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Individuals develop places when they add various artifacts such as images, impressions, historical content, marketing information to augment certain geographical locations, and increase their ability to perceive places as meaningful spots individually.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:

Roots of ecological psychology I

Yesterday we started to revise some concepts of ecology to be useful in our learning context. So i had to come back an look at some theory books.

Harry Heft writes in Ecological Psychology in Context

Heft (2001): There is a dynamic realm of thoroughly natural, co-evolved entities functioning in a web of environmental interdependencies. The structural and functional properties of natural entities, and the interdependencies they share, reflect their ongoing mutual history. This view underlines an ecological perspective.

The founder of ecological psychology is William James (1842-1910). He was among the first generation of psychologists to introduce evolutionary perspective into psychological theorizing. His philosophy of radical empirism can be employed as a philosophical foundation to ecological psychology.

James identified pure experience as the ground of all knowing. Pure experience embedded as it is in a person-environment relation is poised to be dynamically differentiated. The defining characteristic of knowing is selectivity.

Immediate experience consists of things and relations. Knowing is an activity that traces out lines of potential structure in immediate experience, structure is not imposed on experience.

The knower appears from the outset in relation to the thing known. The knower and object known each become realized as different constellations of relations themselves coexisting ultimatively in a ground of pure experience.

Experience is unitary, but at the same time, it can simultaneously be part of two constellations of relations, that is, a part of two distinguishable contexts. The object known and the knower are each embedded in contexts of relations that have their own distinguishable structures.

Selection of structure in experience involves following a set of relations in experience. Relations in experience are “transitional experiences which the world supplies” (James, 1912/1976, p. 14). The lines of structure selected out by the knowing function are not imposed on the thing known, but are identified and discovered in it.

Three basic claims characterize James’s philosophy:
- only those things that can be identified or discovered in experience are to be included in one’s philosophical system.
- the relations between things, conjuctive, as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience.
- the world itself possesses an inherent discoverable structure.

In radical empirism, knowing refers to a functional relation in experience between the knower and an object known.

Perceiving is ongoing, continuous, unbroken and multimodal. The continuity of perceptual flux is punctuated by boundaries that gradually flow one into the next. “Boundaries” is misleading, suggesting an edge that is rigid and impermeable. Better put, there are transitions in perceptual experience, which are overflowed by what they separate and whose parts compenetrate and diffuse into its neighbours.

Perceiving is a direct, unmediated, selective discovery of structure in immediate experience.
Perceiving is an action that entails selection of a flow of immediate experience out of the potential ground that is pure experience.

Thinking or conceiving entails selecting and fixing particular parts of this perceptual flow. Through this process, concepts are carved out of immediate perceptual experience at a remove from action and are abstracted from it. The system of concepts is selected out of the perceptual flow. “Concepts extracted from the perceptual flow, ” verbally fixed and coupled together (let us) know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time (james, 1912/1976, p. 47).

Forming concepts and beliefs is something complex biological creatures do in order to be better in touch with the flow of experience, rather than uncovering fixed and transcendent universal truths. It is a natural process of complex animals attempting to function adapatively in relation to changing environment-person relations.

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:

Ecological learning design framework

We have in Tallinn University nice tradition to re-elect researcher positions every 4 years. My position is now recruited and part of getting it back it is to give a report of my last period work. This will be at monday.

I have been working in Tallinn University from autumn 2006 with half position working for iCamp project, and from january 2008 at full position. Ecological learning design framework is something what i consider the main work of my last period besides participating in the development of the iCamp intervention model in elearning2.0. It is based on two papers, one Elaborating connectivism is now fully published as the book chapter, another is published in journal Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 2009, Vol. 12, Issue 3.

Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning: Collaborative Methods and Human Interaction
Edited By: Niki Lambropoulos, London South Bank University, UK; Margarida Romero, University of Toulouse, France
Chapter XIV: Revising the Framework of Knowledge Ecologies: How Activity Patterns Define Learning Spaces. Kai Pata

Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 2009, Vol. 12, Issue 3, Pages 23–43
Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses
Kai Pata

Here are the slides of the ecological learning framework:

Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses

Today i sent away my paper: Modeling spaces for self-directed learning at university courses to the special call of Journal of Educational Technology & Society. I hope it is of some interest, although to go through the review process is always very hard

The main idea is to bring out the ecological learning design framework elements and show how they were applicable at the course design.

In the article I pointed to the need for the new learning design frameworks for self-directed learning with social software that were ecological. This learning design emphasizes the following aspects, which were developed and tested empirically.

The basic steps of an ecological learning design framework for supporting self-directed learning in new social Web are:

1. Define the learning and teaching niches for your students by collecting their affordance perceptions of their learning spaces.

a) To support the conscious self-managed development of learner-determined spaces, provide students with the tools of visualizing and monitoring their activity-patterns and learning landscapes, and enhancing public self-reflection and collaborative grounding of learning affordances.

b) To maintain coherence of the current niche, introduce cycles of re-evaluation of learning affordances of the learning space within your course.

