Ecological aspects for learning theory of new Digital Age

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

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

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

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

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

Some aspects to be considered and elaborated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socio-cultural and ecological explanations to self-reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

distributed self

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

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

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

Keeping distributed self keeps us in touch with different communities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

spreading of textual variation (experiment)

Anatole Pierre Fuksas invited me to participate in this experiment: Mutating Genre Meme (more likely: ‘ecology of emerging new memes’)

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EXPERIMENT
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.

My grandparent is Belgrad and Beyond.

My parent is The Ecology of the Novel.
————————————————————————

The best abstract painting in european art is:
Black square by Kazimir Malevich

The best mindpushing novel in pseudoethnography is:
The Art of Dreaming by C.Castaneda.

The best psychological film in science fiction is:
Stalker by Andrei Tarkovski.

Passing it to:
Pirkko Hyvonen
George Siemens
Martin Lindner

————————————————————————–

R. Dawkins has written: people could view many cultural entities as replicators, generally replicating through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (though not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour.

Does the information have to be molecular at all? Memes. This is not something that I’ve ever wanted to push as a theory of human culture, but I originally proposed it as a kind of… almost an anti-gene, to make the point that Darwinism requires accurate replicators with phenotypic power, but they don’t necessarily have to be genes.

Memes do not always get copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes. These memes may themselves prove more (or less) efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for an hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.

Wikipedia says: The meme as a unit simply provides a convenient way of discussing “a piece of thought copied from person to person”.

Charles J. Lumsden and Edward Osborne Wilson published a theory of gene/culture co-evolution in the book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. They argued that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Wilson later adopted the term meme as the best existing name for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance.

Memes spread by the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes have as an important characteristic their propagation through imitation

Memetic drift refers to the process of a meme changing as it replicates between one person to another.
Memetic drift increases when meme transmission occurs with variations.
Generations of hosts pass on these changes in the phenotype. Folk tales and myths often become embellished in the retelling to make them more memorable or more appropriate and therefore more impressed listeners have a greater likelihood of retelling them, complete with accumulating embellishments that may serve to modify human behavior.
Memes can move from one propagation medium to another (more efficient) one.

Very few memes show strong memetic inertia (the characteristic of a meme to manifest in the same way and to have the same impact regardless of who receives or transmits the meme).

Cultures can retain memes that once served a purpose during one epoch or era as vestigial memes.

So basically the meme talk is about spreading neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory through action variables we can observe in behavior, or narrative variables which convey the meme in phenotype? Basically, spreading happens through some viewed action, listened narration or artifact mediation, when ideas were made external, toolisized, embedded to the environment for deliberate spreadout or as a by-product of our own activities.
That is well in line with what i think happens at any of our action - in order to use part of the environment for our actions, we need to make it our own, by toolisizing some of its objects through identifying some of their existence as affording our actions and emotions (basically during the neural processing we internalize ‘part of the objects’ from the environment that we may then name affordances, however if we do so, these affordances may be viewed through our behaved actions, narrations and artifacts by other people evoking similar neural patterns mirroring actions and emotions they see).

Meme is a content or meaning part, while meme propagation happens by decoding the meaning from mediation tools/artifacts?

Anatole thinks that ‘memes’ have to be eventually defined as emergent features instead of units of information residing in the brain. Ramifications of descriptions based on multiple potential affordances of described features are responsible of massive textual variation. Textual plasticity found both in oral and in literary traditions, from papyri to manuscript, from print to digital media supporting shared meaning based on collaboration, corroborate the idea that narratives have to be addressed as emergent features, encoded by means of symbolic systems and referring to perceptual events, actions and emotional correlates.

Do i get it right that in narrated text or written artifact we represent a set of affordances that emerged in action/emotion activation for ourselves (we simultaneously embodied part of objects for ourselves and inevitably embedded these embodied perspectives to in these objects). But if someone picks these perspectives (affordances) up from narrated texts, they will see these embedded perspectives (affordances) as correlates of their own embodied action/emotion of the similar kind. Of course that may not be exactly the same perspective (set of affordances) at all, what they have embodied. So it changes the affordances as they propagate them.

