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.

Call for book chapters

Here is a nice initiative for book chapter calls.

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS & REVIEWERS
Submission Deadline: April 30, 2008

Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning:
Collaborative Methods and Human Interaction

A book edited by:
Niki Lambropoulos

Centre for Interactive Systems Engineering, London South Bank University, London, UK
Margarida Romero
Université de Toulouse II, FR

http://www.educationalsocialsoftware.net/

Socio-cultural and ecological explanations to self-reflection

I was reading this sunday morning the chapter from the Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (2007) by (eds.) Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa:

Social basis of self-reflection
by Alex Gillespie
pp.678-691

Since i have been thinking in terms of inter-subjectivity, activity theory and cultural semiotics earlier, while now my understanding has more and more shifted towards the embodied cognition and hybrid ecology ideas, i tried to see where my standing-point is and where it differs from socio-cultural ideas.

It seems to me that the basic idea in this chapter is recognizing that signs (but then also tools, since both are mediators of action what person needs to realize his objectives in an environment?) are created during culturally constrained actions as multi-perspective and inter-subjective representations, including both the actor’s and the observer’s experiences of that action.

Gillespie suggests that in different social acts we will get experiences of the both sides of the act in lifetime (learner/teacher, giving/receiving), so we can activate these perspectives simultaneously when the we need to create/activate a mediator (sign, tool) to carry out any act.

The re-using of the signs means activating these embodied experiences and switching between these multiple perspectives when using certain sign either alone or with the others in interaction.

In Gillespie’s elaboration i can see direct relations with embodied cognition and mirror-matching theories: these theories assume that we need to experience something, embody it, and only then we can observe others doing it so that it might reactivate our similar neural processes. But embodied cognition has not dealt with this constant activation of different experiences simultaneously - my own perspective as an actor, and the other’s perspective as an observer of that action.

Secondly, in embodied cognition the representational mediation, the processing of signs that represent something is excluded, and the observation, hearing or reading can directly activate sensory-motor paths that make as feel and act.

Following Gillespie, and relating it how i understand these issues, in case of conscious self-reflective activities we might simultaneously activate several previously embodied affordances of the environment (extracted dimensionalities) to do something what we wish to do (eg. my experience of learning and also my experience of teaching), then we are running these sensory-motor activations in parallel/simultaneously/one-by-one that means as a result that we sometimes suppress some affordances in the environment that we initially perceived as coupling with our anticipated affordances for doing some actions.

Rupture and the use of internalized actions as part of self-reflection in this case are the constraints we put to the anticipated affordances of actions internally before even trying to carry them out. Can it be like conscious hindering certain sensory-motor neural activation patterns as part of our decision-making of what act to perform?

Mirroring from others and the social conflict are the constraints emerging from the environment as the response to find/make use our anticipated affordances of action. It means we consciously accommodate our sensory-motor activation paths ecologically, searching in other people, in the environment for coupling affordances of our anticipated affordances for action and hindering those sensory-motor activation paths that do not find the match to become activated.

These are some ideas what i got reading the following parts from the Gillespie’s article:

Self-reflection can be defined as temporary phenomenological experience in which self becomes an object to oneself.

People use semiotic mediators, or signs by which they pick out certain affective experiences or situations, thus distancing themselves from both self and immediate situation. These signs are combined into complex semiotic systems (representations, discourses, cultural artifacts, symbolic resources), that provide even greater liberation from the immediate situation.

Such distance enables self to act upon self and the situation.

Four socio-cultural theories of the origin of self-reflection:

1. Rupture theories of self-reflection posit that self-reflection arises when one’s path of action becomes blocked or when one faces a decision of some sort.

Peirce: A problematic situation. a small irritation or rupture stimulates reflective thought (1978/1998).

Dewey (1896): in ruptured situations the object becomes subjective because the actor has two or more responses toward the object, and the self-reflection arises.
However, from Pavlov’s experiments it is shown that contradictory responses can co-exist without leading to self-reflection.

According to Piaget (1970) the problem situation forces the child to abstract and recognize his/her developing schemas when these schemas lead to unfulfilled expectations.

It was not clear from this explanation, why semiotic mediators must be stimulated.

2. Mirror theories of self-reflection suggest that the defining feature in self-reflection is the presence of an other.

The other perceives more about self-reflection than self can perceive.
The reflective distance from self which self-reflection entails first exist in the mind of other. This can be fed back to self by other, such that self can learn self from the perspective of other (Bakhtin 1923/1990).
Other provides feedback to the self same as mirror provides feedback about our appearance that we cannot perceive unaided.

