Using ’social navigation’ and ‘participatory surveillance’ terms for co-creation and joint action

Olga Levistova wants to deal in her master study the question: How does social surveillance become into participatory surveillance. Her investigations are related with our hybrid ecosystem studies in which we refer to certain swarming phenomena that take place as a result of something like social awareness and monitoring, social surveillance, and social navigation.
I started to wonder about the terminology, it seems some of these terms have an overlap and we need to think which is the right concept we are talking about.

Gary T. Marx (2005) wrote in the “Encyclopedia of Social Theory”:

Information boundaries and contests are found in all societies and beyond that in all living systems. Humans are curious and also seek to protect their informational borders. To survive, individuals and groups engage in, and guard against, surveillance.

Traditional surveillance often implied a non-cooperative relationship and a clear distinction between the object of surveillance and the person carrying it out. The new surveillance with its expanded forms of self-surveillance and cooperative surveillance, the easy distinction between agent and subject of surveillance can be blurred.

The new social surveillance can be defined as, “scrutiny through the use of technical means to extract or create personal or group data, whether from individuals or contexts”. The use of multiple senses and sources of data is an important characteristic of much of the new surveillance.

However, social surveillance has been detected in social software systems:
eg. Myspace and Facebook: Social Surveillance for the 21st Century

Christian Fuchs writes in his “Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society” about the rise of surveillance society.

He refers that Focault makes clear that surveillance is a repressive, coercive process:

Surveillance means that someone “is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (Foucault 1977: 200).

Next Fuchs points that Giddens (1985) does not see surveillance as something entirely negative and dangerous, and argues that surveillance phenomena also enable modern organization and simplify human existence.

Further on, Fuchs refers to Anders Albrechtslund (2008) who argues that social networking sites show that surveillance is not necessarily disempowering, but is “something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful”.

“Online social networking can also be empowering for the user, as the monitoring and registration facilitates new ways of constructing identity, meeting friends and colleagues as well as socializing with strangers. This changes the role of the user from passive to active, since surveillance in this context offers opportunities to take action, seek information and communicate. Online social networking therefore illustrates that surveillance – as a mutual, empowering and subjectivity building practice – is fundamentally social” (Albrechtslund 2008).

Participatory surveillance term is explained by Albrechtslund (2008) in Online social Networking as a participatory surveillance.

Albrechtslund refers that the term originates from Mark Poster and T.L. Taylor.

Poster argues that individuals are not just disciplined but take active part in their own surveillance even more by continuously contributing with information to databases. Taylor uses the concept to study collaborative play in the online computer game World of Warcraft.

However, Nicolas Nova and Paul Dourish have also used another term social navigation:
“ Social navigation is a term coined by Dourish and Chalmers (1994) that refers to situations in which a user’s navigation through an information space is guided and structured by the activities of others within that space.” (Nova and Ortelli, 2004).

The point is to find traces from other’s activities to help you performing the task you want to..

Alan J. Munro, Kristina Höök, and D. R. Benyon write in Social Navigation of Information space (1999):

Social navigation is a vibrant new field which examines how we navigate information spaces in ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ environments, how we orient and guide ourselves, and how we interact with others to find our way. This approach brings a new way of thinking about how we design information spaces, emphasising our need to collaborate with others, and follow the trails of their activities in these spaces.

Both in case of participatory surveillance and social navigation the focus seems on more how individual is benefiting if using the information available from other people’s action traces.
This is one, individual side of the phenomenon. Another side is collaboratively emergent action, artifacts etc. that may result from these monitoring behaviors – the system level phenomena
For example, swarming describes such non-coordinated aggregation behaviors, which become possible because of the signal traces left to the environment or read from other members in the system.

Question is, do we see such agglomeration behaviors in system as part of social surveillance or social navigation, as part of the means that INDIVIDUALS can use? Can we use term participatory surveillance or social navigation in agglomeration/global result context, or are we blurring the picture?

I believe that dynamic ontospace term can be used for the representation of our actions and meanings in social web.
Agglomeration of content or activities in ontospace, which makes them traceable uses semantic means. Visibility is often achieved by tags and mashups, pushing information to many spaces.

Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers distinguish between semantic navigation and social navigation:

[semantic navigation offers] the ability to explore and choose perspectives of view based on knowledge of the semantically-structured information.
…
In social navigation, movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others.

In 2008 Daniel Tunkelang wrote in his blog The Noisy channel:

Following Dourish and Chalmers, let us define social navigation as the ability to explore and choose perspectives of view based on social information. Social navigation, defined as above, offers users more than just the ability to be influenced by other people. It offers users transparency and control over the social lens. It allows us to think outside the black box.

Tunkelang uses the term perspective, that comes close to our own framework of taking perspectives in ontospace.

Taking perspectives, and becoming aware of and guided by collaborative perspectives seem for me the cue to noticing traces for participatory actions, collaboration, co-creation.

We assume in our paper about “Writing narratives as a swarm” with Mauri Kaipainen:

A perspective is a personal prioritization of shared ontospace dimensions. A perspective is by definition individual, but sharing perspectives determines niches. If noticing such prioritizations to be shared by more than one individual, these perspectives become community-defining, and facilitate some community actions more than the others, and contribute to the determination an abstract community-specific activity niche.

However, so far we have not used neither the social navigation nor participatory surveillance terms to signify that process. Should we use it?

Albrechtslund, Anders. (2008). Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday 13 (3).
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage.
Giddens, Anthony. 1985. A contemporary critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 2: The nation-state and violence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Poster, M., 1990. The mode of information: Poststructuralism and social context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
T.L. Taylor, 2006. “Does WoW change everything? How a PvP server, multinational player base, and surveillance mod scene caused me pause,” Games & Culture, volume 1, number 4, pp. 318–337.

Modelling spaces for self-organized learners

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

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

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

Swarming to write narratives in hybrid ecosystem

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

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

1. Hybrid narrative ecosystem

1.1. Defining hybrid ecosystems

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

1.2. Representing hybrid ecosystems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.3. Embodiment of hybrid ecosystems

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

2. Writing narratives in hybrid ecosystem

2. 1. Appearing new storytelling standards in Web

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

2.2. Swarming as a bio-metaphor for writing narratives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

writing narratives as a swarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note! Again place for ontodiemnsion trajectory?

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

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

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

2.3. Narrative swarming from ontospace perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swarm – my first search in Communities and Networks

Swarm seems not yet so popular tag (i tested in Delicious and in Technorati it is mentioned less than 100 times a day).

However, i have started to believe it fits much more for describing the actual behaviors in hybrid ecologies.

Today i did my first search with the very potential swarm keyword in Communities and Networks Connection hub.
For me swarm describes activities in hybrid ecologies better than networks.

What i found:

Evolving web wrote:

…insects, dominoes – each adding up to a swarm, a chain reaction – when one insect or domino chooses to act in the right way at the right time.

Writing by one small, easily imprisonable, Solzhenitsyn can create massive change. People of good conscience can create a better world. But Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned.

Bumblebee wrote: swarms in primetime tv

What do killer bees, locusts, field mice, mayflies, starlings, cicadas, cuban land crabs, driver ants, redflies, locust birds, silver carp and honey bees all have in common? The “Wisdom of Crowds” or in other words the ability to Swarm in huge groups.

We discover what happens when superswarms invade our lives…

Swarms make it extremely difficult for predators to pick-off individuals and are an amazing way for the individuals to look out for each other and instantly share important information.

An exciting European technology company Swarmteams which provides unique patent-pending bioteaming technologies for all shapes and sizes of groups, social networks, business clusters, virtual/mobile communities and enterprises. Swarmteams enables groups to be more responsive and agile by fully integrating their mobile phones and the web with bioteam working techniques.

In another article Bumble Bee distinguishes characteristics of distributed P2P networks and swarms.

Peer to peer (P2P) is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network.

P2P processes are not structureless, but are characterized by dynamic and changing structures which adapt themselves to phase changes. Its rules are not derived from an external authority, as in hierarchical systems, but generated from within. It does not deny ‘authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy…

Equipotency means that there is no prior formal filtering for participation, but rather that it is the immediate practice of cooperation which determines the expertise and level of participation. Communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system.

