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

Multi perspective view to affordances of tools

Today at master defences commission i played a bit with my data collected from students’ course.
Here is the demo tool to play with your dataset:
http://kerg.tlu.ee/demos/multi-perspective-exploration

The formation of learning spaces happens through the social definition of several learning and teaching related environmental gradients that define the niche as the multidimensional space. In general, any gradient is a peak of the fitness landscape of one environmental characteristic, which can be visualized in two-dimensional space as a graph with certain skewness and width, determining the ecological amplitude. The shape of the fitness graph for certain characteristic can be plotted through the abundance of certain specimen benefitting of this characteristic. Each niche gradient defines one dimension of the space. Any learning and teaching gradient is determined as a characteristic that learners and teachers as creative knowledge constructing organisms perceive and actualize as useful for their activities and wellbeing individually or in groups. These niches gradients that make up learning and teaching spaces may be ecologically named learning affordances of the space – they are defined mutually in interaction both by the learner and the surrounding system.

Niche gradients emerge in the course of the embodied simulation processes of several individuals. Both the environmental cues and activity traces from surrounding environment, as well as, learner’s embodied knowledge involving the use of this environment in action, would trigger the actualization of certain learning affordances.

The activity system model provides a meaningful framework for describing the components of the surrounding environment where the learners and teachers are embodied during their activities. These involve individuals with certain objectives aiming to work together and defining certain rules and roles within their community when using tools and artifacts as mediators of their actions. Hence, the learning affordance descriptions involve the learning action verbs, people who are involved in action, and mediators of actions (various tools, services and artifacts). Any individual conceptualizes learning affordances personally, but the range of similar learning affordance conceptualizations may be clustered into more general affordance groups eg. pulling social awareness information or searching artifacts by social filtering etc.

Since in the learning design models the choice of the software tools plays an important role, niches may be defined by the frequency each learning affordance is perceived useful when making use of the certain tool.

The most useful affordances of each tool are demonstrated at upper right corner.

Here are the affordances of blog and wiki.

Affordances of social bookmarks and google search engine

Affordances of chat and aggregator

How do learning affordances define niches?

A work in progress for the affordance paper.

Introduction

An affordance term is used for signifying the intermediate constructs that emerge dynamically in the activities what people perform with certain objectives while using the environment as a mediator for these activities. Affordances indicate the certain dimension of the environment that learners actualize as the mediator of specific activities. Affordances also constrain the certain range of possible activities that would be considered in this environment. Therefore affordance definitions usually contain activity verbs, actors and object properties from the environment. The two components – the emerging activity objectives, and the certain aspects in the environment as the mediators of actions simultaneously influence, which affordances will be actualized.

One of the hypotheses is that the emergence of affordances may at some cases be triggered more by the environement side, and at other cases more by the activity planning side.

At an environment side the environment is the niche that forms through the uncoordinated action of many individuals. At action side, each individual performs coordinated actions and influences the niche. These both sides of the ecosystem are interrelated, the individual ‘particle’ level state creates feedback to the environment that in large scale causes the emergence of another ‘whole’ state of the niche. The whole state serves as the activity system, constraining the actions for each individual.

The learner’s choice of affordances at their activity- and landscape descriptions enables to investigate how some social media tools are perceived and actualized as learning mediators more at particle level, while others are perceived as obtaining the learning affordances at the whole activity system level.

The questions in interest were:
1. Which are the learning affordances that learners evoke when using certain social media tools?
2. Do learners perceive the overlapping learning affordances when using different social media tools?
3. Does the description type (activity description or learning landscape description) actualize different sets of learning affordances?
4. Do learners evoke different learning affordances with individual and collaborative learning activity and learning landscape descriptions?

Methods

For the data analysis the visual and narrative, data collected from the master level students participating at the course ‘Self-directed learning with web 2.0 tools‘, was used. The students composed personal learning environments from web 2.0 tools and described these, composing learning landscape schemes. They also draw activity patterns to describe activities at their personal learning landscapes. Several of the landscape and activity pattern descriptions were composed for collaborative groups. Each figure was accompanied by narrative descriptions mentioning several learning affordances in relation with the tools the student(s) used for activities and for constructing distributed learning landscapes.

The analysis of 63 activity- and learning landscape descriptions was conducted. From the figures and from the narratives the learning affordances were collected and categorised. The categorization scheme separated each affordance according to its belonging to: a) activity scheme or learning landscape scheme, and b) individual or collaborative learning activity. The relationship of the learning affordance with the tool(s) was categorised using binary system. The main tool categories were: blog, wiki, chat tools (MSN, Skype, Gabbly), email, search engines, RSS aggregator, social bookmarking tools, forums, co-writing tools (eg. zoho or google documents), co-drawing tools (eg. Vyew, Gliffy), and social repositories Flickr and Youtube. These were selected because these tools were mostly in use by the students during the course and they also appeared at their schemes frequently.

Analytically, ANOVA , Cross tabulation and Chi square anlaysis were used as primary methods to show if there was a difference in the distribution of learning affordances in different settings: wholistic and collaborative emergence level, and particular and individual emergence level.

