Ontobranding: how reality promotes itself

Yesterday we had a meeting with Nello Barile and Andrea Miconi from Universitá IULM.

Nello’s paper “From post-human consumer to the ontobranding dimension” for forthcoming Mobile communication and social policy conference points to an interesting aspect how new social technologies together with consuming practices within these technologies can create certain ontobrands.

He writes:

To explain this connection between consuming, technology and geolocalized experience the theorists invented several formulas such as hyper-geography, hybrid ecologies and geotagging.

The idea of assigning an IP address to every square meter of our planet suggest that there will be a complete isomorphy between the net and the planet so that every movement in one dimension implies an immediate modification on the other. Every element of our urban and natural environment could be able to interact and dialogue with this integrated system and other system connected with it. In this way when the idea of a traditional branding strategy will be overcome by a sort of diffused kind of branding.

Nello claims that : “branding becomes a flexible and spread technology”.

He writes:

If the traditional branding was just a tool in the hands of companies to build their own image and positioning in the collective mind, the selfbrandig approach demonstrates how the marketing thought is a state of mind that produces an existential positioning

Unfortunately, Nello does not define clearly his ‘ontobranding’ idea, but i can see that it is exactly what we were doing in our Hybrid Narrative Ecosystem studies.

We wrote with Mauri in our forthcoming book-chapter for IGI Gobal “Participatory design experiment: Storytelling Swarm in Hybrid Narrative Ecosystem” that one representation of hybrid ecosystem is ontospace, which consists of ontodimensions – descriptive features of an entity within a domain of information (eg. cool, expensive, cheap, nice).
People take perspectives of ontodimensions that can be fixed with ontocoordinates in this ontological space (eg. i can prefer more cool but cheap dimensions).
Niche is such a range of ontodimension perspectives that certain community members jointly define in ontospace, that effectively meets their understandings, expectations, and behaviour. Practically, niche is an abstract communality of community members personal preferences and perspectives.
Niche defines a subspace in ontospace that constrains the personal selection of perspectives of each community member. (simply you don’t fit to this community if your perspective is out of this range).
We also claim that every person evokes affordances as perceived perspectives in ontospace when they interact within this hybrid space. So they are simultaneously keeping and shifting the community subspace in ontospace. (This can be imagined as brand shift, changes in fashion).
However, this activity is not centrally coordinated, but may appear in the swarming kind of behaviours. In swarming each individual relies on signals left by swarm members into the ecosystem (practically the geotagged content). Again, the more strong is the signal, the more likely it will be picked up and it becomes a brand.

For me this is how the ontobrand can appear. I don’t know if Nello Barile will agree with this explanation

Anyway, i think we can continue discussions with him.

Modelling spaces for self-organized learners

Today i found that the special number of Journal of Educational Technology & Society “Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners” has been published. There are two articles from Tallinn workgroup of Educational Technology.

Mine is about Modelling spaces for self-organized learners
http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_3/4.pdf

Terje Väljataga and Sebastian Fiedler write about the course that we did in iCamp project “Supporting students to self-direct intentional learning projects with social media”
http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_3/6.pdf

Swarming to write narratives in hybrid ecosystem

Recent month i have been trying to write together with Mauri Kaipainen about the “Narrative ecology” course results. In principle, we come up with some theoretical baseline how writing narratives happens in new hybrid ecosystems, and how it may be represented ontologically and used for detecting more about the new standards of writing stories in Web 2.0.
Finally it has to be a book chapter, but since it is not ready it is about a time to show some of it.

