social search ecology

Few days ago Hans Põldoja told me that Riina Vuorikari has been using the ecology concept in her social retrieval studies. It gives some input to the model of ecosystems (learning ecology). Specifically it shows that the reuse of traces that users leave to ecosystem is not so prevalent part of web-culture. Still, this behaviour may be used for cross-border translation between communities.

Ecology of social search for learning resources
Vourikari & Koper

In this paper they use attention metadata to model the ecology of social search.

An interesting part of the paper summarizes new search options:

Explicit search: comprises the traditional search box with text and filtering options based on multilingual metadata.

“Find by subject” offers browsing through pre-defined categories.

Personal search: Looking for bookmarks from one’s own personal collection of bookmarks

Novel exploratory search systems that assist users in obtaining content that meets their information needs include social navigation and collaborative recommender systems.

Social navigation involves using the behaviour of other people to help navigate online.
Social navigation types are: Interest indicators, which can be acquired either directly from the user (e.g. rating) or indirectly (e.g. time spent on an object).
Community browsing: these are social navigation features such as accessing resources through tagclouds and specific lists of most bookmarked resources, but also “pivot browsing” which means using tags or usernames as a means to reorient browsing.

Collaborative recommender systems use explicit ratings to find like-minded users (Adomavicius and Tuzhilin, 2005).

Rafaeli et al., (2005) introduced a system to harness the social perspectives in learning where the learner could choose from whom to take recommendations (friend or algorithm).
Koper (2005) used indirect social interaction in choosing a path that allows successful competition of a learning task.
Farzan and Brusilovsky (2005) studied social navigation and found that adding the time spent reading each page provides more precise insight into the intention of the group of users and more accurate information about pages selected from search results.

Secondly, they describe an interesting coordination system underneath the ecology of search that is based on three relations that might lead the people. I would think interpreting the personalized perception and actualization of such relations as search affordances.

Social bookmarking and tagging creates a triple (user, content, annotations) which indicates user’s relationship between resources, users, and tags (Golder and Huberman, 2006, Marlow et al., 2006, Sen et al., 2006). Such underlying structure allows flexible social navigation (e.g. tag-item, tag-user, user-item), but could also be a source for collaborative recommender systems by linking like-minded users not only through resources, but also through tag-based interest sharing (Santos-Neto et al., 2009).

The use of social information (annotations – interest indicators) in navigation was smaller than i expected, still the traditional search culture prevails. However, social search as a way of using community traces appeared.

A model was created of data to study how processes are interlinked (i.e. ecology).
The model shows that the annotation (i.e. Interest indicators) play an integral part in creating a social search ecology and offer more diverse ways to discover resources.
The search taking advantage of Social Information Retrieval methods yield more relevant resources with less effort from the user. Despite this edge, users have a strong search preference for Explicit search methods (2/3 of all executed searches).
Most often users discover cross-boundary learning resources as a result of Explicit search, and when the resource is deemed relevant, they bookmark it in the Search result list.

Conclusion: We show that users are more efficient with Social Information Retrieval
strategies, however, Community browsing alone does not help users discover a wider variety of cross-boundary resources.

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

Hybrid ecosystem of narratives

Many (that i refer below) have already assumed that learning through developing and discussing narratives in social web spaces has become a new innovative form of learning.

We have developed and tested the course Hybrid ecosystem of narratives in Tallinn University as one approach to understand how narratives appear in hybrid (real + virtual + social) Web 2.0 space.

When we started this course we had no answer to the students’ questions about “what is this space that we (me and Anatole-Pierre Fuksas) have named the hybrid ecosystem of narratives. How it emerges, and how it develops through the interplay of various interactions, was to be investigated through the participatory design with these same students.

In the end of 2008 Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine summarized in the whitepaper: Web 2.0 storytelling: emergence of the new genre – web 2.0 storytelling in education serves as composition platform and as curricular object.

First, Web 2.0 storytelling is a useful composition platform whenever storytelling is appropriate. The second possible application for Web 2.0 storytelling in higher education is its use as curricular object.

They encouraged educators as follows: the best approach for educators is simply to give Web 2.0 storytelling a try and see what happens. We invite you to jump down the rabbit hole.

