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/

Competing self-reflection in PLE and shared collaborative environment

Availability of different feeds, tags etc. used by social software technologies has triggered a big boom of distributed personal and group learning environments to be created and used for learning purposes. These integrate blogs, micro-blogs, different feeds from various friends’ blogs, social bookmarks, image- and video-repositories etc., that enable people to distribute their personal self to the different communities, while simultaneously managing their own tools as a learning- and knowledge-building environment.

A common way in e-learning 2.0 has been moving from initial personal learning landscapes (PLE) towards combining these with other people’s PLE’s in order to do some joint learning activities (Tammets, Väljataga & Pata, 2008). This often means changing and expanding each individual’s PLEs, and integrating new tools to their PLEs, while suppressing others in the sake of forming a shared activity space where all the tools can be used equally by the group members. Several obstacles rise in this PLE integration. The competitive nature of self-reflection done in personal PLEs against the reflective activities done in group landscapes integrated from PLEs is one that needs the most attention.

One of the most cherished sides of using PLEs has been the increase of self-reflection and self-direction that they promote. It has been emphasized that learning on our own in such environments creates many challenges, and forces people to develop self-reflection and self-direction competences in order to manage their objectives and be intrinsically motivated. Gillespie (2007) has brought out some of the theories of the origin of self-reflection: a) ruptured situations, in which actors have more than one response to the situation that needs decision-making, and thus self-reflection of our own arguments is induced; b) the presence of others who provide feedback to the sides of the self we are not so aware of, and thus make us to reflect upon these sides; and c) within the activity systems in groups and communities the reflection upon the rules and conditions of the ongoing interaction that leads to the personal self-reflection (Engeström, 1987).

The self, according to Hermans (1996), is organized as a dialogical interchange between relatively autonomous and mutually influencing selves. By allowing the various positions to be internally voiced, one reaches decisions and self-directs ones’ actions. The activities of self-direction contain diagnosing and formulating needs, identifying resources, choosing and implementing suitable strategies and evaluating outcomes (Knowles, 1975). Brockett and Hiemstra (1991), have pointed out that self-directed learning activities always take always place in a certain social context and cannot be separated from that social setting and other people. Thus, effective self-reflection and self-direction calls for challenging situations and the presence and reflective intercourse with other people.

Besides internal self-reflection and self-directed actions, PLEs, but especially blogs and micro-blogging tools, and personal wikis, enable people to record ones’ reflections externally, enabling them to keep track of their earlier reflections. They can also plan their activities in advance and monitor their self-directed actions in self-reflective manner. Using feed- and tag-technology with different social software tools enables people to mash in timeline their different types of reflections using them as evidence of their self-directed behavior. They can also mash these reflections with those of other people they work together with or whom they monitor, thus, creating the visible conflict situations for themselves to ponder about. Social software enables also to publicly distribute personal reflections, sharing them within groups and communities, since personal self-directed work is always the pillar on which the group work stands on.

iCamp project (http://www.icamp.eu/) has conducted several learning experiments in which learners were prompted to form a PLEs and conduct self-reflection in their personal spaces, while simultaneously being involved in the group activities in various types of group spaces (eg. shared weblog, shared wiki, combined distributed learning environment from various socials software tools). These experiments have indicated that active self-reflection and working in ones’ PLE might be inhibited after learner becomes involved in the group landscapes (Pata & Väljataga, 2007).

This suggests that the collaborative reflective activities, and working for the common goal might be hindering the individual reflective activities. This seems to be especially true if large parts of PLE remain separate from the shared group space and people need to take additional effort for contributing to both personal and group spaces. While not doing so, they miss the opportunity to benefit from the effects of self-reflection upon the dialogue and activities with their work mates. They may also not sufficiently pay attention to their own self-regulation within the group. The solution from the technical side can be seen in using the feed, mashup, trackback and other technologies for enabling the creation of such group spaces where large parts of individual PLE’s start serving as the mashed regulation spaces of the group. The pedagogical challenge is entwining the self-reflection activities into group communication upon the shared objectives.

Ecological aspects for learning theory of new Digital Age

Recently, the widespread public use of social software has triggered for the need to theoretically ground the learning phenomena in this new environment.

Siemens (2005) has suggested Connectivism as the learning theory for new Digital Age. Connectivism focuses on how information, situated externally from people in the web, and creating meanings publicly in social software environments, aids through connective processes the new creative learning- and knowledge-building cultures.

Besides information-centred view to learning, what Connectivism carries, the other view should explain how learning is triggered by the involvement into the activities or by the observation of the activities of other individuals and groups. This view suggests that embodied cognition could be also considered as part of our knowledge.

Thus, while modelling the learning theories the new social software environments call for, an activity centred view to learning would be of same importance as the information-centred view, and should be theoretically entwined with the latter.

