Was two weeks in Spain, starting from iCalt 08 conference:
… and ending with great mountain hiking in Picos Europas starting from Potes.
We took three hard gorges: Collado de San Carlos, Torre de Los Horcados Rojos, Canal de Pedabejo and Collado de Liordes with Tornos de Liordes over 2000 m and spent five days in internet free zone with ibex, bear and eagles.
And all this with my little MacBook Air on my back 
in big backbag.
A work in progress for the affordance paper.
Introduction
An affordance term is used for signifying the intermediate constructs that emerge dynamically in the activities what people perform with certain objectives while using the environment as a mediator for these activities. Affordances indicate the certain dimension of the environment that learners actualize as the mediator of specific activities. Affordances also constrain the certain range of possible activities that would be considered in this environment. Therefore affordance definitions usually contain activity verbs, actors and object properties from the environment. The two components – the emerging activity objectives, and the certain aspects in the environment as the mediators of actions simultaneously influence, which affordances will be actualized.
One of the hypotheses is that the emergence of affordances may at some cases be triggered more by the environement side, and at other cases more by the activity planning side.
At an environment side the environment is the niche that forms through the uncoordinated action of many individuals. At action side, each individual performs coordinated actions and influences the niche. These both sides of the ecosystem are interrelated, the individual ‘particle’ level state creates feedback to the environment that in large scale causes the emergence of another ‘whole’ state of the niche. The whole state serves as the activity system, constraining the actions for each individual.
The learner’s choice of affordances at their activity- and landscape descriptions enables to investigate how some social media tools are perceived and actualized as learning mediators more at particle level, while others are perceived as obtaining the learning affordances at the whole activity system level.
The questions in interest were:
1. Which are the learning affordances that learners evoke when using certain social media tools?
2. Do learners perceive the overlapping learning affordances when using different social media tools?
3. Does the description type (activity description or learning landscape description) actualize different sets of learning affordances?
4. Do learners evoke different learning affordances with individual and collaborative learning activity and learning landscape descriptions?
Methods
For the data analysis the visual and narrative, data collected from the master level students participating at the course ‘Self-directed learning with web 2.0 tools‘, was used. The students composed personal learning environments from web 2.0 tools and described these, composing learning landscape schemes. They also draw activity patterns to describe activities at their personal learning landscapes. Several of the landscape and activity pattern descriptions were composed for collaborative groups. Each figure was accompanied by narrative descriptions mentioning several learning affordances in relation with the tools the student(s) used for activities and for constructing distributed learning landscapes.
The analysis of 63 activity- and learning landscape descriptions was conducted. From the figures and from the narratives the learning affordances were collected and categorised. The categorization scheme separated each affordance according to its belonging to: a) activity scheme or learning landscape scheme, and b) individual or collaborative learning activity. The relationship of the learning affordance with the tool(s) was categorised using binary system. The main tool categories were: blog, wiki, chat tools (MSN, Skype, Gabbly), email, search engines, RSS aggregator, social bookmarking tools, forums, co-writing tools (eg. zoho or google documents), co-drawing tools (eg. Vyew, Gliffy), and social repositories Flickr and Youtube. These were selected because these tools were mostly in use by the students during the course and they also appeared at their schemes frequently.
Analytically, ANOVA , Cross tabulation and Chi square anlaysis were used as primary methods to show if there was a difference in the distribution of learning affordances in different settings: wholistic and collaborative emergence level, and particular and individual emergence level.
These data reflect specifically the learning affordance perception of the students of the course (beginner users of web 2.0 tools), and cannot be broadened to the perception of learning affordances of the active web 2.0 users in various settings.
The learning affordances were categorized into specific types representing similar affordances: assembling, managing, creating, reading, presenting, changing and adding, collaborating and communicating, sharing, exchanging, searching, filtering and mashing, collecting, storing, tagging, reflecting and argumenting, monitoring, giving tasks and supporting, asking and giving-getting feedback, and evaluating. These types were taken from the main verbs the students tended to use in their learning affordances.