P2P is a network is ‘distributed’, though it may have elements of hierarchy, centralization and ‘decentralization’; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system.

Though P2P arises in distributed networks, not all distributed networks exhibit P2P processes. Many distributed bottom-up processes, such as the swarming behavior of insects, of the behavior of buyers and sellers in market, are not true P2P processes, to the degree that they lack holoptism, or do not promote participation. Insects in a swarm, do not have information about the whole, they follow markers that determine their individual behaviour.

seminar: Internet Swarms and Peer production

Today we have in KERG seminar two guests, Petri Kola and Juhana Kokkonen.
Topic is: Internet Swarms and Peer production

Swarm as a structure of very skillful internet users – net natives – who move from service to service using them in a very creative way. Participants have between them lose connections compared to the physical world. Traditionally if you start a volunteer organization officially people first must argue of hierarchy and rules and it slows down the process before anything real happens. In the net it is the opposite – people come together and start to develop some idea and start to put it into action step by step. People are investing a little time to see if the thing goes forward – microtrust, things do not have to succeed.

It is different from common view of web 2.0 users as amateurs, Petri believes the users are more with expertise.

How net is different from physical world?

Our concept of “how internet works” shouldn’t be developed on the basis of metaphors but real research data.

Metaphors can give us totally wrong picture how things are, eg. friction and privacy can be totally different in physical and virtual environment.

Internet happens to be a different kind of beast.

Micro contribution is something that doesn’t exist in physical world.
It is different from traditional participation systems – you can make easily contributions (eg. like in wiki).

Typical life patterns change with micro contributions.

More and more knowledge production is becoming the leading part in creating values and money.
Productivity in cognitive work depends on the right participants and resources meeting together.

Open systems better as information processing systems.

Individual physical differences are not so big as the knowledge work differences between individuals.
Out cognitive ability is different at different times of the day, we are productive when we can choose time and space.

Commons based peer networks: open systems

Compared to hierarchical organizations, it makes a lot of sense to go over organizational borders and give people initiative to choose people to work with and to choose what to do.

Yokshai Benkler: The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom (2006).

Essential question: how to combine contributions.

What are the criteria for someone to have the permission to contribute.
In open production model there is no hierarchy about who is more competent. In digital world we have a permanent undo-possibility – if someone contributes what does not fit it can be undone.

Question is how to make difference and separate good and bad contributions.
Community can establish a system where contributions are evaluated.
Contributions can be evaluated by their merit, effect.

There must be some rules:
The rule of neutral point of view: every article should be balanced with point of uses.

Forking makes open virtual immaterial collaboration different from real production.
Community can choose the safe branch and avoid the problematic one.

Forking is an insurance for participants.

How virtual organizing is different?
Organizing to the virtual internet can be differnet from organizing physical reality.

early feedback
do something and evaluate afterwards
emergent rules
unclear borders
focus on action and achievement
short time periods for one goal
rules are more decided on the way
doesn’t look like much effort
doesnt have to succeed
the collaborations do not look like anything
you must be part of it to see the point

In lightweight organizations, if based on volunteer participation, the projects can go to sleeping mode without a problem.

Hacker attitudes from wikipedia, but many of these attitudes seem much in line how participating in swarm.

Produsage= production + usage
If production and consumption cannot be separated, it may change values, it may make to rethink what is the product.

If you are not a contributer now, you are always a potential contributor. A wiki must be constantly monitored all the time to remain the product it is.

stigmery= indirect coordination between agents or actions
It means the way how ants coordinate their action, they change their environment and it changes actions of other sin this environment.

Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. “

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

Karsten Heuer, a wildlife biologist, observed in 2003, when he and his wife, Leanne Allison, followed the vast Porcupine caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus granti) for five months. “It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was.”

“In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent,” says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “Everything is very distributed: They don’t all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they’re all anonymous.”

Charles N. Harper: “When ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food,” Harper explains. “The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes.”

ecological niche idea is there!

The text is not only content, but it is also a guide for participating in the project. It is both the content and the participation interface put together.