I refer only one interesting aspect what they mention about what web 2.0 storytelling: It is a distributed art form that can range beyond the immediate control of a creator.

So it is clear that the web 2.0 narrative courses are emergent and cannot be precisely planned using some clear design what people should do (because then we will violate the nature of the system itself). The courses must follow certain participatory and design-based approaches to capture what is true.

From the Learncom study “Pedagogical innovations in new ICT-facilitated learning communities” draft report ” Review of lifelong learning” by Kirsti Ala-Mutka (2009) i picked three innovative aspects of online communities:

- ICT­enabled communities are enabling different ways for learning (narratives, discovery, experimentation, observing, reflection),
- social support for learning (peer support, apprenticeship and situated learning, social acknowledgement of learning, social knowledge management),
- new ways to access and organize learning (applying community models for courses, organizations, linking communities to learning and education in new ways).

The report mentions Bruner’s (1996) cultural­phychological approach to education that emphasises narratives as vehicles for meaning making. He suggests that education should help those growing up in a culture find an identity within that culture, in order to be able to make meaning.

Narratives are essential in constructing an identity and finding a place in one’s culture.

Narratives are a powerful way of learning, providing means to situated oneself in the culture and make meaning.

Bruner, J.S. (1996). The culture of education. Harward Univesity Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The report refers to Mayer (2003) who found that conversational narratives combined with animations contributed to a personalization effect, where the students developed significantly more creative solutions than through conventional instruction and explanations. Secondly, Carbonaro et al. (2008) showed that multimedia storytelling allowed students to engage in learning by design.

Mayer, R. (2003). The promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13, 125- 139.

Carbonaro, M., Cutumisu, M., Duff, H., Gillis, S., Onuczko, C., Siegel, J., Scheffer, J., Schumacher, A., Szafron, D & Waugh, K. (2008). Interactive story authoring: a viable form of creative expression for the classroom. Computers and Education, 15, 687-707.

The study points out that narratives serve as the mediators for externalizing tacit knowledge without writer’s full consciousness.

Recently i found an interesting paper to the same direction, where tacit knowledge was automatically collected from work narratives and used for composing certain more suitable narratives (community suggestions) that could be used in decision-making:

A computational narrative construction method with applications in organizational learning of social service organizations
W.M. Wang, C.F. Cheung, W.B. Lee, S.K. Kwok
Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 8093–8102

Anyway, the boom of various narrative centred learning environments is evident and there is not enough information how people naturally use such environments.

I believe that if there is narrative ecosystem, there must exist something (narratives itself) that the communities will use as a feedback from these ecologies to adjust themselves to their ecosystem parametres.

How narratives function in the ecosystem as the ecosystem feedback and can the community have some analysis means to enhance this feedback within ecosystem?

After analyzing the course data I would say that storytelling has become part of our new way of sensing in hybrid environments.

Storytelling is a new form of hybrid sensing. Web 2.0 storytellers are extending themselves beyond their body borders and using this extended self as the tool. The hybrid stories enable to be more adjusted with the real and virtual hybridized surroundings, extracting dimensions for personal activity and emotions within which they can operate. People are constantly embodying themselves, entangling and detangling themselves to the hybrid systems, while enacting with it.

And at certain moments collaboration appears over the narratives binding persons in the ecosystem, forming certain food-chains, consumerism and other nice ecological phenomena that needs to be brought to light in new systems.

Some ideas are apparent in the dataset that we collected and extracted with the students:

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.

Swarms, semiotic fitness, ecologies – ideas triggered from J.Hoffmeyer’s papers

I have been reading some articles of Jesper Hoffmeyer about the swarms, semiotics, semiosphere and ecologies and doing some thought connections with niches, affordances in new learning ecologies.

I believe that in new media communities the meaning/action based traces are left in the environment that determine the niches for these communities and also influence the niches of other communities.

The communities perceive/anticipate/translate meaning and action relevant cues (affrdances) from ongoing meaning-making and actions, as well as, from the traces of meanings and actions left in their niches.

The translation from cues/traces left in the environment and the relevant actions of the communities are explainable with the swarm-phenomena and with the general cultural semiosphere model.

