liquid learning place, free-floating knowledge, flow experience

Today a ‘liquid learning place’ metaphor caught my eye in the blog of Eleanora Guglielman.
It is a S. Warburton brand marking the fluidity of concepts and identity:

Concepts of identity are inherently fluid and flexible and our understandings of learning are becoming less strongly bonded to institutions and specific educational spaces. This is a landscape where the form is contingent on the beholder. A place where learning opportunities shift and adjust to the learner.

It reminds me is a “free floating” metaphor that i first detected few years ago in concerns with elearning (Barron, 2000).

Barron (2000) views the convergence of Knowledge Management and e-Learning as:

“a beast (which) combines formal training as represented by e-Learning, and the free-floating knowledge swirling through organisations that knowledge management practices seek to snare and share”.

Barron T, (2000),“A Smarter Frankenstein: The Merging of e-Learning and Knowledge Management”at http://www.learningcircuits.org accessed 29/05/02

Siemens wrote in his book “Knowing Knowledge”:

Ecologies and networks provide the solution to needed structures and spaces to house and facilitate knowledge flow (p. 86).

Besides associating floating, liquidity and flow to knowledge itself and connecting it with the spaces where knowledge is moved, the flow process has been associated with personal perception and action.

A term of interest is “flow experience”.

This originates from a metaphor people were using: several people described their ‘flow’ experiences using the metaphor of a water current carrying them along.

Some factors that Csíkszentmihályi identifies as accompanying an experience of flow are of interest:

- Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention
- A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
- People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging

My interest is a hybrid ecosystem, combining virtual arnd real worlds, people, knowledge and activities.

I would like to have a bit of time, thinking how people become part of hybrid reality involving knowledge, action and the environment into their activity space, perceiving this flow experience.

Becoming hybrid beings in any moment of an activity, extending yourself out of your physical body by action and merging yourself with the environment, may enable probably to be part of these liquid places where knowledge is free-floating. But how does the fluidity of knowledge enhance the flow experience? Or does it help?

Is it something as “caught by the pipe”?

Timespace, what else

I have been running with some students an experiment of hybrid narratives.

We have been writing personal narratives and collaborating in the non-determined manner, presumably we have simulated something swarm-like.

Now we are in the phase of collecting data and looking ideas for analysing what we experienced. There are many ways. Today i came to one of my old blog posting about time-space, which seems to visualize what i always imagine as the activity and meaning paths within one ecology.

Here is the idea of personal time-space from a paper.

I think what is possible to do on the basis of our dataset is to show something similar. I am still thinking how to put on one figure places, experienced entities and their transformations.

Let’s imagine places are real locative spots from where i collected content.
In the next layer (Brightkite) this content did a permutation. In the more next layer (in Flickr) it changed one more time. And in Blog as well.

Instead of time, i could use the quantity of impressions or objects from this spot.

And i think i also need something for distinguishing my favourite categories of objects, either by meaning, activity, narrative or so.

For example my favourites may be trees, birds, shadows. Or some particular tags that i use distinguish my categories.

It is still not clear how i will visualise it…
My data are currently in excel format.

If i could map more than one person into this space, i could see something similar to ant-road in our little narrative ecology swarm.

Binding affordances and GIS in hybrid places

There is an interesting paper that provides some ideas how to use affordances together with geographical coordinates. This would enable the practical exploration of geolocative spaces.

However, this framework is yet limited in describing hybrid places – the various virtual artifacts and meanings and action cules that are simultaneously mapped geolocatively must be part of the place description with affordances.

The affordances are individually or culturally defined. This duality of bottom up definition and top-down use of such affordance-rich coordinates should be part of the technical platforms of mapping and exploring hybrid places.

An Affordance-Based Model of Place in GIS
Troy Jordan, Martin Raubal*, Bryce Gartrell, and Max J. Egenhofer

This paper presents a methodology to model places with affordances.
Modeling places with affordances integrates cognitive and engineering aspects, therefore leading to a knowledge-representation that comes closer to the user.
The integration of affordance-based models of places into future GIS will lead to a better communication between users and systems.