In order to extract the new principles of learning, while considering the activities that are part of the digital culture in social software environments, the web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment must be described. The interrelations between individuals, and the real and virtual places they adopt for themselves in the process of manifesting their ideas, and engaging themselves into various learning activities in self-directed manner should be theoretically explained. This new ecological perspective to learning in social software environments can reside on the ideas of Gibson‘s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, elaborated approach of Engeström’s Activity Theory, rising theory of embodied cognition, but also on the Lotman’s school of cultural semiotics.

Some aspects to be considered and elaborated:

It is generally accepted that learning and tools used by certain culture from one side, and individuals of this culture and their learning and tool-using habits from another side, are influencing and shaping each other mutually (see Vygotsky, 1979). By definition the more social software tools are used, the better they become adjusted to the cultural habits of their users. The more user-defined interrelations between the meanings exist and can be activated by certain social-software specific microformats, the better the systems get for social retrieval of information. The more users‘ activities in social environments are externally marked by the users, for example with machine-readable formats describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do (FOAF), the better the access to the activity-related information and people becomes. The positive side effect of it is also, that the systems obtain new qualities for monitoring and getting awareness, that would open the gateway to the otherwise non-traceble communities in which the members are not personally related into social networks through shared activities. They may or may not have an awareness of each other, but they share similar meanings or perform same type of activities. Access to such people in new environments is potentially opening a multi-dimensional place where individuals can learn from each other or where shared group activities can be initiated for learning purposes. The more people get involved into the similar activities while evoking for themselves certain functions the social tools offer, the stronger the pressure gets of developing the systems towards facilitating this activity, and the more this activity becomes part of the learning culture in this environment.

This presumes the ecological relationships between people and their objectives for action in certain learning environments, and the personally differentiated perception of meanings and tools in their surrounding environments which would all-together dynamically shape the social software environments as places for learning. In particular, the focus is on how social software systems become accommodated with their users through evoking different affordances in the environment, discussing the multi-dimensionality and dynamicity of such places, and explaining how creativity and active participation are triggered in these places ecologically through different types of interactions.

The inhabitants of social web are characterised as distributed selves between different real and virtual social spaces. They express their identity as part of indistinct activity patterns, involving different social tools and different people. They influence social environments by virally spreading ideas that weave people and social places into invisible meaning dimensions. They leave activity traces as cultural prompts for new similar activities within certain dimension of the environment. The personal meaning-space and activity-space may be or may not be transcendent for the other individual learners in the web if the learner is distributing one‘s self between different social software tools.

The awareness of different dimensions of the social web as places for creative learning is obtained by perceiving the other inhabitants of social web as similarly distributed wholes. Tracing the meaning-spaces and activity patterns of other people twined between the distributed real and virtual places they inhabit, the dimensions of social space become unfolded and usable for our own self-directed learning.

Two aspects here are important. The meaning centred aspect suggests to use distributed self to be aware of more communities and their meaning spaces, and to create conditions for transferring information from one conceptual dimension to another. This precondition for cross-border meaning-building activities has been focused both in cultural semiotics as well as in the theory of Connectivism. Weaving one’s own coherent meaning web on top of such connections in distributed places is part of learning practices individuals do in social web to propagate their own self. Second aspect is finding people to learn together with. To be involved in the similar activities, similar spaces need to be used for interaction. The activities the members of such lose communities get engaged with, do not necessarily have to be centrally coordinated, but rather may emerge and exist as social patterns.

Learning through meaning building, and learning from participating in socially shared activities can be explained all together as part of emergent hybrid ecologies. The architecture of such environments interrelates various meaning dimensions, activity dimensions, and the distributed selves. By distributed self people can access different dimensions, propagate their meanings and activities into these dimensions, and use crossing borders of different dimensions for creative knowledge-building, as well as, for embodying and embedding cultural practices of new social web.

Interpreting hybrid ecology in augmented reality

A draft of my major ideas.

Background theory

Concepts: embodiment, neural representations of sensory-motor actions, action potentialities, affordances, anticipated goals, action, mediation, coupling, tool, hybrid ecology

The basic ideas in Activity theory (Leontjev, 1975) relate ‘people who want to reach some goals’ with their ‘mediating tools for realising activities’ necessary to ‘reach the goal’. Mediating tools can be cognitive (eg. language, gestures, content of narrative artifacts or pictures etc.) or material artifacts (tools, objects etc.).

Discoveries in cognitive and neuroscience about the functioning of mirror-neuron systems (Gallese et al., 1996), claim, that cognition is embodied through grounding knowledge directly in sensory-motor experiences without the mediation of symbolic representations (Pecher & Zwaan, 2005).