Swarming to write narratives in hybrid ecosystem
by
Kai Pata
Mauri Kaipainen

1. Hybrid narrative ecosystem

1.1. Defining hybrid ecosystems

For describing what we mean by storytelling with participatory media, the concept of hybrid ecosystem is useful. The term conveys two ideas. First, hybrid refers to the property of the world that is achieved by active hybridization of physical spaces with digital media spaces (eg. blogs, microblogs, wikis, social repositories and -networks). These borders can be blurred or eliminated whenever purposeful, allowing embedding artifacts across borders for creating an augmented and more interactive reality. The second key term is that of an ecosystem with its explanatory subconcepts ontoplace and niche.
Individuals develop places when they add various artifacts such as images, impressions, historical content, marketing information to augment certain geographical locations, and increase their ability to perceive places as meaningful spots individually. Place is assumed to have not only geographical coordinates but also ontocoordinates, that is other defining characteristics for a place (Kaipainen, et al., 2008). Ontocoordinates enable to identify ontoplaces that are unique for each individual. The concept of ontoplace refers to the context of events, objects, emotions and actions of an individual in the place, and includes both natural, e,g, geographical elements as well as conceptual constructions. Individuals with similar cultural background form communities that may have a similar perception of ontoplaces because they are involved in similar activities or share common meaning making principles. We use niche concept for determining such shared ontoplaces and -spaces.
Niche concept is used in biology for describing an abstract space in which certain species has optimal living conditions for performing all actions related to their life. Hutchinson (1957) defined niche as a region (n-dimensional hypervolume) in a multi-dimensional space of environmental factors that affect the welfare of a species. These environmental factors (eg. optimal temperature amplitude or daylight period) may be related with geographical aspects (eg. latitude, altitude) or may be determined by other non-geographical aspects (eg. chemical components of the soil, specific prey objects of other species in the area etc.). Niches appear as generalizations, they become evident if many similar individuals live, interact and evolve in certain conditions. Each individual is constantly adapting itself to the niche of the species.
In our discourse we look individuals who share certain joint activities as a community. We determine a community as an equivalent of the species. This community is influenced by the various environmental factors in hybrid environment. Different artifacts, perceived action possibilities or people available in the physical or virtual places create environmental factors for the communities that determine their possibility of taking community-specific actions. Environmental factors influence individuals physically as well as emotionally or cognitively. The determination of ontocoordinates of ontoplaces individually by community members creates conditions for the emergence of niches with shared ontocoordinates that facilitate taking certain community-specific actions. For example, Hoffmeyer (1995) coined the term of semiotic niche to signify the semiotic spaces that are actualized by certain organisms in species’ specific semiotic processes when interacting with their environment. Magnani (2008), and Magnani and Bardone (2008) use the term cognitive niche to mark the distributed space that people create by interrelating individual cognition and the environment through the continuous interplay through abductive processes in which they alter and modify the environment. Niches represent generalized ontoplaces and -spaces for communities – groups of individuals with similar cultural background and perception. It must be noticed that niches may have but do not necessarily have geographical coordinates in real world.
An ecosystem is a unit of interdependent species, which share the same habitat. Another view to the ecosystem is niche based – one habitat may provide various partially overlapping or separate niches for species to coexist. In our case hybrid environments form a particular habitat in which various communities create and alter their activity niches. The niches for writing hybrid narratives appear if individuals who share some common Web 2.0 storytelling culture determine for themselves ontoplaces in the hybrid ecosystem and use them as triggers of their narratives. It must be noted that such facilitating niches for storytelling appear in hybrid environments when several people find, use or embed digital contents for perception and action as part of their daily interaction with the hybrid ecosystem. On one hand, narratives created in this ecosystem may have geocoordinates connecting them with physical world. On the other, in the virtual environment, narratives possess ontocoordinates, thus determining optimal abstract niches for storytelling. By adding their contents to the environments, participants create the evolutionary feedback loop to the niche (Magnani & Bardone, 2008; Pata, 2009; 2010). Participatory media environments together with real places can be conceptualized as a hybrid ecosystem, provided that participants of social media have ecological dependence of the particular set of “tools” that they use as their niche for taking action. The concept of tool here should be interpreted as it is used in an activity theory (see Leontjev, 1978), which considers various artifacts (eg. digital narratives, images), software (eg. social software tools) and language (eg. user-created ontologies, tags) as mediators of action. Ongoing narrative activity by many individuals in hybrid environment influences and shapes the characteristics of available niches in the ecosystem and allows a habitat for communities.

