Please look back in anger

This has proven to be a good way to describe my combination of frustrations and lack of of effort. Writing about learning and new media, kind of a research field tagged with ‘ICT,’ ‘media literacy,’ ‘identity and learning,’ and so on, is not as easy as I thought. Or to be precise: Writing in that field seems sometimes to be exeptionally easy, but actually contributing to our understanding of education in light of new media is not. The coma node still needs a respirator.

If educational research within this field is to be taken seriously, one must look back more often and evalute theories and assumptions! We must be able to reflect upon what has been written and what has been said, and acknowledge problems and flauds in our views. If we trick ourselves to believe that new words separate us from what happened five years ago, and try to dress ourselves up as surfers on the waves of paradigmatic changes, we are just dull cowards running from the battlefield. There are no paradigm shifts. It’s mostly reproduction of bullshit in search for funding.

But, maybe looking back and accepting the fact that much of what has been done have served to produce and strenghten an ideology of anti-knowledge attitudes and crazy futuristic ideas within educational research, will lead to something? Maybe instead of running away we must stop and discuss what is going on, and what sort of fundamental problems the mixture of futurism, qualitative research methods and normative assumptions leads to?This is of course also a big fat ‘should,’ but at least I’m saying it, and at least I can back it up with something stronger than complex terms and models, and nonsense about creativity and border-crossing.

The next fad seems to be inter-cultural learning (maybe multi-cultural, I don’t know). People will be lured into master degrees in this qasisubject! Money will be thrown at the the well positioned bullshitters who write the most overcomplicated project descriptions. Nothing will be gained outside the «field» and in 10 years time something new will come along and everybody can erase and rewind once more. No, I rather think it’s time to look back in anger!

Newspeak; ++ungood

Is it a new thing that different contexts “penetrate” the classroom? I’ve heard people talking and writing about the fact that ICT makes it possible to move across many different contexts in much shorter periods of time than before. “Context” here means something completely different than “place,” but when this is ignored you may start talking about a sort of “heterotopic classroom of the web 2.0 age” (completely missing Foucault’s ideas with the term, I believe). And not only that: “Multimodality” is used to capture elements of new genres associated with the use of ICT (everything is so digital and multi, this days), so one ultimately, though completely “counter-evolutionary,” even allow oneself to speak of qualitatively new forms of learning.

What is new is not how we learn, but how we speak about it. When “creativity” is sees as a part of “digital literacy” some might think that this is where creativity belongs: In a multimodal, ICT mediated classroom of cooperation. Neither the place, nor the means are any prerequisite for creativity. It’s like educational researchers are stunned by the fact that children can be inventive, and then, intoxicated with newspeak and techno optimism, talk about this as something entirely new (and of course “mediated” by new technology).

We have paradigm shifts for breakfast. I need lunch

d/Discussion

I visited the London Knowledge Lab in june. That was exiting. One of the project presented to our group had some interesting findnings about the use of youtube. After going through a large amount of profiles, they found that 0.17% of these users had actually uploaded anything! This means that for everyone contributing, there are at 600 only watching (of course there are possibilities of people having more than one profile and of one profile being run by more than one person). And many contributions, as we all know, are not the result of any creative work, but of riping.

The discussion I’m talking about should circle around how we depict young people on the net. Considering that we use these assumptions when thinking about education, it is important not to base them on obscure examples. Our schools are mainly for the 600 people watching. The relevance of marginal online youth culture must be questioned. We cannot believe that everything we see is an instance of ”early adoption.”

Lifespace

We appreciate young people’s freedom and creativity, but not seeing or hearing or feeling it outside well established media channels. We like them to be with friends, but loitering is viewed as a social problem. A system called mosquito uses high frequency sound to make people under the age of 25 (approximately) move away from places we don’t want them to hang around. The truth is that the social spaces of many urban areas are heavily restricted. The ideal person in such surroundings is buying stuff!

On this background it’s striking how the picture of the youth’s use of the Internet is often so colourful. They make friends and flirt and chat and quarrel and do all sorts of things in this ‘virtual space.’ Given that we don’t give them any real space, it’s suspiciously convenient to imagine that they have an almost infinite space somewhere else. I’ve heard teenagers talking about hanging on the net. Isn’t that cute?

I realise the importance of the net, but the way we depict it in general, and especially the way we think about young peoples ‘life online,’ should be the object of constant critical inquiry. The metaphors we use should be scrutinized, the architectures of control investigated. To think that most young people today are expressing them selves in new ways in virtual environments is in my opinion far too optimistic. When in a fatalist mood I think it is consumption all the way down.

The coma node

I realize that my blog is in a coma. The posts are like microscopic hand movements, maybe indicating life. But I should not pull the plug on it just yet. For all I now there will be a second wave of blogging and then I can say: “I’ve been doing it for years.” I’m looking forward to that.

These days I’m thinking about how similar the world is despite how much it has changed. Biologically we are the same. Many structures are as strong as ever, and after doing observations in a school in Oslo I see that the classrooms are pretty much the same, too. Not that I expected something radically different, but I spend a lot of time reading the words of ePreachers, putting ‘digital’ in front of everything, so it’s easy to hold some stupid expectations.