These data reflect specifically the learning affordance perception of the students of the course (beginner users of web 2.0 tools), and cannot be broadened to the perception of learning affordances of the active web 2.0 users in various settings.

The learning affordances were categorized into specific types representing similar affordances: assembling, managing, creating, reading, presenting, changing and adding, collaborating and communicating, sharing, exchanging, searching, filtering and mashing, collecting, storing, tagging, reflecting and argumenting, monitoring, giving tasks and supporting, asking and giving-getting feedback, and evaluating. These types were taken from the main verbs the students tended to use in their learning affordances.

Factor analysis was used to indicate how certain learning affordance categories are related with certain tools. Cross tabulation shows the overlap of some tools on the basis of learning affordances.

The frequency of learning affordance categories was found for each tool both in case of activity and landscape descriptions. Each learning affordance eg. searching was considered as a variable defining the niche. Niches have been defined as the environmental gradients with certain ecological amplitude, where the ecological optimum marks the gradient peaks where the organisms are most abundant. In all activity/landscape descriptions the optimum for certain learning affordance category was calculated dividing the frequency of this affordance per certain tool to the total frequency of certain learning affordance category for all tools.

Results

Factor analysis related certain tool types with certain learning affordance categories.

Factor analysis indicated that learners relate certain affordances with certain tools. 13 factors, describing 60 % of the system, were identified:

1. searching with search engine
2. collecting and sharing in social repositories (flickr, youtube)
3. collaborating, communicating and exchanging with email and chat
4. collecting, tagging and storing with social bookmarking tool
5. finding, filtering and mashing and monitoring with aggregator
6. collaborating and communicating with collaborative publishing tools (wiki, zoho and google documents, View and forums)
7. presenting, reflecting and monitoring with co-drawing tools (Vyew, Gliffy)
8. giving tasks, asking and supporting with blog
9. changing, adding, collaborating and communicating and sharing with co-drawing tools (View, Gliffy)
10. creating, assembling and reflecting with co-drawing tools (View, Gliffy)
11. managing, collecting and monitoring with blog
12. assembling and evaluating with blog
13. reading and reflecting with forum and blog

Learners perceived that several tools have overlapping affordances and can be used simultaneously or together when solving certain pedagogical aims.

The findings of ANOVA analysis (see Table 1) indicate that learners perceived the affordances differently if they focused on the activity side or if they focused on the learning landscape (tool) side when describing self-directed and collaborative learning. When learners described learning landscapes they actualized more learning affordances of social bookmarking and co-drawing tools than they did at their activity descriptions. The learning affordances related to blog, wiki, and forum usage were more frequently mentioned in case of activity descriptions compared to learning landscapes.

There was no significant difference between affordance distribution in case of individual and collaborative diagrams of activities and learning landscapes using ANOVA analysis. The ANOVA analysis indicated that in the activities with social media, the learners did not make significant differences between how they actualized affordances when learning individually with the teacher, and when participating in the group learning situations.

The cross tabulation and Chi square analysis of the distribution of the learning affordances related to activity and landscape descriptions in case of individual and group learning situations (see Table 2) demonstrated that some tendencies, indicating the different frequency of affordances similarly like in ANOVA analysis (see Table 1), were present both at individual and collaborative descriptions. For example both in individual and collaborative learning cases the learning affordances using aggregator and co-drawing tools were mentioned more frequently in case of landscapes compared with activity descriptions.

The difference between individual and collaborative distribution of affordances in landscape and activity descriptions was found in case of using social bookmarks and search engines. It was found that there were significantly more than expected affordances related to using social bookmarking tools at collaborative landscapes, and the number of affordances related to using search engines was larger at individual activity descriptions. Significantly more learning affordances were related to individual activity descriptions and blog and wiki usage. The last finding seems to be related to the activities of the course and maybe is not so general. The students of the course did individual assignments in blogs, commented each other’s blogs and worked collaboratively with wiki tool.

The cross tabulation and Chi square analysis of the distribution of the learning affordances related to individual and group learning situations in case of landscape and activity descriptions (see Table 3) indicated that search engine usage is clearly related with individual activity descriptions, while chat and aggregator-related learning affordances have been used at collaborative landscapes.

The same tendency was not apparent in case of the descriptions of collaborative learning. When describing learning affordances of collaborative landscapes the social bookmarking tool was noted significantly more than expected compared with collaborative activities.

The following figures 1 and 2 demonstrate two different niche landscapes.

Figure 1. The niche landscape of learning affordance types presented at activity descriptions

Figure 2. The niche landscape of learning affordance types presented at learning landscape descriptions

Figures 3 and 4 present learning affordance niches for the activity and landscape descriptions

Figure 3. Niche landscape from activity descriptions.

Figure 4. Niche landscape from learning landscape descriptions.

The following example presents the clear qualitative difference of learning affordances of social bookmarking tool in learning landscape and activity descriptions. The former indicates recognized new social activities and related affordances, the latter is more old-fashioned and individual centred.