From observation of others and the environment (Rizzolatti et al., 2001), from listening narratives (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998; Iaccoboni, 2005) or from reading narratives (Scorolli & Borghi, 2007) and looking everyday images of objects or works of art (Gallese & Freedberg, 2007) we perceptually activate certain multi-modal action-potentialites to mediate our purposeful and goal-directed actions (see Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). These embodied dimensions are activations of neural representations located in sensory-motor areas in brain.

Hommel (2003) assumes that action control to all behavioral acts is ecologically delegated to the environment - when planning actions in terms of anticipated goals, the sensory-motor assemblies needed to reach the goal are simultaneously selectively activated in the environment, and bind together into a coherent whole that serves as an action-plan, facilitating the execution of the goal-directed actions through the interaction between the environment and its embodied sensory-motor activations.

My understanding of affordances sees them as the emergent constraints in the activity system dependent of various system components and interactions. I interpret them as action potentialities. However, affordances can also be potentially embedded into mediating tools due to cultural use of language or due to culturally defined activity potentials objectified in artifacts and tools.

Our hybrid nature

Hybrid ecology binds together into one inseparable whole the subjects aiming to do something, the surrounding environment with its objects, and the mediating tools of their action. In this view all external entities of the person can be considered as an environment (eg. living and nonliving things and their causal and structural interrelations).

In this symbiosis we can see that in any activity there is no clear and distinct border between subject and the environment. The mediation between the personal (internal) and environment (external) is a dynamic two way process of embodiment of environment’s dimensions, and expressing the embodied in the environment.

Any action can be taken only on the basis of embodied dimensions of the environment.

Environment becomes a place for action if we accommodate it with our tools, if we embed part of our embodied sensory-motor experiences to the external environment and if we reuse it constantly matching our internal embodied sensory-motor action potentialities and action potentialities that couple with it around us.

Extending and accommodating ourselves to the environment

To be purposely navigating and acting in the environment, persons need to embody part of the environment in order to toolisize it, and start using it for their action. This is not necessarily a conscious and goal-driven process. Also the environment with its culturally defined action potentialities in relation to persons’ previously embodied action-potentials and emotions can evoke certain goals for action. In such case certain aspects of the environment may be extended above the others to the range of the persons’ perception.

People can also toolisize the environment by externalizing their internal imaginations, emotions and sensory-motor action patterns to the environment as objects for use for themselves and the others.In a way it can be seen as making the environment as part of their symbiotic being where they can find and use the common sensory-motor action potentialities over and over again.

Toolization is not necessarily merely a process of symbolizing meanings. If toolization of the environment is done by language, or making narrative or visual artifacts it is done by using symbols as carriers of sensory-motor action potentialities. But toolization is also direct activity carried out in the environment, when the objects of the environment and some perspectives of the environment are actualized to express and carry out goals-directed action plan, which has sensory-motor neural correlates.

Creating new tools

Our usual acting in the personally accommodated environment is based on the preferred perception of affordances that match with our sensory-motor action correlates of previously embodied emotions and actions. Basically we repeat ourselves to feel safe in the environment. We actualize the affordances that we define for ourselves as the members of certain culture, those that enable us to take active part in this culture.

However, some of the affordances, that are very distinct from the usual affordances, may also be perceived and may start intruding the activation of embodied sensory-motor paths. These affordances can be viewed as the noise to be ignored or noise to be considered.

Some of the noise we try to ignore, telling to ourselves that it is the similar affordance to some other usual affordance. Similar affordances are coupled with the previously anticipated sensory-motor action potentialities.

Some of the noise we perceive as analogical affordances. Analogy is accepting the difference in nature but making the relation on the basis of some features. In this case partial coupling of anticipated affordances with the actualized affordances happens, which may activate only part of the previously embodied sensory-motor neural correlates or even some new ones.

Looking for the noise to activate different sensory-motor experiences is an important aspect of our creativity. Looking for the noise may lead us toolizising the environment for us differently. We basically create new tools to accommodate ourselves into the environment with our usual goal-directed plans. Or, the creation of these new embodiments from the environment would lead us to the totally new set of goal-directed action plans. We shift from one set of anticipated affordances we are looking for in the environment to another set.

Tools we create from tools left to the environment

Lev Manovitch has pointed out to some trends of tool designs in modern environment.

Manovitch deals with ‘interfaces’ enclused to ‘objects’. There is a new trend in design: disappearance of technological objects as such, which become integrated into our spaces. In such cases the previous culturally accommodated tool or artifact and the previously culturally accommodated technological interface may together start triggering different potential affordances for action.

The action potentials technology offers through ‘interfaces’, and the action potentials that the objects had in another previous culture, can be contraversial and may cause certain “battles” between what action to carry out, evoking the necessity for internal grounding between the different sets of affordances. This would result in not using these new devices most effectively as planned by the designers and visioners of new technology, because we would be triggered simultaneously by the affordances evoked by two different cultures.