1.2. Representing hybrid ecosystems

Next, we will discuss some methods of representing various coordinates of hybrid ecosystems. The initial idea of bringing place-information to the active use in participatory media environments was to associate contextually meaningful information and metadata with the geo-coordinates of the places. For capturing, storing, retrieval, analysis and display of spatial data GIS as a computer-based system was developed. It was discovered soon that the methods of mapping geographical space by GIS geo-coordinates do not match the way people think about their world. For this reason, Jourdam Raubal, Gartrell and Egenhofer (1998) suggested that integrating a model of how people conceptualize and perceive places into GIS would enable to use GIS to make important decisions about places. They suggested that physical features of objects in places, actions that people take at places, narratives that are related to the places, symbolic references of the places (eg. names, metaphors), cultural factors of the place and the typologies of places given by people could be used for advancing GIS. They presented a methodology to model places with affordances that they saw as user-centred perspectives of the place. However, this technical innovation did not get much attention because for every person places contain different action and emotion potentialities, and manually annotation of this action- and meaning-specific metadata directly with places would have reduced the community-based applications of hybrid places.
The recent emergence of different participatory media has brought in ways of describing the conceptual nature of content collectively. One of the most popular methods is so called tagging, that is, adding descriptive terms associated with content by members of the community, and the complementary addition of geographical position information. Tags are related with meaning and activity dimensions of the communities. Using tag-based search, certain dimensions of the virtual places could be discovered and brought to the active use. Some social software environments (eg. Flickr.com) now enable the simultaneous use of tags and GIS information for mapping digital contents location-based to real world. Yet, many commonly used software types (eg. blogs, wikis) still lack this possibility. Using tags and GIS concurrently has opened another, more flexible way how communities can mark their meaningful places with artefacts independently of other communities, and interact at the physical locations with the virtual contents left by other communities. 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 media content applied to geographical 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 mobile technology (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Hanzl, 2007, Kaipainen & Pata, 2007). With positioning technologies e.g GPS-chips built in telephones, or by searching locations on digital maps (eg. Flickr.com, Google.maps.com, Brightkite.com), people can gain access to of the place-related digital artefacts. They can use them for learning, playful activities, marketing and other ways.
As to our approach, we take that the proper model of hybrid narrative ecosystems consists of a hybrid geo-conceptual-temporal ontospace. Hybrid ecosystem functioning at individual and community level causes the emergence of an ontospace. To ground this concept, on a general level we adopt the concept of ontology from IT systems, in the broad sense referring to specification of conceptualization (Gruber 1993) of the content dealt with, or to the manner of existence of the content, pointing at the old philosophical traditions related to ontotology. However, we find it difficult to apply the standard ontologies of IT, e.g. OWL, to the purposes of hybrid ecosystems, because their hierarchical and rigid nature does not support the emergence of new narrative tracks (we need to define tracks first) as we propose. Assuming that tagging involves the actual conceptual structure of the metadata, as with the activity of storytelling, the resulting ontology needs to be ‘soft’, that is, not fixed a priori but evolving in the course of the activity. Moreover, we assume that the created patterns or tracks are ontologically fundamental, that is, we want to allow that they can constitute new ontological categories.
As a consequence, we rather choose to apply in hybrid ecosystems the ontospatial approach of Kaipainen et al. (2008). This approach describes the domain of inquiry in terms of descriptive feature dimensions (ontodimensions) that altogether constitute an ontological space (ontospace), also referred to as soft ontology. In this model, the number of ontodimensions is not fixed, but can vary dynamically, allowing new defining features to emerge in the process.

Ontodimension is one dimension in ontospace that can be perceived and followed when collecting and storing artifacts in hybrid ecosystem. Such dimensions may be perceived only by one individual or by many individuals. The more strong ontodimensions are perceived the more probable is that they are followed and used in new narratives.

Note. It is the way how we can later connect it to the swarming behaviour (making and following the signal trace means basically that people notice ontodimensions and start accumulating/monitoring these ontodimensions).

As another crucially important feature for modeling hybrid ecosystems is that the model does not assume any a priori hierarchical structure, but considers all descriptive features to be of equal ontological importance. It is the observer’s perspective that priorizes the ontodimensions and determines the perceived order.

The ontodimensions that a person has previously noticed as meaningful, and used in his/her actions, will narrow his/her perception and help to focus only on certain ontodimensions of the ontospace. If noticing such dimensions is common for more than one individual, these ontodimensions become community-specific. Ecologically, certain ontodimensions start to facilitate some community specific actions more than the others, and enable to form an abstract community specific niche. Niche is a community specific and community determined part of an ontospace. Niche is a meaningful place for the community, and we may call it an abstract ontoplace of the community. Ontoplace for a community is optimal for certain activity, beyond a mere geographical place.
The niche as a community place in hybrid ecosystem is never stabile and static but is always in the stage of evolvement as the community members perceive and use various ontodimensions.

An ontospace is a means to relate the existence of entities of a domain to each other and to the domain to which they belong in terms of similarity, in turn defined as proximity in the ontospace. Formally, coordinate system O=(x1,x2,…xm) defines m-dimensional ontospace A of domain D. Each entity i of domain D, for example §, is represented by an m-tuple Ai=(ai1, ai2,…aim) , were aij stands for the salience value of property j that can be determined or specified for entity I in the data collection process. Altogether, Ai constitutes the ontocoordinates of entity i and expresses the position of i in ontospace A.