2. Try to influence the niche re-emergence by embedding activity traces and ecological knowledge relevant to evoke affordances for certain niches or select activity systems where these traces are naturally present.

3. Use same social learning environments repeatedly to gain from feedback left as activity traces and embodied knowledge of earlier learners.

Theoretically, in the self-directed learning process students should be promoted to use their own personal learning environments. Thus, the learning environment as a system of tools and resources cannot be ready when learning starts but has to evolve as part of learners’ self-directed individual and collaborative action process in which facilitator has a guiding role.

To run emergent bottom-up courses, facilitators would need to establish some constraints and guidelines for planning the learning process. Rather than composing a list of optional course tools, resources and activities, an abstract learning space might be determined for the course design and made explicit to the learners.

This article proposes that learners’ perception of action potentialities of their personal and collaborative learning environments – learning affordances – could be dynamically collected in a bottom up manner during learners’ public planning of their goals, visualization, and self-reflection of their learning activities and learning environments.

Knowing these learning affordances and making the abstract learning space explicit for the learners and for the facilitator would permit:
i) the individualized learner-specific integration of their goal-directed activities with other perceived components, resources and community activities in the environment; and
ii) the reuse of the commonly perceived affordances for environmentally adaptive self-direction.

In this study the course for self-directed learning with social software and the ideas of an ecological learning design framework were simultaneously developed.

The emergence of the course’s learning space would consist of cycles of developing and monitoring the learning niches. Such dynamical monitoring and grounding of the mutually used learning affordances was possible and practiced during both courses. For this learners’ schemes and reflective postings in their weblogs were used. It is assumed that if some tools were available for learners and facilitator to visualize the niche with less analytical effort during the course of action, this might increase the use of affordances as niche gradients in adaptive shaping of self-directed learning.

Knowing the fundamental learning niche characteristics enables to develop particular list of suggested activities and plan appropriate instructions during the course. It was found that students perceived many affordances that are related with planning, reflecting and evaluating personal learning in collaborative social software settings. Potentially these affordances could be further used for activity design.

When planning participation at the courses and for choosing tools and resources for personal learning environments, self-directed students might need information of the affordances that a particular course community perceives in relation to certain tools.

In this paper the factor analysis brought out that some types of social software might offer a unitary affordance perception possibility while others would evoke different types of affordances. In is assumed that, during the learning activity the latter software would serve as multifunctional for switching from one learning niche to another.

I have not analyzed in this paper the particular differences between learning niches (eg. for individual or collaborative activities) that form the learning space, but there is evidence in my other studies that such distinguishable niches appear within the general learning space.

One of the expectations of investigating the course learning space at consequent years was to see if the fundamental learning space for self-directed learning with social software was stabile and potentially replicable while students had a big freedom of using various tools.

The ANOVA analyses demonstrated that while the use of different types of social software differed significantly at Cases I and II, the affordances were used with similar frequency at both cases. This permits to conclude that the affordance-based learning space description might be re-used in the course design as a guideline for students and the facilitator, for deciding which affordances should be evoked at the course.

Coupling this affordance-based learning space description with the descriptions of the affordances that certain community has activated with certain types of tools, and considering individual perception of affordances of the personal learning environment, enables learners to participate at joint course activities with their own tools.

Traces and niches

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

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

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

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

Elaborating connectivism

This chapter draft describes the web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment, discussing and elaborating the Connectivist framework coined by George Siemens in his book Knowing Knowledge. This new perspective to ecological learning in social software environments resides on the ideas of Gibson‘s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, the rising theory of embodied simulation and the Lotman’s ideas from cultural semiotics.

The full chapter is published in the Educational social software for context-aware learning book.

1. Introduction

Recently, the widespread public use of social software in Web has triggered for the need to theoretically ground the learning phenomena in this new environment. The theoretical framework developed by Web visionaries like John Seeley Brown (1999; 2002), George Siemens (2005; 2006) and others is directed towards information and artefacts, meanings and knowledge, networks and connections, in weaving ecologies of knowledge. In his book “Knowing Knowledge” George Siemens (2006) has suggested Connectivism as the learning theory for new Digital Age. He formulated that Connectivism is the assertion that learning is primarily a network-forming process (Siemens, 2006, p. 15). He relies on the ideas of Downes (2005) who wrote that: A property of one entity must lead to or become a property of another entity in order for them to be considered connected; the knowledge that results from such connections is connective knowledge. The act of learning is one of creating an external network of nodes – where we connect and form information and knowledge sources (Siemens, 2006, p. 29). Connectivism focuses on the knowledge, situated externally from people in the web. Siemens (2005; 2006) assumes that creating meanings and relations publicly in social software environments would aid through connective processes the formation of new knowledge ecologies and learning cultures.

