Today i have a talk of iCamp pedagogical trials in Wienna University to the people who organize elearning courses in this university. Its combines some preliminary and older findings. However a deeper insight is yet to come after 3rd trial ends and we can collect the activity patterns.
One of the theoretical pillars is the hybrid ecology framework is embodied simulation, elaborated in the studies that Gallese refers below. His new paper, dedicated to the social nature of language is generalizing many studies. If to think how it is useful in our experimental ideas, we can think that not only texts, but also acustic or visual artifacts (eg. in Youtube) may trigger actions similarly like we believe the narratives might do.
What seems to be missing from his explanations is how these visual, acustic or verbal cues are triggering different actions ecologically same way like in the environment we evoke different affordances that let us accomplish our intentions and actions.
However, while in his experiments such non-stability shows no relation between certain type of clues and appropriate action statistically, considering this person-specific activation of certain actions seems to be necessary if we are supporting the Ecological psychology framework.
From an uncorrected proof from V. Gallese page:
Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: The neural exploitation hypothesis
Vittorio Gallese
2008
By neural exploitation, social cognition and language can be linked the experiential domain of action.
The perception of shared environment and behaviors helps in maintaining alignment between conversational partners (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Pickering & Garrod, 2004).
Embodied simulation is a specific mechanism through which the brain/body system models its interactions with the world (Gallese, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006).
Besides visual input, mirror neurons are also activated during the observation of partially hidden actions, when the action outcome can be predicted - the anticipated final goal-states of the motor acts (Umilta et al., 2001).
Nonhuman primates possess the ability to deduce what others know about the world on the basis of ostensive behavioral cues, like the direction of gaze.
Embodied conceptualization mechanism grounds meaning in the situated and experience-dependent systematic interactions with the world (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005)
Barrett et al. (in press) have argued that apparent cognitive complexity of the social domain emerges from the interaction of brain, body and the world, rather than being the outcome of the level of intrinsic complexity of primate species.
Viewing social cognition as an embodied and situated enterprise offers the possibility of new neuroscientific approach to language (Clark, 1997; Barsalou, 1999; Lackoff & Johnsone, 1999).
Meaning is the outcome of our situated interactions with the world.
With the discovery of written language, meaning is amplified as it frees itself from being dependent upon specific instantions of actual experience.Language evokes the totality of possibilities for action the world puts upon us, and structures action within a web of related meanings.
Our way of being depends what we act, how we do it, and how the world responds to us.
When we speak, by means of the shared neural networks activated by embodied simulation, we experience the presence of others in ourselves and of ourselves in others.
According to the embodiment theory the neural structures presiding over action execution should also play a role in understanding the semantic context of same actions when verbally described.
Action contributes to the sentence comprehension.The prediction of the embodiment theory of language understanding is that when individuals listen to action-related sentences, their mirror neuron system should be modulated which should influence the primary motor cortex, henceforth the production of movements it controls.
The experimental data shows that processing sentences describing actions activates different sectors of motoneuron system, depending of the effector used in the listened action.
Silent reading of words referring to actions of arm and leg led to the activation of different sectors of pre-motor areas controlling motor acts of the body congruent with the referential meaning of the read action words (Hauk, Johnsrude & Pulvermüller, 2004).
The mirror-neuron system is involved not only in understanding visually presented actions, but also in mapping acustically or visually presented action-related sentences.
The precise functional relevance of mirror neuron system and embodied simulation in the process of language understanding remains unclear.
When in the course of evolution selective pressures led to the emergence of language, the same neural circuits in charge of controlling the hierarchy of goal-related actions might have been exploited to serve the newly acquired function of language syntax.
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.
We had quite a discussion on the niches in hybrid ecology with Anatole Pierre Fuksas. He assumed that novels are ecologically more evolved form of art for enaction than other types of art. In a way this argument puzzled me, because it seems that novel is a niche with more constraints for taking action and triggering emotion freely than for example symbolic art is, which has less sensory-motor action potentialities clearly defined.
One example indicating, that people like such forms that have seemingly more constraints is the learning course design - students always seem to prefer more constrained tutor-defined settings rather than free ones for self-directing their learning. In the beginning this idea did not make sense to me: why would the more constrained environment be ecologically preferred, since we know what happens with the over-specialized organisms in very specific niches - they die out as soon as something changes slightly.