The virtue of this formalism is that aij§ can represent any type of description, be it a tag, or the geoposition, or a time stamp of an event, and they can be blended and referred to in various hybrid ways.

In addition, it allows the description of stories as a trajectories across the ontospace.

Furthermore, we can represent an ontodimension as an affordance, which enables to give another, ecologically interpreted explanation of how people perceive and interact with the hybrid ecosystems.

1.3. Embodiment of hybrid ecosystems

The ways people interact with the hybrid ecosystem – augmenting artifacts and accessing virtual information associated with places – extend the human capabilities of action and perception. Perception in hybrid ecosystem involves expectations and meanings (Gibson, 1979) and is a continuous, active and embodied process (Gibson, 1979; Michaels, 2003; Zhang & Patel, 2006). Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991, p. 149) associate the capacities of understanding with biological embodiment, but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history. They coined the term embodied action to point at the idea that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that originate from having a body with various sensory-motor capacities. They also emphasized that that these individual sensory-motor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. The authors assumed that sensory and motor processes, perception and action are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition (p. 172-173). Using the term enaction they focused on two points: 1) perception consists of perceptually guided action, and 2) cognitive structures emerge from recurrent sensory-motor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided (Varela et al., 1991, p. 173). The enactive cognition framework (e.g. Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela, et al., 1991) emphasizes cognition and knowledge as active construction of a subject, rather than passive representation of an external reality. From the viewpoint of writing stories in hybrid environment this assumption is important. The narratives of the hybrid space are not representations of events that are described by digital means. The stories emerge as part of the places and are constantly enacted in various ways, depending of the ‘reader’ of the story. Communities may compose locative narratives, which will perceptually guide this community, but also the other communities.
Ecological psychology (eg. Gibson, 1979) can be applied as a theoretical framework to explain how people conceptualize and perceive hybrid places. Ecologically oriented approach regards perception more as a direct process of translating environmental action potentialities into action. Information processing according to this view states that when a given stimulus from the environment is frequently coupled with a given response, the information derived from that stimulus will become associatively enriched with response produced cues that then will help to discriminate this stimulus from other ones coupled with other responses (Hommel et al., 2001). The most important claim of the ecological perception theory is that neither the properties of the place nor the physical properties, action goals, memories, or emotions that people have beforehand, would alone suffice to provide the interaction potentialities for the place.
Gibson (1979) originally coined the term affordances for marking this complementarity of the environment and organisms (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). He (1979, p. 129) wrote: “An affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to observer.” Affordances are not properties, resources nor features of the environment. Instead they are “relations between particular aspects of animals and particular aspects of situations” (Chemero, 2003, p. 184). Coupling happens between the place-related and culturally defined affordances, and internal personally relevant goals, emotions and memories of previous interaction. It is the very mutuality between actor and environment that constitutes the basis for the actor’s perception and action (Albrechtsen, Andersen, Bodker, & Pejtersen, 2001). Barab and Roth (2006) assume that in the perception-action cycle of coupling each new action potentially expands or contracts affordances as active interaction possibilities of the place. Magnani (2008), and Magnani and Bardone (2008) note that human and non-human animals “modify” or “create” affordances by manipulating their cognitive niches. According to Heft (2001): “we engage a meaningful environment of affordances and refashion some aspects of them… These latter constructed embodiments of what is known – which include tools, artifacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions – can be called ecological knowledge. Ecological knowledge through its various structural, material culture, human setting manifestations becomes an integral social and cultural part of ‘the environment’, with these social and cultural affordances constituting effective, largely material, forms of knowledge with their own functional significance, cultural transmission, and adaptation implications.”
Affordances emerge when people use social software tools, collecting stories in the geographical places, developing and embedding digital artifacts or interacting with the augmented space. The term of affordance marks the dynamic process by which people in the course of action accommodate themselves with their surroundings and simultaneously shape these surroundings. For example Bruner (1996) refers to such an accommodation process when cultural identity is found by meaning making and writing narratives. Affordances appear for every individual differently, but as long as individuals are part of certain communities and cultures, they evoke similar sets of affordances (Pata, 2009). In the present context we may consider affordances as abstract dimensions of the space by which activity and meaning niches of the communities may be described (Pata, 2009; 2010). Affordances of the hybrid narrative ecosystem emerge in the course of storytelling. The sets of affordances that many individuals perceive and use in storytelling will reveal the potential storytelling niches of the hybrid ecosystem.