Swarms are communities in which decision-making takes place based on cues/traces left by individual swarm members in the environment or picked up from their real activities. These cues determine the semiotic niche for the swarm community.

The semiotic fitness term applies to describe that specific cues are recognized and interpreted in the semiotic niche to establish well-being for the swarm.

The integration of the cues of other swarms may influence the swarm behaviour. The swarms need to translate the align, unfamiliar action relevant cues from the environment to their own system.

In general each swarm always deals with the semiotic niche that is dual – our own cues and align cues.
The borderline between common and align cues in the semiotic niche is constantly re-developed in the course of action.
The cultural semiosphere model (see Lotman, 1990) describes such a dual structure as a necessary condition for translation acts to take place, which may lead to new types of meanings and actions to emerge in the semiotic niche.

Since the swarms are entities at different levels, consisting of other swarms we can also talk of semiotic sub-niches for a particular community. The actions distinguish one niche from another – in principle the same ecology may provide different niches in which specific semiotic fitnesses are in operation.

Communities are not different of termites – they pile meaning and action traces as artifacts or system use preferences, and orientate and make decisions using these piles.

If we look communities in action – the same set of tools and artifacts may be interpreted and used differently in the course of individual learning, and when these individuals switch to collaborative problem-solving actions. Personal learning environments are changing in different semiotic niches.

Some interesting parts from the Hoffmeyer papers:

Hoffmeyer, J. (1995). The global semiosphere. Paper presented at the 5th IASS congress in Berkeley, June 1995. In Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (eds.): Semiotics Around the World. Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Berkeley 1994. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter 1997, pp. 933-936.

The behavioural and communicative aspects of animal life are considered but they are generally not allowed to play any fundamental role in the dynamics of ecosystems or in evolutionary theory (Levins and Lewontin 1985). This bias towards the material and energetic aspects of ecosystem dynamics may have blinded us to the importance of the semiotic web unfolding throughout ecosystems.

Survival through semiosis implies a dynamic creativity. In addition to vertical semiotic system, i.e. genetic communication down through the generations, all organisms also partake in a horizontal semiotic system, i.e. communication throughout the ecological space (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991).

The horizontal or ecological semiotic network has gained an increasing autonomy relative to the genetic semiotic system, i.e. the authority to make decisions was gradually delegated from the genomic systems to the organisms themselves.

The most important in horizontal semiotic system is the organisms’ capacity for anticipation, the possibility of foreseeing actual events and protect oneself against them or otherwise derive advantage from them.

The populations of organisms are forced to occupy specific semiotic niches. The organisms will have to master a set of signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and chemical origin in order to survive in the semiosphere. This semiosphere poses constraints or boundary conditions to the organism populations.

The semiotic demands to populations are often a decisive challenge to success.

Note. In another article he uses term semiotic fitness.

Wherever there has developed a habit there will also exist an organism for whom this habit has become a sign. There can be no doubt that the principle that one organisms’ habits becoming another organisms’ signs is at the very heart of the evolutionary process.

Ecosystems would not be stable were it not for the millions of semiotic processes built on habits which themselves were formerly built on other habits.

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Hoffmeyer, J. (2005). The swarming body. Paper presented at the 5th IASS congress in Berkeley, June 1995. In Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (eds.): Semiotics Around the World. Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Berkeley 1994. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter 1997, pp. 937-940.

Semiosis is the basic principle of life. Semiotic competence is delegated to decentralised units like swarms.

A swarm has been defined as a set of (mobile) agents which are liable to communicate directly or indirectly (by acting on their local environment) with each other, and which collectively carry out a distributed problem solving.

The body swarm is not built on ten thousand nearly identical units, rather it should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of more or less overlapping swarms of very different kinds. And the minor swarms again are swarm-entities, so that we get a hierarchy of swarms.

At all levels these swarms are engaged in distributed problem solving based on an infinitely complicated web of semetic interaction patterns.

French biologist P.-P. Grassé made a semiotically very interesting analysis of
nest construction in termites (Grassé 1959). His conclusion was: “No direct interaction is necessary between the animals, since co-ordination is assured solely through the artefacts resulting from their behaviour.”

