Imagined worlds

Here's my last post reviewing the new publication 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures'.

When we started out writing our chapter on cybercultures, Helen Keegan and I didn't know that it would eventually end up being the final chapter in the book. We first hit on the idea for the chapter while we were talking together at Online Educa - a conference held at the end of every year in Berlin. Because Helen lives in Manchester and I live in Plymouth, the best solution for our collaborative writing turned out to be Google Docs. It worked superbly. We wrote in different colours so we could track who was doing what, and eventually, the chapter was completed. We are very pleased with the result. Entitled 'Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures', chapter 17 focuses on the experiences found in technology mediated communication within virtual environments and we attempt to identify and explain some of the emerging practices, behaviours and self-representations. We pay particular attention to the 'imagined' elements of social networking services and multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), and specifically on relationships:

It is often the fantasy component and the freedom to let one's imagination run riot that first attracts adherents. Imagined worlds facilitate a number of experiences that could never be conceived as possible in the real world, but they also mediate familiar experiences. One familiar feature of the human experience - friendship - is increasingly mediated through new technologies and social spaces. For some, even this fundamental human experience may need to be reconceptualized (p 262).

We go on to discuss a number of experiences such as 'virtual promiscuity', weak and strong social ties, the clash of old and new media and the implications on formal learning, and discuss the breaches in cultural boundaries that have been caused through liberalized social media such as YouTube ('Star Wars Kid' for example) and Facebook. We also compare the popular digital clan cultures of Flickrites and Facebookers. We conclude with a discussion on how shifting perceptions of privacy, identity and ownership as well as friendship are being redefined due to the imagined worlds we inhabit for increasing proportions of our time.

Give PLEs a chance

This is my penultimate post in the series reviewing the new book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures'. This post features Graham Attwell's chapter on the social impact of personal learning environments (PLEs). Graham, as director of the Wales based independent research agency Pontydysgu (Bridge to Learning) is deeply embroiled in the study of emerging learning technologies. In his chapter, he concentrates on learning in the workplace, and predicts that PLEs will have:

a profound effect in systems for teaching and learning, on pedagogic approaches to learning, and on knowledge development and sharing (p 120).

Graham Attwell shows how industrial models of education and training fail to address the needs of contemporary society, and argues that it is the PLE concept, with all its associated content generation and sharing tools, that will provide solutions. He argues that most learning takes place informally outside the boundaries of traditional school environment:

Learning is taking place through engagement in social networking, both by young people of school age and by older people in work. Furthermore, learning takes place in multiple contexts, in work, in the community, and in the home as well as in the school, yet our schooling systems remain wedded to attainment against a narrow curriculum of formal knowledge. Informal learning is hardly acknowledged, less still fostered and facilitated (p 125-6).

Attwell makes some compelling arguments for change in the school system, calling on teachers to revisit the concept of learning. For him, the PLE is the weapon of choice for those who want to survive and thrive in the shifting sands of a challenging and volatile world of work. It's another cracking read for all those who are interested in how learning technologies, education and training will prosper in the coming decade.

(Image source: replacement-software.co.uk)

The end of civilization? Revoicing txt

I borrowed the title for this blog post from an article by an old friend and colleague of mine, Victoria Carrington, who is sadly no longer with us (she returned to Australia, see). Victoria introduced the term 'squeeze text' or 'txt' to describe the respellings that have emerged due to short message services where 160 characters or less prompt abbreviations and other contrivances. Words and phrases such as gr8, cu2moro and l8r, (a short glossary is available) have caused consternation amongst purists of grammar and spelling, hence the 'end of civilisation' imprecation. Such respellings may however be simply evidence of a continuing process of evolution for the English language. In the new volume 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', a chapter written by Tim Shortis explores this notion in greater detail. Tim considers the way texting is challenging the orthodoxy of spelling, and shows that there are...

...textual pressures that act on users' choices. ICT and the Internet have not so much changed spelling as reregulated what counts as spelling, and in doing so, there is a challenge to the official educational discourses of literacy, and particularly as they apply to literacy (p 225).

