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.

Recently there are quite many biological theories that are used to explain the web 2.0 phenomena.

I have been fascinated in elaborating the niche ideas and these other biological ideas seem to be moving into their places in this ecological learning theory i have in mind.

About a year ago i was reading about hive mind idea for explaining collective intelligence and global mind.

..we see sophisticated, elegant, convenient communications software arise “from nowhere,” made of thousands and thousands of carefully ordered code

The major components of a Hive Mind are:

* Communication
* Visibility
* SharedAwarenessSystem
* Commitment

Just recently Petri Kola explained at seminar the concept of swarms as a very useful one to explain behaviour in microblogging sites.

At summerschool I was talking with Tobias about foraging behaviours that seemed quite promising and fitting into the ecology framework of learning in web 2.0.

Wikipedia says that:
Foraging theory predicts that the foraging options that deliver the highest payoff, should be favored by foraging animals because it will have the highest fitness payoff.
There are many versions of optimal foraging theory that are relevant to different foraging situation. These include:
* The optimal diet model, which describes the behavior of a forager that encounters different types of prey and must choose which to attack
* Patch selection theory, which describes the behavior of a forager whose prey is concentrated in small areas with a significant travel time between them
* Central place foraging theory, which describes the behavior of a forager that must return to a particular place in order to consume its food, or perhaps to hoard it or feed it to a mate or offspring.

The patch selection theory seems to be connected with ‘leaving traces’ ideas from the swarm behaviour. The ‘central place foraging’ idea has a connection with niche formation through fitness landscapes.

There is a paper in press:
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals
Volume 38, Issue 1, October 2008, Pages 277-292
Collective motion of a class of social foraging swarms
Bo Liu, Tianguang Chua, Long Wanga and Zhanfeng Wanga

The general understanding in biology is that the swarming behavior is a result of an interplay between a long-range attraction and a short-range repulsion between the individuals.
In the course of foraging the swarm individuals may also be affected by a nutrient profile (or an attractant/repellent), i.e. attraction to the more favorable areas or repulsion from the unfavorable areas of the attractant/repellent profile.

The results show that the members of a quasi-reciprocal swarm will aggregate and eventually form a cohesive cluster of finite size for different profiles.
All the swarm individuals can converge to more favorable areas of the profile and diverge from unfavorable areas under certain conditions.
More complex self-organized oscillations may occur in the systems.

Graham was mentioning also the rhizomic networks idea i have liked before, that might fit into the scheme.

The workshop was a discussion with students and Graham, it was a bit disappointing… I think mostly very general things were brought up by students and Graham’s answers were same general. Anyway, nice experience of how to spend 1,5 hour of making bubbles with some pearls among. Graham’s point of course was that he is not presenting anything but he is here to start the conversation, in the end he said that for those who feel disappointed, there is the slidecast of 20 min is in slideshare and lots of info is under PLE tag in his blog.

Graham: What is a learning environment?

Stein: Learning environment is all my distributed tools
Lauri: it annoys me that the learning environment is considered technology, there is a glass wall between this and more natural learning environment outdoors.

GrahaM: How much our identity, when we are in the computer environment, differs from our identity in real world?
I want my personal learning environment to represent my knowledge - i think most relevant is Matrix film representation of knowledge.

dougsymington:@cristinacost how do learners acquire a “public voice” in online environments? Obvious differences depending on age. Other issues? #scohrid

Graham: What you do and who you share in learning environments gives the public voice.
Does public voice depend on your learning in networked systems - its an interesting question.

Lilian: Personal learning environments - i have three questions, what is personal, what is learning, what is environment. I think education is manipulation, the idea of personal is MINE, how can i disconnect from it time to time? Does environment needs to be integrated, does someone need to help me to manipulate my environment.

Graham: I call it personal LEARNING environment. Lots of our learning is incidental.
We must often log in to institutional systems and adopt, why not can we come with our own learning environments. Learning environment is not a program or site in internet - its a series of tools which individual learners use across multiple devices which are used in different ways and different contexts.
Learning is not how people use technology, we use different things in different context.

xxx: Most students are too lazy to use PLEs, we must force students to use them.

Martin:You also have to control them, without control they don’t do anything.

Linda: i disagree i think it is only easier for us as teachers to control them. With PLE development the teacher must work hard, students become lazy and lost, but you must do this road with them and also do this road as a teacher. For me is difficult to leave the control to the hands of students.

Alev: if you try to change it, students don’t like it.

Lilian: in French business school young students say we know what is learning, we don’t want to change it.