Factor analysis was used to indicate how certain learning affordance categories are related with certain tools. Cross tabulation shows the overlap of some tools on the basis of learning affordances.
The frequency of learning affordance categories was found for each tool both in case of activity and landscape descriptions. Each learning affordance eg. searching was considered as a variable defining the niche. Niches have been defined as the environmental gradients with certain ecological amplitude, where the ecological optimum marks the gradient peaks where the organisms are most abundant. In all activity/landscape descriptions the optimum for certain learning affordance category was calculated dividing the frequency of this affordance per certain tool to the total frequency of certain learning affordance category for all tools.
Results
Factor analysis related certain tool types with certain learning affordance categories.
Factor analysis indicated that learners relate certain affordances with certain tools. 13 factors, describing 60 % of the system, were identified:
1. searching with search engine
2. collecting and sharing in social repositories (flickr, youtube)
3. collaborating, communicating and exchanging with email and chat
4. collecting, tagging and storing with social bookmarking tool
5. finding, filtering and mashing and monitoring with aggregator
6. collaborating and communicating with collaborative publishing tools (wiki, zoho and google documents, View and forums)
7. presenting, reflecting and monitoring with co-drawing tools (Vyew, Gliffy)
8. giving tasks, asking and supporting with blog
9. changing, adding, collaborating and communicating and sharing with co-drawing tools (View, Gliffy)
10. creating, assembling and reflecting with co-drawing tools (View, Gliffy)
11. managing, collecting and monitoring with blog
12. assembling and evaluating with blog
13. reading and reflecting with forum and blog
Learners perceived that several tools have overlapping affordances and can be used simultaneously or together when solving certain pedagogical aims.
The findings of ANOVA analysis (see Table 1) indicate that learners perceived the affordances differently if they focused on the activity side or if they focused on the learning landscape (tool) side when describing self-directed and collaborative learning. When learners described learning landscapes they actualized more learning affordances of social bookmarking and co-drawing tools than they did at their activity descriptions. The learning affordances related to blog, wiki, and forum usage were more frequently mentioned in case of activity descriptions compared to learning landscapes.
There was no significant difference between affordance distribution in case of individual and collaborative diagrams of activities and learning landscapes using ANOVA analysis. The ANOVA analysis indicated that in the activities with social media, the learners did not make significant differences between how they actualized affordances when learning individually with the teacher, and when participating in the group learning situations.
The cross tabulation and Chi square analysis of the distribution of the learning affordances related to activity and landscape descriptions in case of individual and group learning situations (see Table 2) demonstrated that some tendencies, indicating the different frequency of affordances similarly like in ANOVA analysis (see Table 1), were present both at individual and collaborative descriptions. For example both in individual and collaborative learning cases the learning affordances using aggregator and co-drawing tools were mentioned more frequently in case of landscapes compared with activity descriptions.
The difference between individual and collaborative distribution of affordances in landscape and activity descriptions was found in case of using social bookmarks and search engines. It was found that there were significantly more than expected affordances related to using social bookmarking tools at collaborative landscapes, and the number of affordances related to using search engines was larger at individual activity descriptions. Significantly more learning affordances were related to individual activity descriptions and blog and wiki usage. The last finding seems to be related to the activities of the course and maybe is not so general. The students of the course did individual assignments in blogs, commented each other’s blogs and worked collaboratively with wiki tool.
The cross tabulation and Chi square analysis of the distribution of the learning affordances related to individual and group learning situations in case of landscape and activity descriptions (see Table 3) indicated that search engine usage is clearly related with individual activity descriptions, while chat and aggregator-related learning affordances have been used at collaborative landscapes.
The same tendency was not apparent in case of the descriptions of collaborative learning. When describing learning affordances of collaborative landscapes the social bookmarking tool was noted significantly more than expected compared with collaborative activities.