The society can be a mirror as well, leading to self-reflection (Cooley, 1902). According to him, self is a social product formed out of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling such as pride or mortification.
Cooly always related self-reflection with judgements leading to emotions such as pride, shame, guilt etc.

Questions: How does self take the perspective of the other? Is other a passive mirror, neutrally reflecting back to self?

3. Conflict theories of self-reflection suggest that self-reflection arises through social struggle.

Hegel: self-consciousness arises through gaining recognition from an other who is not inferior to self. Self and other treat each other as physical objects, and thus deny any recognition to each other. Due to this denial they enter into a struggle, the outcome of which is the relation of domination and subordination, that is master-slave relation. The slave can get recognition from the master but not vice versa. Slave struggles for recognition, developing new skills and competences. Self-onsciousness arises from struggling for recognition.

Psaltis & Duveen: Explicit recognition of new acquired knowledge by other and self is needed for durable cognitive development through interaction - the interaction needs to provide mutual self-reflection.

Sigel’s (2002) Psychological Distancing Theory asserts that discrepancies introduced by utterances of others can put a cognitive demand on the child which can in turn lead to representational work and thus distancing.

Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987) assumes that problematic situation includes problems introduced by the perspective of others. Participants within an activity system prompt each other to reflect upon the conditions and rules of their ongoing interaction. Thus contradictions between different counterparts of an activity system lead to reflection.

Social representation theory (Duveen) emphasizes that there are contradictions in the bodies of knowledge that is circulated in modern societies. Bauer and Gaskell (1999) suggest that people become of aware of the representations at the points at which they overlap or contradict each other. This coexistence of multiple forms of knowledge in the society can lead to self-reflection.

Similarly to rupture theories, it is not clear through which semiotic processes self-reflection arises.

4. Internalization theories of self-reflection posit that thought is a self-reflective internal dialogue with absent others, between their internalized perspectives.

Self-reflection arises through internalizing the perspectives that the other has upon self, followed by self taking the perspectives of other upon self.

Vygotsky (1997) emphasized that the process of internalization is a process of transformation rather than simple transmission. Signs are first used to mediate the behaviours of others, and later used to talk about self, reflect upon self, and mediate the behaviour of self.

Mead and Vygotsky conceive the sign (or significant symbol) as comprising two perspectives - the actor perspective and the observer perspective.

On one hand, there is the embodied actor perspective (the response) to some object (the child reaches hand to point to an object she wants to get). On the other hand, there is the distance introduced by the observer perspective of the other on the action (mother sees the grasping gesture indicating desire to get the object). The grasping becomes pointing when the child uses both of these perspectives.

Thus the sign (significant symbol) is fundamentally inter-subjective: it evolves both actor and observer perspectives in both self and other.

Questions: if the sign is composite of the perspective of self and other, how does this composite form, how are these two perspectives brought together.

Gillespie (2005) now starts to generate his own theory. He relies on the Mead’s theory of the social act suggesting that people move amongst the positions with a relatively stable social/institutional structure (host/guest, buyer/seller).

Each social act pairs (eg. giving/receiving, teaching/learning) entails reciprocal actor and observer positions and perspectives which mots people have enacted. They have previously been in these social positions of the other. Thus we are able to take these perspectives in each social act. The self becomes dialogical, containing multiple social perspectives for each act.

The social act is the institution that first provides individuals with roughly equivalent actor and observer experiences, and second, integrates these perspectives within the minds of individuals. When both actor and observer perspectives are evoked within a significant symbol (or sign) /like in gesture/, then there is a self-reflection, because self is both self and other simultaneously.

Gillespie calls self-reflection triggered by an actor perspective self-mediation and the self-reflection triggered by an observer perspective on an actor short-circuiting.

Gillespie assumes that different socio-cultural theories of self-reflection are not in opposition, but rather theorize different proximal paths leading towards self-reflection.

The magic of social act is that it integrates the actor and the observer experiences or perspectives into the formation of signs enabling higher level of semiotic mediation. Conceiving of the sign as this integration of perspectives elucidates the logic of self-reflection.

Whenever one uses the sign it can carry self from one perspective to another continuously.
Introducing the concept of sign (significant symbol) as a complex semiotic system entails abandoning the assumption that complex semiotic systems mirror the world. Instead, it conceptualizes these semiotic systems as architectures of inter-subjectivity, which enable translations between actor and observer perspectives within a social act.