Graham: Do we teach students to be lazy, sit there and let them to be taught? We come here to learn, not to teach ourselves!
I think when we invent new technology we invent it in the previous society paradigms. Our school system comes from factory system - teacher as factory overseer, when we take computer and build virtual classrooms, we take the same paradigm. Of course it does not work.

Ralf: the educational system is getting even stronger, since kindergarten we try to prepare them for labour market.

Graham: I certainly agree that in periods of paradigm shift the contradictions will get stronger in the society.

Lauri: teachers’ experience comes from history, teachers are always old-fashioned for the students. I think future is so unpredictable, we need a new way to teach providing ability to invent.

Linda: We are people from 20th century teaching people of the future.

Graham: Is important that teachers were less trying to teach technology but also use it by themselves.

Graham: Is very interesting that you drag the conversation back to schools, but i think of learning outside the school, facilitation and encouraging learning outside the school, embedding learning in wider hearts of the society than school, it may actually start addressing the problems where real learning takes place.

Google was being widely used for learning - if you want to learn something you google, you dont go to your research environments that look horrible.
Why if you are using google you expect students will do something different?

Graham: Reclaim lurking!
Paper: Searching, lurking in the zone of proximal development.

All communities are interconnected by notes, nodal learning. Are you just accessing information or are you learning? People do contextually purposeful activities, they are sequenced in the terms of their own learning not by curriculum, they are social. A lot of learning is driven through personal interest that people do by themselves. In educational technology we keep sucked back to e-learning classes.

Start help people to manage their personal learning environments for informal learning.

Ralf: life long learning as a punishment never stops.

xxx: Are we replicating in virtual learning environments the ‘prison’?

Graham: no instead we use the term ‘walled garden’

Lilian: what do you think of the tyranny of connection?
Linda: the same tyranny is the books

Here are some resources for ProLearn summer school workshop.

Some files can be accessed from here.

macedonia_icamp

Here are the results of our workshop:

Planning doctoral landscape and activity pattern

Doctoral students’ activity niche

Doctoral students’ activity ontospace plotted on tool landscape

Today at master defences commission i played a bit with my data collected from students’ course.
Here is the demo tool to play with your dataset:
http://kerg.tlu.ee/demos/multi-perspective-exploration

The formation of learning spaces happens through the social definition of several learning and teaching related environmental gradients that define the niche as the multidimensional space. In general, any gradient is a peak of the fitness landscape of one environmental characteristic, which can be visualized in two-dimensional space as a graph with certain skewness and width, determining the ecological amplitude. The shape of the fitness graph for certain characteristic can be plotted through the abundance of certain specimen benefitting of this characteristic. Each niche gradient defines one dimension of the space. Any learning and teaching gradient is determined as a characteristic that learners and teachers as creative knowledge constructing organisms perceive and actualize as useful for their activities and wellbeing individually or in groups. These niches gradients that make up learning and teaching spaces may be ecologically named learning affordances of the space – they are defined mutually in interaction both by the learner and the surrounding system.

Niche gradients emerge in the course of the embodied simulation processes of several individuals. Both the environmental cues and activity traces from surrounding environment, as well as, learner’s embodied knowledge involving the use of this environment in action, would trigger the actualization of certain learning affordances.

The activity system model provides a meaningful framework for describing the components of the surrounding environment where the learners and teachers are embodied during their activities. These involve individuals with certain objectives aiming to work together and defining certain rules and roles within their community when using tools and artifacts as mediators of their actions. Hence, the learning affordance descriptions involve the learning action verbs, people who are involved in action, and mediators of actions (various tools, services and artifacts). Any individual conceptualizes learning affordances personally, but the range of similar learning affordance conceptualizations may be clustered into more general affordance groups eg. pulling social awareness information or searching artifacts by social filtering etc.

Since in the learning design models the choice of the software tools plays an important role, niches may be defined by the frequency each learning affordance is perceived useful when making use of the certain tool.

The most useful affordances of each tool are demonstrated at upper right corner.

Here are the affordances of blog and wiki.

Affordances of social bookmarks and google search engine

Affordances of chat and aggregator

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.

This year Ed-media 2008 conference takes place in Vienna. Although i am not able to be at EdMedia this year, since i go to iCalt conference, i really regret since there will be a very interesting community meeting.