The following figures 1 and 2 demonstrate two different niche landscapes.
Figure 1. The niche landscape of learning affordance types presented at activity descriptions
Figure 2. The niche landscape of learning affordance types presented at learning landscape descriptions
Figures 3 and 4 present learning affordance niches for the activity and landscape descriptions
Figure 3. Niche landscape from activity descriptions.
Figure 4. Niche landscape from learning landscape descriptions.
The following example presents the clear qualitative difference of learning affordances of social bookmarking tool in learning landscape and activity descriptions. The former indicates recognized new social activities and related affordances, the latter is more old-fashioned and individual centred.
Learning affordances from landscape descriptions related with social bookmarks
Contributing
Advancing the software
Adding resources to the landscape
Increasing affordances
Student can change and add materials
Collecting and storing
Finding information
Searching information
Searching information
Searching information
Adding links
Important bookmarks can be collected
Links to the learning materials
Adding bookmarks
Adding necessary information
Saving information
Saving information
Collecting private bookmarks
Collecting artifacts
Tagging
Tagging artifacts
Social tagging of presentations
Social tagging of feeds
Community based tagging
Social tagging
Social tagging
Social tagging of videos
Social tagging of feed channels
Adding tags for remembering important links
Filtering
Filtering information
Access through tags
Receiving information for learning from different sources
Information feed to demonstrate presentations
sorting tools for oneself
searching tools with tags
receiving information
Showing tagged information feeds
Pulling
tagged bookmarks can be pulled together
information feeds from links go automatically to aggregator
Pulling information feeds
Sharing
Using shared resources
Sharing artifacts
Sharing with peer students
Public usage of bookmarks
Sharing presentations
Sharing information tag-based
sharing tags and impressions
sharing bookmarks
Collaborating
Asynchronous learning
synchronous learning
simultaneous work with team members
Working jointly
communication with team members
viewing bookmarks collaboratively for learning
Managing
system administration and content generation
Learning affordances related with social bookmarking tools at activity patterns
Collecting and storing
searching
searching
searching and collecting information collecting
Searching ideas from internet
Searching images from Internet
collecting
collecting information feeds
collecting links
adding links
adding links
saving the bookmarks of materials
saving data
saving the results
Saving information
Saving information
Saving materials
Saving information and artifacts
Sharing
Sharing data
Sharing information with interested counterparts
sharing materials
exchanging materials
Taking into use the artifacts of shared learning activity
Sharing information with learners
Tagging
Student gets familiar with tags
Student searches bookmarks with tags
adding tags to texts
Tagging important information
Tagging important posts
Tagging information
saving bookmarks with tags
choosing bookmarks with searching tags
Marking important information obtained from blogs
Connecting information data and artifacts
Individual assignments
Student starts solving the task
Reading written information
Student gets the answer
Students communicates with peer learners and finds new information
tutor gets overview of the study topics
Conclusions
These results suggest that some old tools (search engines) and new social tools (eg. blog, wiki) are perceived more as meditors for individual actions, while other social tools eg. aggregators and social bookmarking tools seem to be perceived more as collaborative scenes for ‘produsage’.
Final words
In general these results seem to be supporting my initial hypothesis that the perception of learning affordances of different social media tools is not happening with the same mechanism if we plan activities and if we think where we conduct these activities. These results are even more notable because students’ task was to present in parallel their learning landscape and an activity pattern at the same learning landscape.
This rises another question, whether the niches in web 2.0 environments arise with different affordance perception mechanisms (basically, are there two ends of one dimension?) - some because of particle level affordance perception that is related more to highlighting personal actions, and another due to highlighting the collaborative broad ‘produsage’ scene perception.
Today we have in KERG seminar two guests, Petri Kola and Juhana Kokkonen.