Any narrative is not just a narrative that is analogical to self’s own experience, it is an inter-subjective structure that enables translations between actor and observer perspectives. Partially integrated actor and observer perspectives are the pre-condition for self-reflection. Rupture, feedback, and social conflict can cause self-reflection because of a pre-ecxisting and only partially integrated architecture of inter-subjectivity.

Artefact ecologies

Today i found a paper, which partially comes close to some ideas about tools, affordances and embodiment as some ecological system. Some ideas or formulations i don’t support 100 % (eg. artifacts have affordances perceived by the user who acts with them) and these seem to be not in accordance with the way they explain the dynamic and mutually influencing and emergent nature of affordances. Maybe it is the question of formulation rather than the step back. There notion of embodiment is not based on new ideas from neural findings.

Artefact Ecologies: Supporting Embodied Meeting Practices with Distance Access
Dhaval Vyas
Alan Dix

Material artifacts related with practices play a critical role in the activity formation.

Authors introduce the notion of artifact ecologies, which refer to a system of consisting digital and physical artifacts, people, their work practices and values, and lays emphasis on the role artifacts play in embodiment, work coordination and supporting remote awareness.

From the biological ecologies they take the following characteristics:
Ecology is made up of heterogeneous objects (environment) and organisms (species)
Organisms interact mutually
Interactions emerge between counterparts of the ecology
Organisms and objects are mutually adaptive
Organisms are co-adaptive with other organisms

Artifacts have affordances perceived by the user(s) who then act on them.
However, performing action changes the situation culturally, cognitively, physically (eg. user’s awareness of affordances increases when using an artifact).
This leads to reflection on the potential uses of artifacts and people’s roles (constraints on action).
Once the users are aware, their perceived affordances change.

They distinguish 3 levels of affordances: personal, organization/community and culture level, which differ also on the level of how rapidly they can change.
Affordances of different levels influence each other.
For example affordances one person can perceive may depend on the affordances the community perceives or culture uses as norms.

They refer to Ilyenkov (1977), who sees the creation of artifacts and tools as embodying practices of the community, claiming that artifacts embody cultural norms and values.

The notion of artifact ecology offers a set of analytical properties of artifacts that emerge from the interaction between participants and artefacts in different situations.

Embodiment: Artifacts allow participants to use their bodily skills and their familiarity of the real world objects.

ecology of hybrid social web

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example:

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

Two Theories of Perception and affordances

I found a paper about the differences of constructive and ecological aspects of perception and their interrelations, that was much in line with the theoretical affordance concept how i understand it, consisting of matching of two kind of aspects coming from the environment and from internal goal-directed processing.

These issues also make me think of our discussion with Mauri Kaippainen: he suggested that in Neisser framework the exploration is sort of unconscious scanning that does not involve so much goal-directed mental construction in advance (seems like ecological framework to me), while i thought that after a while this scanning as a spiral activity will be more and more conscious (seems like constructive framework to me). Also i suggested that sometimes we start exploration by shifting some internal imagination to the external environment, actualizing some aspects there - this again seems like constructive perception to me, where schemata must be internally processed in order to perceive something in the environment.

Joel Norman:Two Visual Systems and Two Theories of Perception: An Attempt to Reconcile the Constructivist and Ecological Approaches
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (6)

According to Joel Norman (2000) the constructivist and ecological theories of perception differ, however, he claims that there is certain continuum rather than dichotomy between approaches. Both approaches to perception, the ecological and the constructivist, are valid descriptions of perception, but of different aspects of perception.

Comparison of two theories to perception:

1. Mental processes to pick up information or not
The constructivists see the stimulation reaching our senses as inherently insufficient necessitating an “intelligent” perceptual system that relies on inferential types of mechanisms to overcome this inherent equivocality of stimulation.
The ecologically oriented theorists argue that the information in the ambient environment suffices and is not equivocal and thus no “mental processes” are needed to enable the pick up of the relevant information.

2. Direct or indirect perception
The constructivists see perception as multistage with mediational processes intervening between stimulation and percept, i.e., perception is indirect.
The ecological theorists see perception as a single-stage process, i.e., it is direct and immediate.

3. Relying on stored information
For the constructivists, memory, stored schemata, and past experience play an important role in perception.
The ecologically oriented approach sees no role for memory and related phenomena in perception.