The Personal Learning Environment PLE issues are discussed at the symposium: How Social is my Personal Learning Environment (PLE)? with the participation of:
1. Sebastian Fiedler
2. Tarmo Toikkanen and Teemu Leinonen
3. Stéphane Sire et al.
4. Liliane Esnault, Denis Gillet and Annick Rossier Morel
5. Colin Milligan
6. Graham Attwell, Margarita Perez Garcia, and Steven Warburton
7. Barbara Kieslinger and Kai Pata
8. Bernadette Charlier and France Henri

Our paper with Barbara Kieslinger is:
Am I alone? The competitive nature of self-reflective activities in groups and individually

Abstract: Although it is not yet common practice, the use of personal learning environments (PLEs) has started to enter formal higher education by a number of early adopters. Some lecturers facilitate their students in making use of social software tools and networked resources for learning activities. In our contribution observations from field research that has been conducted in the context of the European research project iCamp are discussed. On a conceptual level iCamp intends to develop a learning environment design model that provides more autonomy to the learner, in terms of activities tools and resources. In the field trials students were guided towards self-reflection and self-direction activities by making use of their personal learning environments, while at the same time they were prompted to perform collaborative activities in distributed shared learning environments. Thus students and facilitators were challenged by the competitive nature of self-reflection done in single PLEs against the other-directed reflective activities done in distributed shared learning environments. This article elaborates on why collaborative activities might be hindering the individual reflective activities, and how this can be overcome.

Besides symposium, we have another paper where we elaborate the self-directing aspects in social learning environment using the data from the master course of web 2.0 from Tallinn University.

Tammets, K., Väljataga, T., & Pata, K. (2008). Self-directing at social spaces: conceptual framework for course design. Proceedings of Ed-Media 2008. Vienna: AACE, 2008.

Abstract: This paper examines the use of social spaces in order to foster self-directed learning activities in higher educational institutions. It argues that current instructional design models need to be adjusted with respect to self-direction according to the continuously changing processes in post-industrial society. Based on empirical research conducted with master students it attempts to design a conceptual framework for course design with the emphasis on self-direction in social spaces.

There was a reference to Ilyenkov and significances as Soviet version of affordances in one paper of artifact ecologies that i wanted to check out for a while ago.

The ideal form is a form of a thing, but a form that is outside the thing, and is to be found in man as a form of his dynamic life activity, as goals and needs. Or conversely, it is a form of man’s life activity, but outside man, in the form of the thing he creates. “Ideality” as such exists only in the constant succession and replacement of these two forms of its “external embodiment” and does not coincide with either of them taken separately. It exists only through the unceasing process of the transformation of the form of activity – into the form of a thing and back – the form of a thing into the form of activity (of social man, of course).

Try to identify the “ideal” with any one of these two forms of its immediate existence – and it no longer exists. All you have left is the “substantial”, entirely material body and its bodily functioning. The “form of activity” as such turns out to be bodily encoded in the nervous system, in intricate neuro-dynamic stereotypes and “cerebral mechanisms” by the pattern of the external action of the material human organism, of the individual’s body. And you will discover nothing “ideal” in that body. The form of the thing created by man, taken out of the process of social life activity, out of the process of man-nature metabolism, also turns out to be simply the material form of the thing, the physical shape of an external body and nothing more. A word, taken out of the organism of human intercourse, turns out to be nothing more than an acoustic or optical phenomenon. “In itself” it is no more “ideal” than the human brain.

And only in the reciprocating movement of the two opposing “metamorphoses” – forms of activity and forms of things in their dialectically contradictory mutual transformations – DOES THE IDEAL EXIST.

One side-thought from it is that as different cultures construct their idealities to the same boundary objects, basically the ideality for certain objects is never disappearing, just changing. The tools or mediators, what the ideality actually represents, can objectively exits out of their creator’s culture due to being boundary objects and forming ideality to some other cultures as well.
This makes all tools boundary objects as long as several cultures hold and develop the ideality in action.

But then i came to this paper today.
The Turner paper classifies affordances into simple Gibson’s affordances and complex affordances that embody history and practice.

Very interesting is Turner’s approach to consider boundary objects as objects that are useful for different communities, and thus boundary objects represent the culturally emergent affordances.

He makes a kind of leap in his conclusion: affordances are boundary object between ‘use’ and ‘design for use’ - designed artefacts are boundary objects both between and within the communities of practice of designers and users.

He also sees that basically use, context and affordance is the same thing and refers to the elements that are part of activity systems.

It seems that very often we need to use some label, but all the labels: affordance, context, ideality are so meaning-laden in certain contexts, and a lot of confusion emerges if our theory is changed but we use still the words from the previous theories.

Affordance as context
Phil Turner
Interacting with Computers 17 (2005) 787–800

Significances are described as real and objective, but dependent on us as they are a product of our purposive, sensuous work.

Hartson (2003) has proposed a four-fold division of (simple) affordance for the purposes of designing for interaction. These four categories are (a) cognitive affordance; (b) physical affordance; (c) sensory affordance and finally, (d) functional affordance.