Tim is very vocal in his belief that text respelling is nothing new, although the technology being used to convey the messages is. The 'vernacular orthographies' - slang and reduced spellings used in txt messages - have influences, he says, which go beyond the limited 160 characters, embracing a number of other influences including trade names and popular culture. This is a well written and challenging chapter, and I suspect the purists amongst us who baulk against the idea of txters creating their own new spellings of words, will probably be in no position to complain in 30-40 years time when 'Generation Y' have become the captains of industry, head teachers and military commanders, and we have all joined the ranks of the retired.

(picture source: georgevanantwerp.com)

The embodied self

Continuing with my post-publication commentary on my new book, the edited volume entitled: 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', today I feature Chapter 5 by Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold: 'Identity in Cyberspace'. I remember when I read the first draft of this chapter, thinking, wow - this has a real incisiveness about it. Hugh and Jill have done a very thorough job exploring the multiple virtual worlds we find ourselves drawn into, such as Facebook (for the 'flat' representations of self) or Second Life (where our avatars are 3D and mobile). They are very much concerned with the psychology behind the way we re-create ourselves when we venture into these imagined worlds. They write:

Our own research has shown that the psychology of identity and self presentation on the Web is best understood in terms of how people draw on those same signifiers of who and what we are as are used elsewhere: use of photos, claims made of achievements, hobbies, geographical origins, etc. We argue that when people enter into cyberspace they bring with them expectations, challenges, and vulnerabilities from every day life experience and the experience of managing an identity in various circumstances, and here was just another mode (or exciting new theatre) to explore and to play out being oneself (p 58).

Miller and Arnold are here arguing that the self we project into cyberspace has all the components of our real life self, but that there is the potential for fantastic or even outlandish new representations of that self, within the affordances of the virtual environment. This of course, implies that all of the outworkings of people's avatars (the gender bending, species swapping, age reassignment, fantasy representations and so on) lay inert within the person's psyche, and are enlivened (or made possible) within say, Second Life as the environment gives them licence and utility. I would be interested to hear people's views on this interesting perspective (do you agree with it?), and how such ideas might be applied to learning, whether formal or informal....

A little bit of culture

I am really pleased that I was able to finish off the final editing and proof reading for the new book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures' which has now gone to press. A whole host of people have contributed toward the 17 chapters in the volume. The publishers, Information Age, who are based in the USA, Greenwich, Connecticut, are already publicising it on their website, and I have seen some of the cover artwork, so publication is imminent. Here's the blurb (wot I wrote meself):

As the title indicates, this book highlights the shifting and emergent features that represent life online, specifically in and around the territory of e-learning. Cybercultures in themselves are complex conglomerations of ideas, philosophies, concepts, and theories, some of which are fiercely contradictory. As a construct, "cyberculture" is a result of sustained attempts by diverse groups of people to make sense of multifarious activities, linguistic codes, and practices in complicated and ever-changing settings. It is an impossibly convoluted field. Any valid understanding of cyberculture can only be gained from living within it, and as Bell suggests, it is "made up of people, machines and stories in everyday life." Although this book contains a mix of perspectives, as the chapters progress, readers should detect some common threads. Technology-mediated activities are featured throughout, each evoking its particular cultural nuances and, as Derrick de Kerckhove (1997) has eloquently argued, technology acts as the skin of culture. All the authors are passionate about their subjects, every one engages critically with his or her topics, and each is fully committed to the belief that e-learning is a vitally important component in the future of education. All of the authors believe that digital learning environments will contribute massively to the success of the information society we now inhabit. Each is intent on exploration of the touchstone of "any time, any place" learning where temporal and spatial contexts cease to become barriers to learning, and where the boundaries are blurring between the formal and informal.