4. Process versus stimulation
The constructivists excel at analyzing the processes and mechanisms underlying perception.
The ecological approach excels at the analysis of the stimulation reaching the observer.

Milner and Goodale (1995): the ventral stream transforms visual information into an exocentric (also labeled “allocentric”) framework allowing the perception of the object as it relates to the visual world. The dorsal system, on the other hand, transforms visual information into an egocentric framework allowing the actor to grasp or otherwise bodily manipulate the object.

Norman (2000) suggests that if it is true that the two systems function independently and that the dorsal system functions can be carried out with little or no conscious awareness, it is possible that the two systems will be capable of simultaneously processing two different sources of visual information with very little interference.

The primary function of the ventral system is the recognition and identification of the visual input. Recognition and identification must depend on some comparison with some stored representation. In contrast, the primary function of the dorsal system is analysis of the visual input in order to allow visually guided behavior vis-à-vis the environment and objects in it (e.g., pointing, reaching, grasping, walking towards or through, climbing, etc.).

The ventral system is superior at seeing fine details, while the dorsal system is better at seeing motion.

The ventral system is the memory-based system, utilizing stored representations to recognize and identify objects and events. In contrast the dorsal system appears not to have a long-term storage of information, but only very short-term storage allowing the execution of the motor behavior in question.

The dorsal system is the faster.
We are much more conscious of ventral system functioning and hardly conscious of dorsal system functioning.

Ventral system functions aim at recognizing and identifying the object and for this purpose all that is needed is object-centered information. In contrast, the dorsal system must perform some action on, or in relation to, the object, such as grasping it. For this purpose the dorsal system must utilize egocentric frame of reference. In order to be able to pick up the object the dorsal system must utilize absolute metrics, while functions of the ventral system only require relative metrics.

Broader theory of perception is based on the accumulating research findings that point to the existence of two visual systems, the dorsal and the ventral. It was suggested that the ecological approach broadly parallels the functions of the dorsal system, and the constructivist approach broadly parallels that of the ventral system. These two visual systems deal with different aspects of perception. The dorsal system deals mainly with the utilization of visual information for the guidance of behavior in one’s environment. The ventral system deals mainly with the utilization of visual information for “knowing” one’s environment, i.e., identifying and recognizing items previously encountered and storing new visual information for later encounters. But it should be stressed that both systems overlap in the functions they perform.

This last thing is interesting, if to think of the role of perception in determining affordances from the environment in one hand, and affordances of the anticipated activity in another hand, which must be coupled.

Iaccoboni’s studies about mirror neuron function divergence seem to support Norman’s assumptions.

Iaccoboni: canonical neurons seem to be coding the affordance of an object, the pragmatic aspect of how-to-grab-that-thing, rather than its semantic content; mirror neurons do not fire at the sight of an object but will fire at the sight of a whole action. Mirror neurons have auditory access and they enable a multimodal representation of action that is not linked to
the visual channel only.

Ecological approach
Dorsal system: utilization of visual information for the guidance of behavior in one’s environment
- seeing motion
- utilize egocentric frame of reference (i grasp an apple)
Canonical neurons: seem to be coding the affordance of an object, the pragmatic aspect of how-to-grab-that-thing, rather than its semantic content

Constructivist approach
Ventral system:utilization of visual information for “knowing” one’s environment, i.e., identifying and recognizing items previously encountered and storing new visual information for later encounters
- seeing fine details
- recognition and identification of the visual input
Mirror neurons: fire at the sight of a whole action

Mapping Hybrid Ecology ideas rev.1

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

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

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

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

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

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Here is the initial seed from Anatole Pierre Fuksas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My talk with Anatole:

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

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

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

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

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

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

K: yes..human anatomy and perceptional organs?

A: Now, the actual affordance of an object …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

K: i agree

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

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

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

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

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

activity theory, affordances and tools

I made an effort to conceptualise initially on the figure what i believe happens in activity settings, what are affordances and how they relate with mediation and emergence of tools.

This theoretical framework is based on the neurobiological findings of embodied simulation of humans (see Gallese et al.; Iaccoboni), ideas of mediation and tools and imaginations expressed by Vygotsky, ecological psychology conceptualizations of affordances, events and meanings (Gibson; Heft; Chemero), conceptualizations of affordances from computer-based action (Gaver; Wiredu; Vyas et al., etc.; Arminen & Raudakoski), activity theory and activity systems (Leontjev; Kuuti; Engeström), cultural semiosis (Lotman; Stecconi), psychology (Neisser).