‘Real affordances are not nearly as important as perceived affordances; it is perceived affordances that tell the user what actions can be performed on an object and, to some extent, how to do them’ (Norman, 1988).

Perceived affordances are ‘often more about conventions than about reality’ (Norman, 1999, 124)

Turner and Turner (2002) create an explicit three layer model of affordance:
- ‘basic level’ equating with simple usability/ergonomics,
- a ‘middle layer’ matching user tasks (and/ or) embodiment and finally,
- a ‘top level’ corresponding to the purpose of the activity
for which ‘cultural affordance’ are appropriate.

Cole (1996) notes that mediating artefacts embody their own ‘developmental histories’ which is a reflection of their use. That is, these artefacts have been manufactured or produced and continue to be used as part of, and in relation to, intentional human actions.

Boundary objects (Star, 1989) are resources or artefacts which support the work of separate communities such as different departments within an organisation or even between very different communities of practice. To be useful by these different communities they must be sufficiently flexible to be used in different ways, by different people for different purpose in a range of contexts. The term ‘boundary object’ is, of course, primarily descriptive rather than a design imperative as they are seen to develop or ‘evolve’ within and between communities by embodying custom and practice.

Ilyenkov begins his argument by identifying two classes of nonmaterial phenomena namely:
1. mental phenomena such as thoughts, beliefs and feelings and
2. phenomena that are neither material nor mental—meaning and values, such as goodness.

Through human activity we idealise our world (i.e. endow it with meaning) and in so doing we also endow it with properties that come to exist completely independently of us.
As Ilyenkov puts it:
Ideality is a characteristic of things, but not as they are defined by nature, but by labour, the transforming, form-creating activity of social beings, their aim-mediated, sensuously objective activity.
The ideal form is the form of a thing created by social human labour. Or conversely, it is the form of labour realized [osushchestvlennyi] in the substance of nature, ‘embodied’ in it, ‘alienated’ in it and ‘realized’ [realizovannyi] in it, and thereby confronting its very creator as the form of a thing or as a relation between things, which are placed in this relation (which they otherwise would not have entered) by human beings, by their labour (Ilyenkov, 1977: 157).

Ideal properties such as significances are thus real, objective but not independent of us as they are products of meaning-endowing in human activity.

The ideal exists in the collective not the individual mind.
While social life is a product of the collective, it is experienced by individuals as a set of given rules, practices, tools and artefacts.

Through purposive use objects acquire significance.
Ideality is like a stamp or inscription on the substance of nature by social human activity.
A significance makes a thing knowable.

Ilyenkov notes that activity is the source of the world we inhabit and the principal expression of how we inhabit it.

Some significance has to be attached to the thing through the process of the object’s incorporation into the sphere of human activity which is not necessarily true of an affordance—particularly simple affordances.

Objects acquire this ideal content not as the result of being accessed by an individual mind, but by the historically developing activities of communities of practice.

In conclusion, from a holistic or phenomenological perspective, affordance, use and context are one. From a design perspective affordance is not an intangible, elusive property of interactive systems, it might better be thought of as a boundary object between ‘use’ and ‘design for use’ .

Cole, M., 1996. Cultural Psychology. Harvard University Press.
Ilyenkov, E. (1977) Problems of Dialectical Materialism (Translated by A. Bluden). Progress Publishers. Also available from http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm.
Norman, D.A., 1988. The Psychology Of Everyday Things. Basic Books, NY.
Star, S.L., 1989. The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. In: Grasser, L., Huhns, M. (Eds.), Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Pitman, London.
Turner, P., Turner, S., 2002. An affordance-based framework for CVE evaluation, People and Computers XVII— The Proceedings of the Joint HCI-UPA Conference 2002 pp. 89–104.

Yesterday Pirkko Hyvonen mentioned an interesting paper of the affordance networks. In this paper the ecological theory of knowing is elaborated that is in line with what i have been dealing with in my research.

It seems they eventually have same idea like i developed of an activity system as the place where affordances emerge as constraints (in their case affordance network).

They assume that when connecting learners to ecological networks where they can learn through engaged participation, the affordance networks must become activated.

What is different from my understanding is that in this paper they try to use the Gibson’s effectivity term “effectivity set, he or she is more likely to perceive and interact with the world in certain ways”, but i think behind this term effectivity we should look embodied knowledge and embodied simulation processes, which have been discussed in relation to mirror neuron studies.