In the Connectivism framework George Siemens takes an approach that is strongly tilted towards knowledge, meanings, communities and networks and their spaces – knowledge ecosystems. However, the Connectivism framework is inconsistent in elaborating the ecological role of tools, activities, and communities in the formation and evolvement of knowledge ecologies. Siemens writes: The pipe is more important than the content in the pipe. ‘Know where’ and ‘know who’ are more important today that ‘knowing what’ and ‘how’ (Siemens, 2006, p. 32). In this chapter we attempt to argue against this metaphoric claim. We suggest that the use of static ‘pipe’ metaphor, and diminishing the role of activities, the ‘knowing how’ part, may theoretically lead to losing the ecological nature of knowledge ecologies framework.

Studies of communities and networks assume that these are formations of people (Lin, Sundaram, Li, Tatemura & Cheng, 2006; Kumar, Novak & Tompkins, 2006) or their artifacts (Klamma, Spaniol, Cao & Jarke, 2006). What yet is missing is seeing Web 2.0 as a united ecological system with its inhabitants. The interrelations between communities, the environment and the culture left there by people – the traces of meanings (Lor, Yesui, Welge & Goldberg, 2006) and the traces of activities – are important in the ecological framework. Similar tiltedness towards artifacts and meanings appears in the development of most of the social software tools. In social software systems we can find several possibilities of organising and filtering content by socially defined meanings, however, to see what activities take place in the communities that use these systems is often possible only if participating in the communities. We assume in this chapter that the ecological formation of common places, where communities and networks exist and take action, needs to be integrated into the theoretical explanations about connectivist learning in these systems.

2. Knowledge ecosystems in the Connectivism framework: flowing knowledge in the connected pipes

Siemens (2006) wrote in his book Knowing Knowledge that Connectivism is a staged view of how individuals encounter and explore knowledge in a networked/ecological manner. The central concepts Siemens discusses are: knowledge, learning, spaces, networks and knowledge ecosystems. He illustrated his framework with the following metaphor: The pipe is more important than the content in the pipe. ‘Know where’ and ‘know who’ are more important today that ‘knowing what’ and ‘how’ (p. 32). Subsequently we introduce his position in concerns of these terms, asking also some questions, which reveal the areas where Connectivism framework must be elaborated. These questions will be further elaborated in the next chapters.

Knowledge: Knowledge rests in networks. Knowledge may reside in non-human appliances, and learning is enabled/facilitated by technology (p. 31). The act of knowing is offloaded onto the network itself – to a connected network of specialists. The network (or web) of connections is the structure, which holds the knowledge of individuals in a holistic manner (p. 33). Content is imbued with new meaning when situated in network (or is more accurate to say that the network acquires new meaning when new content is added?) (p. 43).

Learning: Learning is a network formation process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources (p. 31). The elements that create understanding are scattered across many structures and spaces. We ‘know’ when we seek and pull elements together – when we create a meaning-laden view of an entity (p. 45).

Q: How technology enables/facilitates ecologies?
Q: How network holds knowledge and acquires new meanings?

Spaces: We create spaces where we can dialogue about and enact knowledge (p. 4). Ecologies and networks provide the solution to needed structures and spaces to house and facilitate knowledge flow (p. 86). Understanding knowledge in a particular era is important in ensuring that we have aligned our spaces and structures with the nature of knowledge (p. 10). Spaces are themselves agents for change. Changed spaces will change practice (p. 87).

Q: How spaces enable enacting knowledge?
Q: Can we separate the knowledge flow from the structures and spaces – networks and ecologies – where knowledge flows?

Networks: Our mind is a network… and ecology. It adapts to the environment (p. 27). The network is a structure that individuals create on their own (p. 132). Content is imbued with new meaning when situated in network (or is more accurate to say that the network acquires new meaning when new content is added?) (p. 43). Better quality of networks and connections result in better quality knowledge sharing (p. 20). Networks occur within ecologies. Ecology is a living organism. It influences the formation of the network itself. The health of each personal learning network is influenced by the suitability of the ecology in which the learner exists (p. 92).

Q: What are networks: Personal learning environments (PLEs)? Connections between artifacts a person creates? Connections between people a person interacts with?

Ecology: Ecologies and networks provide the solution to needed structures and spaces to house and facilitate knowledge flow (p. 86). Ecology is a knowledge-sharing environment (p. 87). The ecology fosters connections to original and knowledge sources, allowing for currency. The ecology fosters rich interaction between disparate fields of knowledge, allowing growth and adaptation of ideas and concepts. Each participant in the ecology pursues his/her own objectives, but within the organized domain of knowledge of a particular field (p. 117). Ecologies permit diverse, multi-faceted concepts… and meanings to emerge based on how items are organized or self-organize (p. 87). The creation of the ecology permits a broad-scale implementation of differing knowledge and learning experiences, permitting employees to achieve knowledge-based needs in a multi-faceted manner, multiple ways, and through multiple devices (p. 132). Ecologies are nurtured and fostered…instead of constructed, organized and mandated (p. 90). Ecologies are capable of rapid growth, adapting to new competition, differing perspectives, and enabling innovative concepts and ideas to gain traction (p. 87). Ecology is a living organism (p. 92). Ecologies are: loose, free, dynamic, adaptable, messy, and chaotic (p. 90). The ecology influences the formation of the network itself. The health of each personal learning network is influenced by the suitability of the ecology in which the learner exists (p. 92).