I believe that we can look at the affordances as the constraints we create for ourselves in the functioning of the current activity system. Both observation of this activity system elements in action and embodied simulation of actions, emotions of others from the system, as well as, the imaginatons we create internally for explaining systems and externalise in the course of action or by mediational means are sources of constraints of the activity system. Activity is always mediated by the tools we create in the process of actualizing affordances - when making something from the environment into our own or when bringing something of our own into the environment.

Basic arguments, my ideas rely on are:
Tools and signs always mediate the relationship between human agent and objects of environment (Vygotsky).
How tools appear is by embodiment of external environment or externalization of imaginations. Both processes are based on affordance perception.

Events are changes in the perception of affordances (Chemero).
Affordances point to percepual meanings (Heft).
Affordances emerge in the process of goal-directed action (Heft).
The object’s meaning derives from a particular set of intrinsic properties that it possesses in relation to the perceiver and is perceived in the context of a goal-directed action (Heft).
Affordances must be actualized, they are meaningful potentialities for action (Arminen & Rautakoski).
Affordances change dynamically (Vyas et al.,).
Neisser elaborated Gibson‘s concept of affordance and distinguished three perceptual modes:
- Direct perception/action, which enables us to perceive and act effectively on the local environment;
- Interpersonal perception/reactivity, which underlies our immediate social interactions with other human beings, and;
- Representation/recognition, by which we identify and respond appropriately to familiar objects and situations. Neisser’s interpretation introduces the interpersonal perception of subjects in action as an additional source of affordances in the social and regulative domain. Another type of affordances relates with learners‘ familiarity of perceiving certain aspects of the environment certain ways, which is culture-dependent.
The culturally defined affordances or canonical affordances exits (Heft).
From an interaction-centred view (Vyas et al.) affordances are the perceived possibilities for both thinking and doing, what learners perceive and signify during their actual interaction with an artefact or tool.

There are some aspects of cognition related to awareness caused by mirror-neurons the Activity Theory might consider.
Simulation mechanisms of action, language and emotion constitute altogether a shared manifold of intersubjectivity (Gallese).
Any intentional relation can be mapped as a relation between a subject and an object (Gallese).
To observe objects is equivalent to automatically evoking the most suitable motor program required to interact with them (Gallese).
A common functional mechanism, embodied simulation, is the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding:
- unconscious modeling of our acting body in space
- our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains (Iaccoboni).

About affordances in ‘Ecological Psychology’ 2003

ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 15(2) is a special number of affordances.
Here are some of the paper-notes from this issue.

An Outline of a Theory of Affordances
Anthony Chemero

The paper makes difference between inferential theory of perception (when the meaningful perception is created in brain) and direct perception (when environment contains meanings and animal gathers meanings from the environment). Gibson’s theory of affordances is in line with the direct perception theory.

Chemero (2003) attempts to offer the description of affordances that would be ontologically respectable, but still in line with Gibson’s theory.

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill (Gibson, 1979).

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 behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (Gibson, 1979, p. 129)

According to Gibson, affordances are properties of the environment but taken relative to an animal (Chemero, 2003).

Chemero (2003) assumes that previous post-gibsonian attempts have claimed that affordances are animal-relative properties of the environment (eg. Heft, 2001; Reed, 1996; Turvey, 1992), which have some significance to the animal’s behaviour.

Reed (1996) related affordances of the environment and the natural selection - according to him affordances create the selection pressure to the development of the perceptual system.

Turvey (1992) suggested that affordances are dispositional properties of the environment. Dispositional properties are tendencies to manifest some other property in certain circumstances. Chemero (2003) elaborates it: Environment is such that in some circumstances, certain properties will become to manifest. Dispositional affordances depend of the presence of animals to actualize them, and the animals need to have properties that would be complementary to the affordances (effectivities) (Shaw, Turvey, Mace, 1982). Thus, effectivities are also diapositions and they must be complemented to the affordances of the environment to become actualized.

Chemero (2003) assumes that everyone of these authors agrees that affordances are relations between the abilities of animals and features of the environment.

Chemero disagrees that affordances are the properties of the environment. He claims that they are rather the relations between particular aspects of the animal and the situations
.