2. Writing narratives in hybrid ecosystem

2. 1. Appearing new storytelling standards in Web

New technology, such as microblogging (eg. Smallplaces in Twitter http://twitter.com/smallplaces; Twiller http://twiller.tcrouzet.com/), mobile text-messaging (eg. Novel Idea http://www.mobfest.co.za/novelidea/default.html) or blogs has been used to write stories. A typical application is segmenting and serializing the story into small tweets and making it available to broad audience. Jay Bushman has been experimenting in developing re-imaginings of famous authors’ stories into the microblogging format (eg. The Good Captain http://www.loose-fish.com/waifpole/the-good-captain/) aiming to create embedded fiction between the streams of nonfiction that is constantly arriving to our daily lives. His goal is to blur the line between the real world and the story world (reference). The common “space” characteristic of the stories and human geography is reused in hybrid ecosystems. On one hand, human geography is filled with emotions about places, on the other, stories contain a set of geographical data and play a key role in shaping people’s geographical imaginations (Crang, 1998). Using this characteristic extensively, some authors (eg. Carlos Ruiz Zafon, “The Shadow of the Wind” http://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/shadow-walk.html) have embedded their novels into the real geographical locations and provide itineraries for exploring the novels parallel in real and virtual world to enable for the readers embodiment of the fictional story as part of city reality.
All these are examples of reintroducing old formats of fiction in the new hybrid ecosystem. In our experiment, instead of bending old novel format into the hybrid ecosystem, we wanted to explore the new evolving narrative formats of this hybrid space. For example, Crang (1998) has noted that different modes of writing may express different relationships to space and mobility. Kurland (2000) provides the following general characteristics of traditional stories. They have plot, a geographical setting, where and when story takes place, and characters who are involved into the plot by taking actions. The plot of the story usually involves conflicts and its resolution. Stories are generally read and appreciated only in their entirety, to understand the story we must follow the complete unfolding and resolution of the plot. The structure of the story may be linear progressing from unfolding the conflict, rising action, climax and resolution. Alternatively, the patterns of actions and interrelationship of characters may occur throughout the story. The author of a story plays often an active role in the story either as the first person narrator who participates in the story as an observer, minor character or even the major participant or the third person narrator who stands outside the story itself and can be all-knowing and might describe action from many character’s viewpoint, evaluating people and actions in the story. These characteristics of novels are culturally deeply rooted in our minds and may reappear in the transformed shape if different modes of writing are used in hybrid ecosystem. In the experiment we aimed at collecting evidence of new standards how narratives appear in hybrid ecosystem.

2.2. Swarming as a bio-metaphor for writing narratives

While looking for the models to depict the nature of storytelling in hybrid ecosystems we arrived to another biological phenomenon – swarming (Bonabeau, et al., 1999; Kennedy, Eberhardt & Shi, 2001). Many activities in hybrid ecosystems can be characterized as swarming phenomena. Swarming refers to self-organizing behavior in populations such in which local interactions between simple decentralized agents can create complex organized behavior. A swarm is a community in which every agent is only responsible for its individual actions, but the actions altogether cause shared intelligence to emerge. Such swarming systems can accomplish global tasks and form complex patterns through simple local interactions of autonomous agents. Individuals in swarms have ecological relations to the collective. They maintain their individuality and viability in case if the collective swarm intelligence and viability emerges (Sauter et al., 2005). Swarming relies on using the environment as a shared memory, and on reading information both from the environment and from the swarm members’s signals to maintain individual wellbeing. Thus, swarming is one of the main mechanisms how hybrid ecosystems function and evolve. In other ways swarming mechanisms can be viewed as the creation of an ontospace, and extracting certain signal ontodimensions from this space.

The particular activity that is focused on as an example of swarming in this study is writing narratives in a hybrid ecosystem. A hybrid narrative ecosystem can be described like viewing foraging ants through a prism. The foraging example was taken because it provided a generalized model for the various behaviors that have been observed in social software environments when people create and use textual and visual artifacts. “A central place food foraging” is a swarming behavior that consists of two main phases: an initial exploration for food, followed by carrying it back to the nest (Sudd & Franks, 1987). The foraging ant is randomly searching to explore new area. If an ant collides with some food it picks it up and leaves a certain pheromone on the trail. If foraging, each ant is alert for this pheromone as a food marker that may have been left by other ants in the trail for finding food. They are always moving towards the direction where there is a greater concentration of that pheromone.

