January « 2009 « Vicarious Conversations

January, 2009

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

Will The Twitter replace The Google?

Friday was a funny day. I was chatting to my Daughter in Toronto when she suddenly went offline. I received an email a short time later telling me the power had gone off in Toronto. Well, it was a roundabout way of saying that. But I put my search-fu to the test to find out what was going on. I mean, I have found (and bookmarked) a range of services here in Queensland so that I usually know exactly what’s going on. I have the BoM site (that’s the Bureau of Meteorology) and a range of specifc pages bookmarked. Our electricity company has a fairly regularly updated page about power outages, and you only need to enter your postcode to find out what’s wrong with the power. Surely there was similar information regarding Toronto.

Alas and alack, there doesn’t seem to be. My Google-Fu was letting me down. I spent an hour search fruitlessly for inforation regarding what was going on. An hour into the blackout and I was no wiser.

Enter Twitter. On the off chance that someone on Twitter knew something about what was going on, I searched for Toronto and power and lo, and behold, there was some information. There was even a hashtag. Already! I spent 24 hours with the search page open, and was relaying that information to my daughter via email. If we’d been more organised and thoughtful, we perhaps would have scheduled email exchanges to keep the batteries of her Blackberry fresh, just in case, but it was a more random exchange.

But I can’t help but wonder about the power of Twitter. I’ve been hanging around twitter for quite some time, on and off, mostly off, but for the last few months, since the protests against Australia’s Censorwall (aka nocleanfeed, aka the great barrier wall, aka Conroy’s stupid plan), I’ve been a wee bit more involved. I’m sill not very inclined to post updates, mostly because I’m on holidays and it would be like, ‘yay, got up’, ‘sandwiches for lunch’, ‘more wii-ing’, ‘shopping for purple stuff’. I’m sure that would get kinda inane. But still, I”ve been watching and following a few more people and am kinda getting into it, in more than just a vicarious way.

It seems to me, however, that Twitter provides much more immediate information. The search I performed in the first hour, via Google, provided two hits from 2003. It now returns over 500 hits[1]. But in that first few hours of any emergency, the information available via Twitter is way more powerful, because it is the people affected giving the information. It takes a while for the mainstream to catch up, and while Google is not quite mainstream, it feeds the mainstream news. It relies on a different set of information, that is more structured, more widely accessible. But The Twitter, well, that’s the power of the people. That’s the network at work.

The Twitter is an immediacy of information.

The Google is a coalescence of information.

Two powerful sources of information at opposite ends of the scales. What could be more wonderful than that!

Footnote: My Queenslander daughter, who insisted we put the fire on if the temperature went below 17C, survived 24 hours with no power in Toronto at -17C.

News search term: Toronto power outage [↩]

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Friday, January 16th, 2009

Data visualisations

One of the many things that fascinate me is the visualisation of data and information. I’ve been following Nathan at Flowing Data for a while. Of course, most of my interactions there have been vicarious. Until today. The challenge was to visualise[1] data of poverty rates across different states in the US. I don’t know if we have a similar measure in Aus, but it was a challenge and I’m on holidays so can play with ideas without really needing to, so I did.

Having four subsets within the data made it a bit of a challenge. I thought about using a stacked graph, but that’s too simple. There was a map of poverty as depth of colour across individual states, but I’m still getting my head around where all of the states are[2], so in some ways, maps of the US are almost meaningless to me. I’m familiar with the names of the states, but couldn’t reliably say where all of them were, with probably about half a dozen exceptions. I thought about using area, multiple layers and all sorts of things, but I finally decided on using the names of the states. If there was some way of representing the proportion of the population related to the name of the state, I was home. Then I remembered Wordle. Wordle is a visualisation based on frequency of occurrence of words, but each state only occured once in the list. I had to come up with a way of representing the proportion of people with the name of the state. Using some excel-fu, I managed to get the list in terms of repeated occurrences of each state based on the proportion[3]. Then I could put it into Wordle for it to visualise the frequency. The result is below. I’m quite impressed with it, even if it doesn’t give a really accurate picture.