Topic is: Internet Swarms and Peer production
Swarm as a structure of very skillful internet users - net natives - who move from service to service using them in a very creative way. Participants have between them lose connections compared to the physical world. Traditionally if you start a volunteer organization officially people first must argue of hierarchy and rules and it slows down the process before anything real happens. In the net it is the opposite - people come together and start to develop some idea and start to put it into action step by step. People are investing a little time to see if the thing goes forward - microtrust, things do not have to succeed.
It is different from common view of web 2.0 users as amateurs, Petri believes the users are more with expertise.
How net is different from physical world?
Our concept of “how internet works” shouldn’t be developed on the basis of metaphors but real research data.
Metaphors can give us totally wrong picture how things are, eg. friction and privacy can be totally different in physical and virtual environment.
Internet happens to be a different kind of beast.
Micro contribution is something that doesn’t exist in physical world.
It is different from traditional participation systems - you can make easily contributions (eg. like in wiki).
Typical life patterns change with micro contributions.
More and more knowledge production is becoming the leading part in creating values and money.
Productivity in cognitive work depends on the right participants and resources meeting together.
Open systems better as information processing systems.
Individual physical differences are not so big as the knowledge work differences between individuals.
Out cognitive ability is different at different times of the day, we are productive when we can choose time and space.
Commons based peer networks: open systems
Compared to hierarchical organizations, it makes a lot of sense to go over organizational borders and give people initiative to choose people to work with and to choose what to do.
Yokshai Benkler: The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom (2006).
Essential question: how to combine contributions.
What are the criteria for someone to have the permission to contribute.
In open production model there is no hierarchy about who is more competent. In digital world we have a permanent undo-possibility - if someone contributes what does not fit it can be undone.
Question is how to make difference and separate good and bad contributions.
Community can establish a system where contributions are evaluated.
Contributions can be evaluated by their merit, effect.
There must be some rules:
The rule of neutral point of view: every article should be balanced with point of uses.
Forking makes open virtual immaterial collaboration different from real production.
Community can choose the safe branch and avoid the problematic one.
Forking is an insurance for participants.
How virtual organizing is different?
Organizing to the virtual internet can be differnet from organizing physical reality.
early feedback
do something and evaluate afterwards
emergent rules
unclear borders
focus on action and achievement
short time periods for one goal
rules are more decided on the way
doesn’t look like much effort
doesnt have to succeed
the collaborations do not look like anything
you must be part of it to see the point
In lightweight organizations, if based on volunteer participation, the projects can go to sleeping mode without a problem.
Hacker attitudes from wikipedia, but many of these attitudes seem much in line how participating in swarm.
Produsage= production + usage
If production and consumption cannot be separated, it may change values, it may make to rethink what is the product.
If you are not a contributer now, you are always a potential contributor. A wiki must be constantly monitored all the time to remain the product it is.
stigmery= indirect coordination between agents or actions
It means the way how ants coordinate their action, they change their environment and it changes actions of other sin this environment.
Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. “
Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.
Karsten Heuer, a wildlife biologist, observed in 2003, when he and his wife, Leanne Allison, followed the vast Porcupine caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus granti) for five months. “It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was.”
“In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent,” says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “Everything is very distributed: They don’t all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they’re all anonymous.”
Charles N. Harper: “When ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food,” Harper explains. “The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes.”
ecological niche idea is there!
The text is not only content, but it is also a guide for participating in the project. It is both the content and the participation interface put together.
Projects parvi.fi
Tutkimusparvi: people from social media research
Swarm-like education is the model where people will be representing different stakeholders. There will be learning materials like wikibooks. The idea would be start a peer-learning process, where all the diffrenet groups contribute and learn from each other.
Mauri: when does swarm lose being a swarm, are there characteristics of swarminess
Petri: maybe swarm is a phase of getting more organized
Forking ability gives the swarm-quality.
Learning swarm wiki was started.