And here's a taste of the contents:

Foreword, Howard Rheingold. Introduction, Steve Wheeler. PART I: DIGITAL SUBCULTURES. Learning in Collaborative Spaces: Encouraging a Culture of Sharing, Steve Wheeler. Mobile Subcultures, John Traxler. Podcasting: A Listening Culture, Palitha Edirisingha. The Emergence of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Learning Cultures, Mark A. M. Kramer. PART II: ROLES AND IDENTITIES. Identity in Cyberspace, Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold. Digital Tribes, Virtual Clans, Steve Wheeler. Gaming and the Network Generation, Nicola Whitton. Creating an Online Course Generational Community, Leon James. The Social Impact of Personal Learning Environments, Graham Attwell. PART III: CYBER PERSPECTIVES. Emerging Online Practices: An Endo-Aesthetic Approach to E-tutoring and E-learning, Viv Tucker. Cyberculture and Poststructural Approaches, Ken Gale. Cyborg Theory and Learning, Vasi van Deventer. Transfer Through Learning Flexibility and Hypertextuality, Gorg Mallia. PART IV: NARRATIVES AND CASE STUDIES. Cybercrime in Society, Steven Furnell. Language Evolution in Txting Environments, Tim Shortis. The Cultural Impact of E-learning and Intranets on Corporate Employees, David Guralnick and Deb Larson. Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures, Steve Wheeler and Helen Keegan. Author Biographies. Index.

...Connected Cultures

This is the fourth and final part of the Introduction for the forthcoming book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', which will be published later this year. It is an edited volume with contributions from a number of leading practitioners and thinkers in the field. The Foreword is by Howard Rheingold.

In the final section of this volume, Part 4, we present four case studies drawn from contrasting training and learning cultures, examining the cultures of corporate e-learning, cybercriminality, language evolution and social networking.

David Guralnick and Deb Larson represent the corporate training sector view in chapter 14. They write from the perspective of the company employee and explore the cultural basis of corporate e-learning. Guralnick and Larson describe the current state of employee cyberculture and propose that companies would be far better off using a strategic design approach to e-learning and corporate intranets, one based on helping employees and engaging them in their work. By doing so, companies will be able to integrate technology into employees' work lives in a way that improves their performance and boosts their morale and commitment.

Steven Furnell’s chapter ‘Cybercrime in Society’ presents a disturbing account of the current risks and threats to e-learners, and society in general from a number of criminal activities, including malware (viruses), hacking, and identity theft. There is a suggestion throughout that a criminal culture exists alongside other cultures within online life, waiting for the opportunity to transgress by exploiting network weaknesses. Through this chapter, Furnell provides a timely wake-up call for any user of the Internet who believes themselves to be safe, and suggests ways in which we can all protect ourselves from the more unsavoury elements of the online culture.

The penultimate chapter by Tim Shortis offers an explanatory framework for the re-spellings associated with new technology text formats such as email, internet chat, SMS text messaging and instant messaging. He considers some of the features and patterns of British adolescents’ uses of such writing and technology enabled semiotics. Shortis argues that technology has encouraged an extended set of orthographies which users draw upon to inflect their purposes and project their identities. He holds that such re-spelling is not a new phenomenon. Shortis goes on to consider the contextual pressures which act on users’ choices and argues that technology has re-regulated what counts as spelling, which challenges the official educational discourses of literacy, particularly where they apply to orthography.

The final chapter in this volume is entitled ‘Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures’. It was written as a collaborative project between Steve Wheeler and Helen Keegan who used Google docs to write together across the distance. In this chapter they present perspectives on cyber cultures as ‘imagined worlds’ in education and focus on how emerging online social spaces impact upon individual perceptions and practices. Wheeler and Keegan pay particular attention to the social networking and multi-user virtual environment cultures, where imagination is unleashed, but where friendship can be superficial. They focus upon old and new media cultures and the shift in perception over issues such as ownership, intellectual property, copyright, personal identity and privacy. The chapter examines cultural values such as privacy, identity and ownership and highlight two 'digital clan' cultures – FaceBookers and Flickrites. They analyse some similarities and differences in an attempt to explore how tribal cultures develop around and through imagined worlds.