Question is, if meme is more like the meaning, while propagation is more like the action potentiality (affordances), we can imagine that in each person the whole reconstruction of the meaning will take place (like diSessa and Hammer etc. have explained will happen when people build up self-explanations of phenomena) rather than the meaning framework (or meme) was transplanted in them (like there are ideas of Stella Vosiniadou). How will these affordances (that are action/emotion related only?) propagate complicated meanings like some Pythagoras school of thinking?
———————-
Ok..so much of trying to understand the background of the experiment.
It is not so easy to write those following the rule: The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…!
I got in trouble with the genre and medium, especially the medium definition - i think the medium is the tool where we have defined its affordances (novel - mindpushing), the thing what we spread via this medium is the emotion, action or meaning. Why i need to define genre and subgenre..for me they feel like affordances and i cannot define them when i want to propagate my action potentials, emotions or meanings what relate with these action potentials. The classification has no sense for me in this case, it is something we humans do as a game - classification. I never saw any need for that to propagate my embedded action potentials and emotions. Maybe? for systematic meaning propagation it has some sense? Donno…

migrating affordances?

MIGRATION AND NARRATION
Brigitte Boenisch-Brednich

Her article from electronic journal Folklore aims to work out the main narrative techniques of “telling migration”. It is based on field studies of people who moved to New Zealand after war. Why i find this article interesting? It picks up some affordances that are more extending, inviting for the newcomer. It demonstrates how people try to shift from one ecology with certain activity potentials and affordances for them, into another align system by drawing comparisons. Very semiotic approach of translating meanings from align framework to the common one by using certain connection points (see Stecconi writings).
It kind of makes me think about possibility of transferring affordances from some mediating tools in one environment into the totally new object in new setting that then becomes the substitute tool.

Can affordances be re-embedded?

Will the connection with the previous tool and its affordances remain embodied in person and will it be evoked simultaneously with the new tool and its affordances for a certain period of time?
It is also interesting how the narratives point to the affordances in the environment and there is also personal justification and evaluation for these affordances.

To the paper:

The approach is to investigate migration from the perspective of focussing on everyday life, an investigation on the basis of personal experiences, such as “work, housing, food, celebrations, social life”. A special focus is set on the analysing of “mental narratives” as key stories, examples, comparatives etc.

In terms of migration experiences there are 3 types of narrative items:
a) Stories about leaving and arriving

The narratives of the very first impressions on New Zealand are vivid and mostly very short. The first impressions, beside taking in the new landscape, were mostly those of the different food, the missing coffee-shops, the Sundays when everything was closed. But sometimes it was pleasurably different.

b) stories about the first year in New Zealand, which are stories about cultural misunderstanding, language problems, homesickness; basically about feeling alien, and being considered alien.

They outline pictures showing very different, often incoherent patterns to the outsider; only the migrant him- or herself can bring it to a pattern which makes sense for him- or herself.

c) there is a form of narratives covering the whole life of a migrant: the narratives of comparing countries and cultures – the culture you come from and the one you are now living in.

The underlying system of all the stories is the overall scheme of constantly comparing countries.In the process of composing points to compare, people create a supposedly objective reality; this enables them to combine argumentation and narration, and to make sense of their world.

*drawing very personal conclusions
Comparing countries can also mean that people are drawing very personal conclusions about their life in both countries.

*justification, push the rational narrative to points of proving their decision was right
A very personal decision is therefore followed by creating individual narratives which underline the direction in which they have sought to change their biographies.
They push the rational narrative to points of proving their decision was right, because they feel right.

*trying to narrate success
maybe 10% per cent of my interviews revealed this slightly problematic pattern of trying to narrate success when you should really be talking about misfortune or failure. The usual way is that a key narrative is used as a personal and symbolic mark5 to give a rationale

thinking of hybrid ecology 2

I have an idea what i want to do in augmented (hybrid reality) where some narrative and visual artifacts are tagged, which people can find with mobile phones, plus the place itself has a lot of objects around.

I want to try out how this new content changes actions, objects in the environment, and how objects in the environment and actions would change content of these artifacts.

I think it is like the 3 dimension system: one is some objects in the envitonment, second is actors (subjects), third are different artifacts and meanings and art etc. Actions are like flow in this system.