Note! This may be related to the trajectory and gradient in ontospace)

However, the pheromone dissipates over time. If there are not enough ants collecting food and dropping pheromone on the way home, the trail may disappear. The system of diffusion and evaporation leads of a competition among food sources for available ants, because the number of ants is limited and the trails need a steady walking of ants along them to stay stable. The shorter the distance of a feeding place to the nest, the shorter is the trail, the more often ants walk from nest to feeder and back per time unit. This leads to a stronger positive feedback loop and race conditions among the feeders, selecting for the nearest one.

Note! This may be related to the trajectory and gradient in ontospace, why movig towards gradient is more effective behaviour.

The pheromones similar to those signaling about food may also be used to allure ants from the track. An enemy trying to conceal the search target, may spread false signals to attract the ants to a location of little interest. To avoid this trap, the signal is responded only if it reaches to certain threshold value (Marshall, 2005).

Note! Can ontodimensions reinforce each other? In niches it is possible that niche dimensions may reinforce each other if they appear together. So if some ontodimensions appear simultaneously they provide a stronger signal to the narrator to add some content, to do action)

writing narratives as a swarm

Figure 1. Swarming: Foraging behavior of ants and writing narratives in hybrid ecosystem.

As an analogue to ants’ foraging behavior, human storytellers in their hybrid ecosystem search for and are influenced by the attractor objects (eg. interesting aspects of the environment). When finding something of interest, the objects are captured in textual or digital image format using microblogging programs (Brightkite.com, Zannel.com) in mobile phones. Alternatively, digital cameras could be used and artifacts would be uploaded later. Microblogging environments enable to pull digital contents automatically also to the social repositories (Flickr.com) or social networks (Facebook.com). Stories uploaded from microblogging environment can be mashed using special tags, and pulled as RSS feeds to the other social software environments for monitoring. This may be done for extracting various stories from the collected artifacts individually or for the community. The artefacts can be locatively geotagged in microblogging systems (eg. Brightkite.com, Zannel.com), and connected to stories either by simple linking, tagging with keywords or merging them and providing longer explanations in personal blogs. The attention of emerging story is caught by various trace-leaving techniques like mashing, pulling and aggregating, tagging for social retrieval, social awareness technologies or hybrid maps etc. These collected and personally meaningful artifacts with tags serve as signal trails for the narrators themselves to continue with certain story aspects, and also for other storytellers to contribute for this story or to trigger their own stories. The application of microblogging environments and social mashups with tags enables for other people an immediate access to the new signals of potential attractors, causing selective noticing in the hybrid ecosystem. Following the signal trail opens the possibility of accumulating more content for a particular story, especially if several individuals start to strengthen the signal. The more similar content is accumulated, the more attractive and visible the story trail becomes as a trace in the narrative ecosystem. This trace attracts other individuals and thereby reinforces itself. Strong signal trails may also be attacked and reused, for example by alluring the crowds away from the original trail with various similar signal baits. The initial story may thus become modified into many paths.

Adopting traces of other individuals of the swarm depends on analogy or closeness of the attractor narratives to one’s own. Various forms of collaboration may appear. One is agglomerating stories in the manner comparable to how termites build the nest (Kennedy et al., 2001). Termites build high dome-like termite nets following the swarming behavior. They take some dirt in their mouth moistening it and then start to move in direction of the strongest pheromone concentration. They deposit dirt when the smell is strongest. After some random movements searching for a relatively strong pheromone field, the termites will have started a number of small pillars. The pillars signify places where a greater number of termites have recently passed, and thus the pheromone concentration is high there. The pheromone dissipates with time, so in order for it to accumulate, the number of termites must exceed some threshold; they must leave pheromones faster than the chemicals evaporate. This prevents the formation of a great number of pillars. As termite pillars ascend and termites become increasingly involved in depositing their loads, the pheromone concentration near that pillars increases. The termites are attracted to let the dirt between the pillars that attract them from several sides.

Note! Can ontodimensions reinforce each other? In niches it is possible that niche dimensions may reinforce each other if they appear together. So if some ontodimensions appear simultaneously they provide a stronger signal to the narrator to add some content, to do action)

Termite arch-building contains two kinds of behaviors: cue-based and sign-based. In the cue-based case the change in the environment provides a cue for the behavior of other actors (eg. growing pillars provide such cues). In the sign-based swarming the pheromones are used as signals.
In the hybrid narrative ecosystem the tags (like pheromones) are glued to the soil material (geotagged content of the narrative pieres, text, images). This provides signals and makes story elements attractive. The artifacts that are marked with same tags or artifacts that contain certain significant elements for the storytellers will be noticed and integrated into stories. However, these stories are not linear, but can be viewed rather as story dimensions.