The point is not that we are in any sort of stand still. And I do really believe that the network society gives us reasons to change many models and maybe the way we think about education. But these discussions all to soon end up being occupied by screamers: The one side saying everything was better 50 years ago, the other saying we have to change it all to fit some made up ‘digital’ future.

And still young people go to school, getting bored in the classrooms, flirting, fighting, trying to figure out who they are, what they should do and what the point of all this is. If you are an outsider, you might find somewhere to participate on the net, getting the space you are not given in other places. That’s a good thing! If you’re an insider, you probably participate on the net too, using facebook or myspace or whatever, extending, or showing of, what you have elsewhere. And many people do not, lonely or highly sociable, use the net at all.

All of us are never the less affected by the ways new media (new communicational technology) changes the spaces around us. For instance through the impact this has on language (new metaphors, SMS-lingo etc) and in the way physical proximity becomes less important in structuring what you hear, read, say and think about. So both what you say and think, and how you do this, is affected by the tools we use and by the fact that we are linked.

Old but funny

People talk about remixing as if it was a magic formula, but here we can at least see an example that is realy good (an important point is never the less that Eddie Izzard makes the fun; without him the LEGO animation would loose most of its punch, hence its a "secondary modality" if one likes words like that).

Time to try again

I’ve realized that the concepts of participation and content production as it is understood by some researchers on the field of so called web 2.0 phenomena (user generated content and social software and so on), may make analysis of consumption more difficult. If you treat anything as production, people will come through as extremely reflected and artistic under any circumstances. Reading blogs is interesting, but when hearing that 28% (of American youth) create their own journal or blog (PEW 2007), one has to wonder about the quality level of these “productions” (and in a norwegian context: where are they?) And even more important: One has to ask if the survey separates “have tried to write a blog” from “are writing a blog.” As far as I can tell they are not.

Given the common way of grouping “have tried’s” as “regulars” I myself would be a dedicated blogger. It is in my opinion not wise to lower the threshold this far down (“again with the virtual masochism”). You are then missing out on the fact that consuming media content is still the most important activity (the process of consumption might be more complex and interactive, but never the less…). Then you might also become blind to power structures that are having different, but profound impacts on the next generation of young people. Most of us are consumers most of the time. It might change, but I do not think it has yet. So it’s a long way to walk before media freedom prevails.

miniNode

Well, it’s obviously not easy to publish myself. Neither has this proven to be de driving force I needed for my phd work. Maybe I overestimated how motivating it would be going public. Maybe it really doesn’t feel that public. Perhaps it isn’t (it very much isn’t).

I just read that an interesting article on the Guardian by Scott Rosenberg. The title was “The blog haters have barely any idea what they are raging against.” In the end he has a nice quote: “Blogs have realised that old wisecracking twist on an Andy Warhol aphorism: that, someday, everyone will be famous for 15 people.” That’s narrowcasting.

But Barabási seems to have proved that real networks don’t develop like this (of course I understand that is not what is meant by the above quote, but bear with me). Given that the blogospehere is a network, which it most certainly is, it has hubs. Hence the A-list. Hence a periphery that are occupied by many nodes, among them the mNode.

So fame will not be distributed to everyone. That is the point of it. And then even 15 fans is to much to ask. Where am I headed? I’m not sure, but I think I’m trying to convince myself I like blogging, but that reaching out to many readers still isn’t my main goal. Five would be fine. Three maybe. Hypocrisy is wonderful, especially on Fridays. Cheers!

Learning as some kind of change

As a dubious remedy for my eLoneliness, Facebook came along. It’s like ordering spam, but the spam is knitted out of stuff from your social life or, more likely, from your social past. So you keep returning. It’s a sort of politeness. And the interface is perfect for people like me (almost half way there, at least if we don’t stop a lot of things or start believing (even more) heavily in medical science): Simple, clean cut, easy to navigate and usable for a lot of things you didn’t really have to do.

Last week I attended a course called “Learning and identity.” As usual such a “wide” header attracts very different people and some of them seemed to have a quite different understanding of both these concepts than I have. Some spoke of grasping “how people really are,” “behinds the mask” and so on. I don’t know much about such grasping, but from my perspective identity is more like Gees “packages;” made and remade by us seeing trough them and living in them.

“Core identity” is not what I’m looking for. And neither is it what was meant with “identity” in the course header. But one of the discussions was interesting. I claimed, backed up by a nice citation from Bateson, that the “word learning (.) denotes change of some kind.” And “identity,” even if you see as a very dynamic entity, isn’t. The word identity is not pointing at change per se (rather the opposite). If learning takes place, it may be called a subcategory of change; it is the change we are talking about. Some other participants talked about how “we should not think in boxes” and argued we must focus on the similarities rather than the differences (being a fan of Bateson I obviously raged).

What is changing? I guess that is what much of the discussion in educational and learning research is all about. Probably a lot of things are changing for learning to occur. Mapping them all might be impossible. But I don’t think you need to map everything to talk sensible about learning and identity. What I have to do is “draw the borders,” finding how much I need to take into account.