What is complicated, is to start seeing it as patterns, because especially the 1 and 3 dimension elements are changing in these patterns into tools and back.

What i am interested in is, the patterns in hybrid ecology.

In computerbased systems you create something verbally, by typing, drawing..and at some moment it serves like the tool, at another moment it is hanging out there and is a potential object to become back into the tool when someone starts using it in actions for realizing some goals.

I was discussing these issues yesterday with Anatole again. There were some interesting ideas i would like to keep.

Anatole pierre Fuksas 10/4/07 10:28 PM
so, for instance, the sand castle story we was discussing yesterday may fit your 3rd layer
whereas the beach subjects are walking on fits the 1st
and the subjects themselves fits the second?

Kai Pata 10/4/07 10:28 PM
yes, for a while when we talk, we use the story as a tool

Anatole pierre Fuksas 10/4/07 10:29 PM
why do you feel like that story works as a tool
in my understanding that story just enanches the setting by means of descriptions
basically implements stuff into your 1st layer
by means of mirror matching vehiculated by sentences
as in, you feel like the castle is there even if it’s not
(as the sound of an helicopter performed by a sound blaster behind your back, the helicopter isn’t there but you feel like it is before you turn)

Kai Pata 10/4/07 10:30 PM
a tool is every item what i need to perform an action - either real action or imagined action
if you want to explain me something, you shift something from the environment to be this narrated tool for me..and i shift this narrated tool back into the environment doing some action on the basis of it

see on left side..and right side..What i think happens between the layers is this embodiment and externalization.

Anatole pierre Fuksas 10/4/07 10:39 PM
Natural environments and narrative environments are of course different in terms that the second one is not directly experienced by senses but by words referring to perception, action and related emotions

Kai Pata 10/4/07 10:40 PM
But if words, phrases are like objects?

Anatole pierre Fuksas 10/4/07 10:41 PM
still, for a narrative environment to actually work and being of some interest, it has to trigger perceptually related action potential by means of descriptions

Kai Pata 10/4/07 10:41 PM
i think narrative (language) mediates something what is behind it, and the real environment with its elements and objects does the same

Anatole pierre Fuksas 10/4/07 10:42 PM
They both refer to actions that may be performed by?

Kai Pata 10/4/07 10:43 PM
As soon as you start using something from the environment, you create a bond over affordances, and this object becomes into something in this system, you embody this object through affordances, and it is like the tool in the scheme.

when organisms evolved and they developed different senses..do you think the environment they perceive and use for actions is so much different of the voice-sounds what we also perceive?
if you touch blinded way things, you perceive them, voice is like touching too..and both ways you create this something in this interaction,
that enables you to act on the basis of it, get emotions too..i dont know what first
if you think of language now, then narrated language is just more culturally defined
same is environment what we use

if we think of signs we use to write down narrations, different signs probably are like objects..i just started to think of hieroglyphes and different languages, does writing down narration become (when in sign) something special of its own, that has more dimensions and affordances than just spoken sign?..and also spoken sign depends of how it is said

Anatole:
let’s put it this way, may words work as objects and tools they refer to?
I mean, you are on that beach, i say bucket and showel, you feel like you might start digging hole in the sand filling the plastic bucket
still, if we sit on the sand and i tell you once I wrote my name on the sand with my finger I am probably enanching the environment (your layer 1) by means of description
I mean, my words directly complement the natural landscape without acting as tools

Kai Pata 10/4/07 10:59 PM
they are always mediated through someone who perceives
let me try to understand that drawing on the sand
if you wrote the name on the sand and left, it is there as part of the environment..i can perceive it as it triggers my emotions, and what affordances for action it gives to me..and it may not be the same as it affords for you..

after you wrote it, you shifted, externalised it to the environment (in my scheme)..it is same as you wrote a post in blog..and it is now part of something different.
ok..you actually say the words now to me about the name on sand, then it seems a bit different!

