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Virtual Canuck

Collectives, Borgs and Hive Mind

Written by terrya

Jon Dron and I have been writing a book chapter on our “Taxonomy of the Many” – groups. networks and collectives. In the process we’ve been thinking (again) about the challenge of the term collective to our individual sense of unique self. We continue to see applications evolve where data mining and aggregation of large numbers of Net activities, opinions, artifact organization and postings yields very interesting and useful results that can be used to guide decision making and increase effectiveness of Net activity for individual, group and network benefit.

But there is something inherently threatening about the loss of individuality associated with the hive mind and of course amplified when human choice to participate is eliminated as in “Resistance is Futile”. Searching further (using the hive optimized Google search tool ) I found a very interesting article Speculations on Hive Minds as a Posthuman State by Anders Sandberg. In the article Sandberg discusses various type of borg like entities including social insects, individual cells in an organism or component parts of a complex organ such as the human brain. Sandberg goes on to discuss the nature and psychology, weaknesses and strengths of these borganisms.

While interesting, Sandberg’s analysis assumes a coercive and all consuming state of borganism, where the benefits of borganism are available only to those who have given up their individualism. I see collective activity in a more tool like fashion where I exert my individual agency to exploit an affordance provided by collective tools. I realize that my activities on the Net are constantly being mined and aggregated. But I don’t think this is too much more loss of control than I give to a traffic engineer or a radio station traffic reporter counting the number of vehicles using an intersection at any given moment. Knowledge of the collective activity helps me make individual decisions.

Of course the collective may make mistakes and we see evidence of group think, erroneous meme proliferation and illegal extraction of individual and identifiable activity from collective activities, but misuse and inefficiencies accompany all forms of human organization. One must judge the value of the tool use, as compared to these costs.

Sandberg references a 1999 article Metasystem Transition by Turchin and Joslyn in which they describe the emergence of metasystems that coordinate and control lower level activities. They show that these higher control systems have developed from control of movement, through control of individual thinking to emergence of human culture. Again, I don’t like the coercive connotation of the work control, but I do acknowledge that as life has evolved to more complex entities, meta systems are necessary for survival.

But these are tools, not mindsets. even though, as Marshall McLuhan noted “We make our tools and then our tools make us“. We need practice and time to evolve tool use in ways that allow us to optimize our indiviudal selves in a complex and collective universe. Resistance may be futile, but in the resistance we recreate the technologies to meet our individual and social needs.

collective

Time, Ice and CNIE

Written by terrya
2 Comments

I spent a few learning filled days last week at the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education Conference in Banff. This was the first conference of the new organization created from the merger of the Association For Media and Technology in Education and the Canadian Association for Distance Education. I suggested at the final plenary session that presenters upload their slides to Slideshare using the tag CNIE2008, (or just CNIE) and many have.
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Distance Education, IRRODL

Back Channel Contention

Written by terrya
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Bud’s Deihl’ posted an interesting (and flattering) post in response to my web conferenced seminar delivered last week to the EduCause NLI via Adobe Connect.

In the post Bud reflects on the advantages and challenges of the back text channel available to the audience in this type of distributed, real time presentation format. Bud wonders if we need a new form of net etiquette to keep us on track, or at least communicating civilly, when more than one channel is available to a group. Bud also links to a reflective post by Gord Campbell in which he apologetically describes the “roasting” of a not too effective key note speaker, in F2F real time, through Twitter dialog among the audience.

Two issues come to mind. The first is the challenge of continuous partial attention. This may be related to your generation and certainly to your exposure to various modes of communication, but I know from my own experience, that I can productively attend to a talk, while scanning my email or looking up a reference to a site noted by the speaker. If things get very interesting, I flip my focus back to the talk. But that doesn’t mean that I am very good at composing, debating, challenging or rebutting while really paying sufficient attention to the speaker to achieve maximum benefit. Of course if I am only expending partial attention, I should also be satisfied with only partial return on knowledge gain from the talk. So, rather than etiquette rules, we need to understand our own capacity for multi tasking and use different numbers of channels depending on the cognitive load of the activity, of the channel(s) and the amount we are willing to attend and thus benefit.