Basically what we need, is immersion of cultures, becoming these new ‘immersive technology generations’ and we will no more distinguish the potential affordances the objects evoke as old and new activity potentials. Rather we will shift out internal immersed and augmented intentions into the environment activating combined affordances.

Do we need new designs to obtain the new culture or would the new culture emerge in using currently not ideally integrated technologically enriched objects and augmented reality? If so we will just start evoking different affordances in this environment and the design and immersion of old and new should not necessarily be melted to each other organically, we would do it by ourselves, with our perception and imagination.

In this case we can act in the current environment we are used to, but we can see, if we want so, in this environment also this virtual, technologically added space - we will get hybrid, augmented or ecologically defined environment for totally new activities, where we can go or not go depending our intentions.

Manovitch assumed that another trend in design is that tools are vanishing and becoming into seamless interfaces. It seems that in interaction with new technological and hybrid tools affordances of the activity-side become stronger and stronger perceived, while the affordances of the previously recognized tool or artifact sides, where interface is embedded, are decreasing in the perception of the user.

In the PhD thesis of Elza Dunkels “Bridging the Distance: Children’s strategies on the Internet” (2007) she conducted online interviews in chatroom to ask about how children perceive the Internet environment. She wrote: From 8000 words in the interviews kids actually mentioned the word computed 19 times, and only at 2 occasions this was initiated by the child. Communication and fun themes, rather the use of technology per se prevailed.Kids totally forgot that technology is there as a mediation tool of their action goals!

To interpret these results, it seems that the actualized affordances of Internet seemed not to depend of the objects, computers, technology with its functionalities and limitations, but instead these ‘information age immersed kids’ had real life and very warm and alive activity goals and thus they perceived in the technology environment other affordances than the grownups from earlier generations. Kids actualized for themselves the ‘communication and interaction affordances’ and did not consciously actualize the affordances of the technology as something that mediates their actions.

Hybrid beings interact

Interesting perspective emerges if the person, who externalized the embodied sensory-motor action potentialites (basically their tools as mediation devices) for themselves to the environment, is viewed from aside by another person. For the other person two versions of the environment may appear.

One is where he can see the other subject together with its mediation devices. The studies of embodied cognition indicate that it is highly likely to embody and directly activate the sensory-motor patterns they view the others doing in the environment - thus what is happening is the culturally defined selective embodiment of the action-potentialities (tools they make from the environment to use it)of the others. Evolutionary, this can be viewed as some kind of reuse or optimization strategy, getting the same result without using the energy what was initially used on creating the initial interrelation between the person and the natural environment.

Vyas and Dix (2007) suggest that sets of affordances exits at the level of person, group/community and culture, and that the interactions between these affordances may influence each other.

Second is if only these man-made objects (various cultural tools eg. texts, patterns, images, artcrafts etc.) and other type of traces of their activity are left to the natural environment, but their initial originators have left the scene. Now, it is the question of culture to couple the previously experienced sensory-motor action potentialities with those that are recognized in the environment. It is highly likely that this kind of embodiment and toolization of the environment for purposeful action is always partial or even completely transforming the initial action-potentialities of the tools.

The notion of meanings in activity-centered view to hybrid ecology needs to be elaborated. Meaning is the result of embodiment of environmental entities partially as sensory-motor action potentialities. Meaning-making is a more or less conscious search of action-potentialities in the environment that can be coupled with previously embodied ones in the process of making them mediating tools. What is meaning making for an individual in these situations when he/she can see only the environment toolisized by someone else?

First is, when does the person notice that the environment is actually toolisized - perhaps this is a culturally defied process of noticing certain affordances, coupling it with embodied affordances and taking action if there is a match of affordances. Noticing affordances and actualizing something from the environment as tools similarly as other people depends of whether they are part of this community and culture.

It can be assumed that cultures leave traces of activity potentials as patterns to the environment which can be actualized if the pattern is strong enough, frequent enough and matches with some of the anticipated affordances for the person. It is clear that if these patterns are left to the environment without perceived interrelation with their creators, they are harder to be actualized similar way by other people.

Hybrid ecology in augmented environments

The previous aspects of hybrid ecology are quite general and deal with the nature of individuals acting in an environment.
What happens if the environment too becomes hybrid?

Recent trends in the Web development have caused the immersion of borders between the real and virtual spaces, giving rise into the new potential learning environment. New kind of social software eg. blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, social artifact repositories enable user integration into democratic content-development and publishing. Mashup technologies allow publishers to syndicate their data into machine-readable RSS feeds to which readers can selectively subscribe with free social software. Geotagging systems make it possible to create locative content by mobile devices, situated both in real and virtual environment (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006). Locative content is digital media applied to real places, any kind of link to additional information set up in space together with the information that a specific place supplies, which is triggering real social interactions with a place and with technology (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Hanzl, 2007, Kaipainen & Pata, 2007).