My reflections:
i think Petri put two different things into one that are not same at phenomenon level - awareness based dynamic small-particle behaviour centred microblogs, and wikis that are more the broad result centred less than identifying the actors.1. some swarm phenomena in awareness systems are at particle level dynamic and convey short term feedback type of influence to changing of the ecosystem/niches in the sense why and what the others do, that is socio-emotional and task and process (activity) awareness perhaps
2. more artifact-centred wikis are systems where the long-term feedback (the pages) influences the niche more and is of more ecological impact. Focus is on what changed in the environment where the actors are living in. Maybe it is the broad situation awareness?
In embodied simulation there are some aspects from both: picking up and integrating into your action both the other actors as well as the objects (something in text either as traces of action or triggers of meaning building) that might serve as your action triggers.
An interesting paper was advertised in one of the Springer newsletters:
Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography
Michael F. Goodchild
GeoJournal (2007) 69:211–221
Why i find this paper interesting is that it asks the questions why do people do this. We truly don’t believe that it is done because to make better maps. Why would an amateur geographer do it?
I would just think of processes like:
- creating niches for ourselves, for better embodiment and enaction
- playfully following some cultural practices because we can, and because the environment calls for such actions,
- leaving for ourselves mental maps to free our thinking same way as we have learned to trust the files in our computer as an extra memory?
- streaming for self-administered, personalized, user-tagged and thus more appropriately filtered content for triggering our emotions and actions
Here are some from the paper:
Why is it that citizens who have no obvious incentive are nevertheless willing to spend large amounts of time creating the content of Volunteered Geographic Information sites?
Self-promotion is clearly an important motivator of Internet activity
Public personal usage - Many users volunteer information to Web 2.0 sites as a convenient way of making it available to friends and relations, irrespective of the fact that it becomes available to all.
Personal satisfaction from seeing their own contributions appear in the growing patchwork.
While geographic naming has been centralized and standardized, and assigns no role to obscure individuals, the new web 2.0 environments have given rise to the composition of layers of new kind of volunteered geographic information.
Remote sensing with satellites has replaced mapping.
Very few people know the latitude and longitude of their home, but in normal human discourse it is place-names that provide the basis of geographic referencing.
In Wikimapia…
anyone with an Internet connection can select an area on the Earth’s surface and provide it with a description, including links to other sources. Anyone can edit entries, and volunteer reviewers monitor the results, checking for accuracy and significance.
Google Earth and Google Maps popularized the term mash-up, the ability to superimpose geographic
information from sources distributed over the Web, many of them created by amateurs.
Practicality:
A collection of individuals acting independently, using shared protocols and standards, and responding to the needs of local communities, can together create a patchwork coverage.
Networks of human sensors
Humans themselves, each equipped with some working subset of the five senses and with the intelligence to compile and interpret what they sense, and each free to rove the surface of
the planet.
There will be the session “Activity patterns and affordances” during the “e-Uni 08 conference” in Tallinn (03.04.08 17.00–18.30). Conference video: Mis on tegevusmustrid ja lubavused.
1. Tegevusmustrid ja õpimaastikud e-õppes
Kai Pata, Kairit Tammets, Terje Väljataga
1. Activity patterns and learning landscapes in e-learning
Tutvustame tegevusmustrite elemente /tegevuste rühmi/ (nii LMS süsteemidest kui ka sotsiaalsets tarkvarast pärit näited). Kaks vaadet õpitegevusele: õpimaastik ja tegevusmuster. Miks on vaja õppijatele sotsiaalse tarkvara keskkonnas õpetada õpimaastiku koostamist ja seal tegevusmustrite planeerimist, näited kuidas õppijad muudavad oma vaadet õpitegevuse vahenditele, õpimaastikule. Tarkvara lubavused on õppijate jaoks erinevad, näited. Kuidas mõjutab õppijakeskne lubavuste erinevuse arvestamine õpikeskkonna ja õpitegevuse disaini.