Projects parvi.fi

Tutkimusparvi: people from social media research

Swarm-like education is the model where people will be representing different stakeholders. There will be learning materials like wikibooks. The idea would be start a peer-learning process, where all the diffrenet groups contribute and learn from each other.

Mauri: when does swarm lose being a swarm, are there characteristics of swarminess

Petri: maybe swarm is a phase of getting more organized

Forking ability gives the swarm-quality.

Learning swarm wiki was started.

My reflections:
i think Petri put two different things into one that are not same at phenomenon level – awareness based dynamic small-particle behaviour centred microblogs, and wikis that are more the broad result centred less than identifying the actors.

1. some swarm phenomena in awareness systems are at particle level dynamic and convey short term feedback type of influence to changing of the ecosystem/niches in the sense why and what the others do, that is socio-emotional and task and process (activity) awareness perhaps

2. more artifact-centred wikis are systems where the long-term feedback (the pages) influences the niche more and is of more ecological impact. Focus is on what changed in the environment where the actors are living in. Maybe it is the broad situation awareness?

In embodied simulation there are some aspects from both: picking up and integrating into your action both the other actors as well as the objects (something in text either as traces of action or triggers of meaning building) that might serve as your action triggers.

knowledge management in organisations

Was reading the book
Knowledge Creation and Management
edited by
Kazuo Ichijo
Ikuijoro Nonaka
Oxoford University Press, 2007

Preface
In 1492-1800, at globalization 1.0 period, enterprises were entering to the global markets. 1800-2000 was the period of globalization 2.0 with global competition of enterprises. Starting from year 2000 globalization 3.0 has started with newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally through knowledge work.

Why do firms differ. The theory of the knowledge-creating firm
by I.Nonaka & R.Toyama
Theories explain that differences between firms originate from imperfections of profit-maximizing like blocked barriers (cannot get certain confidential resources or mobility problems); high cost (too costly to acquire resources, high transaction costs); limited capabilities of managers (firms fall into path dependencies and are ecologically dying out).
Firms differ also because of their management vision (values, commitment of employees) differs, they envision different futures (maximizing profit versus making a good car).

It has been claimed (Teece, 2003) that firms are passive entities in the environment, that take information and produce products and services, but they merely adapt to the environment and never try to shape it. Nonaka and Toyama view firms as dynamic knowledge-creating entities that interact with the environment (an ecosystem of knowledge) reshaping the environment and even itself by creating and intaking knowledge assets and the environment as an ecoystem of knowledge and multilayered ba, through knowledge creation.

The knowledge-based theory of the firm rests on two elements:

1) basic view of human beings (human subjectivity in the company’s information-processing machine is not a noise)
The difference in human subjectivity (how we view the world) in companies helps to create new knowledge. Humans are not replaceable parts of machines. An individual transcends himself/herself through knowledge creation (Nonaka, Toyama, Konno, 2000). In organisational knowledge-creation process, individuals interact with each other to transcend their own boundaries and, as a result change themselves, others, the organisation, and the environment.

2) process of organisational knowledge creation (where knowledge includes values and ideals).
Knowledge-creation theory treats knowledge as fallible and influenced by subjective factors. However, in organisational knowledge-creation this subjective tacit knolwledge, held by individuals, is externalized into objective explicit knowledge to be shared and synthesized within and beyond organisations, and newly created knowledge is, in turn, embodied by individuals to enrich their subjective tacit knowledge. Organisational knowledge-creation is an ongoing social process of validating truth in which knowledge keeps expanding (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

The firm’s knowledge vision (Why do we exist and do what we do?) inspires organisation members so that they are encouraged to create knowledge and defines a consistent value system to evaluate and justify the created knowledge within the organisation. Firms need the concept/goal/action standard as a driving objective of knowledge-creating process that helps to realize the vision.

Knowledge creation is guided through the synthesis of contradictions (Nonaka & Toyama, 2003) – accepting dualities and synthesizing them through dialectical thinking and action in dialogues. Contradictions that cannot be solved through objective analysis alone can be solved by synthesizing subjective views and intuitions that have accumulated through practice.

A foundation for knowledge-creating activity is ba – a shared context in motion at certain time and space.At ba one can be open to the others by losing oneself, seeing itself in relation to the others, accepting their views and values. The boundary of ba must be permeable so that it can accept new contexts. Ba needs the participation of multiple perspectives.