Learning affordances from landscape descriptions related with social bookmarks

Contributing
Advancing the software
Adding resources to the landscape
Increasing affordances
Student can change and add materials

Collecting and storing
Finding information
Searching information
Searching information
Searching information
Adding links
Important bookmarks can be collected
Links to the learning materials
Adding bookmarks
Adding necessary information
Saving information
Saving information
Collecting private bookmarks
Collecting artifacts

Tagging
Tagging artifacts
Social tagging of presentations
Social tagging of feeds
Community based tagging
Social tagging
Social tagging
Social tagging of videos
Social tagging of feed channels
Adding tags for remembering important links

Filtering
Filtering information
Access through tags
Receiving information for learning from different sources
Information feed to demonstrate presentations
sorting tools for oneself
searching tools with tags
receiving information
Showing tagged information feeds

Pulling
tagged bookmarks can be pulled together
information feeds from links go automatically to aggregator
Pulling information feeds

Sharing
Using shared resources
Sharing artifacts
Sharing with peer students
Public usage of bookmarks
Sharing presentations
Sharing information tag-based
sharing tags and impressions
sharing bookmarks

Collaborating
Asynchronous learning
synchronous learning
simultaneous work with team members
Working jointly
communication with team members
viewing bookmarks collaboratively for learning

Managing
system administration and content generation

Learning affordances related with social bookmarking tools at activity patterns

Collecting and storing
searching
searching
searching and collecting information collecting
Searching ideas from internet
Searching images from Internet
collecting
collecting information feeds
collecting links
adding links
adding links
saving the bookmarks of materials
saving data
saving the results
Saving information
Saving information
Saving materials
Saving information and artifacts

Sharing
Sharing data
Sharing information with interested counterparts
sharing materials
exchanging materials
Taking into use the artifacts of shared learning activity
Sharing information with learners

Tagging
Student gets familiar with tags
Student searches bookmarks with tags
adding tags to texts
Tagging important information
Tagging important posts
Tagging information
saving bookmarks with tags
choosing bookmarks with searching tags
Marking important information obtained from blogs
Connecting information data and artifacts

Individual assignments
Student starts solving the task
Reading written information
Student gets the answer
Students communicates with peer learners and finds new information
tutor gets overview of the study topics

Conclusions

These results suggest that some old tools (search engines) and new social tools (eg. blog, wiki) are perceived more as meditors for individual actions, while other social tools eg. aggregators and social bookmarking tools seem to be perceived more as collaborative scenes for ‘produsage’.

Final words

In general these results seem to be supporting my initial hypothesis that the perception of learning affordances of different social media tools is not happening with the same mechanism if we plan activities and if we think where we conduct these activities. These results are even more notable because students’ task was to present in parallel their learning landscape and an activity pattern at the same learning landscape.

This rises another question, whether the niches in web 2.0 environments arise with different affordance perception mechanisms (basically, are there two ends of one dimension?) - some because of particle level affordance perception that is related more to highlighting personal actions, and another due to highlighting the collaborative broad ‘produsage’ scene perception.

Affordance as an ideality or context

There was a reference to Ilyenkov and significances as Soviet version of affordances in one paper of artifact ecologies that i wanted to check out for a while ago.

The ideal form is a form of a thing, but a form that is outside the thing, and is to be found in man as a form of his dynamic life activity, as goals and needs. Or conversely, it is a form of man’s life activity, but outside man, in the form of the thing he creates. “Ideality” as such exists only in the constant succession and replacement of these two forms of its “external embodiment” and does not coincide with either of them taken separately. It exists only through the unceasing process of the transformation of the form of activity – into the form of a thing and back – the form of a thing into the form of activity (of social man, of course).

Try to identify the “ideal” with any one of these two forms of its immediate existence – and it no longer exists. All you have left is the “substantial”, entirely material body and its bodily functioning. The “form of activity” as such turns out to be bodily encoded in the nervous system, in intricate neuro-dynamic stereotypes and “cerebral mechanisms” by the pattern of the external action of the material human organism, of the individual’s body. And you will discover nothing “ideal” in that body. The form of the thing created by man, taken out of the process of social life activity, out of the process of man-nature metabolism, also turns out to be simply the material form of the thing, the physical shape of an external body and nothing more. A word, taken out of the organism of human intercourse, turns out to be nothing more than an acoustic or optical phenomenon. “In itself” it is no more “ideal” than the human brain.

And only in the reciprocating movement of the two opposing “metamorphoses” – forms of activity and forms of things in their dialectically contradictory mutual transformations – DOES THE IDEAL EXIST.

One side-thought from it is that as different cultures construct their idealities to the same boundary objects, basically the ideality for certain objects is never disappearing, just changing. The tools or mediators, what the ideality actually represents, can objectively exits out of their creator’s culture due to being boundary objects and forming ideality to some other cultures as well.
This makes all tools boundary objects as long as several cultures hold and develop the ideality in action.

But then i came to this paper today.
The Turner paper classifies affordances into simple Gibson’s affordances and complex affordances that embody history and practice.

Very interesting is Turner’s approach to consider boundary objects as objects that are useful for different communities, and thus boundary objects represent the culturally emergent affordances.

He makes a kind of leap in his conclusion: affordances are boundary object between ‘use’ and ‘design for use’ - designed artefacts are boundary objects both between and within the communities of practice of designers and users.