Hoffmeyer defines a swarm conception at the body-mind level: Swarms of immune cells interact with swarms of nerve cells in maintaining the somatic ecology. The view of a centralised authority in the brain controlling the ignorant body fades out of sight and is replaced by an interactive organisation based upon the distributed problem solving capacity of myriads of cell swarms working in parallel.

The transformation of molecules to signs opens for an unending semiogenic evolution based on semetic interaction patterns between entities at all levels. The swarm of cells constituting a human body should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of overlapping swarms of very different kinds.

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Hoffmeyer, J. (1998). The Unfolding Semiosphere. In Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Stanley Salthe and Manuela Delpos (eds.), Evolutionary Systems. Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Selection and Self-Organization. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1998, pp. 281-293.

Darwin was careful to underline that natural selection was a process very different from artificial selection in that no intention or purpose lay behind it. Natural selection was a selection without a selector (or even a selection principle since organic evolution had no privileged direction).

Note: If we consider that basic functioning of organisms appears through swarm-based semetic interaction patterns (units in swarms and swarms of swarms communicate directly or indirectly by acting on their local environment with each other, and carry collectively out a distributed problem solving), is it really the natural selection without a selector? It seems that in this case these units of swarms and the sub-swarms, and finally the swarm itself becomes a selector?

In the macro evolutionary perspective we can distinguish at least three dominating instances of emergence, which changed the rules of the evolutionary game:

a) The emergence of galaxies (the emergence of difference, i.e. the creation of lumps of certain matter in the middle of nothing).

b) The emergence of life (emergence of distinction, self-interpretation and code-duality, i.e. as analog codes the organisms recognise and interact with each other in the ecological space giving rise to a horizontal semiotic system, while as digital codes they (after eventual recombination through meiosis and fertilisation in sexually reproducing species) are passively carried forward in time between generations.

DNA does not contain the key to its own interpretation.
In sexually reproducing organisms only the fertilised egg ‘knows’ how to interpret DNA, i.e. to use its text for the construction of the organism.The interpretant of the DNA message is buried in the cytoskeleton of the fertilised egg (and the growing embryo).

Note: The role of ecological pressure and niche influence in the evolution may be considered as part of swarm-swarm interactions?

The appearance on the planet of self-interpretation leads us to the emergence of linguistic culture.

c) The emergence of linguistic culture (emergence of experience and cultural evolution through translations back and forth between experience of reality and its linguistic re-description).

Being self-conscious selves humans are the result of the evolutionary creation of a whole new kind of code-duality, a ‘meta’-code-duality so to say, a
duality of reality as analog coded experience perpetually interacting with its digital linguistic redescription in an unending chain of translations back and forth. The dynamic properties and creativity of this code-duality is the core of cultural evolution.

Note. Can we consider evolutionary interactions of organisms with their niches (eg. affordance-based approach) from the semiotic perspective. In this case the emergence of ‘liguistic culture’ between various swarms and their niches appears as a ‘cultural evolution’ already before self-conscious humans?

Semetic interactions refer to interactions in which regularities (habits) developed by one species (or individual) successively become used (interpreted) as signs by the individuals of the same or another species, thereby eliciting new habits in this species eventually to become – sooner or later – signs for other individuals, and so on in a branching and unending web integrating the ecosystems of the planet into a global semiosphere (Hoffmeyer 1993)

Semiotic fitness

Fitness depends on a relation, something can be fit only in a given context.
Genetic fitness may be a useful term in genetics, but if evolution is concerned what matters is not genetic fitness but semiotic fitness.
Genes may be fit only under certain environmental conditions.
But if genotypes and envirotypes (Odling-Smee and Patten 1994) reciprocally constitute the context on which fitness should be measured, it seems we should rather talk about the fit in its relational entirety, that is as a semiotic capacity.

The semiotic fitness, should ideally measure the semiotic competence or success of natural systems in managing the genotype-envirotype translation processes.
The optimization of semiotic fitness results in the continuing growth in the depth of interpretative patterns accessible to life.

Note. Semiotic fitness applies for the inhabitants active in niches and thus provides the interrelated activity/meaning measurment characteristic for spaces.