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 23:05:02
I mean, if I say I feel like writing something with my finger, words as ‘finger and write’ may trigger action potential working as a tool and you may start wondering what I may eventually write, or feel on the skin of your arm the touch of a finger writing something as it was on the sand

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 23:06:38
i mean, the first case triggers potential that is not related to features yet embedded into the landscape

Kai Pata: 23:06:43
for me i see the two things are different..if you leave something behind, or if you just now say/do it and i watch you saying/doing

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 23:07:22
yes of course, but I am still just talking about descriptions, I mean, I am not moving I am not actually writing with my finger
just describing two different things
the will of writing with my finger
and a word I once wrote with my finger

Kai Pata: 23:09:52
ok..is it like this..
i am like the monkey, i observe you doing something and i think/relate it with my goal and i am feeling some emotions as if i was you doing it..
this is the same as you tell me on writing (because telling and seeing feels same to me due to this mirroring thing)…
in another case, you said it by really externalising, embodying it to the environment and left,
will i be able of feeling the same as in first case?

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 23:10:31
that’s even more tricky

Kai Pata: 23:11:18
but for me it is the main thing what they havent discovered yet.
Neural studies have proved the case 1 with watching and with hearing, but not the case 2
and basically what you try to say on my opinion is about case 2 to work same frames

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 23:12:06
you mean if emotions attached to verbalized actions referring to past actions or to action that have not yet been performed feel the same as the ones perceived while being performed?
you are right, this is still disputed, there is still not any sort of neurological evidence supporting one view or another

Kai Pata: 23:13:25
i mean, will they feel the same if the actual origin of the action the one who did it /said it and had connections with it 1) has left and you are on your own with that ‘object’
on my activity system with affordances..i would say they don’t feel the same, as some component of the system is off

some ways it may be the same ‘mystic’ person if the action/verbalised action is there or if just the sign or object was left..but what i think, if the guy is off the picture, then you are getting something less from the sign/object because
i) they are like having interaction while they are together?
ii) or because the guy has interaction with the thing and other elements around when there? or
iii) does all of it play some ways on your awareness etc
Do u say something you keep having interaction with this thing until yo are on the play
like you keep this saying on the string and don’t let it lose, and thus it is different

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 23:24:20
not sure, I am thinking about clues being eventually MORE effective if origin is off the picture

Kai Pata: 23:24:40
effective is tricky
but if to take Lotman stance again..then you are right
as soon as the author is off the picture, the other can translate (or you used encode) how he likes without any common area where he knows how to translate, and this is suppoesd to be more creative, making the birth of new things, bringing new elements into system, creating semiosis

Discussing hybrid ecology

Trying to come on common ground with Anatole about what we have in common in the framework of affordances, and hybrid ecology.
It is still not clear to me, but i think keeping these recordings will enable to develop further my thinking of the activity system in which affordances play the certain role. And part of this activity system i see Anatole’s interest in art and literature and hybrid ecology.
Main idea from this talk what i filtered is Anatole’s comment: everything is basically revolving around the concept of space as an emergent feature

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 15:55:58
do you think that art and literature may be part of an hybrid ecology?
Kai Pata: 15:56:39
in my understanding there are 3 layers, people, tools/environmental objects and artifacts, so the creative artifacts definitely can be

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 15:57:48
yes I know this 3layered things of yours
basically you set art crafts and novels into the third isn’t it?
Kai Pata: 15:58:06
i can see the artifacts and the meanings on the artifacts as something that is transported/or actually it is not transported but changed in spots by users
i mean not changed but interpreted and reused
in action, or in making new tools, or making new artifacts

Kai Pata: 15:59:55
in summer i developed some very nice thoughts after we discussed

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:01:40
I am more into flee flowing of concepts into plastic and fluid systems, still, since you agree stories may be part of hybrid ecologies, there is definitely room for merging.
I really do think that what you say about meaning emerging from shared affordances
my point is description processing shape the space as direct sensory processing does
Kai Pata: 16:04:19
that is pure semiotics how lotman has, isnt it?..he does not use affordances, he says something what we perceive from another system we can interpret in our system, and then new meaning may emerge, if the untranslatable things are translated from one system to another

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:06:43
yes semiotics is basically about translation but ecological approaches, to my understanding bypass the translation thingy, since the symbolic encoding is an emerging feature as well, and any new encoding is based on plastic, fluid data, not just on the received code. Still, of course semiotics deal with symbolic features, hence is not ‘deeply’ concerned by reference