This new learning environment – an augmented reality/virtuality - consists of distributed virtual spaces generated by social software tools, and of the real spaces and objects, in which locative content has been added with mobile devices. Augmented reality, the reality overlaid with virtual reality, and virtual reality, in which representations of the real world have been embedded and contextualised, is enabling interactions both in real and virtual spaces. Lonsing (2004) suggests that an augmented reality system generates a composite view in real time - a combination of a real scene viewed by a user and a virtual scene generated by a computer, where the real scene is submerged with additional information in order to enhance the perception of the user.

Rich layers of embodied knowledge and practice in the real spaces, and authentic context triggering activities and knowledge-building in virtual spaces, makes augmented space into a potential learning environment with new challenges for the learners. This new learning medium is a distributed activity space in which learners meet other learners, knowledge artifacts and practices.

New augmented learning environment provides novel tools and triggers new types of activity patterns in this distributed space. Possible learning patterns involve both actions in real and virtual spaces - thus we need to view this space as one whole.

Several community-activities with new technologies can be built upon the relationships between real spaces/objects, people and meanings:
Space with dynamically embedded meanings (eg. spoken narratives, movement) entails action potentials. The embodiment of these action potentials is a process of coupling affordances evoked by internal imagination and goals in one hand, and the perceived and culturally predefined external affordances from the environment, on the other hand. As a result, this space becomes into a place for new interpretors and starts triggering activities.

Question is of course when can persons in such places perceive the patterns of activities, when can they perceive affordances of the certain culture to interact with this culture?
(eg. How much geotagged content at places/virtual content in blogs, social repositories there needs to be, that it would reveal activity potentials for triggering certain community activities. What happens if the activity potentials coupled with different anticipated activity potentials, how do such creative threads and activity derivations emerge and influence the augmented reality activity potentials?)

In which areas of the augmented reality (real or virtual) can the activity potentials be actualized, will the proceeding activity take place in the same dimensionality or can it cross the imaginary border of these spacial dimensions of the augmented reality?
(eg. i can add geotagged content in real place, but later it starts my virtual activities in virtual space, that in turn can be traced as activity patterns from the real place)

ecology of hybrid social web

Rising social web and its rapid becoming into the hybrid environment that integrates virtual and real spaces has given birth to the new activities:

• self-management of personal mediation spaces constructed by orchestrating distributed sets of web-based and mobile tools;
• self-propagation of one’s presence and self-positioning into the multi-perspective hybrid places evoked by merging virtual and real spaces through creating personal external meaning-spaces and geo-tagging personal meanings as action potentialities to hybrid locations;
• self-localization in the hybrid space by tagging, feeds, and mashup technologies for obtaining awareness of people, their meaning perspectives and activities;
• self-identification and alignment into virtual communities and their spacial perspectives through detection, participation and playful variation of their activity patterns, and connective uptake and translation of meanings;

These activities all together enable to establish the dynamic ecology of hybrid social web as an activity system. This consists of external spaces with objects, what people need to activate as embodied concepts in neural circuits of sensory-motor area of brain. Embodiment happens by intentionally evoking anticipated affordances related to previously experienced or culturally defined action potentialities and their emotional correlates.

Embodying objects in space as embodied concepts turns them for persons into places with embedded meanings, which serve as mediating tools for activities. People propagate their activity patterns in spaces as meanings attached to artifacts, what they externalise through mediating tools. Each artifact, when interpreted in space, constrains the dimensions of the space for the person, it contains action potentialities (affordances) that will be created and embodied by new person, and which start constraining the space, actions in space, emotions related to this space. We can see these artifact-action triggered affordances as sort of ecological activation or even instruction for the user how it is possible to use the environment.

In order to perceive certain activity potentials of other people in space people need to be intentionally at same wavelenght and embody similar/or potentially competing action potentialities and their emotional correlates (affordances). Self-identification of spaces into places enables the person to locate himself, propagate one’s identity, and distinguish from the other identities creating therefore an ecological niche where to inhabit. Continuous self-localization in respect to other space perspectives and their inhabitants, and potential adjustment to their places serves for community formation that is ecologically important to defend the communal places.

Ecological social web is in dynamic changes because the embodiment of action potentials of individuals is never totally similar and brings in variations. Within the communities this variation is low, resulting in similar perception of places and uptake of meanings and participation of the common activity patterns. As certain communities embody different perspectives of spaces, this creates the potential borders of understanding meanings, and noticing afforded activity patterns. Thus, the social web as an ecosystem obtains structural complexity – certain communities may simultaneously inhabit the same space while defining it as a different place. The uptake of meanings of another community in the jointly inhabited space may also happen. Such meanings will be embodied in the different intentional frames causing novel activity patterns to emerge.