He also sees that basically use, context and affordance is the same thing and refers to the elements that are part of activity systems.

It seems that very often we need to use some label, but all the labels: affordance, context, ideality are so meaning-laden in certain contexts, and a lot of confusion emerges if our theory is changed but we use still the words from the previous theories.

Affordance as context
Phil Turner
Interacting with Computers 17 (2005) 787–800

Significances are described as real and objective, but dependent on us as they are a product of our purposive, sensuous work.

Hartson (2003) has proposed a four-fold division of (simple) affordance for the purposes of designing for interaction. These four categories are (a) cognitive affordance; (b) physical affordance; (c) sensory affordance and finally, (d) functional affordance.

‘Real affordances are not nearly as important as perceived affordances; it is perceived affordances that tell the user what actions can be performed on an object and, to some extent, how to do them’ (Norman, 1988).

Perceived affordances are ‘often more about conventions than about reality’ (Norman, 1999, 124)

Turner and Turner (2002) create an explicit three layer model of affordance:
- ‘basic level’ equating with simple usability/ergonomics,
- a ‘middle layer’ matching user tasks (and/ or) embodiment and finally,
- a ‘top level’ corresponding to the purpose of the activity
for which ‘cultural affordance’ are appropriate.

Cole (1996) notes that mediating artefacts embody their own ‘developmental histories’ which is a reflection of their use. That is, these artefacts have been manufactured or produced and continue to be used as part of, and in relation to, intentional human actions.

Boundary objects (Star, 1989) are resources or artefacts which support the work of separate communities such as different departments within an organisation or even between very different communities of practice. To be useful by these different communities they must be sufficiently flexible to be used in different ways, by different people for different purpose in a range of contexts. The term ‘boundary object’ is, of course, primarily descriptive rather than a design imperative as they are seen to develop or ‘evolve’ within and between communities by embodying custom and practice.

Ilyenkov begins his argument by identifying two classes of nonmaterial phenomena namely:
1. mental phenomena such as thoughts, beliefs and feelings and
2. phenomena that are neither material nor mental—meaning and values, such as goodness.

Through human activity we idealise our world (i.e. endow it with meaning) and in so doing we also endow it with properties that come to exist completely independently of us.
As Ilyenkov puts it:
Ideality is a characteristic of things, but not as they are defined by nature, but by labour, the transforming, form-creating activity of social beings, their aim-mediated, sensuously objective activity.
The ideal form is the form of a thing created by social human labour. Or conversely, it is the form of labour realized [osushchestvlennyi] in the substance of nature, ‘embodied’ in it, ‘alienated’ in it and ‘realized’ [realizovannyi] in it, and thereby confronting its very creator as the form of a thing or as a relation between things, which are placed in this relation (which they otherwise would not have entered) by human beings, by their labour (Ilyenkov, 1977: 157).

Ideal properties such as significances are thus real, objective but not independent of us as they are products of meaning-endowing in human activity.

The ideal exists in the collective not the individual mind.
While social life is a product of the collective, it is experienced by individuals as a set of given rules, practices, tools and artefacts.

Through purposive use objects acquire significance.
Ideality is like a stamp or inscription on the substance of nature by social human activity.
A significance makes a thing knowable.

Ilyenkov notes that activity is the source of the world we inhabit and the principal expression of how we inhabit it.

Some significance has to be attached to the thing through the process of the object’s incorporation into the sphere of human activity which is not necessarily true of an affordance—particularly simple affordances.

Objects acquire this ideal content not as the result of being accessed by an individual mind, but by the historically developing activities of communities of practice.

In conclusion, from a holistic or phenomenological perspective, affordance, use and context are one. From a design perspective affordance is not an intangible, elusive property of interactive systems, it might better be thought of as a boundary object between ‘use’ and ‘design for use’ .

Cole, M., 1996. Cultural Psychology. Harvard University Press.
Ilyenkov, E. (1977) Problems of Dialectical Materialism (Translated by A. Bluden). Progress Publishers. Also available from http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm.
Norman, D.A., 1988. The Psychology Of Everyday Things. Basic Books, NY.
Star, S.L., 1989. The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. In: Grasser, L., Huhns, M. (Eds.), Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Pitman, London.
Turner, P., Turner, S., 2002. An affordance-based framework for CVE evaluation, People and Computers XVII— The Proceedings of the Joint HCI-UPA Conference 2002 pp. 89–104.

Affordance networks

Yesterday Pirkko Hyvonen mentioned an interesting paper of the affordance networks. In this paper the ecological theory of knowing is elaborated that is in line with what i have been dealing with in my research.

It seems they eventually have same idea like i developed of an activity system as the place where affordances emerge as constraints (in their case affordance network).

They assume that when connecting learners to ecological networks where they can learn through engaged participation, the affordance networks must become activated.

What is different from my understanding is that in this paper they try to use the Gibson’s effectivity term “effectivity set, he or she is more likely to perceive and interact with the world in certain ways”, but i think behind this term effectivity we should look embodied knowledge and embodied simulation processes, which have been discussed in relation to mirror neuron studies.

Effectivity coupling with affordance networks is seen by them as intentionally bound system initiated by person or by the environment (external lifeworld), but i think that according to the embodied simulation theory such system or process is activated in the mutual interaction of goals and envoronment:

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.

Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing From an Ecological Perspective
Sasha A. Barab, & Wolff-Michael Roth

Educational Researcher, Vol. 35, No. 5, 3-13 (2006)

Knowledge acquisition may be overrated and that a more important role of education is to stimulate meaningful participation (Sfard, 1998), or what we describe as effectivity/affordance
coupling.

Central to the situative perspective is the belief that one should abandon the treatment of concepts as self-contained entities and instead conceive of them as tools—tools that can be fully understood only through use.

The central tenets of this perspective with respect to knowing are that:
(a) knowing is an activity—not a thing;
(b) knowing is always contextualized—not abstract;
(c) knowing is reciprocally constructed in the individual–environment interaction—not objectively defined or subjectively created;
(d) knowing is a functional stance on the interaction—not a “truth” (Barab & Duffy, 2000).

Consistent with the situativity perspective, we argue for an ecological theory of what it means to know. Such a theory acknowledges the world as being structured to support goal-directed behaviors, while at the same time placing the realization of these meanings as part of the individual–environment relation.

Situating knowing and meaning as part of individual–environment relations, rather than solely
in the world or in the individual.

From ecological perspective, learning is a process of becoming prepared to effectively engage dynamic networks in the world in a goal-directed manner (Hoffmann & Roth, 2005).

Affordance networks, in contrast to the perceptual affordances described by Gibson, are extended in both time and space and can include sets of perceptual and cognitive affordances that collectively come to form the network for particular goal sets.

Affordance networks are not entirely delimited by their material, social, or cultural structure, although one may have elements of all of these; instead, they are functionally bound in terms of the facts, concepts, tools, methods, practices, commitments, and even people that can be enlisted toward the satisfaction of a particular goal.

In this way, affordance networks are dynamic sociocultural configurations that take on particular shape as a result of material, social, political, economic, cultural, historical, and even personal factors but always in relation to particular functions.

Affordance networks are not read onto the world, but instead continually “transact” (are coupled) with the world as part of a perception–action cycle in which each new action potentially expands or contracts one’s affordance network. Rather than separate the thinking individual from the physical environment, the ecological paradigm that underlies our thinking transcends the mind-body dualism, instead situating meaning in the dynamic transaction between mind and body.

The particular shape of a network changes with the dynamic interplay of these factors.

For a key bounding on the shape of any network for a particular individual is the effectivity set through which she comes to form relations with the network.

Connecting learners into ecological systems means coupling effectivity sets and affordance networks.

Each individual has a life-world.
The environment, from the vantage of any one individual, includes material, social, and even cultural resources, all of which share the act of successful participation.

Life-worlds are always structured in patterned ways that are functionally meaningful for an individual within some societally defined activity and are therefore inherently intelligible to others (Leont’ev, 1981; Mikhailov, 1980).

Life-world is an emergent phenomenon, with its particular shape being a result of the affordance network/effectivity set coupling, and persons’ goals being an essential factor contributing to whether a particular network becomes enlisted in supporting the emergence of one’s life-world.

Like activity systems (e.g., Engeström, 1987), affordance networks are functionally bounded, which implies that the boundaries are dependent on the intended outcome or function that they serve (i.e., they are situated with respect to the task at hand). Boundaries of a particular network lie in those aspects of a performance necessary to functionally address a particular goal to which the network has value.

For a particular individual, constraints exist in social, cultural, economic, and political factors such that they mediate whether a tool, resource, or even a particular stance can be found in her network.

An effectivity set constitutes those behaviors that an individual can in fact produce so as to realize and even generate affordance networks. When an individual has a particular effectivity set, he or she is more likely to perceive and interact with the world in certain ways—even noticing certain shapes of networks that are unavailable to others.

Effectivity sets are properties of individual–environment transactions out of which a new epistemic frame might emerge.

The dynamic coupling of an effectivity set to an affordance network forms what we refer to as an intentionally bound system. An intentionally bound system is not simply defined by the environment or the individual but emerges through the dynamic transaction that couples effectivity sets with affordance networks.

This coupling begins with an intention; whether the intention begins with the learner or the environment is inconsequential from an ecological perspective, in that the two are simply aspects of the same phenomenon.

niches in hybrid ecology

We had quite a discussion on the niches in hybrid ecology with Anatole Pierre Fuksas. He assumed that novels are ecologically more evolved form of art for enaction than other types of art. In a way this argument puzzled me, because it seems that novel is a niche with more constraints for taking action and triggering emotion freely than for example symbolic art is, which has less sensory-motor action potentialities clearly defined.

One example indicating, that people like such forms that have seemingly more constraints is the learning course design - students always seem to prefer more constrained tutor-defined settings rather than free ones for self-directing their learning. In the beginning this idea did not make sense to me: why would the more constrained environment be ecologically preferred, since we know what happens with the over-specialized organisms in very specific niches - they die out as soon as something changes slightly.

Then we came to the idea that all man-made ecological niches, what novels, art or learning environments are, can be described on the axis of entanglement of emotional and action clues: symbolic art or music entangles both type of clues in one, while novels do separate emotional and action clues more clearly, as words and expressions in the narrative. So it seems we as humans rather prefer those niches, where the emotional and action clues are easily separable to be enacted.