Q: How does the ecology influence personal networks?

Siemens (2006, p. 87) also discusses the characteristics of ecologies that promote knowledge sharing. He emphasizes the freedom of choice to use different systems and tools that meet the needs of each person, and which they perceive easy to use. This suggests owning a personal learning environment (PLE), which is accommodated to certain person’s needs and is interconnected with other person’s PLEs. Secondly, the variety of systems and tools that individuals use is considered important. This may increase the possibility of making connections between people and between artifacts across the various borders. The personal choice in making connections is of importance to hold motivation and inquiry spirit. Because knowledge is supposed to situated in networks and connections, the deep and trusting connections between individuals, who uptake knowledge from the ecologies, and tolerance among these individuals must be achieved. Thirdly, the consistency of participating in certain practices with knowledge is suggested, which may increase the probability that patterns will emerge within ecologies, and that persons will notice them.

Individuals are active in the learning ecology/space in terms of consuming or acquiring new resources and tools. The learner begins to actively contribute to the network/ecology essentially, becoming a visible node. Time in the network has resulted in the learner developing an increased sense of what is happening in the network/ecology as a whole. She/he will become more adept at recognizing new patterns or changing winds of information of knowledge. Individuals are capable of understanding what do the emerging patterns mean. The learner is also focused on active reflection of the shape of the ecology itself. The learner may engage in attempts to transform the ecology beyond his/her own network (Siemens, 2006, p. 45).

In the practical implementation of Connectivism ideas into learning Siemens (2006, p. 140) suggests three key aspects of ecologies – they must be holistic, adaptive and result-focused. These concepts may also serve as the starting-points into taking the fresh look at the knowledge ecologies.
Siemens suggests that holistic ecologies represent the situation diversely, allowing multiple perspectives and views. We can further argue that holistic view means that we may find several subspaces in the ecologies, which differ from each other by perspectives. Ecologies are formed of many individuals who try to realize their personal objectives, often individually and without being consciously involved into group actions. The view at the ecology level permits to see these individuals forming various communities who share similar views or act in a certain way without even knowing each other or forming networks. However, the communities inhabit spaces in the ecology, which are evolving, and dynamically changing. Across the vaguely defined borders of community spaces, knowledge can be interpreted and translated, creating new knowledge. The abstract space concept, which we formulize as a niche for certain community, is central in the revisions of Connectivism framework.

Secondly, Siemens suggests that ecologies must be adaptive and able to adjust and change as the environment changes. These characteristics are elaborated further in the next subchapter, introducing the ecological idea of affordances that define niches. If the persons are linked to their existing habits, activities, processes and tools, like Siemens suggests, any change in their objectives and preferences would cause the changes in the whole environment, in these communities. People, activities, and tools what they find to fulfill their objectives are ecologically interrelated. People rely on the cultural behaviors that take place in certain social environments – eg. tagging of personal meanings or reflecting in public spaces etc. Thus, community activities influence, which perspectives of meanings, actions and tool functionalities and objectives would be actual for the learners. Everything what people do, remains as the feedback into the systems. It is interpreted as ecological knowledge, influencing not only this community, but also potentially other communities.

Thirdly, Siemens emphasizes the intended targets and desired outcomes that the ecologies might have. This view would obtain a new meaning if we stop seeing the formation of ecologies as the systems purposefully designed by groups, but as emergent and evolving activity systems. The mutual interrelations between individuals, their objectives, and what they see and use in the surrounding system, when constructing knowledge, are triggered ecologically. The ecological knowledge is always being formed and always influencing what is being formed, and how it is being formed. This ecological knowledge is not only content left into the systems, but also the process traces from actions taken with certain tools with certain artifacts, with certain people. Thus, the communities always shape their spaces and these spaces shape the communities.

3. Enactment when learning in knowledge ecosystems: communities construct niches

In the previous discussion several questions where raised when analyzing the Connectivism framework. These questions revealed that there are unclear aspects, suggesting the necessity to take a more in-depth look into the knowledge ecologies. We have reorganised the order of these questions to frame our argumentation about the nature of knowledge, networks, knowledge ecologies and their interrelations.

Q: What are networks: Personal learning environments (PLEs)? Connections between artifacts a person creates? Connections between people a person interacts with?
Q: How network holds knowledge and acquires new meanings?
Q: Can we separate the knowledge flow from the structures and spaces (networks and ecologies) where knowledge flows?
Q: How technology enables/facilitates knowledge ecologies?
Q: How spaces enable enacting knowledge?
Q: How does the ecology influence personal networks?