Kai Pata: 16:05:18
elaborate this: my point is description processing shape the space as direct sensory processing does
i think i get, but the phrase is complicated!

my thought is we can shift internal descriptions/imaginations into external and then we shape the space, and environment, and tools there so that something becomes into a tool

its like shifting from imagination the affordances into external in action, but then the things we use in this process become tools

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:09:07
yes i got it, but why do you need internal and external into an ecological perspective based on interaction between perceiver and perceived environmental features? since perception triggers potential actions, externalization is just the result of activation of a given motor scheme

besides i do totally agree about the way things become tools
(basically actual affordances toolize things in a very pragmatical way)
everything is basically revolving around the concept of space as an emergent feature, that may sound tricky, since we are so used to give it for granted
that is to separate the perceiver and the target
whereas the space is just the result of their interaction
Kai Pata: 16:11:57
i like this: everything is basically revolving around the concept of space as an emergent feature, ..and i agree
is there only one space or 2?
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:13:20
well maybe since you start seeing things like that probably the very concept of external and internal doesn’t make sense anymore, but I am still not that sure, i mean, it’s something I completely understood
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:14:03
well space being an emergent feature, it emerges as singular just in terms you can synchronize it into a given, unitary view or understanding
Kai Pata: 16:14:32
the space where we act (more ‘objective’ although it is still perceived differently by different people) and then the space that is totally plastic and subjective (in mind, or when you dream and create), and then space that is a bit constrained representation of your dreams/creations…in this system you need to define some things
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:15:23
still, picture a beach where you went lately
of course you are not walking on the sand now
but the feeling suddenly arises
smell iodium, waves roaring
your senses are reacting
to my decription as to your imagination
moreover, I am picturing a different beach
Kai Pata: 16:17:28
on my scheme it is embodiment of certain action affordances from the environment and when i do it, i can make it my own and feel emotions
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:18:06
but you may attach emotions to descriptions too, that’s why you can feel concerned by the destiny of a character when you read a novel
Kai Pata: 16:19:24
You can also create totally new affordances that are not embodied from previous action, imagine them and write them down so that it will create feelings and action possibilities of the character
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:21:18
so, let’s agree on the basis, narrative descriptions can be part of hybrid ecologies in terms that they shape environmental features and their potential affordances as direct sensory appraisal does
Kai Pata: 16:22:36
yes i agree with this
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:22:44
I mean, picture this: you are walking on that very same beach and somebody starts telling you that just 100 mts ahead he once built a sand castle. The sand castle is not there, but the story he told you ’shapes’ space
you are somewhat forced to set the castle about where your friend is now pointing at
Kai Pata: 16:24:12
i mean i get action potential to build it, or emotional drive
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:24:21
both in my opinion
depends if you are emotionally concerned by the sand casle lol
Kai Pata: 16:25:17
imagine there is an inventor, he imagines something like electricity bulb or mobile phone that nobody has thought of, then he first he develops proposal to develop such a thing..and then it is the matter of other people do they start believing into this invention..if he develops it, its the same, it may or may not become a tool depending of other people’s interpretation of it as a tool
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:25:44
definitely
cultural difference can be an interesting test in this case
what’s a semaphor in the understanding of a native esquimese?
Kai Pata: 16:27:13
or goal-directed thinking and emotions?..in case if it is a sand castle, i may not be so romantic, have similar kind of memory, i may not even know what the sand castle is..and i build a totally different thing, lets say a sand hole
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:27:59
yes, you may have been one of those terrible kids tearing down sand castles or jumping on them and feeling guilty lol
Kai Pata: 16:28:04
and then one thing becomes into another, (that lotman example)
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:28:32
yes I see the translation thing
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:28:54
but there I say what is the esquimese translating?
I mean, he has no clue about the intended meaning
his own meaning just emerges as the intended one in the understanding of the creator
I mean, both are symbolizing independently
Kai Pata: 16:30:05
this is also at lotman scheme
translating from untranslatable..and you actually just get a trigger and do something totally wrong
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:30:18
encoding an emergent meaning into their own framework
Kai Pata: 16:30:27
yes
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:30:52
more than translating, since translating is basically moving from code to code
encoding is moving from perception to code
in my understanding I mean
Kai Pata: 16:31:34
but if you don’t know the code? and still translate
is it encoding?
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:32:07
lol yes but why do feel the need to call it translating
Kai Pata: 16:32:29
then you take a wrong pierce of puzzle into your own system and start using it as your own, but in another system this pierce has different meaning
Kai Pata: 16:33:14
i don’t feel certain urge to tell it is translating, but when i think of this scheme in my mind i still use the word
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:33:48
let’s see if I can summarize effectively…
Kai Pata: 16:33:51
i think it is translating, as if omitting the meaning to the object we don’t know but what feels to fit somehow into our system
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:34:24
(yes I see your point, that happens all the time and his a very interesting concern into globalization framework)
Kai Pata: 16:35:58
think at lotman scheme this is the whole point of creation to become possible - that there are known and unknown areas, and the borders between these areas we create by our perception, action, culture, and also with the people who are involved etc.

Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:36:45
I would basically make difference between encoding and translating in terms that encoding is sort of labeling environmental features in symbolic terms whereas translating is like re-coding and encoded feature in a new language
Kai Pata: 16:36:36
do you know something about social networks?
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:37:05
yes I know something about social networks, i am investigating one calling anobii (is a social network of enthusiastic readers uploading book titles and comments into a given hong kong based platform
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:37:27
I will write a paper about “The Long Tail of Digital Shelves” that is about it
Kai Pata: 16:37:37
there are people who share ideas, and then some people may be like transferring points from one social network to another, and the ideas they carry become in another network like new seeds, because they seem different there
you write: I would basically make difference between encoding and translating in terms that encoding is sort of labeling environmental features in symbolic terms whereas translating is like re-coding and encoded feature in a new language,
but my question is why you do not consider environment as one language?
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:38:56
yes I see what you say, but that’s completely in the field of plastic re-coding of symbolized issues
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:39:23
ok I see your point clearly now
Kai Pata: 16:39:28
or why cannot we say language is one environment?
Anatole pierre Fuksas: 16:39:40
yes i see I see, lemme think about it lol
in my understanding language can be defined as an environment as in a metaphor, since language is just the code… instead, environmental landscapes may certainly emerge from narratives or simple descriptions

ecology of narratives

Few days ago i got an interesting email from Anatole Pierre Fuksas who writes a weblog called The Ecology of the Novel - which is his future book. Sitting in Vancouver airport I finally had time to read his interesting ideas.

I have selected few sentences which i find interesting:

A novel basically exists as an ecological feature. In that very moment (of reading) the novel start acting as a plastic organism susceptible to both textual or/and conceptual variation.

Some thoughts about it.
First thing what is intriguing is ecology concept. If to think, any ecological system is sustainable only due to these many aspects. In books and in all written narratives these many aspects are brought to living if we tell these narrations to us during reading, which brings in people with their different contexts.
So the reader makes the systems ecological?
Can the readers also make this ecology of novel out of balance or too vulnerable (if to think of the processes in real ecosystems).

It seems as if novels (and not only, actually all our written memory) is some kind of mediated ecological memory system what we bring into living. And we need to keep it in variations so that it was ecological.

Another though is that in science, this multiple narrations is somewhat resticted deliberately. Does it mean that it reduces the ecological system of scientific narratives, makes it less durable…

The Ecological Theory of the Novel mantains that perception and action are tightly connected through the narrative flow of the novel. The description of the setting features verbs, nouns and adjectives actually referring to perceptive events, sensory-related properties and body part-specific affordances of items in order to trigger action potential.

That is why the novel relies on a plastic narrative network connecting body part-related references and a modal, general-aspecific ones, pragmatically integrating perception, action, states of mind and emotions into the same vocabulary.

Reading this part made me think of what the activity theory and activity systems are somewhat missing - this states of mind and interpretational part what has so much role in interpreting the texts in hand.

Definition of ecology: Ecology is the study of the interactions between living organisms and their biotic and abiotic environments.

What is mediated ecology of meanings?