The ecosystem of knowledge consists of multilayered ba, which exists across organisational boundaries and is continuously evolving. A knowledge-creating firm needs to manage a multilayered ba, which stretches across organisational bondaries. At the same time firm needs to protect its knowledge assets as sources of competitive advantage.

Knowledge assets are not knowledge just created but it also includes social capital that is shared in the organisations. One of the most important knowledge asset is firm-specific kata, a pattern or way of doing things in dialogues and practices. Three steps of kata, creative routines, are: shu (learn), ha (break) and ri (create).

Leadership of knowledge-creating firm requires active commitment from all members of the organisation, not just from elite members using the middle-up-down mechanisms.Middle managers break down the vision or driving objectives, create ba and lead dialogues and practices. Knowledge is the source of power that exist outside the hierarchy of organisation. Leaders provide visions, develop and promote sharing of knowledge assets, energize and connect ba, protect ba from outside contexts so that it can develop in its own contexts according to organisation vision, enable the spiral knowledge creation.

Knowledge in organisational settings.
L.Prusak & L.Weiss
Early knowledge management initiatives collected individual knowledge assets without contextualizing them in team contexts. New view of knowledge management has increased attention to the adding context to content and the group knowledge (opposite to individual knowledge) is made easier to access, secondly the social networks must be made viewable making it easier to find knowledge workers with whom to establish relationships.

Knowledge creation and Transfer. From teams to the whole organisation.
B. Büchel
There are two key measures of social networks that indicate the organisational capabilities and use of social capital: density of networks within teams, and number of external contacts. Performance is more effective if density of networks in group creates cohesive understandings, however, too cohesive groups with stabile perpectives lose effectiveness and are unable to integrate diverse perspectives from external contacts.

Knowledge transfer within organisations
D. Leonard
Transfer is always two-way.
Knowledge assets must be replicated to hold stability within firm, but understanding the core knowledge and practices these assets hold is essential to apply them in situational contexts.
Knowledge assets must be evaluated and changed through reuse in different situations.
Initiating creative fusions to cooperate at multiple levels.
Types of knowledge to be transferred: know-what, know-why, know-how, know-who.
Barriers of knowledge transfer: too rigid or too vague knowledge assets, culturally sticky knowledge (difficult to separate from source), the gap between the initial source and the receiver of knowledge assets.
Transfer is aided if knowledge is made explicit and if there is physical proximity of the knowledge source and the receiver.

Bringing the outside in
M. Mazevski & N. Athanassiou
Knowledge is personal – social networks and social capital.
Relationships may be:
strong/weak: stong relationships are built with the kind of interaction necessary for establishment of shared tacit knowledge, they are characterised by trust
flexible: participants share many areas of knowledge and expertise, they have willingness to share and learn
transferable: transferable relationships can be given to someone else, people are reluctant to transfer strong relationships unless they are aware that new contact is worthy
power: power is the access to resources that are important and scare, powerful relationships provide access to such resources.
satisfying: if needs are fulfilled reciprocally

Human resources management and knowledge creation
M. Osterloch
Creating synergies constitutes collective good that can be used by people who have not contributed their share to its production.
In contrast to manual teamwork, pure knowledge teamwork raises productivity of the team if different knowledge is dispersed among different people (Hayek, 1945).
The result of knowledge teamwork is at least in part new explicit knowledge that can be used by others outside the team.
Knowledge workers in teams have more bargaining power than manual workers do, the people cannot be easily replaced.
Motivation is the key of knowledge work:
- enjoyment based intrinsic motivation: the individual acts as homo ludens (Huizinga, 1986), pleasure is derived from activity itself and not from compensation, flow experience
- prosocial intrinsic motivation takes into account the well-being of others, the welfare of the community, people want to contribute to common good of their community or company
extra-role behaviour: willingness to cooperate, willingness to keep organisational citizenship behaviour (protecting other members if rules are violated)
How to increase intrinsic motivation:
The perception of autonomy decreases if people perceive that their self-determination is reduced when doing intrinsically interesting activity. They feel that they are not the origins of their behaviour.
Feeling of competence grows if individuals understand what they are doing and when they feel responsible for outcome. If people feel that they are competent, they make greater contributions to the community (Kollock, 1998). But individuals must get positive feedback about the outcome of their contributions that does not eclipse their feeling of autonomy. Feedback must be perceived as supporting not controlling. Second, individuals must believe that their participation is important for the provision of the community good. Feedback, whether other members have received and used the contributions, and training possibilities are important. Providing opportunities to personal contacts increases motivation.