The elements of activity patterns (activity types) will be introduced, using examples from LMS systems, as well as, social software. Two views to the learning activities: learning landscape and activity pattern will be discussed. Why learners need conceptual tools to construct their activity pattern and learning landscape diagrams, examples from e-learning courses. What are learning affordances and how they are integrated with the learning landscapes and activity patterns, examples from learner-perceived affordances at social-software based e-learning course. Considering learner-defined affordances calls for new Learning environment and activity design model in e-learning.
2. Töövookeelte kasutamine õppimise ja õpetamise protsesside kirjeldamiseks
Priit Tammets
Using the workflow language to describe learning and teaching processes
Tegevusmustrite kirjeldamiseks on vaja formaliseeritud töövookeelt. Tutvustatakse varasemaid töövookeeli ja nende eesmärke (IMSLD, LAMS jt.). Miks on vaja luua uus pedagoogiline töövookeel ja kuidas seda saab rakendada õpikeskkonna ja õpitegevuste disainis. Töövookeele elemendid ja konkreetsed kasutusnäited sotsiaalse tarkvara keskkonnas.
To describe activity patterns, the formalized workflow language could be used. Some attempts to establish the language elements and standards for describing workflows (IMSLD, LAMS etc.), and the aims of using such languages in e-learning will be discussed. Why new pedagogical workflow language is needed and how could it be used as the tool in the learning environment and learning activity design? What are the elements of pedagogical workflow language, examples of using workflow language for describing learning activities in social software environment.
3. Narrative encoding of Activity Patterns in New Media (ingliskeelne)
Narratiivsete tegevusmustrite kodeerimine uus-meedia keskkonnas
Anatole Fuksas
University of Cassino
Lubavused uus-meedia tekstides võimaldavad lugejal luua enda jaoks teksti lugemisel erinevaid tegevusmustreid. Tutvustatakse mitmeid uusmeedia narratiivseid hübriidses keskkonnas toimuvaid tegevusmustreid, mida algatavad näiteks mikroblogimine kui raamatu kirjutamine, reisiraamatud blogides koos geograafilise kohaga seotud artifaktidega jt. näited.
The reader-specific activation of affordances in new-media texts enables people to trigger different activity patterns. Some narrative-related activity patterns in new-media environments will be discussed (eg. writing books in micro-blogging environment, locatively embedded travel itineraries etc.)
Availability of different feeds, tags etc. used by social software technologies has triggered a big boom of distributed personal and group learning environments to be created and used for learning purposes. These integrate blogs, micro-blogs, different feeds from various friends’ blogs, social bookmarks, image- and video-repositories etc., that enable people to distribute their personal self to the different communities, while simultaneously managing their own tools as a learning- and knowledge-building environment.
A common way in e-learning 2.0 has been moving from initial personal learning landscapes (PLE) towards combining these with other people’s PLE’s in order to do some joint learning activities (Tammets, Väljataga & Pata, 2008). This often means changing and expanding each individual’s PLEs, and integrating new tools to their PLEs, while suppressing others in the sake of forming a shared activity space where all the tools can be used equally by the group members. Several obstacles rise in this PLE integration. The competitive nature of self-reflection done in personal PLEs against the reflective activities done in group landscapes integrated from PLEs is one that needs the most attention.
One of the most cherished sides of using PLEs has been the increase of self-reflection and self-direction that they promote. It has been emphasized that learning on our own in such environments creates many challenges, and forces people to develop self-reflection and self-direction competences in order to manage their objectives and be intrinsically motivated. Gillespie (2007) has brought out some of the theories of the origin of self-reflection: a) ruptured situations, in which actors have more than one response to the situation that needs decision-making, and thus self-reflection of our own arguments is induced; b) the presence of others who provide feedback to the sides of the self we are not so aware of, and thus make us to reflect upon these sides; and c) within the activity systems in groups and communities the reflection upon the rules and conditions of the ongoing interaction that leads to the personal self-reflection (Engeström, 1987).