To answer these questions we introduce some more concepts to the ecological learning framework: niches as abstract community spaces, affordances that define niches, ecological knowledge as the feedback that communities create, enactment and embodied simulation as the possible processes that cause ecology formation. Siemens (2005, 2006) has built his Connectivist framework on the ecological understanding. However, deepening of the ecological approach enables to see activities in the more central position in the knowledge ecologies. We aim to elaborate the knowledge ecosystem idea, strengthening the role of activities and introducing the theoretical framework how activities are related to the knowledge ecosystems.

Knowledge ecologies framework

Network-knowledge interrelations

Q 1: What are networks: Personal learning environments (PLEs)? Connections between artifacts a person creates? Connections between people a person interacts with?

We do not want to criticise the main idea expressed by Siemens (2006) in Knowing Knowledge, declaring that knowledge rests and changes in the networks that connect people and their artifacts. Asking, what these networks are, we want to emphasise the role of tools and activities as an ecologically entwined parts of the network. We emphasise that knowledge, is more than information and meanings – knowledge has an activity- and tool-related dimension. Personal learning environments (PLEs) that people construct and use in their daily activities are not merely the mediators, ‘the inactive pipes’ that enable knowledge flow. PLEs are dynamically evolving activity systems in which the personal objectives and human and material resources are integrated in the course of action.

We want to emphasize the distributed nature of what we define as PLEs. Here, we do not mean only that each PLE may be constructed of many separate tools forming a distributed system. PLE is also distributed ecologically, integrating our minds with the environment. Hommel (2003), has written that action control to all behavioral acts is ecologically delegated to the environment – when planning actions in terms of anticipated goals, the sensory-motor assemblies needed to reach the goal are simultaneously selectively activated in the environment, and bind together into a coherent whole that serves as an action-plan, facilitating the execution of the goal-directed actions through the interaction between the environment and its embodied sensory-motor activations. In the frames of ecologically defined learning systems, we can assume that our embodied sensory-motor knowledge of previous meaningful actions and its environmental correlates that we find around us form one emergent distributed system. In the course of learning our PLE is always in change. We actualize certain dimensions from the environment around us integrating it to the action-plans, and simultaneously the environment extends certain dimensions to us changing and shaping our intentions. Deliberately, we do not talk of the environment as merely of tools and systems. Environment involves all kind of resources in PLEs – people, artifacts, software systems and services. Thus, the network in the ecological framework may be interpreted as a distributed system continuously constructed of our minds and the environment components.

Q 2: How network holds knowledge and acquires new meanings?

Applying the previous interpretation of networks in ecological framework we can assume that knowledge that the networks hold is pattern-like, distributed between the environment and people, and dynamically emergent in activities. Two perspectives are important about the nature of knowledge – knowledge is always developed within the distributed systems personally and culturally. These personal and cultural ways to create knowledge are interrelated.

Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991, p. 149) wrote that knowledge is the result of ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history. They coined the term embodied action to transmit the idea that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second that these individual sensorimotor 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 sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided (Varela et al, 1991, p. 173).

Bereiter (2002, p. 57) framed and answered the question about the nature of knowledge as follows: Where is knowledge if it isn’t contained in individual minds? The kind of answer coming from activity and situated cognition theorists runs along the following lines: Knowledge is not lodged in any physical or metaphysical organ. Rather knowledge inheres in social practices and in the tools and artifacts used in those practices. Knowledge is regarded as distributed. This does not mean merely that it is spread around, a bit here and a bit there… knowledge does not consist of little bits…all the knowledge is in the relationships – relationships among the people engaged in an activity, the tools they use, and the material conditions of the environment in which action takes place. Yet, Varela et al. (1991) and Bereiter (2002) do not offer explanations of how network holds knowledge and how this knowledge can change.

Recently researchers have come up to the idea how this distributed knowledge emerges as a result of embodied simulation. Discoveries in cognitive and neuroscience about the functioning of mirror-neuron systems (Gallese et al., 1996), claim, that cognition is embodied through grounding knowledge directly in sensory-motor experiences without the mediation of symbolic representations (Pecher & Zwaan, 2005). Research indicates that from observation of others and the environment (Rizzolatti et al., 2001), from listening narratives (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998; Iaccoboni, 2005) or from reading narratives (Scorolli & Borghi, 2007) and looking everyday images of objects or works of art (Gallese & Freedberg, 2007) we perceptually activate certain multi-modal action-potentialites of embodied symbols that mediate our purposeful and goal-directed actions (see Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). When acting in social learning environments not only the meanings are newly created from found information, but also the action-related cues are picked up from different narratives and from the whole systems, and they are integrated into our action plans. These findings indicate, that besides possibilities of organizing meanings with various ways in social learning environments, much more attention needs to be put on these action-related cues individuals and communities interact with in the environment. Knowledge is always in change because of personal nature of embodied simulation processes and the influence or feedback that people make with their actions, action- and meaning traces, and their specific way of activation of PLEs on the environment, to other people.

