach in a space outside of home, school or work. Meaningful dialog and relationships occur here, identity is formed here, people find community here, all despite the fact that it is taking place on a computer monitor.

One of the things I have been picking up on throughout my academic work is that a growing amount of people believe that the university as we know it is a pretty lousy place to learn. For many, a class is simply a means to an end, a way to fulfill some requirement for a degree. Is it even possible to learn something you don’t care about? In addition, students are often put in relational silos in each of their classes, working alone except for rarely utilized office hours. Collaboration is often minimal, while individual reading, listening and homework dominate the time spent for a class. Content is decontextualized from meaningful practice or a community. Courses are the ruling organizational unit above all else and then they dissolve every 16 weeks. One thing I’m sure of: Things learned outside of practice, interest or community fade away at a blistering pace.

I for one have been fascinated by the concept of an online learning community. A community of this sort, say a group of users from all over the world that participate in fandom or political discourse, organizes itself around an interesting common trait, exchanging dialog and relationship in a technology mediated format. What I see today is that whether it be video gaming, digg, or your friend list on facebook, these 3rd spaces play a large part in our education. We may even learn more about what we really think the universe is like in these informal environments than anywhere else.

I do.

In these separate spaces, the rules change. The awkward become leaders and the powerful become noobs. It doesn’t matter that you have a PhD or make a lot of money. The effects of this equalizing are likely impossible to measure and I’m sure the effects are not always positive. However, the interactions that take place give us things to consider as we think about the teaching and learning processes that we do facilitate in our traditional courses.

That all said, I feel like I have one more reason to explore the development of games in context of the class. While the university structure is too mammoth to change from the top down, I can at least allow the benefits of informal learning, 3rd spaces, fun and community to make their way into the individual courses I work with. We might even succeed in changing our own view of education along the way and have a good time doing it together.

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.

From Simulation to Scoreboard – Designing Playable Engineering

As part of a team on consultants the University of Wisconsin’s Academic Technology group I was involved with a project to lead faculty in a process of designing video games that teach or involved in the teaching of their courses. One such course was in Cryogenics, the study of getting things very cold.

During this time, I was also taking a course with Kurt Squire about the use of video games in the classroom. This paper was written for that course and outlines the differences between simulators and games, additionally taking the stance that games have educational benefits that are not seen in simulators.

Here is the paper for your reading pleasure:
David Gagnon, From Simulation to Scoreboard

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.

PS3 Home

Move over Second Life. It looks like the PS3 is going to be rolling out a new interface to a virtual world.