Effectivity coupling with affordance networks is seen by them as intentionally bound system initiated by person or by the environment (external lifeworld), but i think that according to the embodied simulation theory such system or process is activated in the mutual interaction of goals and envoronment:

Hommel (2003), assumes that action control to all behavioral acts is ecologically delegated to the environment - when planning actions in terms of anticipated goals, the sensory-motor assemblies needed to reach the goal are simultaneously selectively activated in the environment, and bind together into a coherent whole that serves as an action-plan, facilitating the execution of the goal-directed actions through the interaction between the environment and its embodied sensory-motor activations.

Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing From an Ecological Perspective
Sasha A. Barab, & Wolff-Michael Roth

Educational Researcher, Vol. 35, No. 5, 3-13 (2006)

Knowledge acquisition may be overrated and that a more important role of education is to stimulate meaningful participation (Sfard, 1998), or what we describe as effectivity/affordance
coupling.

Central to the situative perspective is the belief that one should abandon the treatment of concepts as self-contained entities and instead conceive of them as tools—tools that can be fully understood only through use.

The central tenets of this perspective with respect to knowing are that:
(a) knowing is an activity—not a thing;
(b) knowing is always contextualized—not abstract;
(c) knowing is reciprocally constructed in the individual–environment interaction—not objectively defined or subjectively created;
(d) knowing is a functional stance on the interaction—not a “truth” (Barab & Duffy, 2000).

Consistent with the situativity perspective, we argue for an ecological theory of what it means to know. Such a theory acknowledges the world as being structured to support goal-directed behaviors, while at the same time placing the realization of these meanings as part of the individual–environment relation.

Situating knowing and meaning as part of individual–environment relations, rather than solely
in the world or in the individual.

From ecological perspective, learning is a process of becoming prepared to effectively engage dynamic networks in the world in a goal-directed manner (Hoffmann & Roth, 2005).

Affordance networks, in contrast to the perceptual affordances described by Gibson, are extended in both time and space and can include sets of perceptual and cognitive affordances that collectively come to form the network for particular goal sets.

Affordance networks are not entirely delimited by their material, social, or cultural structure, although one may have elements of all of these; instead, they are functionally bound in terms of the facts, concepts, tools, methods, practices, commitments, and even people that can be enlisted toward the satisfaction of a particular goal.

In this way, affordance networks are dynamic sociocultural configurations that take on particular shape as a result of material, social, political, economic, cultural, historical, and even personal factors but always in relation to particular functions.

Affordance networks are not read onto the world, but instead continually “transact” (are coupled) with the world as part of a perception–action cycle in which each new action potentially expands or contracts one’s affordance network. Rather than separate the thinking individual from the physical environment, the ecological paradigm that underlies our thinking transcends the mind-body dualism, instead situating meaning in the dynamic transaction between mind and body.

The particular shape of a network changes with the dynamic interplay of these factors.

For a key bounding on the shape of any network for a particular individual is the effectivity set through which she comes to form relations with the network.

Connecting learners into ecological systems means coupling effectivity sets and affordance networks.

Each individual has a life-world.
The environment, from the vantage of any one individual, includes material, social, and even cultural resources, all of which share the act of successful participation.

Life-worlds are always structured in patterned ways that are functionally meaningful for an individual within some societally defined activity and are therefore inherently intelligible to others (Leont’ev, 1981; Mikhailov, 1980).

Life-world is an emergent phenomenon, with its particular shape being a result of the affordance network/effectivity set coupling, and persons’ goals being an essential factor contributing to whether a particular network becomes enlisted in supporting the emergence of one’s life-world.

Like activity systems (e.g., Engeström, 1987), affordance networks are functionally bounded, which implies that the boundaries are dependent on the intended outcome or function that they serve (i.e., they are situated with respect to the task at hand). Boundaries of a particular network lie in those aspects of a performance necessary to functionally address a particular goal to which the network has value.

For a particular individual, constraints exist in social, cultural, economic, and political factors such that they mediate whether a tool, resource, or even a particular stance can be found in her network.

An effectivity set constitutes those behaviors that an individual can in fact produce so as to realize and even generate affordance networks. When an individual has a particular effectivity set, he or she is more likely to perceive and interact with the world in certain ways—even noticing certain shapes of networks that are unavailable to others.

Effectivity sets are properties of individual–environment transactions out of which a new epistemic frame might emerge.

The dynamic coupling of an effectivity set to an affordance network forms what we refer to as an intentionally bound system. An intentionally bound system is not simply defined by the environment or the individual but emerges through the dynamic transaction that couples effectivity sets with affordance networks.

This coupling begins with an intention; whether the intention begins with the learner or the environment is inconsequential from an ecological perspective, in that the two are simply aspects of the same phenomenon.