Theories for the digital age: Postmodern perspectives

Postmodernist views of society can be appropriated as lenses to analyse the personalised use of digital technology. Consumers of Web based content tend to search randomly and nomadically, due to the multi-layered, multi-directional nature of hyperlinked media and this aligns neatly with some post modern theory. The writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1980), for example, feature the nomadic thought processes that characterise contemporary perceptions, and portray the chaos of modern life. They employ the botanic metaphor of rhizomatic root systems to describe multiple, chaotic non-hierarchical interpretations of knowledge. Rhizomes resist chronology and organisational structures, thereby more accurately representing the unstructured but purposeful manner in which many people now use the Web.

Significantly, because rhizomes are open ended, the importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome explanation is not invested in individual components, but rather in the direction of motion the entire organism can adopt at any given time. This is reminiscent of the participatory Web, which consists not so much of the insights and offerings of individuals, but rather of what Surowiecki (2009) has termed ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ – the seemingly random folksonomic directions chosen by entire communites of users as having meaning and importance. The community decides what is important to learn, so in effect, the community becomes the curriculum (Cormier, 2008).

According to Cormier (2008) a rhizomatic interpretation of education is useful because it embraces the ever changing nature of knowledge, is open ended, and is not driven by specific curricula whilst learning is ‘constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.’  This form of negotiated meaning more clearly represents the knowledge acquisition processes that occur within the transient discussion threads and ephemeral collaborative spaces on the World Wide Web.

The colonisation of knowledge spaces by communities is self sustaining, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, we see individuals assuming the roles of nomads, maintaining a constant state of becoming and transformation. Again, this is reminiscent of the random searching, scanning and jumping around content through hyperlinking that learners participate in when they traverse the digital landscape. In effect, students participate as flâneurs, acting as individual agents, investigators and explorers of their own personal digital terrains. Their seemingly aimless behaviour belies their essentially purposeful wandering, as learners interrogate their environment in attempts to make sense of it, understand it, participate in it, and ultimately portray it (Baudelaire, 1964). 

[This is an excerpt from a forthcoming publication entitled: Personal Technologies in Education: Issues, Theories and Debates]  

References

Baudelaire, C. (1964) The Painter of Modern Life, New York, NY: Da Capo Press. (Originally published in Le Figaro, in 1863).

Cormier, D. (2008) Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. 

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Surowiecki, J. (2009) The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few. London: Abacus. 

Photo by Steve Wheeler

Theories for the digital age: Postmodern perspectives by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The changing Web

This is number 4 in the series of blog posts entitled 'Shaping Education for the Future.' Yesterday's post can be found at this link.

The web is constantly changing. Social media - often referred to as Web 2.0, or the participatory Web - is shaping up to be one of the most important tool sets available to support the promotion of change in education. Almost everyone, it seems, is using some element of social media in the planning, development, delivery, management or evaluation of teaching and learning. One of the greatest changes (and challenges) for education over the last few years has been the proliferation of user generated content. My own students create a lot of their own content during their study, usually in the form of podcasts, videos, wiki and blog content, and are encouraged to share these publicly online to gain additional feedback. Doing this, they tend to engage more deeply with learning, and find themselves collaborating more and learning from each other, as a result of using Web 2.0 tools. Essentially, Web 2.0 enables them to take more responsibility for their own learning. They like to share their ideas, and they enjoy playing their part in the production of knowledge. Learning is changing, and their experience is being shaped by the participatory Web. The Web is constantly changing, but it is also a change agent.

We need to acknowledge that 'Web 2.0' remains a contested label for new and emergent properties that are found on the Web. It is a complex network of dynamic resources that we all acknowledge is constantly changing to adapt to the growing demand for entertainment, communication and access to knowledge. Debate focuses on whether the emerging social applications constitute a sea change or revolution in the Web (cf. Van Dijk, 2002) or simply another phase in its relentless progress. Personally, I find myself in agreement with Brian Winston (2003) who views the Web as a facet of gradual evolution rather than symptoms of sudden revolution. Essentially, the Web has become more social. As with most other technology innovations, Web 2.0 applications have grown out of the need for people to connect together, share experiences and knowledge, enhance their experiences and open up new possibilities in learning. Social software is software that enables people to both read from, and write onto web spaces. It truly is the ‘architecture of participation’ (Barsky and Purdon, 2006) and demands active engagement as a natural part of its character (Kamel Boulos and Wheeler, 2007).