Note! Here we must write about moving along perceived ontodimension trajectory when they write or monor other people stories. Aso moving alog the gradient is interesting here?

Secondly, such artifacts from certain story dimensions that are available in the geographical locations will become gateways to other geographical locations where artifacts with similar tags have been embedded. Such geo-locative story dimensions form an ecological knowledge of the hybrid narrative ecosystems, influencing how people will interact with the environment.
New geo-locative stories are granular and consisting of little content portions. The story may become evident and appear as a result of accumulation of these portions. Popular social software tools often lack sufficient interoperability to provide automatic pingbacks between different software platforms that would enable to trace the story elements across the hybrid ecosystem.
The emergent story may not have a start and end. It is a flow of impressions that may eventually obtain a storyline, or even several story lines for different people. Yet, providing the visibility of stories as linear sequences and composing story plots is technologically unaided.

Note! Again place for ontodiemnsion trajectory?

Individuals tend to mutate their narratives as a result of ecological perception. Sometimes these may initially be mere errors that take place if individuals try to repeat an existing narrative in another virtual environment (for example if adding descriptions and tags to the Flickr images uploaded by means of Brightkite mobile microblogging). Also deliberate reinterpretation of artifacts takes place. Most often if the narrative is transformed from one environment to another (eg. from microblogging environment to the blog) authors tend to elaborate it. If artifacts are borrowed from one individual to another, the new person and different context will cause different perception of this digital entity. This kind of evolution of stories may eventually change the attractor tag concentration to the extent that the original story trace will be lost and the individuals would need to start the search for new narrative resources as new attractors.

Note! Moving from one trajectory to another, can we elaborate this

It is important to note that swarm-like collaboration does not assume an initially decided goal, but suffices for collaborative patterns to emerge. Cloning narrative pieces by analogy may also make the trace of the narrative more visible, similarly like pheromone traces are agglomerated due to the swarm activity. Thus cloning will “hype up” some stories.

2.3. Narrative swarming from ontospace perspective

If we talk about writing narratives in a community of an hybrid ecosystem, the niche ontodimensions are determined by the most frequently selected ontodimensions that people perceive (eg. food, buildings, graffitti, emotions, contrasts, happyness, particular software beyond others, particular geographical locations beyond others). Within this niche certain ontoplaces are more preferred than the others, and start triggering collaboration.

When writing hybrid narratives, each person moves along personal trajectory in the ontospace, creating particular ontoplaces. This trajectory is not predetermined with the story plot. This trajectory is currently observable for the others only by means of participatory surveyllance in social software, and not as a detectable path in ontospace.
Often the trajectory as a storyline is determined by and combines from a limited set of ontodimensions that the person highlights, and a small number of hybrid locations where the person walks in daily life. It usually fluctuates between the limited number of closely situated ontolaces in the ontospace.

The triggers of perceiving new ontodimensions and discovering new ontoplaces are received from monitoring the hybrid ecosystem where other people write narratives in the same niche. Such use of same sets of ontodimensions in the community causes narrative swarming phenomena that are observable as the emergence of closely situated ontoplaces in ontoplace.

NB! Evidences of the activity may be seen from the previous posts.

Here is just a table to compare how narrative swarming in hybrid ecosystem differs from writing a traditional story.

Comparison of traditional stories and narratives written in hybrid ecosystem by swarms

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.

Semiosphere and affordances, talking with Wilma Clark

Yesterday evening I spent three hours with Wilma Clark from London to chat in Tartu University cafe about mutual research interests. Wilma happened to read my blog some time ago and while visiting Tartu she proposed to meet – another great example of how web-based contacts really work!

Wilma is currently in Tartu to write her PhD thesis. She is using Lotman’s semiosphere model to explain how technology changes learning spaces for teachers and learners. Wilma has recently translated in English Lotman’s book Culture and explosion which i referred earlier, it will appear soon. Her other translation is Lotman’s Semiosphere.