The self, according to Hermans (1996), is organized as a dialogical interchange between relatively autonomous and mutually influencing selves. By allowing the various positions to be internally voiced, one reaches decisions and self-directs ones’ actions. The activities of self-direction contain diagnosing and formulating needs, identifying resources, choosing and implementing suitable strategies and evaluating outcomes (Knowles, 1975). Brockett and Hiemstra (1991), have pointed out that self-directed learning activities always take always place in a certain social context and cannot be separated from that social setting and other people. Thus, effective self-reflection and self-direction calls for challenging situations and the presence and reflective intercourse with other people.
Besides internal self-reflection and self-directed actions, PLEs, but especially blogs and micro-blogging tools, and personal wikis, enable people to record ones’ reflections externally, enabling them to keep track of their earlier reflections. They can also plan their activities in advance and monitor their self-directed actions in self-reflective manner. Using feed- and tag-technology with different social software tools enables people to mash in timeline their different types of reflections using them as evidence of their self-directed behavior. They can also mash these reflections with those of other people they work together with or whom they monitor, thus, creating the visible conflict situations for themselves to ponder about. Social software enables also to publicly distribute personal reflections, sharing them within groups and communities, since personal self-directed work is always the pillar on which the group work stands on.
iCamp project (http://www.icamp.eu/) has conducted several learning experiments in which learners were prompted to form a PLEs and conduct self-reflection in their personal spaces, while simultaneously being involved in the group activities in various types of group spaces (eg. shared weblog, shared wiki, combined distributed learning environment from various socials software tools). These experiments have indicated that active self-reflection and working in ones’ PLE might be inhibited after learner becomes involved in the group landscapes (Pata & Väljataga, 2007).
This suggests that the collaborative reflective activities, and working for the common goal might be hindering the individual reflective activities. This seems to be especially true if large parts of PLE remain separate from the shared group space and people need to take additional effort for contributing to both personal and group spaces. While not doing so, they miss the opportunity to benefit from the effects of self-reflection upon the dialogue and activities with their work mates. They may also not sufficiently pay attention to their own self-regulation within the group. The solution from the technical side can be seen in using the feed, mashup, trackback and other technologies for enabling the creation of such group spaces where large parts of individual PLE’s start serving as the mashed regulation spaces of the group. The pedagogical challenge is entwining the self-reflection activities into group communication upon the shared objectives.
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.
A great program for those who like to write stories alone or collaboratively.
This is really a new format that enables to be more interactive than ever with new media formats.
It seems definitely among MUST TRY programs at school!
This week we had the collaborative video workshop with the Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia and Tallinn Univeristy IMKE people. We aimed to try out how does collaborative video publishing work in different Project-related activities. Second aim was to develop the Fooga software.The group-work results showed that if we have a new type of tool, it also makes us to think of totally new kind of activities, not to copy previous patterns from another kind of learning settings.
Teaming up and Introducing the members
Collaborative compilation of project materials
Presentation and evaluation of projects
My own impressions were from this last team. In spite of numerous technical problems we managed to test out a multi-perspective evaluation method with the collaborative video software.
Main idea is that new evaluation paradigms expect that participants of the activity should be involved into the development of evaluation criteria. Thus each participant can first brainstorm different evaluation criteria. Later the videos of these evaluations of an activity can be restructured, compiling together certain aspect of evaluation.
Our team filmed with mobiles the discussions of other groups. These films we made separately were uploaded to the common project area. Next each of us looked these films, cut and edit them until one clear perspective was extracted. We found two perspectives what to evaluate in the group-work: the body language perspective in teams and the way team-members use the technology in their discussions. If such clear evaluation criteria were visualised through the collaborative effort, these can be used to evaluate the activities of groups, since now there is visual evidence what to look for, what to pay attention.
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jaiku Ecology of the Novel IMKE slides