Visualisation of the proportion of the US population living in Poverty

I think visualisation is going to become a very important skill in the future. I’d love to be able to develop a course in this. We touch, ever so briefly, on the concepts in Business Informatics, but with the new degree that we’re planning, I hope to get a full course on visualisation developed.

and yes, it is spelt with an S [↩]
and there’s so many states [↩]
made the proportion a whole number (multiplied by 100), then used the REPT function in excel to get that number of repeats of the state’s name [↩]

Tags: learning

Posted in thoughts | 3 Comments »

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

Rethinking my research

I’ve almost given up trying to get my head into the Vygotsky and Pedagogy book I’ve been trying to read. There’s an indistinct barrier between me and the text. I don’t seem to be able to read it in any intelligent way. There are too many demands on my thought processes. And then, I’m supposed to be on holidays, but have been trying (unsuccessfully) to catch up on some research.

I think part of the problem is that the research I have been doing has been rather superficial (at least in my mind) and doesn’t really engage with the theoretical framework I developed for my PhD (which seems oh, so long ago). My focus for the last few years has been on teaching – on bringing the concepts of learning about technology into the 21st century. As I often jokingly say to Luke: we’re on the cutting edge of six months ago[1]. The course we developed – Business Informatics, really is a different approach to learning and teaching information systems/technology. We’ve moved beyond the ‘this is a computer, this in an information system, this is a database, this is how you make them’ to a course that essentially says ‘here is the world we are making, how will you make sense of it?’

But I do miss the research I was doing. I’ve been trying to entice another colleague into writing more about Vygotsky, but to date, it has not been high on his priorities. I keep pushing that research into the background, waiting for some feedback, hoping to get some collaboration going, which is ironic, seeing I’m supposed to be a collaboration expert.

But, I decided this morning to go back to the original source, that is, my thesis, particularly the theoretical chapter and try to get back into that headspace. I started reading it and was really struck by the first paragraph of the chapter. I’ve paraphrased it slightly, actually it’s more recontextualised as a statement of the research I want to do, what I want to focus on, where everything I’m interested in comes together.

My research investigates interactions between and among humans and between artefacts and humans as these are central features of mediated learning and the effective mediation between individuals by electronic tools. This is essential to the process of appropriating socially constituted, but electronically mediated instruction. Specifically, individuals are held to construct their own knowledge separately or as a part of social processes (Holman et al., 1997, Grossen, 2000). Interaction potentially is held to mediate this construction by both enabling and constraining these processes. I examine the complex relationship among humans, learning, technology and content to understand the pedagogic scope and potential of learning environments. This requires specific attention to both discussions of interaction between humans as mediated by electronic media and its relation to learning, and to those technologies that mediate between individuals in social processes of learning, which collectively constitutes the means of mediating interaction.

The original focus of that paragraph was online learning environments, but I believe that all learning now is technologically mediated, whether we believe that technology is complex, as in a computer, or more simple, as in a classroom[2]. I’m sensing a vague connection between this approach to technology and the ways in which certain current debates are being framed. I need to rethink some of this.

I have a link to someone who said something similar somewhere, but I have no idea now who originally said that [↩]
within this framework, a classroom is a technology, as is a pencil, a book and even the language we use [↩]

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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Filters and learning

I’ve been think about some of the arguments for the proposed changes to access of information in Australia, aka the ‘clean’ feed. I’m not sure what to call it because there has been debate, serious debate, about terminology.

But the thing that’s tweaking me at the moment is the book I’m reading[1] – Vygotsky and Pedagogy (Daniels, 2001). There is something in the Vygotskian tradition that needs to be applied to the whole shenanigans being proposed. The nature of tools and mediation that Vygotsky used – the non-deterministic account in which mediators serve as the means by which the individual acts upon and is acted upon by social, cultural and historical factors – would really help me analyse what’s going on – if I could just get my head back in that space.

Of course, I’m supposed to be reading this book to finish my paper on the adult extension of Vygotsky’s work which goes something like this:

Children learn with the help of a more able partner (be that parent, teacher or peer). In simplistic terms, Vygotsky posited that the Zone of Proximal Development was the difference between what a child can do unassisted and what they are able to achieve with help. This is, in some ways, a better developmental indicator than simply assessing what a child can do at a given point (which is how we traditionally measure development).