We advocate the use of affordances—those things which an object, an assemblage of objects, or an environment enables one to do—for modeling place within GIS.
In order to come up with a scientific concept of place it is necessary to accommodate the relatively objective view of the theoretical scientist (i.e., a decentered view) as well as the subjective view of the individual (i.e., a centered view) who directly experiences a specific place.

Tuan (1977): place is space infused with human meaning.
Experiences of places involve perception, cognition, and affection. Therefore, a place cannot simply be described as the location of one object relative to others. The concept of place has to integrate both its location and its meaning in the context of human action.

The geographical concept of place refers to the areal context of events, objects, and actions, and includes both natural elements and human constructions. It also incorporates the notion of change through time.
Places are a human invention, engendered by naming, applying typologies (eg. suburb, ghetto), picking out symbols (eg Pyramids-Egipt), telling stories, and doing things.
Mapping space by GIS, though useful, does not always match the way people think about their world.
Integrating a model of how people conceptualize and perceive places into GIS will enable to use GIS to make important decisions about places.

We use the following interpretation of the means-end hierarchy for a place (Rasmussen and Pejtersen 1995):

Functional Purpose: purposes and values

Abstract Function: flow of mass, energy, information, people and monetary value

Generalized Function: general work activities

Physical function: specific work processes and physical processes

Physical form: Appearance, Location and configuration of Material Objects

Zaff (1995): “Affordances are measurable aspects of the environment that can only be measured in terms of the individual.
Particularly, it is important to understand the action relevant properties of the environment in terms of values intrinsic to the agent.

Affordances, therefore, play a key role in an experiential view of space (Kuhn, 1996) and place, because they offer a user-centered perspective.

Affordances of physical space can be grouped into four categories reflecting different task situations (Kuhn, 1996):

affordances for an individual user (e.g., move),

a user and an individual entity (e.g., objectify),

a user and multiple entities (e.(e.g., communicate)

We suggest the following 6 aspects of Place:

Physical features: Places consist of collections of objects. Each person perceives some set of affordances for a given small-scale object or collection of objects in large-scale space.

Actions: People perform actions in places. As we have seen, actions are one of the most
important aspects that gives meaning to a place. By defining the relationships between intentions, functions, and physical features, we uncover which actions are possible, and which are constrained.

Narrative: Stories are told in order to help characterize the uniqueness of a place as we define normative/acceptable behavior, by revealing the past actions of others. Establish a historical record: What a place looked like, who was there, what they did, and why theydid it.

Symbolic representations/Names: Certain places are referenced by symbols (e.g., New York City is often referenced as the “Big Apple”) having symbolic and/or mythical meanings. Users can represent complex objects with a simpler (abstract) representation.

(why not tags?)

Socioeconomic and Cultural factors: People identify themselves with places socioeconomically. Different cultures afford different behavior in places.

Typologies: People categorize places in order to understand what is new, in terms of what is already understood.

We suggest that the integration of places into GIS would lead to a better match with people’s real-world spatial interactions than do coordinate-based models and, therefore, to a more user-friendly GIS. Our approach outlines the broad categories of information that must be gathered in order to successfully answer place-based queries. The actual work of establishing a useful affordance hierarchy is formidable. Much work needs to be done to consider the perceptual aspaffordances, especially as they need to be mapped into the electronic domain of GIS.

Kuhn W. (1996). Handling Data Spatially: Spatializing User Interfaces. in: Kraak M. and Molenaar M. (Eds.), SDH’96, Advances in GIS Research II, Proceedings. 2, pp. 13B.1-13B.23, International Geographical Union, Delft.
Rasmussen J. and Pejtersen A. M. (1995). Virtual Ecology of Work. In Flack J., Hancock P., Caird J., Vicente K. (Eds.) Global Perspectives on the Ecology ofNew Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tuan Y. (1977). Space and Place. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Zaff B. (1995). Designing with Affordances in Mind. In Flack J., Hancock P., Caird J., Vicente K. (Eds.) Global Perspectives on the Ecology of Human-Machine Systems (volume 1), pp. 121-156. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Swarms, semiotic fitness, ecologies – ideas triggered from J.Hoffmeyer’s papers

I have been reading some articles of Jesper Hoffmeyer about the swarms, semiotics, semiosphere and ecologies and doing some thought connections with niches, affordances in new learning ecologies.