Then we came to the idea that all man-made ecological niches, what novels, art or learning environments are, can be described on the axis of entanglement of emotional and action clues: symbolic art or music entangles both type of clues in one, while novels do separate emotional and action clues more clearly, as words and expressions in the narrative. So it seems we as humans rather prefer those niches, where the emotional and action clues are easily separable to be enacted.
This niche description triggered me to seek for more information of the niche concept. It seem that the feedback type of interaction of organisms with their environment creates niches both for themselves and the other organisms in the niches.
The basis of this feedback can be explained with the emergence of affordances in the interaction between the organism and the environment - the situated doing and being, as Heft (2003) explains it. Constructed embodiments (Heft calls it ecological knowledge) may be left as traces to the environment including tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions. This is how people shape their surrounding environment as an ecological niche.
The less entangled potential triggers for action and emotion there are in the niche (like in novels), the easier it is to enact in this niche, and the more probable it is that the result of these actions and emotions will be reshaping ecologically this niche through the feedback. Thus, such systems may become more evolving.
I found the book:
Niche Construction:The Neglected Process in Evolution
F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, & Marcus W. Feldman
2003
All living creatures, through their metabolism, their activities, and their choices, partly create and partly destroy their own niches.
Organisms interact with environments, take energy and resources from environments, make micro- and macrohabitat choices with respect to environments, construct artifacts, emit detritus and die in environments, and by doing all these things, modify at least some of the natural selection pressures present in their own, and in each other’s, local environments. This role for phenotypes in evolution is called niche construction (Odling-Smee, 1988).
Niche construction should be regarded, after natural selection, as a second major participant in evolution. Niche construction is a potent evolutionary agent because it introduces FEEDBACK into the evolutionary dynamic.
Ecosystem control is one major new idea associated with the ecological effects of niche construction. It stems from the capacity of niche-constructing organisms to modify not only their own environments but also the environments of other organisms in the context of shared ecosystems.
In order for niche construction to be a significant evolutionary process, it is not sufficient for niche-constructing organisms to modify one or more natural selection pressures in their local environments temporarily, because whatever selection pressures they do modify must also persist in their modified form for long enough, and with enough local consistency, to be able to have an evolutionary effect. Where niche construction affects multiple generations, it introduces a second general inheritance system in evolution - an ecological inheritance (Odling-Smee 1988; Odling-Smee et al. 1996) - one that works via environments.
Genetic inheritance depends on the capacity of reproducing parent organisms to pass on replicas of their genes to their offspring. Ecological inheritance, however, does not depend on the presence of any environmental replicators, but merely on the persistence, between generations, of whatever physical changes are caused by ancestral organisms in the local selective environments of their descendants. Thus, ecological inheritance more closely resembles the inheritance of territory or property than it does the inheritance of genes.
Ecological inheritance also has a lot in common with the more familiar concept of ecological succession, except that it has evolutionary, as well as ecological consequences because it involves the inheritance by populations of modified natural selection pressures, via a succession of environmental states,which may then drive further evolutionary changes in those populations.
Any organism’s selective environment is potentially modifiable by any other organism that happens to be a neighbor or that shares, or that has previously shared, some common physical aspect of a mutual environment or that is capable of exerting an indirect influence by affecting the flow of energy or materials through that environment. All such neighbors are ecologically related but they need not be genetically related.
If organisms evolve in response to selection pressures modified by themselves and their ancestors, there is feedback in the system.
The niche-construction perspective stresses two legacies that organisms inherit from their ancestors, genes and a modified environment with its associated selection pressures. Ecological and genetic ancestors are not necessarily identical.
When phenotypes construct niches, they become more than simply “vehicles” for their genes (Dawkins 1989). Animal niche construction may depend on learning and other experiential factors, and in humans it may depend on cultural processes.
Niche-constructing organisms influence the evolution of their own and other populations, often indirectly via intermediate abiotic components. Some organisms create new niches for themselves, for example, through technological innovation or relocation to a novel environment, which again can influence the dynamics of their ecosystems.
When niche construction is incorporated, information can be seen to flow through ecosystems, and evolutionary control webs begin to emerge. Human cultural activities may influence or may actually be human adaptations, or be the result of other human adaptations, cultural processes may also influence human fitness. Cultural processes are not just a product of human genetic evolution, but also a cause of human genetic evolution.