Wilma and her associates have in press quite interesting paper of school students’ preferences of technology use in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2009), 25, 56–69

Beyond Web 2.0: mapping the technology landscapes of young learners
W. Clark, K. Logan, R. Luckin, A. Mee & M. Oliver

In this paper they have used the boundary idea (similiar to Lotman’s semiosphere model) to analyze learning with technology in formal and informal settings.

From my own research perspective they used similar mapping technology as i have done, only at school level.
Secondly, in the questionnaire they have analyzed the tool use in activities using dimesionality: Can use, Can use, but are not allowed to use, Cannot use. Why this is interesting to me?
This can also be interpreted from the learning affordance aspect: we have often discussed with Mart Laanpere that affordances that some tool can be used for certain activities are same important as affordances (perception) that this tool is hindering (is not useful) for certain activity. So affordance can be described using the two-directional (Lickert?) scale (supportive and hindering).

Another interesting idea triggered from this paper: This perceptional feeling that something is common to certain user group in certain activities and hindering (not useful) or align in other activities enables to start using Lotmans semiosphere model together with affordance conception. Lotman plays in his model with the semiosphere in which always dual structure is created and perceived, and the border line between common to me(my community) and align to me(my community) is flexibly defined in the course of action. I think what concerns culture of the community that is related with similar community-specific activities, the affordances might serve as a useful term in defining this borderline.

It is a pity that in this paper the results of shifting borders between formal and informal learning tools (PLEs) are not presented visually keeping the semiosphere model in mind (or at least it is not so implicit).

From their report
Learners’ use of Web 2.0 technologies in and out of school in Key Stages 3 and 4
http://www.becta.org.uk/ i found a good illustration to formal/informal borders (Figure 12).

Borderline between formal and informal space when using web 2.0 tools for learning

What might be very interesting is not mapping the boundary for the community or class, but start seeing how the boundary is flexibly shifted in Personal Learning Environments (PLE) in formal and informal settings. I believe that the tasks and activities people do in PLE do not have much overlap in formal and informal settings in our classrooms, and practically the learners’ PLE components that exists in informal settings become align in formal settings from the teachers’ perception perspective. However, the students might feel tension and wish to use their PLE tools in formal settings.

We also briefly discussed with Wilma, is it good or bad if there is some overlap of learning space perception in school and outside the school, which enables translation in the dual parts of the semiosphere model - or alternatively, maybe total lack of overlap between perceived and expected affordances in formal and informal settings would create even better conditions for creation? To understand this idea Lotman’s words are the best:

Lotman wrote (in my free translation) in Culture and explosion:

Normal communication between people and normal communication between languages presumes the non-identity of the sender and the receiver. In this case it is normal that the language-space of the sender A and receiver B are partially intersected. Communication is impossible if A and B do not intersect, the total intersection (A and B are identical) changes communication meaningless. Permitted is, therefore, partial overlap of spaces, while at the same time two tendencies will be in action: while streaming towards mutual understanding, the overlapped area is tried to be increased, in order to raise the merit of the message, the difference between A and B must be increased. Therefore, to describe normal communication in languages, we must bring in the concept of tension, the contradiction between the certain forces between spaces A and B.
The overlapped space of A and B becomes their natural area of communication. At the same time the areas that do not overlap seem to be switched off the dialogue. Here we stumble to one more contraversity: communication at overlapped area is trivial. It occurrs that not the overlapped area is of high meaning for the dialogue, but the exchange of information between the areas of no overlap. We can assume that translation of non-translable becomes the carrier of information with high merits. In the area of overlap, between languages that are similar the translation is easy, between the different languages (e.g. poetry and music) it is difficult and creates ambiguent meanings. Not understanding between languages is same valuable as understanding.

The relationships between the translable and non-translable are so complex that they create possibilities for breakthrough to the space beyond the borders. This function is fulfilled by the explosions, that create windows to the space beyond the language borders.

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.

Traces and niches

Here is a conceptual scheme of how activity patterns are related to niches.
This is a continuation of describing how activity traces are emergent and useful in planning for individual learning paths with social media.

Special issue: Links and Interactions Between Language and Motor Systems in the Brain

Thanks to Anatole Pierre Fuksas who sent me note in Facebook i found a great issue supporting my affordance ideas: that any action verbs for example and other action traces may be picked up and embodied/disembodied… from web.
In my thinking this evidence these papers provide of the general idea is necessary to support the ecological learning model functioning.

Interactions Between Language and Motor Systems in the Brain
Volume 102, Issues 1-3, Pages 1-152 (January-May 2008)
Journal of Physiology-Paris