Q 3: Can we separate the knowledge flow from the structures and spaces (networks and ecologies) where knowledge flows?

In the revised ecological framework knowledge and networks are integrated. Our ecological learning framework binds together three assumptions: i) network may be interpreted as a distributed system continuously constructed of our minds and the environment components in the course of action; ii) knowledge is pattern-like, distributed between the environment and people, and is dynamically emergent in activities, iii) knowledge emerges as a result of embodied simulation, when people perceptually activate certain multi-modal action-potentialites from the environment that mediate their purposeful and goal-directed actions, and leave action- and meaning traces as a feedback to the environment.

Network-ecosystem interrelations

Q: How technology enables/facilitates knowledge ecologies?

The concept of ecology plays an important part in the Connectivism framework of learning. However, Siemens (2006) is not very precise in explaining how ecologies and networks influence each other. In our main amendments to Connectivism we try to elaborate the emergent nature of ecologies with bottom-up social definition of learning niches, discuss what is the role of using software systems in these ecologies, and describe how feedback through ecological knowledge connects ecologies and networks.

Ecologies are formed as a result of many individuals taking actions. Thus, people with various perspectives are simultaneously at present in these ecologies and influencing them. Many abstract subspaces can be formed within ecologies. Such spaces emerge when parts of the environment are embodied and used similar way by many people. Spaces are more general than networks of one individual – they come to existence and can be identified only if many individuals actualize similar personal learning environments for the same purposes with certain frequency at the certain period of time. These groups of individuals have something in common in their identity. They form communities who inhabit the same abstract learning spaces in the ecology – niches.

The formation of learning spaces as niches for specific learning-related activities happens through the social definition of several factors that influence learning. Hutchinson (1957) defined a niche as a region (n-dimensional hypervolume) in a multi-dimensional space of environmental factors that affect the welfare of a species. He also made difference of fundamental and realized niche – the former exist as the complex of all necessary environmental characteristics for certain species, the latter is formed under the pressure of all the currently available environmental characteristics in the competitive conditions with other species.

Niches have been conceptualized as the environmental gradients with certain ecological amplitude, where the ecological optimum marks the gradient peaks where the organisms are most abundant. In the gradient concept structural ecosystem properties are comprehended as concentration gradients in space and time (Müller, 1998). Any niche gradient is a peak of the fitness landscape of one environmental characteristic (Wright, 1931), which can be visualized in two-dimensional space as a graph with certain skew and width, determining the ecological amplitude. The shape of the fitness graph for certain characteristic can be plotted through the abundance of certain specimen benefitting of this characteristic. All niche gradients are situated and establish a multi-dimensional hyper-room, which axes are different environmental parameters. Thus, any learning niche in social systems is determined as a set of characteristics that people perceive and actualize as useful for their activities and wellbeing individually or in groups. Each niche gradient defines one dimension of the space. The fundamental niche term applies for all the possibly usable software tools and services, artifacts and people, while the realized niches form under the constrained conditions of resource availability.

What is the mechanism how niches appear? Previously we have described the embodied simulation as a candidate of ecological emergence of knowledge and networks. In ecological psychology and recently in learning environment design the interrelated nature of people and the environment was explained using the affordance concept. This concept we use in our elaborated framework to describe the different dimensions people actualize in the course of action with the environment.

Gibson (1979) originally defined affordances as opportunities for action for an observer, provided by an environment. The mainstream view on affordances in educational technology settings considers them as objective properties of the tools, which are perceptible in the context of certain activities. Thus, it is commonly suggested that tools have concrete technological affordances for certain performances that can be brought into a learner’s perception with specific instructions (Norman, 1988; Gaver, 1996). This use of the concept tends to ignore its relativistic nature and observer-dependence, and seems to imply that affordances should be located in the environment or specific artifacts or tools.

The interactional affordance concept that supports the embodied simulation mechanisms appears in a number of studies. Chemero (2003), a researcher from the school of Gibsonian ecological psychology, has suggested that affordances are rather the relations between particular aspects of the animal and the situations. Gaver (1996) emphasized that affordances emerge in human action and interaction and, thus, go beyond mere perception. Chemero wrote that affordances are features of whole situations (meaning the actors are part of this situation). Michaels (2003) claimed that perceiving affordances is more than perceiving relations, but it brings attention to the action-guiding information and sets up action systems to act.