This niche description triggered me to seek for more information of the niche concept. It seem that the feedback type of interaction of organisms with their environment creates niches both for themselves and the other organisms in the niches.

The basis of this feedback can be explained with the emergence of affordances in the interaction between the organism and the environment - the situated doing and being, as Heft (2003) explains it. Constructed embodiments (Heft calls it ecological knowledge) may be left as traces to the environment including tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions. This is how people shape their surrounding environment as an ecological niche.

The less entangled potential triggers for action and emotion there are in the niche (like in novels), the easier it is to enact in this niche, and the more probable it is that the result of these actions and emotions will be reshaping ecologically this niche through the feedback. Thus, such systems may become more evolving.

I found the book:

Niche Construction:The Neglected Process in Evolution
F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, & Marcus W. Feldman
2003

All living creatures, through their metabolism, their activities, and their choices, partly create and partly destroy their own niches.

Organisms interact with environments, take energy and resources from environments, make micro- and macrohabitat choices with respect to environments, construct artifacts, emit detritus and die in environments, and by doing all these things, modify at least some of the natural selection pressures present in their own, and in each other’s, local environments. This role for phenotypes in evolution is called niche construction (Odling-Smee, 1988).

Niche construction should be regarded, after natural selection, as a second major participant in evolution. Niche construction is a potent evolutionary agent because it introduces FEEDBACK into the evolutionary dynamic.

Ecosystem control is one major new idea associated with the ecological effects of niche construction. It stems from the capacity of niche-constructing organisms to modify not only their own environments but also the environments of other organisms in the context of shared ecosystems.

In order for niche construction to be a significant evolutionary process, it is not sufficient for niche-constructing organisms to modify one or more natural selection pressures in their local environments temporarily, because whatever selection pressures they do modify must also persist in their modified form for long enough, and with enough local consistency, to be able to have an evolutionary effect. Where niche construction affects multiple generations, it introduces a second general inheritance system in evolution - an ecological inheritance (Odling-Smee 1988; Odling-Smee et al. 1996) - one that works via environments.

Genetic inheritance depends on the capacity of reproducing parent organisms to pass on replicas of their genes to their offspring. Ecological inheritance, however, does not depend on the presence of any environmental replicators, but merely on the persistence, between generations, of whatever physical changes are caused by ancestral organisms in the local selective environments of their descendants. Thus, ecological inheritance more closely resembles the inheritance of territory or property than it does the inheritance of genes.

Ecological inheritance also has a lot in common with the more familiar concept of ecological succession, except that it has evolutionary, as well as ecological consequences because it involves the inheritance by populations of modified natural selection pressures, via a succession of environmental states,which may then drive further evolutionary changes in those populations.

Any organism’s selective environment is potentially modifiable by any other organism that happens to be a neighbor or that shares, or that has previously shared, some common physical aspect of a mutual environment or that is capable of exerting an indirect influence by affecting the flow of energy or materials through that environment. All such neighbors are ecologically related but they need not be genetically related.

If organisms evolve in response to selection pressures modified by themselves and their ancestors, there is feedback in the system.

The niche-construction perspective stresses two legacies that organisms inherit from their ancestors, genes and a modified environment with its associated selection pressures. Ecological and genetic ancestors are not necessarily identical.

When phenotypes construct niches, they become more than simply “vehicles” for their genes (Dawkins 1989). Animal niche construction may depend on learning and other experiential factors, and in humans it may depend on cultural processes.

Niche-constructing organisms influence the evolution of their own and other populations, often indirectly via intermediate abiotic components. Some organisms create new niches for themselves, for example, through technological innovation or relocation to a novel environment, which again can influence the dynamics of their ecosystems.

When niche construction is incorporated, information can be seen to flow through ecosystems, and evolutionary control webs begin to emerge. Human cultural activities may influence or may actually be human adaptations, or be the result of other human adaptations, cultural processes may also influence human fitness. Cultural processes are not just a product of human genetic evolution, but also a cause of human genetic evolution.

This niche conception can be related with the affordance ideas:

Chemero (2000) suggests that events are changes in the layout of affordances in the animal-environment system.

Heft (2003) writes: We engage a meaningful environment of affordances and refashion some aspects of them…These latter constructed embodiments of what is known—which include tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions—can be called ecological knowledge. Perceiving the affordances of our environment is the first order experience that is manifested in the flow of our ongoing perceiving and acting. By first order experience Heft means experience that is direct and unmediated. We are simply immersed into situated doing and being.

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/

session about activity patterns and affordances when learning in web 2.0

There will be the session “Activity patterns and affordances” during the “e-Uni 08 conference” in Tallinn (03.04.08 17.00–18.30). Conference video: Mis on tegevusmustrid ja lubavused.