I believe that in new media communities the meaning/action based traces are left in the environment that determine the niches for these communities and also influence the niches of other communities.

The communities perceive/anticipate/translate meaning and action relevant cues (affrdances) from ongoing meaning-making and actions, as well as, from the traces of meanings and actions left in their niches.

The translation from cues/traces left in the environment and the relevant actions of the communities are explainable with the swarm-phenomena and with the general cultural semiosphere model.

Swarms are communities in which decision-making takes place based on cues/traces left by individual swarm members in the environment or picked up from their real activities. These cues determine the semiotic niche for the swarm community.

The semiotic fitness term applies to describe that specific cues are recognized and interpreted in the semiotic niche to establish well-being for the swarm.

The integration of the cues of other swarms may influence the swarm behaviour. The swarms need to translate the align, unfamiliar action relevant cues from the environment to their own system.

In general each swarm always deals with the semiotic niche that is dual – our own cues and align cues.
The borderline between common and align cues in the semiotic niche is constantly re-developed in the course of action.
The cultural semiosphere model (see Lotman, 1990) describes such a dual structure as a necessary condition for translation acts to take place, which may lead to new types of meanings and actions to emerge in the semiotic niche.

Since the swarms are entities at different levels, consisting of other swarms we can also talk of semiotic sub-niches for a particular community. The actions distinguish one niche from another – in principle the same ecology may provide different niches in which specific semiotic fitnesses are in operation.

Communities are not different of termites – they pile meaning and action traces as artifacts or system use preferences, and orientate and make decisions using these piles.

If we look communities in action – the same set of tools and artifacts may be interpreted and used differently in the course of individual learning, and when these individuals switch to collaborative problem-solving actions. Personal learning environments are changing in different semiotic niches.

Some interesting parts from the Hoffmeyer papers:

Hoffmeyer, J. (1995). The global semiosphere. Paper presented at the 5th IASS congress in Berkeley, June 1995. In Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (eds.): Semiotics Around the World. Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Berkeley 1994. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter 1997, pp. 933-936.

The behavioural and communicative aspects of animal life are considered but they are generally not allowed to play any fundamental role in the dynamics of ecosystems or in evolutionary theory (Levins and Lewontin 1985). This bias towards the material and energetic aspects of ecosystem dynamics may have blinded us to the importance of the semiotic web unfolding throughout ecosystems.

Survival through semiosis implies a dynamic creativity. In addition to vertical semiotic system, i.e. genetic communication down through the generations, all organisms also partake in a horizontal semiotic system, i.e. communication throughout the ecological space (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991).

The horizontal or ecological semiotic network has gained an increasing autonomy relative to the genetic semiotic system, i.e. the authority to make decisions was gradually delegated from the genomic systems to the organisms themselves.

The most important in horizontal semiotic system is the organisms’ capacity for anticipation, the possibility of foreseeing actual events and protect oneself against them or otherwise derive advantage from them.

The populations of organisms are forced to occupy specific semiotic niches. The organisms will have to master a set of signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and chemical origin in order to survive in the semiosphere. This semiosphere poses constraints or boundary conditions to the organism populations.

The semiotic demands to populations are often a decisive challenge to success.

Note. In another article he uses term semiotic fitness.

Wherever there has developed a habit there will also exist an organism for whom this habit has become a sign. There can be no doubt that the principle that one organisms’ habits becoming another organisms’ signs is at the very heart of the evolutionary process.

Ecosystems would not be stable were it not for the millions of semiotic processes built on habits which themselves were formerly built on other habits.

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Hoffmeyer, J. (2005). The swarming body. Paper presented at the 5th IASS congress in Berkeley, June 1995. In Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (eds.): Semiotics Around the World. Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Berkeley 1994. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter 1997, pp. 937-940.

Semiosis is the basic principle of life. Semiotic competence is delegated to decentralised units like swarms.

