Knowledging across life’s curriculum

Quantifacts

Reading across the web, gleaning information and surfing on various waves of information, you come across snippets of information that ring true, invite reflection, but are not necessarily connected t…

Blogjects…hmm!!!

Lately I’ve been testing new (to me) feed readers … (BlogBridge, Awasu, and the newest version of FeedReader(3)); an activity that sent me back to my neglected collection of feeds. I miss having the time to read and comment, read and blog, blog and talk with my virtual colleagues and critics. Obviously I read and found this:

On Anne Gallaway’s blog (Purse Lip and Square Jaw), there is an entry on the subject of “blogjects”. Not really on `blogjects’ but she takes the word/concept to task. What are blogjects? A videocast and a picture can help make sense of what these are.

Essentially, the term is meant to represent objects with certain built in capabilities to interact with the environment; designed to collect information and feed it back to the user. Here they speak of GPS mapping and googling attached to : i.e. a camera.
In what they call the Internet of things (seen as post web 2.0), objects are anthropomorphised, they literally ‘talk back’.

The Internet of Things is the underpinnings for a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators in helping us shape our individual social practices towards the goal of creating a more livable, habitable and sustainable world. “Blogjects” — or objects that blog — captures the potential of networked Things to inform us, create visualizations, represent to us aspects of our world that were previously illegible or only accessible by specialist.

As Anne Galloway remarks, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network theory (ANT) is certainly the theory that seems to best represent such actants; the term Latour used to signify people and/or object agency. Actant as a term collapses both into one: no more hierarchy, instead both have equal powers of shaping but they remain separate yet interconnected.

ANT is not focused on the objects says Anne Gallaway, but instead Latour foregrounds the links or relationships these make possible (the network they map out). I agree with Anne’s reading, in that it’s the interdependant connectivity made possible by the translations of actants, that lead to versions of the social. Latour in his latest book mentions there is no social a priori, it is constructed through translations, mapped out from the center out, according to the actants that create the signifying network organised around a controversy/issue/event. (Reviews here).

Instead the notion of blogject seems to collapse person-machine into one, in more of a cyborg type of entity, than a Latourian actant which retains more of its separate yet interconnected reality. The blogject is anthropomorphised, it “thinks” and “communicates”; while the cybord is a human that is machine like. Blogjects seem to fit nicely in Donna Haraway’s cyborg world: “Haraway’s ideal “cyborg world” consists of people living together, unafraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines.” The kinship is forgotten for a fetishised object as Anne remarked.
I too object to the Internet of things being seen as “a renaissance of objects”. Objects have always informed and participated in significant ways in our world. The digital object is just another “species”. (Knorr Cetina also has much to say on this). How I read blogjects (and surface reading it is at this point) and the explanation provided is as follows: they carry their own DNA (to carry through with the anthropomorphism), reveal traces of human/object activity, while feeding back contextual information that is otherwise hidden, accessible only to experts in the past or invisible because of our human limitations.

The tools/objects can help us see more of the context, the history, and even the background and as such extend our information source and perhaps enhance cognitive potential. But what I or You do with what you now have access to and are able to see can be something completely other than connecting to humans in any significant way or creating “sustainable and habitable worlds”. That’s a big technological leap of faith.

What blogjects seem to represent well are various traces of our human/object activities, what they call ‘cataloguing the weak signals” (see slides of presentation).This newer ‘legibility” of traces of what use to be opaque or invisible also implies new types of literacies; a literacy of diverse codes, genres and symbols. It also implies more demands on our already stretched to max attention. Without some purpose, some type of practical use, this is just one other type of information, in an already saturated information world.

As an ordinary user, a citizen doing my thing, I can choose to tune out, or never tune in in any significant way, watching a trend go by without taking part in it. In business certainly. In research, and specialized uses, the many types of mapping made possible by technology is quite useful. (See DontClick.it and see the mouse traces of past users). In education? perhaps, once schools ramp up to systematically teach information-media literacies across the board.
And furthermore, if blogjects don’t partake in actual blogging, that is publishing person generated text we can read, instead of bouncing snippets of all kinds of data, than a more apt term could be “datajects” (sounds too much like reject) or “infojects” or even “mediajects”. What do you think?

Latour’s “Reassembling the Social”- 2 Reviews

Jeremy Price pointed me to Ulises Mejias’ review of Bruno Latour’s latest book (2005) Reassembling the Social. Given my interest in Actor Network Theory or ANT, I was curious to see how the book was received. I googled the title and review to see if there were other write-ups on the book. I found Collin Brooks review on his blog. These two reviews are written through the lens of different interests. Ulises Meijias from an educational technology view and Collin Brooks from a literary view.

The central theme of these postings look into Latour’s redefinition of the social. Latour sees the ’social’ not as a static configuration but as an aggregation of actors and objects (that use to be subsumed under the word ‘actant’ but I didn’t see the word mentionned) interconnected around a controversy. The social is not something a priori but something that is ‘constructed’ from the connections actors establish between people and objects, which redefine and reshape the social according to a situation. Latour’s definition is processual in that it is deployed around shared stakes that organize the network. [This is very similar to Engestrom's understanding, discussed earlier]. The mapping is from the center out, from the issue out. The three steps identified are : deployment, stabilization and composition. I need to read the book to comment further here.