expectations to new social learning tools

Social software is generally recognized as tools, which development is highly dependent of users‘ mutual interaction with the mediation of these tools, involving group processes such as discussion, mutual advice or favors, and play (Shirky, 2002).

Any activity is always mediated by the tools that we create in the process of actualizing certain affordances in our goal-directed and enculturated actions – when making something from the environment into our own or when bringing something of our own ideas into the environment. More than at earlier times, current social tools are the creation of communities. While the artifacts and meanings, created and distributed with social software, obtain in the process of use the community-defined folksonomical dimensions, the activities what are performed and evolve in these systems as a result of community interactions, have yet remained implicit, and are not well observable for the users of social software. Social software still lacks the means how to make activity potentialities of tools, and activity patterns, which emerge in the communities, more observable. What we basically lack, is the soft ontologically defined constraints/possibilities of actions determined by the communities who use social tools.

When using social software for learning at institutional courses, but also for personal self-directed learning attempts with other learners in the Web, the explicit socially defined action potentialities within activity systems would enhance the selection of communal tools for common objectives. Some of the recent developments, such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) technology that aims at creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do, seem to promise that the action-based automated search of learning partners would soon become possible. The best practice of the tool-use for certain learning activities is, thus, disseminated giving a valuable input for the others and narrowing down their choice of appropriate tools for particular learning goals. For example, it is suggested that the super-peer networks would enable the learners to observe, record and share their activity practices with artifacts through networks (Clematis et al., 2007). If FOAF and similar specifications could read personal action potentialities with certain social software, their communities and artifact types, which we described earlier, the decision processes at constructing collaborative landscapes for learning purposes, could be supported by technological means.

Tools that support the construction of group landscapes from distributed personal tools play an important role in the application of new Learning Environment Design model. The new generation of aggregation and mashup tools is anticipated to support the construction of distributed personal and group learning landscapes, using the affordance-based activity system model. The mashup of the learning environment from distributed feeds will be realised, considering, in one hand, the anticipated affordances for action, and personal activity preferences, which may be described with FOAF kind of scripts, and on the other hand, the socially defined action potentialities of tools would enable the mashup tools to automatically select a suitable set of widgets for certain learners or groups. In these mashup tools learners would pertain full control over the selection of feeds – eventually they can ignore or close some tools and even add new tools. Such user-activity can be, in turn, used to update the semantic models refining the activity-tool relations, improving the tool recommendations.

The critical factor of effective use of distributed social landscapes and scaffolding in such systems is the possibility to monitor the use of landscape elements and the information flows between them in the cause of action. New developments at social software systems enable already to visualise the folksonomy based meaning-building dimensions in the communities (see Klerkx & Duval, 2007). What is yet needed, is the visualisation of activities and learning landscapes for the learners. This may be realised through visualising the mashed learning landscapes as affordance-based activity systems in which the distributed social tools would convey also the socially defined activity potentials. Certainly, this may not indicate, which of these available activity potentialities were put into action. For understanding this, interaction within specific social tools, and the content of feeds between tools must be analyzed (eg. which regulatory, social or content-creation types of action potentialities were put into action). But that seems even more complicated issue.

The joint learning situations would also pertain the use of asynchronous or synchronous interaction tools when working with artifacts. Some of the tools like Gabbly chat can now be easily integrated with different webpages, social software applications and masup tools. Yet, the develoment of tools, which keep the interrelations between the talked content and the productive actions made at artifact, should enhance learning at distributed landscapes. The future of using distributed social software elements for self-directed and collaborative learning purposes is in mashing selectively the evidence from different activities eg. weblog posts and commentaries with certain tags, artifacts purposfully created and stored in different repositories, wiki-contributions, discourse logs etc. In these places (hubs) where our distributed knowledge meets again, we propagate ourselves as the connectors between the communities. If we mix our distributed self with the knowledge of our community members (like in micro-blogging feeds of Jaiku), these mashed feeds may work as triggers for learning. They enable to access knowledge community-wise and transfer it to other community spaces.

distributed self

One of the phenomena in web 2.0 is keeping distributed self.