New course: Ecology of narratives in Tallinn

Everybody close to Tallinn are welcome to the course (in english):
info in estonian
info in english

Timetable:
January 29, 30 (12-18, Tallinn University main Building Narva road 25, room P-510, Ecology of Narratives (Kai Pata, Anatole Fuksas)
In between sessions we do activity in town and in virtual reality (writing narrative)
Final meeting will be March 23th (10-14).

Course resources in wikiversity

Course landscape plan:

Traces and niches

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

Cultural transmission theory..also for research about web artifacts?

Recently i found one paper elaborating Cultural transmission theory (CT) research in the anthropological sciences and outlining the benefits and drawbacks of this theoretical framework for the study of material culture. This framework seems quite interesting for explaining the phenomena in artifact culture of the web communities as well.

Most interesting aspects for me are related with my ideas of ‘learning’ in niches:

- culture constitutes a second (in addition to genes) mechanism by which inheritance occurs
This claim is well related to the niche construction ideas from other studies and the evolutionary effect of niche construction.

- our analyses should include more than one measure of relatedness of cultural patterns, each valid but representing different information pathways.
This assumption makes me think of the various gradients that define niches, and how these gradients influence each other.

- humans link the difficult information to things they can easily transmit as part of packages, and certain kinds of information will be bundled during transmission.
Is it the ‘view’ of affordances at some cases, they are somewhat externalized into cultural artifacts meaningful for the other actors coming mainly from this context?

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Cultural Transmission Theory and the Archaeological Record: Providing Context to Understanding Variation and Temporal Changes in Material Culture
Jelmer W. Eerkens and Carl P. Lipo
J Archaeol Res (2007) 15:239–274

Explaining similarity and change in artifacts over time has been a long-standing goal of archaeologists.
Culture historians were interested in how these sequences varied from place to place and over time.
New focus now includes explaining other aspects about artifact variability beyond typology, including explaining why artifacts change the way they do.

Culture transmission (hereafter, CT) is simply the idea that similarity in behavior and artifacts may be caused by the exchange of information using a nongenetic mechanism.

Common descent in CT merely refers to the notion that information about material culture is passed between individuals and that similarity in artifact form may be a product of information ultimately coming from the same source.

Similarity in artifact forms over time and space was commonly explained by reference to the diffusion of ideas and information.

Diffusion was considered a general mechanism by which information was passed (or inherited) across and between populations.

Early and mid-20th century diffusion models were focused on the ‘‘culture’’ as a unit of study, and ideas were perceived as being diffused in and out of groups of people who comprise sets of bounded entities.

CT today derives from Darwinian models of evolution.
CT consists of the recognition that culture constitutes a second (in addition to genes) mechanism by which inheritance occurs.
CT theory provides a powerful means for linking measures of behavioral similarity and claims about historical relatedness.
Darwinian theory, of which modern CT is a part, is based more on the actions and decisions of individuals.
CT acts to decouple information transfer from biological reproduction and allows information to be continually passed from one organism to another through social learning.

The results of individual learning (i.e., behavior modification) can be transmitted, in the modified state, to other individuals. Through individual learning and CT, organisms can continually acquire, modify, and pass on modified information. Thus, the process of CT is fundamentally based on the interaction of both individual experimentation (i.e., innovation) and social learning (i.e., copying).

CT can create patterns in behavioral traits that are distinct from behaviors controlled and transmitted genetically.

Cultural information may consist of a single trait from a single individual, the average of a trait in a group of individuals, the modal trait in a population, or any other combination from any set of models.

We also can acquire information as traits, sets of traits, or simply as rules on how to acquire additional traits or rules.

Behaviors transmitted culturally have the potential to evolve (i.e., change) quicker than those passed on genetically because there are few limits to the structure of information inheritance in CT.

Multiple patterns will generally characterize CT.
When we study cultural variability, our analyses should include more than one measure of relatedness, each valid but representing different information pathways.

As a result, in some cases cultural variability may lack distinct groups with clear boundaries and cohesive internal information, though such groups can clearly form.

Not all similarity in cultural behavior necessarily indicates historical relatedness.
Distinguishing between instances of historical relatedness and convergence will form an important realm in future evolutionary studies.

Where and how replication takes place in CT?
The lack of attention in this area leads to fairly simplistic notions of traits moving from individual to individual with frequencies that are driven only by their prevalence in the population.