This niche conception can be related with the affordance ideas:
Chemero (2000) suggests that events are changes in the layout of affordances in the animal-environment system.
Heft (2003) writes: We engage a meaningful environment of affordances and refashion some aspects of them…These latter constructed embodiments of what is known—which include tools, artefacts, representations, social patterns of actions, and institutions—can be called ecological knowledge. Perceiving the affordances of our environment is the first order experience that is manifested in the flow of our ongoing perceiving and acting. By first order experience Heft means experience that is direct and unmediated. We are simply immersed into situated doing and being.
Last week we had several meetings in Tallinn and Helsinki among our core group to prepare the Hybrid ecology book: Anatole Pierre Fuksas, Mauri Kaipainen, Pia Tikka and myself. We plan entwined research activities and course with master students to give the ideas a better go.
We met in Helsinki at Pia’s and Mauri’s place to discuss the planned course in fall 2008 at the Tallinn University about Hybrid ecology of narratives. The planned master level course will be one of the testing grounds of the book ideas.
The main interest is to see how hybrid ecology evolves on the basis of traced clues in the virtual and real places. We plan the course activities partly as a field experiment, where students participate in planning, acting and analyzing data.
The initial story will be hidden locatively using new media based clues, and remains unknown to the students until the end of the experiment. The story may be either fictional narrative, commonly known to some extent to the participants, a film-based narrative, a social narrative based on the emotional perspectives of some real events, or even a crime story.
An interesting article about Literary places:
David Herbert 2001
Literary places, tourism and the heritage experience, in «Annals of Tourism Research», 28, pp. 312-333
The group of students, investigating this story with mobile technology and preferred reflection tools (eg. micro-blogging in Twitter, blogging or wiki tools), will be given the common starting point of the story from where they can continue guessing the storyline and building up their own reflections. They are supposed to continue the story with the necessary artifacts left into the virtual overlay of real places.
Such an activity is based on enaction: finding action and meaning-related clues in the real places, taking action or being emotionally involved by these clues, and contributing to the environment accordingly.
The initial story is embodied and enacted differently by each participant. Thus it would be possible to see how the enacted emotions and actions dynamically shape the hybrid ecology.
In the process of enaction the involved people get traces of each others’ actions and emotions, and their interpretations of the story. Such enaction based locative awareness calls for more involvement, and may lead to the interaction between participants and the formation of the enactive clusters around the locative story.
Such hybrid places, where stories can be embodied and enacted, have many dimensions depending of the users. These dimensions will appear and can be made visible if different content was locatively tagged by the users with soft ontology means either embodied knowledge based, that involves clues to the accompanied emotions and actions, or knowledge based, which involves our systems of activated concepts.
If participants have access to such soft ontological dimensions of the hybrid ecology, they can interact more. Also, besides the locatively situated artifacts, triggering their action and emotions, the ontological dimensions as whole will be perceived and enacted accordingly.
The tools that can be used at this course are locative maps (eg. Googlemaps), social software (Flickr, Youtube, blogs, wikis, microblogs) and analytical tools what enable to locatively tag embodied knowledge and select meaning or action perspectives withing the hybrid ecology (Montagemaker, Soft ontology tool etc.).
What is interesting in this experiment from the research point of view:
- due to embodied cognition and person-specific enaction different stories would emerge from the clues of the one initial story
- monitoring the hybrid ecology as an evolving system
- the rise of different meaning and activity spaces within the hybrid ecology that call for the formation of the communities of enaction
- persons as hybrid and distributed selves within hybrid ecology: interrelations between persons, their action traces, meaning-making traces, and various parallel dimensions of the hybrid ecology.
Some interesting ideas:
- not linear narratives with start and end but branched stories with many ends
- searching for someone, while also making side trips
- narrative as a quest game
- storylines and crossing path with characters
http://johnitc.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/digital-locative-storytelling/
Our chapter “Distributed learning environments and social software: in search for a framework of design” by Sebastian Fiedler, (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation, Vienna) and Dr. Kai Pata (Center of Educational Technology, Tallinn University) will appear as a chapter of the “Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies” edited by Dr. Stylianos Hatzipanagos and Dr. Steven Warburton, King’s College, UK.
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!
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jaiku Ecology of the Novel IMKE slides