Example:

We may walk in town seeing the previous location of Bronze soldier monument. Depending of our alignment to certain cultural-ideological group we may embody certain emotions (fear/anguish/pride) and maybe some motor actions like (not)going there. If we are the inhabitant of hybrid social spaces, we may be tempted to take a picture of this place and upload it to Flickr, geotagging it at Tallinn map. We may also comment our experiences with the location in the post of our weblog and drag the feed of the Flickr image to the weblog. Let’s suppose many people do the same thing. They can also see the other images tagged to the place, maybe some from the times when the soldier was still there, or some from the hot days in Tallinn. They reflect their different meanings and related action potentials in narratives of their weblogs. Someone else studying the event, will find different weblogs and images and needs to detect what were the action potential of people, if he is able of detecting some communalities in meanings he may also embody some action potentials. These depend of the cultural and activity background of this person (eg. whether this is a citizen of Moscow or New York). They will comment the posts and take other actions, presumably sending some liberty fighters to Tallinn or decide not to take the trip to Tallinn as tourists. We can also imagine there is a certain software that enables people to directly geotag their images or meanings to the Bronze soldier location and view the meanings at spot. This will create a potential for embodying different action potentials for the different communities, and also the possibility to develop novel activity patterns – for example the narratives of the place, grounding of what happened and finding the compromises between cultures etc. We can say then that the previous Bronze soldier location becomes into the space with meanings that serves as a mediating device for understanding and participating in activities.

migrating affordances?

MIGRATION AND NARRATION
Brigitte Boenisch-Brednich

Her article from electronic journal Folklore aims to work out the main narrative techniques of “telling migration”. It is based on field studies of people who moved to New Zealand after war. Why i find this article interesting? It picks up some affordances that are more extending, inviting for the newcomer. It demonstrates how people try to shift from one ecology with certain activity potentials and affordances for them, into another align system by drawing comparisons. Very semiotic approach of translating meanings from align framework to the common one by using certain connection points (see Stecconi writings).
It kind of makes me think about possibility of transferring affordances from some mediating tools in one environment into the totally new object in new setting that then becomes the substitute tool.

Can affordances be re-embedded?

Will the connection with the previous tool and its affordances remain embodied in person and will it be evoked simultaneously with the new tool and its affordances for a certain period of time?
It is also interesting how the narratives point to the affordances in the environment and there is also personal justification and evaluation for these affordances.

To the paper:

The approach is to investigate migration from the perspective of focussing on everyday life, an investigation on the basis of personal experiences, such as “work, housing, food, celebrations, social life”. A special focus is set on the analysing of “mental narratives” as key stories, examples, comparatives etc.

In terms of migration experiences there are 3 types of narrative items:
a) Stories about leaving and arriving

The narratives of the very first impressions on New Zealand are vivid and mostly very short. The first impressions, beside taking in the new landscape, were mostly those of the different food, the missing coffee-shops, the Sundays when everything was closed. But sometimes it was pleasurably different.

b) stories about the first year in New Zealand, which are stories about cultural misunderstanding, language problems, homesickness; basically about feeling alien, and being considered alien.

They outline pictures showing very different, often incoherent patterns to the outsider; only the migrant him- or herself can bring it to a pattern which makes sense for him- or herself.

c) there is a form of narratives covering the whole life of a migrant: the narratives of comparing countries and cultures – the culture you come from and the one you are now living in.

The underlying system of all the stories is the overall scheme of constantly comparing countries.In the process of composing points to compare, people create a supposedly objective reality; this enables them to combine argumentation and narration, and to make sense of their world.

*drawing very personal conclusions
Comparing countries can also mean that people are drawing very personal conclusions about their life in both countries.

*justification, push the rational narrative to points of proving their decision was right
A very personal decision is therefore followed by creating individual narratives which underline the direction in which they have sought to change their biographies.
They push the rational narrative to points of proving their decision was right, because they feel right.

*trying to narrate success
maybe 10% per cent of my interviews revealed this slightly problematic pattern of trying to narrate success when you should really be talking about misfortune or failure. The usual way is that a key narrative is used as a personal and symbolic mark5 to give a rationale

Decision support tool in action

On saturday we tested iCamp Folio with the group of learners. They had to think of the affordances they need in self-directed action. Next they could move the sliders to switch in some of the affordances. If profile was saved, they could see which tools have the needed affordances, and who of the learners has similar profile.