1. Tegevusmustrid ja õpimaastikud e-õppes
Kai Pata, Kairit Tammets, Terje Väljataga

1. Activity patterns and learning landscapes in e-learning

Tutvustame tegevusmustrite elemente /tegevuste rühmi/ (nii LMS süsteemidest kui ka sotsiaalsets tarkvarast pärit näited). Kaks vaadet õpitegevusele: õpimaastik ja tegevusmuster. Miks on vaja õppijatele sotsiaalse tarkvara keskkonnas õpetada õpimaastiku koostamist ja seal tegevusmustrite planeerimist, näited kuidas õppijad muudavad oma vaadet õpitegevuse vahenditele, õpimaastikule. Tarkvara lubavused on õppijate jaoks erinevad, näited. Kuidas mõjutab õppijakeskne lubavuste erinevuse arvestamine õpikeskkonna ja õpitegevuse disaini.

The elements of activity patterns (activity types) will be introduced, using examples from LMS systems, as well as, social software. Two views to the learning activities: learning landscape and activity pattern will be discussed. Why learners need conceptual tools to construct their activity pattern and learning landscape diagrams, examples from e-learning courses. What are learning affordances and how they are integrated with the learning landscapes and activity patterns, examples from learner-perceived affordances at social-software based e-learning course. Considering learner-defined affordances calls for new Learning environment and activity design model in e-learning.

2. Töövookeelte kasutamine õppimise ja õpetamise protsesside kirjeldamiseks
Priit Tammets

Using the workflow language to describe learning and teaching processes

Tegevusmustrite kirjeldamiseks on vaja formaliseeritud töövookeelt. Tutvustatakse varasemaid töövookeeli ja nende eesmärke (IMSLD, LAMS jt.). Miks on vaja luua uus pedagoogiline töövookeel ja kuidas seda saab rakendada õpikeskkonna ja õpitegevuste disainis. Töövookeele elemendid ja konkreetsed kasutusnäited sotsiaalse tarkvara keskkonnas.

To describe activity patterns, the formalized workflow language could be used. Some attempts to establish the language elements and standards for describing workflows (IMSLD, LAMS etc.), and the aims of using such languages in e-learning will be discussed. Why new pedagogical workflow language is needed and how could it be used as the tool in the learning environment and learning activity design? What are the elements of pedagogical workflow language, examples of using workflow language for describing learning activities in social software environment.

3. Narrative encoding of Activity Patterns in New Media (ingliskeelne)
Narratiivsete tegevusmustrite kodeerimine uus-meedia keskkonnas
Anatole Fuksas
University of Cassino

Lubavused uus-meedia tekstides võimaldavad lugejal luua enda jaoks teksti lugemisel erinevaid tegevusmustreid. Tutvustatakse mitmeid uusmeedia narratiivseid hübriidses keskkonnas toimuvaid tegevusmustreid, mida algatavad näiteks mikroblogimine kui raamatu kirjutamine, reisiraamatud blogides koos geograafilise kohaga seotud artifaktidega jt. näited.

The reader-specific activation of affordances in new-media texts enables people to trigger different activity patterns. Some narrative-related activity patterns in new-media environments will be discussed (eg. writing books in micro-blogging environment, locatively embedded travel itineraries etc.)

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.

Learning affordances of the blog and aggregator

Finally we have managed to analyse some data related to learning affordances of aggregators and weblogs. The study was conducted as part of the master-level Educational Technology course at Tallinn University in spring term 2007.

We analysed students‘ visual schemes of personal learning landscapes and activity patterns, and the written explanations containing information about the learning affordances of social software.

Affordances were collected from the schemes and initially categorised according to the tools they were related to. Each particular affordance could be listed only once in relation to the certain tool.

Next, the second order categorization of affordances according to the activity pattern types was undertaken. The base of the activity types emerged from the analysis of different students‘ activity patterns in combination of tools‘ use. The list of 9 pedagogical activity types was developed.

The following figure demonstrates the different types of learning affordances related blogs and aggregators.

Weblog affordances and implications to learning design

The main affordances of weblogs that could be categorized as supporting the activities related to assembling the learning environment were: personalization of web-pages, adding and saving data and links, limiting the access rights, and information facilitation. One of the students mentioned the affordance of relating weblogs with other mediating environment, indicating that indeed such affordances are perceived, which are evoked by the interrelations of certain tools, not only by one tool. Some students perceived that they can do a prognosis of certain resources and evaluate the usage of different tools in weblog.

Students did not mention any weblog affordances related community formation activity. This is quite an interesting result, since it is generally believed that weblogs might be a good tool for social networking. It is assumed that the course designs should try to initiate more such activities using new social software functions. Besides community formation, running the community as a creative system is becoming increasingly important.

The most frequent affordances that could be related as supporting the lecturing and presenting activity type were giving tasks and presenting information to the learners. The fact that students could see this pedagogical task-related affordance is promising for the educators who would like to use weblogs primarily as the teaching tools. Some student, however, generalized this affordance and did not mention task-specific actions - affordances what they perceived as creating information and publishing artifacts are the most general function commonly related to the weblogs.

Only one affordance was classified as supporting the information filtering activity type: understanding the information given by the tutor. However, this affordance still indicates towards cognitive information filtering, rather than information retrieval by using various technical features social software offers. The weblogs have several ways of filtering information by tags, keywords, incoming RSS feeds, tag-feeds. From the perspective of course design, it can be concluded that the facilitators need to plan more activities where students could actively try out how to use such social information retrieval methods.