As relations, affordances are both real and perceivable but are not properties of either the environment or the animal. He distinguishes between features and properties and suggests that perceiving affordances is actually placing features - it is perceiving something about oneself and not in the environment, it is seeing that the environment allows certain acitivity.

eg. I must move myself accordingly to fit withe the certain affordance of the environment.

Chemero (2003) suggests that affordances are features of whole situations (meaning the actors are part of this situation).

If affordances are not the properties of the environment there is no need for complementing properties in actors. He disagrees with Turvey (1992) who defines effectivities as diapositions, Chemero claims that in Turvey’s interpretation if effectivities match with affordances both will always be manifested. Diapsoitions never fail, while abilities can be manifested or not in the appropriate circumstances.
Instead of diapositional effectivities Chemero (2003) suggests to use abilities as functional properties of the animals.

Animals perceive only the affordance relations.Humans can also perceive their abilities and the features of the environment (Chemero, 2003).

Events are conceived as changes in the physical layout (Stoffregen, 2000). Chmero (2000) suggests that events are changes in the layout of affordances in the animal-environment system.

This is very interesting aspect, which enables to relate events into the affordance ontology which we have tried to create! Affordances are dynamically changing and events will be related with the perception of these changes.

In the end of the paper Chemero (2003) assumes that ecological psychology is the form of realism about meaning, in which meaning (affordances) is real aspect of the world and not just in our heads, as indirect theories of perception maintain.

References:
Turvey, M. (1992). Affordances and prospective control: An outline of the ontology. Ecological Psychology, 4, 173–187.

Reed, E. S. (1996). Encountering the world. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stoffregen, T. (2000). Affordances and events. Ecological Psychology, 12, 1–28.

Heft, H. (2001). Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William James’s radical empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Chemero, A. (2000). What events are. Ecological Psychology, 12, 37–42.

Chemero, A. (2001). What we perceive when we perceive affordances. Ecological Psychology, 13, 111–116.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Shaw,R., Turvey,M., & Mace,W. (1982).Ecological psychology: The consequence of a commitment to realism. In W. Weimer & D. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic processes (pp. 159–226).Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
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Affordances: Four Points of Debate
Claire F. Michaels

In this paper the assumption is that affordances do not arise as consequences of mental operations, but are action-referential properties of the environment that may or may not perceived.

I wonder, if humas can also anticipate affordances and abilities as Chemero (2003) claims, then they can create affordances as mental operations.

Michaels (2003) argues that there is a risk that affordances and meanings become synonyms. For example Chemero (2003) makes this strong relation.

Michaels claims that perceiving affordances is more than perceiving relations, it brings attention to the action-guiding information and sets up action systems to act.

She brings up an interesting point, if the tool in hand the effectivities of people will change.

In the end of the paper she brings some definitions of affordances, which give on my opinion some rules about them.

Affordances are actions permitted an animal by environment (objects, events, places, people etc.). Actions are goal-directed and entail intention, detection of information, and relation between information and control movement.

Rule* Actor with intentions is needed to activate environmental affordances as actor’s activities. This suggests awareness concept where intentions select of what we become aware of.

Affordances are multidimensional compounds of properties from other measurments, descriptive or conceptual systems.

Rule* Actor needs to perceive itself as a separate entity in respect to the environment. This suggests awareness concept in which this separation is made.

Rule* Multidimensionality aspect enables the actication of very different activities and coupling with very different effectivities. It also refers that if there are several affordances, which have multidimensional compounds these compunds can interact differently within or between affordances.

Affordances exist independent of being perceived.
Affordances entail effectivities for its actualization, but not for existance.

Perceiving affordances is seeing that some actions can be engaged in by the perceiver himself, it is not perceiveing what actions others can engage in.

Rule* One can perceive only affordances for ones own action.
I believe that new neural mirroring studies reject this assumption. Instead they demonstrate that one can also perceive the actions, intentions and emotions of others as one’s own actions or emotions if the intentions overlap and we become aware of the others. Thus it seems possible that we may be partially aware of the affordances what the other person perceives and engages in its activities.

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Affordances, dynamic experience, and the challenge of reification.
Heft, H.

The most interesting part of this paper is about canonical affordances which are socio-culturally determined and maybe even cause the prospectivity of human perception.