We also talked with Mauri Kaippainen, that there is an advancement of this software already, that fixes the most suitable selection of tools and users to the upper right corner area. So the whole area of the tool becomes more meaningful. We still need to implement it though in iCamp Folio.

Our ECTEL 07 presentation of the folio.

Theoretical Framework of the iCampFolio - New Approach to Evaluation and Comparison of Systems and Tools for Learning Purposes, Terje Väljataga, Mart Laanpere, Kai Pata, Mauri Kaipainen

Mart suggested yesterday that FOAF could be used to get learner’s expected activity affordances and their tool preferences on the basis of affordances together.

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

This idea is interesting, and goes close to our thinking of activity system components interaction when people define their learning landscape affordance-based.

Mapping Hybrid Ecology ideas rev.1

Since we are thinking to start some really interesting brainstorming session about Hybrid Ecologies in augmented reality in Tallinn I started some ideamapping of certain thoughts.

Several community-activities with new technologies can be built upon the relationships between real spaces/objects, people and meanings:
Space with dynamically embedded meanings (eg. spoken narratives, movement) entails action potentials. The embodiment of these action potentials is a process of coupling affordances evoked by internal imagination and goals in one hand, and the perceived and culturally predefined external affordances from the environment, on the other hand. As a result, this space becomes into a place for new interpretors and starts triggering activities. Activities in places are mediated by cognitive tools (eg. language) or physical tools (eg. body movement).

Space geotagged with meanings as media artifacts (eg. textual narratives or images), which were embedded by ICT tools (mobiles, computers, pdas) or manually (etc. graffit, signs) entails action potentials. This space becomes into an augmented place for real and virtual activities (eg. blogging geotagged itinerary). These activities may be simulatneously mediated by cognitive tools (eg. language) or body (eg. movement) and ICT tools (mobiles, computers, pdas) with interfaces (?) (eg. social software like Flickr, Youtube etc.).

Activities in augmented reality are hybrid - interfaces may theatrialize certain action potentials between real and virtual sides of the realm, intentionally activated internal action potentials may be embedded through virtual interfaces to the spaces toolisizing them.

The thoughts, what might be interesting to study, are still to be elaborated. But i believe in to the interplay between three groups: actors, activity patterns and meanings in augmented places, thus, determining interesting ecosystems.

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Here is the initial seed from Anatole Pierre Fuksas:

Storytelling and Hybrid Ecologies in the Age of Social Networking and Locative Media

Philology and criticism usually apply to literary works that have been written and published or literary systems as actual genres. That is, literary studies generally focus on past or present state of the art but they hardly offer predictions, prefiguring forms that will play a role into the future development of cultural landscapes. Making a remarkable exception in respect to the norm, the present contribution aims to forecast potential development in storytelling based on locative media. That is, as part of a more general inquiry on the Ecology of the Novel, it will investigate potential literary applications based on Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS) or similar geotagging standards.

In a few years narrative artists and storytellers’ communities will very likely write or tape stories that will be broadcasted by locative media mining 2.0 websites for contents to delievered by Location-based media on GPS or GIS enabled portable wireless devices. Textual narratives as podcasted stories will will invade laptop computers and mobile phones, providing readers and listeners with pertinent references or analogical interferences aimed to enriching natural environments. Presences triggered by the mirror matching of references entailed by symbolically encoded narratives, both in audio and written text formats, will infest urban and rural environments, forests and deserts, islands and hills, mountains and beaches, enhance the sensory experience of perceived landscapes.

So, questions arise. What formats may be forecasted as the standards ones when it will come to the implementation of socially shared narrative art with locative tagging? Will these new narrative standards reshape interactions between subjects and environments? Will coded and shared hybridation based on narrative contents reshape perception of landscapes? Moreover, while providing a permanently operative level of interaction between narrative contents and natural environments, will geotagged stories play crucial role in the literary system? Will eventually the novel be doomed to extintion because of the rise of socially-networked locative narratives? Rather, will the novel outlast this technological revolution too?

See Storied navigation from MIT medialab
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i had a talk yesterday aslo with Mauri Kaippainen. He showed me some interesting thoughts where he used Neisser’s framework for describing the situation in hybrid systems.

http://www.slideshare.net/M3.thevirtual/kaipainen-normak-niglas-kippar

It is notable that Neisser (1994) elaborated Gibson‘s concept of affordance and distinguished three perceptual modes:
- Direct perception/action, which enables us to perceive and act effectively on the local environment;
- Interpersonal perception/reactivity, which underlies our immediate social interactions with other human beings, and;
- Representation/recognition, by which we identify and respond appropriately to familiar objects and situations.

We discussed what the exploration would entail, and can the participants of the community directly view each others’ exploration or is it mediated through the narrative/visual meanings as emergent patterns in the interface.