I found myself paying only VERY partial attention to the text window as things scrolled by during the NLI presentation. There was a few hundred attendees and probably 90+ % of my attention was directed to my presentation and the slides that accompanied it. Fortunately, the session was very aptly facilitated and questions and comments were filtered and presented to me by a moderator during pauses in the presentation. This extra support though isn’t available when I do my regular distributed teaching using Elluminate in the Masters program at Athabasca. There I try to attend to multiple channels including text chat (though fortunately SKYPE and Twitter) conversations that may be taking place among the students are not shared with the teacher!! I find that after 2 hours of this type of teaching that I am much more tired than I am when I teach in classroom contexts- but maybe I’m just getting older! I think I will experiment this next term by assigning one student to be the “text wrangler” to:

  • make sure I don’t miss relevant comments or questions
  • type in and correct URLs as noted or provided by myself and others during the class
  • respond to simple technical issues

Of course this all means that the designated ‘wrangler’ has to further spread their attention, but it may be justified by the benefits to the class as a whole.

The second issue relates to issues of respectful attention. My wife is always on at me for multitasking my attention by reading, listening to the radio or otherwise paying less attention to her (or others) at meals than she deems appropriate. On the one hand the partial attention provides clear benefit. Reading cereal boxes in French is the way most of us English Canadians gain our greatest exposure to written French! On the other hand, most of us have heard the rants from teachers and business colleagues about the irritation of seeing students at their mobile devices during lectures or business colleagues on their Crackberries, during meetings.

My own cut, is to advise those who feel deprived of 100% attention, to just get over it! I don’t feel compelled to repeat things missed the first time from those paying less than sufficient attention, but I respect that person’s right to decide for themselves how much attention to give to my presentation. Of course the line is drawn when partial attention taking forces others to loose part of theirs (as when the cell phone rings, or one starts verbally chatting so as to distract those attending to the speaker).

New etiquette will and is evolving, but I think the era of 100% attention, 100% of the time to teachers, preachers and spouses may have ended (if it ever existed – lets not discount pre technological day dreaming!)

Distance Education

Pan-Canadian Research Agenda

Written by terrya
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A couple of years ago Tim Buell and I wrote a paper entitled Towards a Pan -Canadian E-Learning Research Agenda.

This literature review was designed to answer  two foundational questions:

1.    What constitutes a “research agenda, generally;” and

2.    What is the current state of the literature surrounding research agendas in e-learning generally, and in Canada, specifically.

We had hoped to move to a next phase of surveying and meeting researchers, teachers , administrators, industry reps and policy makers to actually create this agenda. I had attempted to build partnership with Canada Council on Learning to undertake this task, but didn’t get anywhere.

In discussion with George Siemens we thought that the process should be revived. Canada continues with a complete lack of a national agenda to develop, research and exploite the power of e-learning. Many countries recognize that lifelong learning afforded by e-learning provides an empowering tool to address a wide variety of social, economic and individual needs. Our absence of planning, much less action, remains a national shame and huge opportunity lost.

Distance Education, My Work

Athabasca's Technology Enhanced Learning Research Institute

Written by terrya

We are FINALLY recruiting for a director for the about to be launched TELRI . The Institute is designed to fund chairs, postdocs, research assistants and of course major research programs at Athabasca. TELRI has selected three initial research themes:

  • mobile learning
  • socially enhanced distance learning
  • adaptivity and personalization

We have been creating research agendas for each theme in prepation for a expert think tank to be held after the CNIE conference in May.

I hope readers of this blog with interest and expertise in this area and especially those qualified for the Director’s position will be in touch.

Terry

Distance Education, My Work

More Collective connections

Written by terrya

My friend Jon Dron has finally nailed his own (and no doubt others) ideas about the collective nature of Wikipedia. His recent post notes:

  • the individual actions that create most of the articles,
  • the groups of administrative types who manage the overall infrastructure and set in place the algorithms that manage the look, feel and performance of the system
  • the networks of mostly regular users responsible for maintenance and collaborative development of the articles and finally the way we mine
  • the wiki as a collective resource.

I realize that some folks think this task of dividing and allocating ideas into categories is an arbitrary function that just gives rise to arguments (see for example Dave Snowden’s diatribe and his focus on ‘crews’.)

However I think our ‘Taxonomy of the Many’ classification system has value and defend it and classification systems in general in the rest of this post.
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collective, Distance Education