A swarm has been defined as a set of (mobile) agents which are liable to communicate directly or indirectly (by acting on their local environment) with each other, and which collectively carry out a distributed problem solving.

The body swarm is not built on ten thousand nearly identical units, rather it should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of more or less overlapping swarms of very different kinds. And the minor swarms again are swarm-entities, so that we get a hierarchy of swarms.

At all levels these swarms are engaged in distributed problem solving based on an infinitely complicated web of semetic interaction patterns.

French biologist P.-P. Grassé made a semiotically very interesting analysis of
nest construction in termites (Grassé 1959). His conclusion was: “No direct interaction is necessary between the animals, since co-ordination is assured solely through the artefacts resulting from their behaviour.”

Hoffmeyer defines a swarm conception at the body-mind level: Swarms of immune cells interact with swarms of nerve cells in maintaining the somatic ecology. The view of a centralised authority in the brain controlling the ignorant body fades out of sight and is replaced by an interactive organisation based upon the distributed problem solving capacity of myriads of cell swarms working in parallel.

The transformation of molecules to signs opens for an unending semiogenic evolution based on semetic interaction patterns between entities at all levels. The swarm of cells constituting a human body should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of overlapping swarms of very different kinds.

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Hoffmeyer, J. (1998). The Unfolding Semiosphere. In Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Stanley Salthe and Manuela Delpos (eds.), Evolutionary Systems. Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Selection and Self-Organization. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1998, pp. 281-293.

Darwin was careful to underline that natural selection was a process very different from artificial selection in that no intention or purpose lay behind it. Natural selection was a selection without a selector (or even a selection principle since organic evolution had no privileged direction).

Note: If we consider that basic functioning of organisms appears through swarm-based semetic interaction patterns (units in swarms and swarms of swarms communicate directly or indirectly by acting on their local environment with each other, and carry collectively out a distributed problem solving), is it really the natural selection without a selector? It seems that in this case these units of swarms and the sub-swarms, and finally the swarm itself becomes a selector?

In the macro evolutionary perspective we can distinguish at least three dominating instances of emergence, which changed the rules of the evolutionary game:

a) The emergence of galaxies (the emergence of difference, i.e. the creation of lumps of certain matter in the middle of nothing).

b) The emergence of life (emergence of distinction, self-interpretation and code-duality, i.e. as analog codes the organisms recognise and interact with each other in the ecological space giving rise to a horizontal semiotic system, while as digital codes they (after eventual recombination through meiosis and fertilisation in sexually reproducing species) are passively carried forward in time between generations.

DNA does not contain the key to its own interpretation.
In sexually reproducing organisms only the fertilised egg ‘knows’ how to interpret DNA, i.e. to use its text for the construction of the organism.The interpretant of the DNA message is buried in the cytoskeleton of the fertilised egg (and the growing embryo).

Note: The role of ecological pressure and niche influence in the evolution may be considered as part of swarm-swarm interactions?

The appearance on the planet of self-interpretation leads us to the emergence of linguistic culture.

c) The emergence of linguistic culture (emergence of experience and cultural evolution through translations back and forth between experience of reality and its linguistic re-description).

Being self-conscious selves humans are the result of the evolutionary creation of a whole new kind of code-duality, a ‘meta’-code-duality so to say, a
duality of reality as analog coded experience perpetually interacting with its digital linguistic redescription in an unending chain of translations back and forth. The dynamic properties and creativity of this code-duality is the core of cultural evolution.

Note. Can we consider evolutionary interactions of organisms with their niches (eg. affordance-based approach) from the semiotic perspective. In this case the emergence of ‘liguistic culture’ between various swarms and their niches appears as a ‘cultural evolution’ already before self-conscious humans?