In my work with adult learners, there is a similar process going on, but there are differences. I often see Vygotsky’s work applied directly to adults with no change to account for any difference between adults and children. What I find, though, is that adults are generally able to see that they don’t know something and take action to rectify that. I called this the Zone of Learning Capability in my thesis. It’s almost equivalent to the Zone of Proximal Development but takes into account the differences between an immature learner and a mature learner (although those terms may be problematic).

In a sense then, mature learners (or adults) generally (but not always) undertake activities to assist in their understanding of their world. This is where the Internet is so powerful. We can search and take steps to rectify what we don’t know. We can ask Twitter, Jeeves and thousands of other sites. We are here to learn.

But what has this to do with the filters? Well, I’m fairly sure they won’t work. Most of the people I know are fairly sure they won’t work. And if we’re unsure, we can ask. We don’t pretend we know and go along blythely assuming that we understand when we don’t. We openly discuss the differences in our positions. We may shift our positions depending on any number of new items of information. We are, in a sense, adult learners – mature learners, if you will.

Which brings me to my point: I don’t think Conroy[2] is a mature learner. He won’t accept other possible interpretations or any other information new or otherwise. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many of our politicians, the world over, are not mature learners[3]. There are few people in this debate (at least on one side of the debate) who are what I would call mature learners. The whole debate is being mediated through a particular lens, a way of seeing the world through the perception of immature learners.

The mediator in the debate can almost be essentialised to how we actually view the internet. The language being used almost denies that there is anything of value in the whole series of tubes. Perhaps it’s that analogy that is working against us. Tubes are relatively easy to block and unblock. Of course, it must be simple to alter the flow, it’s like a tap! If the internet is a series of tubes, then the filter is a tap, one which may be turned on or off at will and the flow regulated.

Now there’s a problem we need to work on. What language do we use to state our position?

Reference: Daniels, H, 2001, Vygotsky and Pedagogy, RoutledgeFalmer, London.

which I’ve been reading for ages and never quite finished [↩]
or Our Dear Friend Clive Hamilton – where has he been hiding? [↩]
see if you can pick the few that are [↩]

Tags: censorship, knowledge, learning, nocleanfeed

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Sunday, January 11th, 2009

The hashtag dilemma

I was looking around for one of my text books today (I didn’t find it), but I did come across Weinberger’s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a unified theory of the web. I opened it and rechecked the contents. The last chapter is called Hope. I started reading. It struck me that some of these words were important.

The Web isn’t entering the realm of our thoughts directly as an idea; it’s getting there as a technology. Ever since Marshall McLuhan told us that the medium is the message, we’re used to that: we adopt a technology and it alters the way we think just as much as an explicit philosophical credo or manifesto can. McLuhan also told us why that happens: technologies are extensions of our own bodies. (Source)

So what does this have to do with the hashtag dilemma? Whether we use #nocleanfeed or #nocensorship or #nonetcensorship, each of these, like the web, is an extension of ourselves. Some of us have invested our thoughts, our arguments, our concerns into particular frames. Some of us wore them with some discomfort. Some of us want to change them to incorporate the whole philosophical issue.

I don’t really want to buy into the argument of which is right and why. All of us in this debate are here because we believe that the web, the internet, in whatever form we use, in whatever way we use it, is an extension of ourselves. We feel ourselves being threatened, feel that some part of ourselves will be lost through ineptitude.

I’m not sure of the source of this image (allegedly an out take of the Dark Knight), but this is the ineptitude. I think we all know who Bruce is in this script!

Found on the internet

We are all small pieces and we are loosely joined. We should be able to find some aggregator, some technology that links us, perhaps even hyperlinks us into a web of concern that can bring in all the layers of meaning, all the fames.

Personally, I think of all the prongs we are using, #nocleanfeed is the pointy bit, the bit that wedges in and opens up room for all the other issues, because they’re there. They are important.

Tags: censorship, nocleanfeed

Posted in Ramblings | No Comments »