Seems my plane to Amsterdam is about to get me on board.. so i will leave the question in the air for myself.

note from defence

Yesterday I was listening the master defence of one of our students, Heli-Anneli Villako. Her study was about effectiveness of model-based learning. But for me the most interesting aspect came in the very end, when Ivar Puura asked her about why she was choosing Paivio’s model and is she aware of some other models. She was not able of bringing out anything specific and new (I did not understand why not the model of Schnotz from 2003?). Then this discussion continued shortly in the grading comission meeting. Ivar told that recently there was the annual Spring school of theoretical biology, topic of this year was communication theory. These Spring schools are interesting because they bring together different biologists, semiotics, informatics etc. people to discuss on one topic. So, what Ivar told was that it was very interesting how the biologists, informatics, semiotics and cognitive scientists look at information… meaning when something becomes an information in their models. He also mentioned that there is a striking similarity of these models, however the way the processes with information are discussed are quite different.
It is something i have been trying to make clear for myself in some of my studies, so it was triggering my mind.

looking biologically at knowledge communities

Recently there has been an overexploitation of the community ideas, which has some ways become as powerful term in computer-based systems as the computer metaphor in cognitive systems.

For example Wenger’s idea of communities of practice is conquiring the World, both in education and work.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Each community has some core area towards where those who do not belong to this group stream for. The community is thus always keeping and renewing its’ practices.

In education this idea has transformed into the learning communities conception, and there are attempts of forming knowledge-building communities. For example in Estonia we attempt at creating a knowledge-building community of teachers in LeMill environment:

a Web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources

The essence of the community in biology and in social systems seems to have some resemblance, thus, i got an idea what if to take the “biology glasses” and look at the processes in these networked knowledge communities.

Of course, I am not the first one to try it. There is a very powerful “rhizomic versus taproot metaphor” from Delueze and Guattari circling around since 1980ies.

For Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizomic knowledge was the opposite of the arborescent or tree-like knowledge with its hierarchical systems of understandings and where everybody and everything had its place in an economy of power and totalising theory.

Deleuze and Guattari argued that a ‘rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains…a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded…a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002, p. 7-9).

Deleuze and Guattari state that, The rhizome is an accentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states.

Now, what intriques me here is some contraversity between he community of practice ideas which seem to be following the taproot kind of central area ideas and the totally center-free rhizomic model, which I feel is much more likely in networked systems.

The taproot communities are formed around people while the rhizomic communities are artifact and meanings centered.

Now, if we want to create a knowledge-building community, it seems the rhizomic model, which centres ideas is more valid than the person-based taproot-model. My previous work-experiences in Miksike learning community proved that people came for ideas and materials - the more there was free content, the more they visited the site, but they didnt form networks. Networking was triggered by activities at some extent, possibilities of doing something for their own purposes with new web-based tools in which the others could participate (eg. quizzes for the schools etc.).

This arises another interesting issue, related to activity theory - new tools seem to initiate the community formation. They provide new means of realizing one’s intentions and objectives.

In LeMill the overall intention is that teachers would form communities around shared (or individual) content-creation. The model supported by Tigerleap foundation favours community-formation at teacher-training courses where people learn the tools and MUST create content. It is believed that later these teachers will become active users of the environment.

Personally i do not believe that this is the right model, because ownership of new tools cannot be achieved with short time. The tools do not come alone - they are part of new paradigm, new kind of thinking which is much harder to accept. Teachers do not see why they should create something for the others. At some extreme cases, they are also against of using the others as a source of ideas.

But which would be the model that works?
Can the community be formed like a taproot, initiated by central person?
Or would the new members in LeMill identify themselves as part of the community and the Wenger’s community of practice idea would work?
Or is there some other kind of pattern under the community-formation, especially at inital phases where there is no community core yet? Something rhizomic for example…
Something conquring the territory for my species? maybe ..what always happens in biological communities, at grasslands. How could we initiate this kind of grassland-formation and increase the ‘biodiversity’? because this kind of community is less vulnerable to extreme conditions and changes compared to monocultures.

In one of my earlier writings i tried to compare the lifespan of the community with the lifespan-diagrams of biological communities. I would ask now, in what stage of community are LeMill different communities, and can we look at the different periods of the community-formation using different models?

Some interesting papers:
Rhizome@internet