Barab and Roth (2006) have noted that connecting learners to ecological networks, where they can learn through engaged participation, activates the affordance networks. Affordance networks, in contrast to the perceptual affordances described by Gibson, are extended in both time and space and can include sets of perceptual and cognitive affordances that collectively come to form the network for particular goal sets. According to Barab and Roth (2006) affordance networks are not entirely delimited by their material, social, or cultural structure, although one may have elements of all of these; instead, they are functionally bound in terms of the facts, concepts, tools, methods, practices, commitments, and even people that can be enlisted toward the satisfaction of a particular goal. In this way, affordance networks are dynamic socio-cultural configurations that take on particular shape as a result of material, social, political, economic, cultural, historical, and even personal factors but always in relation to particular functions. Barab and Roth (2006) assumed that affordance networks are not read onto the world, but instead continually “transact” (are coupled) with the world as part of a perception-action cycle in which each new action potentially expands or contracts one’s affordance network.

Affordances emerge and potentially become observable in actions what people undertake to realize their goals. Actions of other people in the environment or traces of their action serve as the triggers of new action plans. Vyas and Dix (2007) distinguished 3 levels of affordances: personal, organization/community, and culture level, which differ also on the level of how rapidly they can change. They claim that affordances of different levels influence each other. For example affordances one person can perceive may depend on the affordances the community perceives or culture uses as norms. Heft (2001) wrote that: “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.” Heft’s interpretation enables to view both the information from the artifacts but also the traces of action in social software systems as important components that define knowledge ecologies.

We can conclude that we in our elaborated framework of ecological learning we support the idea that affordances are the perceived possibilities for both thinking and doing, what learners evoke and signify during their actual interaction with an artifact or tool and with each other. People determine the personal learning affordances within their PLEs. Hence, the learning affordance descriptions involve the learning action verbs, people who are involved in action, and mediators of actions (various tools, services and artifacts). Any individual conceptualizes learning affordances personally, but the range of similar learning affordance conceptualizations may be clustered into more general affordance groups eg. ‘pulling social awareness information’ or ‘searching artifacts by social filtering’ etc. These affordance clusters we may interpreted and used as the abstract learning niche gradients.The affordances as niche gradients are socially developed.

Using the affordance conception for defining learning space dimensions for the communities, we can bring the emergent ecological properties from the individual network level to the new structural level that is niches in the ecologies. Ecologies integrate many niches of different communities. The awareness of different niches is obtained by tracing the meaning-spaces and activity patterns of other people twined between the distributed real and virtual places they inhabit. If the dimensions of learning niches become unfolded they become usable for our own self-directed learning. Two aspects here are important. The meaning centred aspect suggests to use distributed PLEs to be aware of more communities and their meaning niches, 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. Second aspect is finding people to learn together with. To be involved in the similar activities, similar action niches need to be used for interaction. Learning affordances enable to characterize these action niches.

Q: How spaces enable enacting knowledge?
Q: How does the ecology influence personal networks?

Previously we have defined the spaces in the Connectivism framework as learning niches. Here we assume that niches enable to enact knowledge and influence personal networks because of ecological inheritance left as feedback to the social software systems. We suggest that this ecological inheritance is the particular set of affordances and meanings left into the systems by various communities in the form of meaning- and action-relevant cues.

A recent literature in evolutionary theory emphasizes the idea of niche construction (Odling-Smee et al., 2003) as an ecological factor. It is argued, the organism has a profound effect on the very environment as a feedback loop. Organisms have influence on their environment, and the affected environment can have a reciprocal effect on other organisms of this species or on other species, creating an environment different from what it would have been before it was modified. This view challenges the convention of a distinct separation between organism and its environment. The niche-construction perspective stresses two legacies that organisms inherit from their ancestors, genes and a modified environment with its associated selection pressures. The authors assume that the feedback must persist for long enough, and with enough local consistency, to be able to have an evolutionary effect. They introduce the term ecological inheritance. Genetic inheritance depends on the capacity of reproducing parent organisms to pass on replicas of their genes to their offspring. Ecological inheritance, however, does not depend on the presence of any environmental replicators, but merely on the persistence, between generations, of whatever physical changes are caused by ancestral organisms in the local selective environments of their descendants. If organisms evolve in response to selection pressures modified by themselves and their ancestors, there is feedback in the system.

In accordance with the ecological inheritance ideas social software systems demonstrate similar interdependency between user-generated environmental influence and the development of user culture. The activities in social systems make them into the arenas of ‘produsage’ where learners’ production and consumption cannot be separated from the surrounding environment (Bruns, 2008). The concept of ‘produsage’ as a term highlights the idea of embodied action, suggesting that within the communities, which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge, the role of consumer and even that of end user have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance. People actively participating in social web culture and technological systems form an ecological system.

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, 1978). 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 social-software, 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, 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. Such relations would alltogether dynamically shape the social software environments as places for learning.

An interesting aspect about ecological knowledge is its influence to the subsequent members of the community or other communities. Niches and their communities have interdependence and they cannot exist without each other. Besides this, some communities benefit from the niches of other communities, but these may not be existential for their wellbeing.