Such a spectrum of perspectives on cyberculture must hold something for everyone. It is our hope that readers will find the ideas contained within the book challenging and inspiring. Ultimately, we hope that teachers and lecturers and indeed all those involved in education will be able to take at least some of these ideas and apply them to their own professional practice. The result, we trust, will be a better understanding of the practices and processes that are inherent in online life, and that this better understanding will ultimately encourage better teaching and learning.

Emerging Minds...

Here's the third part of the Introduction for the forthcoming book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', to be published later in the year:

Part 3, entitled Cyber Perspectives, opens up the debate about cyberculture through a number of contrasting views and philosophical positions.

In Chapter 10, entitled ‘Emerging Online Practices’ Viv Tucker draws upon her experience as an online tutor, to take a post-structural philosophical feminist position as she describes her approach to online postgraduate initial teacher training. She introduces a model that critically resists the limitations of the instrumental approach and argues instead for a teaching and learning model where contemporary post-structural theory can radically inform emerging online practices.

Ken Gale takes a post structural perspective as he examines cyberculture in the context of online learning. Gale’s chapter draws on postmodern philosophies in order to secure a deeper understanding of cybercultures through their use of various deconstructive strategies. He argues that nomadic inquiry can nurture ever changing structures of multiplicity and interconnectedness in online environments. His chapter explores a number of possible ‘folds and intersections’ between post-structural philosophies and digital learning practices. Gale proposes that new technologies can create many new learning opportunities that bridge the space between the institution and enquiring mind.

Vasi van Deventer’s chapter is entitled ‘Cyborg Theory and Learning’. In this pivotal chapter, he describes the evolution of the human cyborg. He draws on the history, theory and philosophy to argue that theorists are correct when they assert that we are a lot further down the road to becoming cyborgs than we may think. Van Deventer discusses the implications for education and concludes that human minds have an adaptability and plasticity, enabling students to interface with any technology that is useful to their purpose. He also argues that these students actually become ‘learning cyborgs’, developing a symbiotic relationship with technology that blurs traditional distinctions.

Chapter thirteen concludes Part 3 with a narrative entitled ‘Transfer through Learning Flexibility and Hypertextuality’. Written by Gorg Mallia, this chapter argues that hypertext and hypermedia are causing transformations that reach a long way beyond the well-researched and largely accepted social interaction types. Malia suggests that technological immersion is causing social and cultural change, and fears that this may contribute toward diminishing personal user participation in society.

... Emerging Cultures

Here's the second extract from the introduction to the forthcoming Book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', which will be published later this year by Information Age Publishers, Connecticut, USA.

Part 2, which has been designated ‘Roles and Identities’, covers a range of ideas about how the individual copes within the new cyber landscape. Several key questions are addressed: How do learners maintain a constant identity in an ever shifting digital world in which multiple identities and roles are possible? Do they adopt alternative personae as easily as they create new avatars within multi-user virtual environments? Does the creation of an avatar create something new within the identity of the individual? And are real life identities influenced by what the individual does whilst within a cyber identity?

Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold open this section with an investigation into cyber identities and the presentation of self within online environments. They show how social rules governing presence in virtual environments are as important as those that apply in embodied life. Miller and Arnold argue that people construct and reconstruct themselves in cyberspace in ways that are subject to cultural restrictions on both sides of the screen, as well as being influenced by the affordances offered by new media. They suggest that to learn not only requires gaining a new understanding of the world, but it also requires a re-adjustment of one’s self.

In chapter 6 Steve Wheeler takes the reader on a journey through the various digital tribes and virtual clans he believes are emerging due to intensive and sustained use of new technologies. He argues that new tribes and clans are emerging as a direct results of sustained interaction with technology. He contends that tribal identity shapes individual identity in cyberworlds, and that digital tools and networks provide ideal environments within which new cultural transmission propagates. Clans tend to emerge within tribes as cultural definitions and the generation of artefacts become more pronounced. Finally Wheeler asserts that there may be one single ‘digital tribe’ in the broadest sense of its meaning, but analysis of the many social activities found on the web indicates that many sub-sets of this large digital tribe exist – the ‘virtual clans’.