Collin Brooks elaborates on the difference between intermediaries and mediators. Intermediaries are conduits, supports that transport or transmit from one point to another (neutral ?); they connect. Mediators on the other hand, have the potential to change what passes through them. He quotes: “Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (p.39). (what does he list as mediators? language, technologies, etc) It seems Latour is concluding sociology is not a sociology of the social but one of associations. Groups are thus redifined as performative : existing through their definitions, not a priori. Objects are participants “interactants”. Latour moves away from facts and redifines these as concerns, making room for their subjective construction. Finally the social is a provisional composite assemblage.

Ulises makes inferences about social software, and wonders if code is taking over the social, but concludes it is “a delegation of agency, not a surrender”. With a quote from Latour, he concludes technologies trace the social, making visible what was once virtual. What follows about technology is to me not so clear. I wonder if technology collapsed as a homogenous ‘entity’ is presented as a constitutive and creative tool or a conduit for connections (mediator or intermediary?). I’m not clear on this part. If the social is constituted from its parts working together, then technology (which ever type) is part of the constitution and organizing of the social. It supports, defines and shapes it. It makes possible and constrains according to its properties alongside how it is used. The term technology needs unpacking the same way the term social is being reconfigured and reconceptualized from the inside out.

Finally I’d like to say that a such a ‘distributed constructivist approach’ situates actors in environments of artifacts and other actors and organizes them around shared ‘concerns’. What tugs at my mind are the residues from past processes. What happens to what is created by aggregates of actors and their tools? How do they inform (how do they fit in the theory) the moving reconfiguring picture of the social? Processes eventually lead to products and structures. Do these new products products and structures become newer artifacts that are called into the picture later on? How does the theory treat what remains (a core, a ‘noyau”)? I need to read how he treats “products” “structures” and “uses” in a theory of movement like his. Very postmodernistic, even if he would contest such a notion given the fact we were never modern!

I also wonder how Latour’s controversy emanating social fits with the object centered sociality understanding of Karin Knorr Cetina? Both attend to object-relations or connections to objects. The latter is interested in objects as the organizing feature of rapprochements; while Latour sees discursive concerns as organizing forces of actors and objects. Much more reading and pondering is needed here. Thank you to both Collin Brooks and Ulises Mejias for this food for thought.

Web 2.0 and Connectivism

This is an older posting that was in my draft folder. Some of what I present here elaborates on more brief entries of past months.
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I first saw the podcast link on one of my classmates blogs. I took the time to listen to the 35 minute audio-visual presentation which raised a number of questions. To make sure I went back and reread the main paper and other blog entries. George Siemens’ theory of connectivism is, in my opinion repleat with potential, but certain aspects of his discourse raise questions. Some of his theorizing present a number of oversimplifications and what I consider to be contradictions, or perhaps the wrong choice of words and metaphors. I also felt his views were quite techno-deterministic when I listened to the podcast and this sent me back to reading his papers. Unfortunately rereading didn’t disconfirm my opinion.

Siemens, G. (2005) Connectivism : Rethinking learning in a digital age. Podcast October 19, 2005. University of Manitoba. Retrieved October 24, 2005

George Siemens builds on his Connectivism theory, interpreting today’s technological changes as they conflict with what is still the reality of classrooms and organizations. His main concerns relate to what he calls the wrong focus, content instead of conduit or pipe. What Marshal McLuhan coined wrongly according to some: the medium IS the message.

I did appreciate the different visual models presented (complex, complicated, chaos and simple) and learning domains (accretion, transmission, acquisition, emergence) but viewing these as an evolutionary model is in my opinion inaccurate. There is a strong bias to position the Connectivism model (accretion) at the top or front of the evolutionary hierarchy or movement based on the logic of change from simple to complex.

Where I think it falls short is where it still presents the one best model. I do believe it would be more profitable to see an accretion model not as a replacement model, but one amongst others who continue to be useful according to context and circumstance. For example to take the most taboo perspective in higher education today, Behaviourism is still quite useful. You don’t learn the game of football, dance classical ballet, learn typing or accounting for example by constructing your own version of it, or by discovery, you learn rules, formulas or repeat movements untill you get it. Accretion is not a useful notion to understand these.

His notion of pattern recognition must follow an ability to master certain types of knowledge before one can piece these together in a pattern, emphasizing learning tasks that pre-date pattern recognition.
In slide #18 Siemens presents the problem of ‘amateur contributions’ as an information quality control problem. Aside from limiting access to contributors with gatekeepers, new roles in information management will be needed. Collective filtering and revising (see previous posting), will need more refinement. There is no all encompassing solution other than building discerning skills in readers, and yes using your resource network as orienting and validating mechanisms.

In this same slide he also speaks of the Vacuum or Echo effect of filtering out what we don’t want to read or see or hear, and only seeing what reflects our point of view. Both Andrew Keen and Nicolas Carr are of similar opinion on this one.
Slide 19: Start with process end with content, is an incomplete view of how knowledge should be structured for learning. The processual approach he advocates provides a useful recommendation to balance pedagogy that is too content driven. However, process without the structure of content to inform it, inadequately represents the multiplicity of elements that mediate and shape process, all needing attention. This is an oversimplification.

Finally, the whole concept is wrapped in a technological understanding of learning to an extent that it overrides a more nuanced view of learning. Techno immersed individuals are not a global reality. This is an educated white collar view of the world. Learning continues to happen in places where knowledge artefacts are primarily mediated by people in F2F encounters. Revisions may be necessary to a theory of distributed learning that I continue tol believe has potential once it is more nuanced.