Gabora (2004), notes that the locus of cultural replication is in the minds of individuals. Minds are more than simple ‘‘bags’’ that hold traits but complex webs of algorithms and rules for acquiring and especially sorting information. Gabora calls these algorithms a worldview.

As a person receives cultural information, it is filtered through their worldview, where it is assimilated and related to all existing information before being stored and later recalled. Although strongly shaping the kinds and rates of information acquisition, worldviews are not static entities but constantly change.
The worldview not only transforms incoming information but is transformed itself to accommodate new information and is itself transmitted culturally.

Hypotheses:
First, we expect that individuals living in similar cultural, social, and physical environments will
tend to acquire similar worldviews. As a result they also may acquire similar kinds of behavioral traits, including material culture.

CT may include not only information about traits but also rules about how/when to acquire traits as well as rules about how/when to acquire new rules. This means that information may change (i.e., evolve) within a population at dramatically different rates.

Third, we expect that the set of rules that compose the ‘‘worldview’’ will be cumulative because they build on one another.

CT is a separate inheritance system that governs behavior, CT can easily account for seemingly ‘‘maladaptive’’ traits that spread or even come to dominate within the range of things people do.

For example, despite fairly strong genetically controlled instincts to eat, CT can explain why a behavior like anorexia may spread within a population (e.g., worldviews pertaining to a certain body image).

A significant amount of information is preserved in some way and is coherently passed from individual to individual through populations over relatively long periods of time. How well the historical signal of cultural transmission is preserved, particularly over long periods of time, is unknown and surely varies from context to context.

We assume that at least some information is transmitted between individuals and that this information is subject to modification before being retransmitted to others either through copying error, filtration through worldviews, or purposeful ‘‘innovation.’’ As a result, the information that is transmitted is subject to evolutionary forces.

We suggest further that at least some of this information stays relatively intact over archaeologically relevant periods of time.

‘‘Information’’ that is argued to be transmitted between individuals: Unlike DNA, which is physically passed from person to person in Genetic Transmission (GT), no such empirical entity is known for CT.

We have no direct way of ‘‘seeing’’ transmission.
There is no physical ‘‘chunk’’ of material that is passed from individual to individual.

Fundamentally, there is no distinction between GT and CT; each system simply passes information using different ways of coding.

This information-centered view has several consequences.
1. There are no boundaries on the types of physical entity that can carry information. This is true for
cultural and genetic forms of transmission.

The lack of a single empirical entity means that we have to define one.

Although there are no agreed-upon empirical units of CT, we can build a unit for measuring CT. For example, Pocklington and Best (1997, p. 81) define CT units as ‘‘the largest units of socially transmitted information that reliably and repeatedly withstand transmission.’’ This definition makes it clear that CT units are measurements of the effect of transmission on variability, not a physical package of something.

2. We must keep the physical package separate from the information being transmitted. We are not interested in the physical package or set of physical packages of cultural information but rather the structure, content, and ultimate effect on observable phenomena like material culture.

Because variation is the raw material upon which evolution operates and CT processes directly affect variation, it stands to reason that CT strongly affects the course of evolution.

Transmission works on both the originating (i.e., source of information) as well as the recipient
side (i.e., the destination of information) as individuals acquire, store, recall, replicate, and materialize this information.

Different combinations of the content, context, the number of people involved, the direction of transmission, biases, and information packaging present a bewildering array of possibilities for CT.

Content refers to the actual information that is being transmitted between individuals.

The more complex information is, the longer it takes to describe its properties whether done
mathematically, pictorially, or verbally. For evolutionary modeling, the complexity of information is important because complex information is subject to greater copying error.

The various human sensory systems are different in their accuracy, hence the propensity to produce error during replication of cultural information (see Eerkens 2000; Eerkens and Bettinger 2001; Eerkens and Lipo 2005).

The repetitiveness of the information being transferred also affects error rates during replication. Information that is highly repetitive is more likely to be materialized with less error than information that is singular.

The structure of information affects how it is transmitted. Mesoudi and Whiten (2004) showed that social information loses detail (‘‘low-level information’’) but may gain high-level structure as it is transmitted between people verbally. Mesoudi (Mesoudi et al. 2006) suggests that social gossip is transmitted with greater accuracy than similarly structured but nonsocial information.