In a robustly written chapter on the digital gaming cultures, Nicola Whitton explores how games can be positioned in higher education. Chapter 7 considers the acceptability of computer game-based learning in the context of university education. Whitton discusses the potential of computer games in relation to theories of learning, and examines the conceptions of a cognitively different type of learner. She challenges the notion that these learners find computer games the ideal environment in which to learn. Whitton discusses student game preferences in terms of genre and the types of computer game that may be more appropriate for learning, and aspects of computer game design that may influence student use. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the benefits and challenges of computer games for learning and teaching in tertiary education.

In Chapter 8, Leon James describes the creation and management of an ongoing course-integrated Web community at a college social science course in Hawaii. Each student enrolled in the course automatically adopts cyber-community membership by reading, processing, and identifying with the reports of prior generation students, and then contributing their own reports to the cumulatively expanding ‘generational curriculum’ topics. The benefits of such an approach are discussed in terms of psychological models of acculturation, identification, cyber-citizenship, and the student as scientist model functioning in a Web environment that is increasingly shaped by human social processes. James concludes that the project demonstrates that a course-integrated online learning activity can be effective in producing cybercitizens by managing the students’ interactional procedures through the generational community-classroom approach.

Graham Attwell conducts the reader through a journey that examines the social dimensions of personal learning environments in Chapter 9. His chapter examines the social impact of Personal Learning Environments. Attwell expects that Personal Learning Environments will exert a profound influence over established teaching and learning systems and will radically change pedagogic approaches to learning, knowledge development and sharing. He suggests that the emergence of PLEs and the widespread interest in PLEs are a reaction to the changing ways in which people are using technology for learning. He argues that PLEs result from new societal demands for education and are a response to changing forms of knowledge usage within society.

Connected Minds ...

'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures' is a new book several of us have got together to produce over the last year. In the next few blog posts I will present an extract of the introduction to give you a flavour of what you can expect in the book when it is published at the end of the year through Information Age Publishers (Greenwich, Connecticut, USA):

In the opening section there are four chapters about digital subcultures, the first of which focuses on learning within the collaborative online spaces increasingly popular in education. The chapter showcases some of the recent research into the use of wikis in higher education and Steve Wheeler approaches this topic armed with an extensive data set derived from the discussion group postings of his online teacher trainee groups. He concludes that wikis are a powerful and as yet relatively untapped online collaborative tool that has the potential to promote deeper engagement with learning.

The second chapter, written by John Traxler, dwells on the realities and possibilities of the mobile culture, made possible by cellular and wireless technologies that are now pervasive in the Western world and in the process of becoming a global phenomenon. Although the future of mobile technology seems robust, Traxler raises a number of important questions about its impact on learners, teachers, communities and society in general. He offers to evaluate this impact through an exploration of the impact of mobile technology on culture, community, discourse, identity and their educational implications. The author attempts to reconcile the perception that discrete mobile subcultures exist with the perception that all cultures are somehow transformed by mobility.

Chapter 3, written by Palitha Edirisingha, reveals that a ‘listening’ sub-culture has grown up around the increasingly popular podcasting technologies. In his chapter, Edirisingha traces the development of podcasting through media, entertainment and technology industries and the transformation of a broadcast tool into a learning tool. He identifies a variety factors that have an impact on the formation of such a listening culture. He highlights some of the lessons learned from empirical studies, predominantly from an international study called IMPALA. Edirisingha concludes by offering insights into how podcasting can be effectively used for learning, with a focus on higher education.

Part 1 concludes with chapter 4, in which Mark A M Kramer explores the ways students are beginning to harness mobile networked enabled technologies to create new cultures of learning and collaboration. Kramer argues that these new movements can best be understood as a ubiquitous and pervasive learning culture in which anyone can engage in a form of learning that takes place independent of time and location. He concludes by suggesting that this new culture of ubiquitous and pervasive learning is inevitable, but warns that it may take time to become established in education.

More tomorrow from the Introduction...