Vandermeer (2008) explains that if organisms construct their environments, there must be ecological consequences in addition to the evolutionary ones. He distinguishes between obligate and facultative organisms and niches, formulating assumptions how these organisms are influenced by niche construction: a) In an obligate constructive niche the organism dies in the absence of niche construction; b) In a facultative constructive niche the organism survives even in the absence of niche construction, nevertheless will benefit further from the construction, c) A facultative organism survives even in a non-constructive niche, but benefits further from the construction, and d) An obligate organism does not survive unless a constructed niche becomes available. These assumptions can be transferred to the social web environments. For example: a) Wikis and microblogging environments can be considered obligate constructive niches, where single person without the community has very little benefit of the system; while b) Blogs or social bookmarking systems may be seen as facultative constructive niches, in which keeping individual diary or collecting bookmarks gives some additional value even without the community; c) A facultative user of web systems will not rely on its’ activities on the niche construction of the other users; but d) An obligate web user has constructed its personal learning environment of community tools and services eg. of pulling feeds, and cannot function effectively without this niche construction.

4. How ecologies enable learning and knowledge?

In this chapter we try to elaborate some ideas how learning happens within ecologies. We rely heavily on the model created by Lotman (1990) of the semiosphere to explain cultural semiosis. His model depicts interrelation and semiosis as a knowledge creation between cultural spaces on the basis of meanings. Our interpretation of affordances as the equally important triggers for niche formation enables to consider that similarly to meaning-creation also the action-related information is re-interpreted and translated, creating new possibilities for enactment.

Deeley (1990) defines semiosis as a process of applying signs to understand some phenomena, reasoning from sign to sign, and intervention of new signs to make sense of some new experiences. Processes of operating within the same or between different sign systems are characteristic to problem-based learning. The simplified way of interpreting semiotic processes is by claiming that there is a complete mutual translability between signs from different systems and all the information can be transformed from one system to another without any loss until new understanding of the phenomenon under investigation has reached learners’ minds. As an improvement, Eco (2000) suggested that semiotic processes are more complex. He interpreted signs as not fixed semiotic entities but rather the meeting ground for independent elements coming from different planes and meeting on the basis of coding correlation.

A cultural semiotic Lotman (1990) assumed that separate sign systems do not have mutual semantic correspondence. Lotman (1990) wrote that any cultural semiosphere and its text-generating mechanisms depend on otherness and its semiotic input in order to forge appropriate conditions for semiotic enrichment and change. He assumed that the dynamic reconstruction of context, the alteration of meanings, and the construction of new information happens only in the communication between differences when the lack of fit between languages creates the conditions for translation. According to his theory, fixed elementary semiotic systems are abstractions. Instead, semiosphere should be regarded as an initial unit where semiotic processes take place between inconsistent semiotic spaces that people create in their minds. Lotman (1990) has defined the conception of the semiosphere as a living space of dialogical events, in which the production of consciousness and meaning can only take place through contact with an ‘Other’. He explained that during semiotic processes people always focus on those aspects of the sign systems, which are important to them. They systematize their perceptions into structured descriptions of the system, by this distinguishing also the elements that are perceived as belonging to out-of-system area or to other systems for them. Thus, a dynamic binary structure is formed in their minds that Lotman described as the semiosphere.

Binary parts of semiotic spaces – common and align contexts – are connected by translation. Stecconi (2004) suggested that during semiosis the translator relies on his notion of similarity to find and generate intuitively equivalent relations between sign systems, using abduction to make certain elements of these systems that may not have similar meanings equivalent. By this, the dynamics of semiotic structures emerge from the involvement of the out-of-system elements to the system and the upstage of the system elements to the regions with less systematic nature.

Learning ecologies are similar to the semiosphere model. Niches support the formation of binary structures, the places where learners must apply different rule-systems and languages, and can yield knowledge or find new ways how to yield knowledge. Niches enable to translate between common and align contexts not only meaning-based, but also the affordances of different niches may be integrated temporarily into ones personal learning environment for performing certain actions. The formation of the dynamic ecology for the learners depends on whether their personal learning environment evokes different affordances from different niches enabling their interrelations, and if learners perceive and start using the interrelated binary structures manifested by these emerging affordances. The software use at different, non-familiar communities may in some cases attribute totally new affordances to the software that differ from the previous cultural use of this software. One example of how this translation of affordances has appeared may be taken from microblogging environments (Mackie, 2007). Integrating one new tool may restructure the whole set of affordances people perceive in concerns of other software in their PLE.

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Elaborating Connectivism framework: deepening the ecological focus

This chapter draft describes the web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment, discussing and elaborating the Connectivist framework coined by George Siemens in his book Knowing Knowledge. This new perspective to ecological learning in social software environments resides on the ideas of Gibson‘s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, the rising theory of embodied simulation and the Lotman’s ideas from cultural semiotics.

It appeared in:

Pata, K. (2009). Revising the framework of knowledge ecologies: how activity patterns define learning spaces? In Niki Lambropoulos & Margarida Romero (Eds.), Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning: Collaborative Methods & Human Interaction. IGI Global imprints.

Knowledge ecologies framework