Washburn (2001) found that the overall structure of the images was more accurately reproduced than elements about detail. Furthermore, cultural background played an important role in the accuracy of reproduction; the greater the familiarity of the culture from which the image was drawn, the greater the accuracy in reproducing structure and especially detail.

Context refers to the social and physical setting in which cultural information is transmitted. The physical and social context of transmission can mediate or alter the content of what is being transmitted.
The context in which this information was transmitted greatly affected variability in how it was remembered and subsequently retransmitted (Barth, 1987, 1990).
It is possible that artifacts transmitted within ritual contexts had conservative rates of change.

Mode refers to the process by which individuals transmit and acquire information.
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) and Boyd and Richerson (1985) have modeled, that different modes of transmission can have dramatic effects on the rate of evolution of cultural information. For example, many-to-one transmission tends to slow the rate of change relative to one-to-many transmission (MacDonald 1998, p. 230; Shennan 2002).

Conformist transmission is a many-to-one system but with a particular type of bias, where the ‘‘many’’ represents those individuals possessing the modal or average behavior.

Rarity (or pro-novelty) biased transmission

Prestige-biased transmission – certain prestigious individuals, rather than the masses, are assumed to have access to (or have experimented to acquire) superior information.

The mode of transmission can vary depending on how information is packaged.

In some cases, cultural information may be transmitted because it ‘‘hitchhikes’’ with other information (O’Brien and Lyman 2003).

Individuals (i.e., actors) receive information and intentionally act upon it (e.g., ignore it, choose from whom to accept it, modify it, experiment with it).

Example: Cultural transmission in material artifacts of archeology

Style is something that exists independent of an observer, that is, it is empirical.

Meltzer (1981, p. 314) suggests that ‘‘in many instances, the choice between certain kinds of design elements on ceramics is not a functional consideration, but rather is historically determined and selectively ‘neutral,’ because there is no inherent advantage between one element and the next. The actual presence of the design, however, has a selective value because that particular design serves to mark a certain individual or group boundary (or whatever other function it may serve).’ Style is, therefore, a way of measuring and explaining material culture through the conceptual framework of cultural transmission.

Fundamentally, a random copying model is a null hypothesis.

Mithen (1997, 1998): humans link the difficult information to things they can easily transmit as part of packages.
Certain kinds of information will be bundled during transmission.
According to Mithen’s argument, the presence of such domain-specific structure within the brain results in strong patterns in covariation between certain kinds of information during cultural evolution.

Henrich (2004b) shows that the effective population size (i.e., the number of interacting social learners) is an important factor in the transmission of complex versus simple material technologies. Henrich finds that complex technologies tend to be lost when populations decrease in size while simple technologies are maintained or even improved.

Various transmission processes produce different patterns in variation, with some such as conformist transmission removing variants from the pool of behaviors (i.e., winnowing away), and others such as experimentation and innovation adding new ones.

The documentation of variability and measures of dispersion (e.g., standard deviation, coefficient of variation) and covariation are not systematically reported in archaeological research. To maximize the utility of CT, it is important that archaeologists consistently report and consider the explanatory implications of dispersion measurements as well.

As a conceptual framework, CT is especially powerful for explaining patterns observed in material culture and variation therein through time and space.
Explanations of artifacts include the aggregate of ideas and processes involved in construction and how these are transmitted between individuals while simultaneously being modified through copying error, individual learning, experimentation, or innovation (e.g., Basalla 1988).

Three measures of variation are of particular relevance to CT.

The first is the dispersion about a mode or average. Dispersion can be caused by a number of transmission processes such as purposeful experimentation or copying error.

The second measure of variation concerns the diversity of distinct types within an assemblage of artifacts.

The third measure of variation involves covariation between the attributes of an artifact or between artifact types themselves.

Few studies have explored the intersection of these three measures of variation (dispersion, diversity, and covariation).

Ecological aspects for learning theory of new Digital Age

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

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

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

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

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

Some aspects to be considered and elaborated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning affordances of the blog and aggregator

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

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

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

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

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

Weblog affordances and implications to learning design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aggregator’s learning affordances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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