Participation and the eLonely

Participation is no doubt a key concept in understanding what’s going on. When someone is just surfing now and then, they are like tourists, superficially interested and maybe easy to cheat. When someone spends a lot of time in different “virtual worlds” (a word that has to be renegotiated), playing games, blogging, or whatever, they are citizens. But what about those who spends a fair bit of time on the net, but never really “get connected”? Who are we? The eLonely?

We, the eLonely, are a reaching out, trying to participate, missing the points, talking rubbish like everyone else, but not the right rubbish. The eLonely are virtually pathetic; who we are elsewhere doesn’t matter.

Sometimes I think that if a give up blogging (etcetera), I will be wandering around the net. Not like the “tourists” mentioned earlier, but like a virtual hobo. I wonder if there are many virtual hoboes out there.

That is a field in need of inquiry. And funding. The question is how you go from eLonely to virtual hobo. What are the characteristics of these social and mental “traversals”? Is it possible to extend the metaphor? What about eShelters? What is the “e-” equivalent to soup or rags or supermarket wagons?

Moving in every direction

It’s obvious that the typology I proposed earlier on research approaches to blogging is too simple, though I’ve just found something similar in an article from 2005 (Lawson-Borders, G. & Kirk, R. (2005). “Blogs on Campaign Communication,” in American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 548, Dec 2005, Sage). They distinguish three approaches to research on blogging: Blogs as social diaries, blogs as organizational tools and blogging viewed as a sort of participatory journalism.

From the perspective of educational science something is missing in that list(: On the other hand: blogs as organizational tools is quite similar (or identical) to using blogs in educational contexts, when this means using them as a form of LMS (Learning Management System). But there is another strand within educational research that is focusing on the language use in blogs, and how blogging may boost the learning of literacy (for instance Huffaker, D. A. (2004). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom)

In surveying the field one could also use other distinctions. Descriptive research differs from prescriptive (action oriented) research (though the lines may be blurry). Some see potential changes in their branch (typically journalism). Some see another chance for preaching about technological enhancement of learning and educational processes. It is somewhat self-oriented to only ask what a new thing might do to you. It is somewhat upside down to continually ask what new things may to for you.

At the moment I’m progressing without direction; getting closer to a target that surrounds me, rather than being some specific point. And maybe Monty Python's Quest for the holly grale wasn't just absurd after all?

Bateson again

Once I was very interested I cybernetics and the application of this approach to the human sciences. I read Bateson and liked his high flying ideas. He uses his concepts and principles all over the place, from cells via human communication to evolution. It’s full of insight and very far out. If you are curious about cybernetics, The principia Cybernetica page is a nice place to start.

I don’t know if any of that will help me now, but there is hope of using some of the ideas in discussing socio cultural theories of participation. At least I think so. Jay Lemke shares many of his interesting thoughts one his pages (a lot of drafts and some finished work of his is there). He seems willing to go beyond the “blind man and stick” analogy in applying Batesonian theory to research on Internet communication and learning conditions in the knowledge/information society.

Bateson’s learning theory is especially interesting here. Yrjö Engeström saw this in the early 80’s, but it is somewhat swallowed by the activity theory and ends up losing it´s biological aspects. But things may change

Blog research

I’ve been writing about research on blogging in general and have tried to summarize in four broad categories: 1) Blogging as a new form of, or at least a very special challenge to, journalism. 2) Blogging as writing “an inside-out diary,” a more traditional understanding of what’s going on in a blog, focusing on things like identity and identity construction. 3) Blogs as tools or, more correct, as potential tools, in schools or other organizational contexts. 4) Blogging as participation in different sub-cultures or discourses, a more socio-cultural view.

Any comments on this are of great interest to me, of course. I know that people have tried different taxonomies on blogs, ranging from rough differentiation to high resolution. This is next on my agenda, but surveying the field should, the way I see it, include a description of different “entrance-points,” so I will first try out the four “streams” described here, before I connect it to the categorization of blogs.

One way to “try it out” is writing about it here, I guess. And I really advise you to click on the link at the beginning leading to “the introduction of the iRack.”

mNode

I found this incredibly scary. Maybe I’m just tired since its Friday, but mixing genres like war and commercial smoothness seems ugly in a more profound way than just telling us that they are very good at making killing tools. Tools beeing one of my interests and all...

I've been making preparations for doing the empirical part of my projects on young Norwegian bloggers. It’s a slow process, since I’m (obviously) not sure what I’m looking for. Why people blog, maybe? How this activity is a part of the social life these people lead? How the blog is not just an inverted personal diary, but also a coordinating tool in different practices? Huge and vague questions like these don’t really push you forward.

Today I will meet with my supervisor and hopefully enter the weekend with an almost anabolic self esteem (alternately feeling like a dot; dimensionless and invisible). This seems to be the normal states of the PhD student, something like a binary opposition. Or maybe everybody feels like that all the time, to quote Futurama. I’m not sure. Bite my shiny metal ass…