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 I mean experience that is direct and unmediated . We are simply immersed into situated doing and being. we have firts-order non-analytical awareness.
We can also shift our attentional focus and isolating particular portions of immediate experience holding it in the awareness for analysis. When we are engaged in this second-order knowing we experience objects and events of the world largerly in relation to each other rather than experiencing them in relation to us as perceivers-actors, that is as affordances (Heft, 2003).

Can the affordances be mediated? Mediated by some tools eg. the developer’s canonical affordances become mediated to the user? The mediation of action potentials has been the startingpoint of developing any tools.

Can the affordances be cognitively mediated as well? For example if we observe some people and dynamically simulate with mirror neurons what they do and emotionally feel as if these were our own actions and emotions, don’t we then mediate the affordances what other persons perceive?

Cannot we perceive relations as affordances for our actions?
I do not understand the difference of first- and secons order awareness, and why in first case we perceive affordances in the environment in relation to us, and in the second case we differentiate relations of ourselves and don’t see them as affordances. I think that if we differentiate relations we can also perceive these inter-relations as the affordances the environment evokes in response to our intended actions.

Reciprocal influences can be divided for analytical purposes:
- person-related factors: physical bodily attributes, perceptual learning, motors-skills, intentionality;
- immediate environmental context: socio-cultural processes

Affective and motivational qualities are intrinsic to affordances. Awareness of affordances typically is an interwining of knowing, feeling and acting.

This is an important claim if we want to consider mediated affordances as part of the picture. One thought relates again with mirror-neurons which are supposedly enabling us to be aware of and simulate both actions and emotions.

Knowing is something that relates with canonical, socio-culturally defined affordances. Ecological knowledge for Heft (2001) is socio-culturally defined meanings (affordances).

Heft names some interesting aspects in relation of the affordance perception.

Recognizing the prospectivity of perceiving.
Meaning can be found in perceptual experience.
The perceptual meanings that he affordances point to are fluid - features of the environment can possess alternative affordances at different times and contexts.
Affordance meaning is typically established by a feature’s relation to a broader environmental context.
Object’s canonical affordance must be based on a history of experiencing the culturally normative use(s) of an object in particular contexts.
Once an object’s canonical affordance is established, that meaning may seem to exist independently of any context.
Affordances can be seen as embedded in ongoing collective social activities.
The affordances that are available to be perceived by the individual over time reflect an interweaving of reciprocal, continuing, historical process.

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The two other papers of this issue were of about more canonical affordance definitions and Chemero refers to these ideas in his paper.

Environmental awareness paper

The mirror-neurons approach (see Gallese, 2000, and other studies) triggered recently some good ideas how to build up the awareness paper in environmental education.

The working title is:
Conceptualizing awareness in environmental education: an example of knowing about air-related problems

The main idea would be demonstrating how environmental literacy development has been exploiting the knowledge-related conceptual awareness conception, while there are studies from dynamic systems about situation awareness , and the studies about mirror neurons of the embodied simulation of actions and emotions perceived by other people which suggest towards activity related awareness.

I would claim that as environmental problems are very complex and multi-perspective, and the latter activity-centered awareness conception is more relevant, and it should not be forgotten.

Current situation in teaching environmental behaviours relies heavily on taught conceptual knowledge and behaviours, while it has been demonstrated that in real activities people do not behave accordingly. They have real problems in being aware of the situation in general sense, which is in most cases the real cause of dilemma type of problems. Thus, it is necessary to teach awareness not as a knowledge-based conception only, but simulated activities in dynamic problem-solving cases (role-plays, investigations, analysis of newspapers) should be organised as well. I think it is necessary to integrate this activity-related awareness into the environmental literacy model.

The empirical data were collected by Eneken Metsalu, the master student under my supervision. There were students’ questionnaires and teachers’ interviews about teaching methods. The separate factor analysis with certain questionnaire items enabled to find the conceptual awareness about four air-related problem issues. Next the factors were classified into nice hierachical clusters that integrated social-awareness components; task-and process awareness components; and contextual knowledge awareness + task- and process awareness components.
K-means clustering and subsequent discriminant analysis showed that also people could be clusered into the same kind of types.

The most interesting was that if the students learned with active methods outdoors they were significantly belonging into the cluster of only task- and process awareness (2).
If they did active learning where posters were developed and brainstorming sessions were carried out, they had only social and contextual awareness (1).
Only the students who got traditional lecturing were having both the task- and process, social and and contextual awareness (3), supposedly because these awareness components were clearly elaborated by their teacher.

I submitted it to the Journal of Environmental Psychology 15.07.07