Semetic interactions refer to interactions in which regularities (habits) developed by one species (or individual) successively become used (interpreted) as signs by the individuals of the same or another species, thereby eliciting new habits in this species eventually to become – sooner or later – signs for other individuals, and so on in a branching and unending web integrating the ecosystems of the planet into a global semiosphere (Hoffmeyer 1993)

Semiotic fitness

Fitness depends on a relation, something can be fit only in a given context.
Genetic fitness may be a useful term in genetics, but if evolution is concerned what matters is not genetic fitness but semiotic fitness.
Genes may be fit only under certain environmental conditions.
But if genotypes and envirotypes (Odling-Smee and Patten 1994) reciprocally constitute the context on which fitness should be measured, it seems we should rather talk about the fit in its relational entirety, that is as a semiotic capacity.

The semiotic fitness, should ideally measure the semiotic competence or success of natural systems in managing the genotype-envirotype translation processes.
The optimization of semiotic fitness results in the continuing growth in the depth of interpretative patterns accessible to life.

Note. Semiotic fitness applies for the inhabitants active in niches and thus provides the interrelated activity/meaning measurment characteristic for spaces.

Ecological learning design framework

We have in Tallinn University nice tradition to re-elect researcher positions every 4 years. My position is now recruited and part of getting it back it is to give a report of my last period work. This will be at monday.

I have been working in Tallinn University from autumn 2006 with half position working for iCamp project, and from january 2008 at full position. Ecological learning design framework is something what i consider the main work of my last period besides participating in the development of the iCamp intervention model in elearning2.0. It is based on two papers, one Elaborating connectivism is now fully published as the book chapter, another is published in journal Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 2009, Vol. 12, Issue 3.

Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning: Collaborative Methods and Human Interaction
Edited By: Niki Lambropoulos, London South Bank University, UK; Margarida Romero, University of Toulouse, France
Chapter XIV: Revising the Framework of Knowledge Ecologies: How Activity Patterns Define Learning Spaces. Kai Pata

Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 2009, Vol. 12, Issue 3, Pages 23–43
Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses
Kai Pata

Here are the slides of the ecological learning framework:

Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses

Today i sent away my paper: Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses to the special call of Journal of Educational Technology & Society. I hope it is of some interest, although to go through the review process is always very hard

The main idea is to bring out the ecological learning design framework elements and show how they were applicable at the course design.

In the article I pointed to the need for the new learning design frameworks for self-directed learning with social software that were ecological. This learning design emphasizes the following aspects, which were developed and tested empirically.

The basic steps of an ecological learning design framework for supporting self-directed learning in new social Web are:

1. Define the learning and teaching niches for your students by collecting their affordance perceptions of their learning spaces.

a) To support the conscious self-managed development of learner-determined spaces, provide students with the tools of visualizing and monitoring their activity-patterns and learning landscapes, and enhancing public self-reflection and collaborative grounding of learning affordances.

b) To maintain coherence of the current niche, introduce cycles of re-evaluation of learning affordances of the learning space within your course.

2. Try to influence the niche re-emergence by embedding activity traces and ecological knowledge relevant to evoke affordances for certain niches or select activity systems where these traces are naturally present.

3. Use same social learning environments repeatedly to gain from feedback left as activity traces and embodied knowledge of earlier learners.

Theoretically, in the self-directed learning process students should be promoted to use their own personal learning environments. Thus, the learning environment as a system of tools and resources cannot be ready when learning starts but has to evolve as part of learners’ self-directed individual and collaborative action process in which facilitator has a guiding role.

To run emergent bottom-up courses, facilitators would need to establish some constraints and guidelines for planning the learning process. Rather than composing a list of optional course tools, resources and activities, an abstract learning space might be determined for the course design and made explicit to the learners.

This article proposes that learners’ perception of action potentialities of their personal and collaborative learning environments – learning affordances – could be dynamically collected in a bottom up manner during learners’ public planning of their goals, visualization, and self-reflection of their learning activities and learning environments.

Knowing these learning affordances and making the abstract learning space explicit for the learners and for the facilitator would permit:
i) the individualized learner-specific integration of their goal-directed activities with other perceived components, resources and community activities in the environment; and
ii) the reuse of the commonly perceived affordances for environmentally adaptive self-direction.

In this study the course for self-directed learning with social software and the ideas of an ecological learning design framework were simultaneously developed.