We all invade various spaces: weblogs, twitter, jaiku, flickr, youtube, social bookmarking spaces etc.
What these distributed spaces enable us to do, is to keep our personality in multiple places at the same time and variate our presence in different modalities.

The result of keeping distributed self increases likelihood that my external knowlege, my artifacts, my meanings, my activity patterns will be noticed, modified and duplicated.

Keeping distributed self keeps us in touch with different communities.

Being simultaneously in different communities enables us to bring information across the borders of the communities, initating semiosis, enabling us to constantly create new knowledge.

The maintenance of distributed self has also become external – we tend to feed together our distributed spaces into aggregators or weblogs in order to feel as a whole and observe our external presence. In these places (hubs) where our distributed knowledge meets again, we propagate ourselves as the connectors between the communities.

Can we create in these spaces as well? If we mix our distributed self with the knowledge of our community members (like in microblogging feeds of Jaiku or Twitter), these mashed feeds may work as triggers for writing new blog entries. They enable us to access knowledge community-wise and transfer it to our other community spaces.

The social media starfish is a good representation of our distributed self. Another idea of digital and distributed self is here.

There is also an article by Stanton Wortham about distributed self – The Heterogeneously Distributed Self (2007)
Journal of Constructivist Psychology, Volume 12, Issue 2, March 1999, pages 153-172.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/107205399266163
http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/109/

Article explains that heterogeneous distribution can be applied to the self.
The self is heterogeneously distributed because a coherent self emerges from the interconnection of structures of diverse sorts, which together facilitate the experience and manifestation of a coherent identity.

Performative account of self: self emerges when person repeatedly adopts characteristic positions, with respect of others and within recognizable cultural patterns, in everyday social action (Butler, 1990).

The author suggests locating self in several different types of structures, including performative, psychological and other patterns.

For example the author writes how there will be interaction between our past and present self in autobiographical narratives.

This makes me think, if we reflect in weblog – do we also talk with our past and present self in order to create some coherence?

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.

course designs for web 2.0 tools

Recently i have had some thoughts and discussions with Sebastian Fiedler and Terje Väljataga about courses with web 2.0 tools in higher education. The question is, that although we intend to use social software for educational purposes..it doesn’t go that simple that we just teach how to blog, write wiki or so on.
These are only means, offering new environment for something meaningful we want to achieve. What would it be what we should stream for and where should the emphasis of the course be so that it meaningfully integrated web 2.0 tools? Content generation? Projectwork? Self-direction? Social retrieval patterns? Networking? Dealing with challenges?

We have tested in spring self-direction as the course focus, which brings along the nessecity to investigate social software from the affordance perspective when building personal or collaborative landscapes of web 2.0 tools for conductig certain activity patterns. This focus has worked out quite effectively, we are continuing running the same course…but

as we know this works there is a temptation to shift focus and try out something new.

One idea we briefly talked with Terje is what if to focus on the development, social retrieval and contextualization of new media objects in activity patterns. This idea is a continuation of what we have tested already at individual and team-learning level when students created complex landscapes and integrated their activity patterns with these by evoking certain affordances of the integrated environment.

The advancement is to highlight the role of media objects in the patterns.
Secondly, what is the role of these media objects for the users, how they contectualize and interpret objects in social networks? (This relates with my previous thinking that we should not talk of social networks that consist only of people, but of people and objects networks).
Thirdly, it is interesting, how the affordances of the environment and affordances of the media objects interrelate and influence each other?

So, the course could be of the distributed actvity systems in which we emphaise the role of media objects – their creation, roles in the activity, how media objects trigger new lines of activity patterns, how the environment with its affordances supports learning process with media objects etc.

Ok, it seems there are enough ideas to try it out and study.