A number of activities could be classified as supporting the self-tutoring activity type. Affordances such as learning, self-study, self-reflection, self-analyzis, and self-evaluation were perceived as part of weblog functionalities. This indicates that weblogs might be used actively in education for self-directed learning. Other affordances students mentioned were creating time-tables and action plans and doing homework.

Student found several affordances that could be classified as supporting the activities related to individual creative assignments. These, that could be related with one student’s learning activities were: getting tasks, browsing thematic information and analyzing information feeds, reading, reflecting on artifacts in the weblog, revising information, presenting, and improving. However, there was high number of affordances, which presumed the interaction with other student’s work, such as commenting the posts, sharing files and giving feedback to peer’s work. This indicates that the the paradigm change is about to happen in what is considered an individual work - commenting and sharing each others’ assignments during the activity shifts the emphasis from the outcome-related assignments, where students must produce a final artifact only, towards increased attention to the learning process in which students develop and dynamically change their knowledge.

A group of affordances were classified as supporting the collaborative creative assignments. Monitoring the other learners and the community reflection, communication with the co-learners and the tutor, sharing and interchange of information with learners, collecting the results from the group activity and coordinating the information among the group of learners were most frequently mentioned affordances. However, it was evident that students did not yet perceive the possibilities social software allowed to do collaborative creative assignments, such as mashing feeds, retrieving information using tags or social browsing etc. Co-construction of knowledge was not perceived as part of the social software affordances.

A small group of affordances were classified as supporting the assessment and evaluation type of activities. These were evaluation of learners knew knowledge, getting feedback and learning from the result of group activities. Notable is that the last two are related to what students can gain from assessment activities. The students were not able of bringing out many different affordances social software might offer for evaluation. This indicates that in the new social-software based course designs the facilitators should develop a bigger variety of assessment methods that originate from the functions social software offers. It is important that assessment and evaluation procedures were used for increasing students’ motivation to learn, and were not merely seen as grading instruments.

A group of affordances were classified as enhancing regulation, monitoring and support activities. Affordances related to the facilitator were monitoring learner’s action and reflection, supervising learners, giving feedback and supporting, recognizing students and giving enthusiasm. Affordance related to the student’s activity was asking the teacher.

Aggregator’s learning affordances

The majority of learning affordances students related with aggregator belonged to three types of activities: assembling the learning environment, filtering information, and regulation, monitoring and support. Activity of assembling the learning environment with the aggregator is favored by the following affordances: creating an aggregator, aggregating personal interest feeds, collaboratively monitoring co-learners blogs, getting feedback and sharing the blog content. Since the aggregator was one of the central tools in the course environment, where students could monitor each other’s weblog feeds and initiate writing feedback, this was influencing strongly students’ perception of aggregators. However, students have not payed much attention to the mashed bookmark feed and bookmark tagcloud which were also accessible from aggregation page. Students noted once the affordance of discussion as supporting community-formation activities with the aggregator. The widgets supporting asynchronous and synchronous discussions were part of the group aggregator. The only affordance supporting lecturing and presenting activity was publishing feeds.

The affordances enhancing information filtering type of activities were: aggregating social tags feeds/artifacts’ information, collecting friends’/community feeds, creating personal filtering for the feeds, monitoring community reflection. Notable is that while some learners perceived information as feeds, the others named it artifacts or information. It may be assumed that this represents two types of thinking: technological (feeds, tags) and information-related (artifacts, blog posts, info). This aspect may be important if aggregators are taught to be used as personal or group learning tools. The affordances related to the aggregator express very clearly students new type of technological understanding of social software - the words feed, social tag, aggregation, and filtering appeared in most of the affordances of this group. Another interesting issue is other-directedness if thinking of the aggregators. Aggregators have commonly introduced as personal tools, while in this master course it was used as a group tool. Thus students perceived mainly the affordances related to monitoring and filtering information from other students and from the community and did not describe the widgets that might be used for mashing personal information.

Affordances belonging to the self-tutoring activity type were missing.

Individual creative assignments were supported by the few affordances like collecting information, reading feeds and selecting information.

Collaborative creative assignments were supported mainly by the affordances of collaborative monitoring the feeds or co-learners. Again the two distinctive perceptions - technological (feed) and learner-related ( co-learner, student, user) can be found when expressing the affordances.

Assessment-related affordances were evaluating feeds and getting feedback. Similarly to weblog affordances for learning, learners see two aspects of evaluation - that of the facilitator who does the evaluation and the other where student benefits from the evaluation. From the perspective of using aggregators in teaching, it is clear that there needs to be developed a new method how to assess students’ personal or group aggregators as their information gateways and activity areas.

Affordances of aggregators related to regulation, monitoring and support type of activities were: getting the instructions, monitoring co-learners or students’ feeds/learners/artifacts, aggregating feeds, sharing personal feeds, and giving feedback to the feed. Interesting was that students named affordances similarly in relation to teacher’s as well as students’ regulation, monitoring and support activities. This indicates that in new type of courses the learning situation is diminishing the difference between the facilitator’s and learners’ roles.