The emergence of the course’s learning space would consist of cycles of developing and monitoring the learning niches. Such dynamical monitoring and grounding of the mutually used learning affordances was possible and practiced during both courses. For this learners’ schemes and reflective postings in their weblogs were used. It is assumed that if some tools were available for learners and facilitator to visualize the niche with less analytical effort during the course of action, this might increase the use of affordances as niche gradients in adaptive shaping of self-directed learning.

Knowing the fundamental learning niche characteristics enables to develop particular list of suggested activities and plan appropriate instructions during the course. It was found that students perceived many affordances that are related with planning, reflecting and evaluating personal learning in collaborative social software settings. Potentially these affordances could be further used for activity design.

When planning participation at the courses and for choosing tools and resources for personal learning environments, self-directed students might need information of the affordances that a particular course community perceives in relation to certain tools.

In this paper the factor analysis brought out that some types of social software might offer a unitary affordance perception possibility while others would evoke different types of affordances. In is assumed that, during the learning activity the latter software would serve as multifunctional for switching from one learning niche to another.

I have not analyzed in this paper the particular differences between learning niches (eg. for individual or collaborative activities) that form the learning space, but there is evidence in my other studies that such distinguishable niches appear within the general learning space.

One of the expectations of investigating the course learning space at consequent years was to see if the fundamental learning space for self-directed learning with social software was stabile and potentially replicable while students had a big freedom of using various tools.

The ANOVA analyses demonstrated that while the use of different types of social software differed significantly at Cases I and II, the affordances were used with similar frequency at both cases. This permits to conclude that the affordance-based learning space description might be re-used in the course design as a guideline for students and the facilitator, for deciding which affordances should be evoked at the course.

Coupling this affordance-based learning space description with the descriptions of the affordances that certain community has activated with certain types of tools, and considering individual perception of affordances of the personal learning environment, enables learners to participate at joint course activities with their own tools.

Elaborating Connectivism framework: deepening the ecological focus

This chapter draft describes the web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment, discussing and elaborating the Connectivist framework coined by George Siemens in his book Knowing Knowledge. This new perspective to ecological learning in social software environments resides on the ideas of Gibson‘s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, the rising theory of embodied simulation and the Lotman’s ideas from cultural semiotics.

It appeared in:

Pata, K. (2009). Revising the framework of knowledge ecologies: how activity patterns define learning spaces? In Niki Lambropoulos & Margarida Romero (Eds.), Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning: Collaborative Methods & Human Interaction. IGI Global imprints.

Knowledge ecologies framework

Summer school activity in Ohrid

Here are some resources for ProLearn summer school workshop.

Some files can be accessed from here.

macedonia_icamp

Here are the results of our workshop:

Planning doctoral landscape and activity pattern

Doctoral students’ activity niche

Doctoral students’ activity ontospace plotted on tool landscape

amateurs and volunteered geography

An interesting paper was advertised in one of the Springer newsletters:

Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography
Michael F. Goodchild
GeoJournal (2007) 69:211–221

Why i find this paper interesting is that it asks the questions why do people do this. We truly don’t believe that it is done because to make better maps. Why would an amateur geographer do it?

I would just think of processes like:
- creating niches for ourselves, for better embodiment and enaction
- playfully following some cultural practices because we can, and because the environment calls for such actions,
- leaving for ourselves mental maps to free our thinking same way as we have learned to trust the files in our computer as an extra memory?
- streaming for self-administered, personalized, user-tagged and thus more appropriately filtered content for triggering our emotions and actions

Here are some from the paper:

Why is it that citizens who have no obvious incentive are nevertheless willing to spend large amounts of time creating the content of Volunteered Geographic Information sites?

Self-promotion is clearly an important motivator of Internet activity

Public personal usage – Many users volunteer information to Web 2.0 sites as a convenient way of making it available to friends and relations, irrespective of the fact that it becomes available to all.

Personal satisfaction from seeing their own contributions appear in the growing patchwork.

While geographic naming has been centralized and standardized, and assigns no role to obscure individuals, the new web 2.0 environments have given rise to the composition of layers of new kind of volunteered geographic information.

Remote sensing with satellites has replaced mapping.