For me the ‘object’ on the figure is too general, and it does not separate the real objects in the environment and the ‘meanings’ that are tagged to the object. On my opinion these need to be looked together but also as separate things.

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My talk with Anatole:

A:If I get you right, you maintain that interaction with objects imply externalization of feelings, emotions, whatever, and the so called meaning the performer attach to the object while perceiving or affording it is somewhat transmitted to the object, that changes into a tool the performer uses to cope with the environment.

K: I assume that i may have internally an emotion or intention (i refer to the meanings or intentions that are initiated inside me as novel, creative), which i cannot express or do without the use of mediation to the external world (to someone certain, to someone abstract). Thus, i must embed this emotion or this action potential to the environment picking something, an object in the environment, or creating an object that didnt exist and attaching my action potentials or emotional cues to this object so that it will become into a tool that helps me to express this emotion/do this action, or to leave this emotion/this action potentiality as an invitation to the environment. This gives the objects i use as mediators a dimension where they become tools. But at the same time they don’t cease to be objects in another dimension.
My understanding is based on the emboding of objects by means of potential or actual affordances.

My understanding involves also the embodiment. I see it as shifting something that is initially left in the environment to some object by someone internal in order to evoke emotions or trigger actions. I cannot use any tools (that the environmental objects with affordances i perceive) are without partly embodying them, extracting something from the object (this something i see as the perspective with affordances), imagining it, initiating some neural processes that lead to my emotions and actions, and then i am able of using this object as a tool to perform action.

When i have used some tool earlier, later this embodied feeling of using the tool with the affordances can serve instead of tool.

Then there is also a possiblity, that i don’t do this embodiment directly by touching the things, but i may observe the others doing it/talking of it.
Or i may read the others having used it. In the last case i somewhat create imaginary tool with affordances, which serves as real tool for triggering my actions and i can use the imaginary tool and do what i wanted to do. (eg. i imagine streets to know where to go, and i can explain it also by using this imagined tool)

A: So, human anatomy is crucial as the shape of the object is and certainly Human phisiology is perturbated by affordances, hence performers can feel like affording a book just by thinking of it or talking about it (mirror neurons etc…).

K: yes..human anatomy and perceptional organs?

A: Now, the actual affordance of an object …

K: i dont believe the object has an actual affordance, it may have many affordance perspectives only due to different actors who have embedded/omitted some of their emotions/action potentials to the object

A:… may turbate the status of the afforded object and the change makes sense to me in terms it determines subsequently different assessment of the landscape it belongs to.

K: i cannot understand word turbate
since i disagree the first part it is hard to get the point of second part

A: I’d redefine the idea of externalizing feelings by actually affording objects in different terms.

K: yes, exactly - omitting internal affordances which we imagine as necessary prerequisties for actions/emotions to the objects in external world.
However i also believe it is kind of coupling process. The objects due to our perception, earier experiences, cultural background, embodied action potentials of these objects will always sort of extend some properties to us, that makes us to pick these objects, feel as if there are paired affordances for our action. So for me at both sides there is matching between imagined affordances.
Is it the same what you think with previous sentence of turbating?

A: That is I’d say goal planned actions so to be defined as purposeful and planned at all have to entail emotional correlates (Bechara and Damasio’s studies I quoted and I attach, one of them I have in paper, so send you the reference and another one I just got the abstract).

K: logically this sentence is not argumented here. But in principle i believe they come as pairs.

A: So, emotions are not externalized, they are simply part of the decision making process…

K: there are some emotions that precede any intentions, and there are some emotions that procede intentions or are simultaneous with emotions

A:… that is they are crucial and completely embedded into the action planning strategy.

K: at least two last versions of emotions are
but some emotions exist per se, not because of intentions
creative emotions often have no goal but emotion

A: To a certain extent, perception triggers action potential and emotional correlates at the same time.

K: i agree

A: So, in order to ‘get’ the emotion driving somebody else into, say, leaving a book into a bookshop, you may be able to decode it from CLUES he left WHILE interacting with the object, that is handling, manually affording it.

K: Yes i believe you attach the emotional potentials to the tools when you actually embed the affordances of action.
But for pure emotion to evoke emotion, do you need the action/goal things in between or can you also embed to some objects, afford pure emotion?

A: Dunno if this fixes the point and sets us on the same page, but I think it may help you with your externalizing struggle

K: for me we are at the same ground, the question was more in my use of words: embedd, externalise, omit, embody is somewhat nice word for himans to take something as part of their body parts, but for me actors and objects do not feel that different. For example trees feel me same as humans. Or stones. Or houses. Or water. So i could somewhat imagine they have some goal-directed embodiment as well.

For example there are studies in the north how trees transmit fear. Or there are many studies of water having structural kind of memory. If to think a bit more open way further, you can see my struggle with embodiment isnt so simple.