Very few people know the latitude and longitude of their home, but in normal human discourse it is place-names that provide the basis of geographic referencing.

In Wikimapia…

anyone with an Internet connection can select an area on the Earth’s surface and provide it with a description, including links to other sources. Anyone can edit entries, and volunteer reviewers monitor the results, checking for accuracy and significance.

Google Earth and Google Maps popularized the term mash-up, the ability to superimpose geographic
information from sources distributed over the Web, many of them created by amateurs.

Practicality:

A collection of individuals acting independently, using shared protocols and standards, and responding to the needs of local communities, can together create a patchwork coverage.

Networks of human sensors

Humans themselves, each equipped with some working subset of the five senses and with the intelligence to compile and interpret what they sense, and each free to rove the surface of
the planet.

Planning the course: Hybrid ecology of narratives

Last week we had several meetings in Tallinn and Helsinki among our core group to prepare the Hybrid ecology book: Anatole Pierre Fuksas, Mauri Kaipainen, Pia Tikka and myself. We plan entwined research activities and course with master students to give the ideas a better go.

We met in Helsinki at Pia’s and Mauri’s place to discuss the planned course in fall 2008 at the Tallinn University about Hybrid ecology of narratives. The planned master level course will be one of the testing grounds of the book ideas.

The main interest is to see how hybrid ecology evolves on the basis of traced clues in the virtual and real places. We plan the course activities partly as a field experiment, where students participate in planning, acting and analyzing data.

The initial story will be hidden locatively using new media based clues, and remains unknown to the students until the end of the experiment. The story may be either fictional narrative, commonly known to some extent to the participants, a film-based narrative, a social narrative based on the emotional perspectives of some real events, or even a crime story.

An interesting article about Literary places:

David Herbert 2001
Literary places, tourism and the heritage experience, in «Annals of Tourism Research», 28, pp. 312-333

The group of students, investigating this story with mobile technology and preferred reflection tools (eg. micro-blogging in Twitter, blogging or wiki tools), will be given the common starting point of the story from where they can continue guessing the storyline and building up their own reflections. They are supposed to continue the story with the necessary artifacts left into the virtual overlay of real places.

Such an activity is based on enaction: finding action and meaning-related clues in the real places, taking action or being emotionally involved by these clues, and contributing to the environment accordingly.

The initial story is embodied and enacted differently by each participant. Thus it would be possible to see how the enacted emotions and actions dynamically shape the hybrid ecology.

In the process of enaction the involved people get traces of each others’ actions and emotions, and their interpretations of the story. Such enaction based locative awareness calls for more involvement, and may lead to the interaction between participants and the formation of the enactive clusters around the locative story.

Such hybrid places, where stories can be embodied and enacted, have many dimensions depending of the users. These dimensions will appear and can be made visible if different content was locatively tagged by the users with soft ontology means either embodied knowledge based, that involves clues to the accompanied emotions and actions, or knowledge based, which involves our systems of activated concepts.

If participants have access to such soft ontological dimensions of the hybrid ecology, they can interact more. Also, besides the locatively situated artifacts, triggering their action and emotions, the ontological dimensions as whole will be perceived and enacted accordingly.

The tools that can be used at this course are locative maps (eg. Googlemaps), social software (Flickr, Youtube, blogs, wikis, microblogs) and analytical tools what enable to locatively tag embodied knowledge and select meaning or action perspectives withing the hybrid ecology (Montagemaker, Soft ontology tool etc.).

What is interesting in this experiment from the research point of view:
- due to embodied cognition and person-specific enaction different stories would emerge from the clues of the one initial story
- monitoring the hybrid ecology as an evolving system
- the rise of different meaning and activity spaces within the hybrid ecology that call for the formation of the communities of enaction
- persons as hybrid and distributed selves within hybrid ecology: interrelations between persons, their action traces, meaning-making traces, and various parallel dimensions of the hybrid ecology.

Some interesting ideas:
- not linear narratives with start and end but branched stories with many ends
- searching for someone, while also making side trips
- narrative as a quest game
- storylines and crossing path with characters
http://johnitc.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/digital-locative-storytelling/