Web 2.0 tools include popular applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasting; social networking sites such as FaceBook and LinkedIn; photo and videosharing services such as Flickr and YouTube; familiar utilities such as RSS feeds, social tagging (e.g. Delicious, Diigo), microblogs such as Twitter, mashups (e.g. geotagging). Web 2.0 has spawned concepts such as folksonomy, ‘Darwikianism’ and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ (Kamel Boulos et al, 2006). Also, we need to pay attention to the growing power, ubiquity and utility of the mobile phone and the central role it is already playing in enabling ‘anytime anyplace’ learning for students.

More is becoming known about the effects the changing Web is exerting upon teaching and learning. We know of some of the benefits and the limitations it brings to education and training. But there are still many questions to be answered. How for example, does this architecture of participation help to scaffold remote learners and how can it promote quality learning outcomes? What is the extent of the capability of social software to encourage a culture of sharing and collaboration? How much will Web 2.0 applications help to shape the education provision of the future? What roles will online games and mobile, personal technologies play in developing the skills young people need to study independently? These are questions we are beginning to address in some of our current research. More on this in future posts on this blog.

References
Barsky, E. and Purdon, M. (2006) Introducing Web 2.0: Social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 27, 65-67.
Kamel Boulos, M. N., Maramba, I. and Wheeler, S. (2006) Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Medical Education, 6, 41. Retrieved 14 April, 2008 from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41
Kamel Boulos, M. N. and Wheeler, S (2007) The emerging Web 2.0 social software: An enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and healthcare education. Health Informatics and Libraries Journal, 24(1), 2-23.
Van Dijk, J. (2002) The Network Society. London: Sage.
Winston, B. (2003) Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge.

Image source


The changing web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Learning pathways

I recently heard a story about the building of a new university campus. Unusually, the architect hadn't designed any pedestrian paths into his plan. When asked why there were no pathways between the buildings, he replied cryptically that he was waiting to see what happened. Soon, over a period of time, as students and staff walked between the buildings, they made their own tracks or 'desire lines' through the grass. Once these tracks had become established as the most natural and preferred routes, the architect ordered the builders in to pave over the tracks. 'Better they create their own pathways', he said, 'than for me build them, and then for them not be used'. Instead of imposing his own ideas onto the community, the architect had crowd sourced his design.

How often do we impose pathways upon students which do not meet their needs, or fit their expectations? How many times have we invested in technology, environments and curricula that is simply a waste of time and resources? The institutional learning platform - the VLE - is a classic case of decisions made about learning without consulting the learner. How can we reach a place in education where students find their own level and make their own pathways through learning?

Deleuze and Guattari's 1980 publication A Thousand Plateaus might offer us some clues. It was hailed by some as a masterpiece of post-modernist 'nomadic' writing. Others criticised it for its dense, pseudo-scientific prose. Whichever way you view this book however, it was notable for introducing rhizome theory as a metaphor for knowledge representation. According to Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes are unlike any other kind of root system, having no beginning and no end. Rhizomes don't follow the rules of normal root systems, because they resist organisational structure and chronology, 'favouring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.' In plain English, the authors are attempting to describe the way ideas spread out naturally to occupy spaces like water finding its level. The rhizome is not linear, but planar they argue - and therefore can spread out in any and all directions, connecting with other systems as it goes. The same might be said about the way communities form, create their preferred ways of communication and decide their priorities.

Rhizome theory is also a useful framework for understanding self-determined learning - the heutagogy described by Hase and Kenyon. Hase and Kenyon contextualise heutagogy with reference to complexity theory, and suggest a number of characteristics including 'recognition of the emergent nature of learning' and 'the need for a living curriculum'. The self-determined pathway to learning is fast becoming familiar to learners in the digital age, and is also the antithesis to the formal, structured learning found in traditional education.

Dave Cormier - one of the foremost contributors to rhizomatic learning theory - takes this concept deeper into digital territory by equating rhizomatic learning to 'community as curriculum'. The advent of social media, mobile communications and digital media facilitate large, unbounded personal learning networks that mimic the characteristics of rhizomes. If we accept that there is a need for a living curriculum, it would be logical to also accept that a self-determined community generates and negotiates its own knowledge, thereby forming the basis of what its members learn. Rhizomatic learning is also premised on an extension of community as curriculum, where: 'knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises'.

Students can, and do, create their own personalised learning pathways. There is also evidence that learning communities informally decide their own priorities, often observed in the emerging folksonomies that result when digital content is organised, shared and curated. These processes often occur in spite of the strictures and rules imposed upon students by the institution. Most are the result of informal learning, achieved outside and beyond the walls of the traditional education environment. Self-determined learning pathways are crucial for individual learners as well as learning communities and they are by their very nature beyond the control of universities and schools. Schools and universities cannot (and should not attempt to) harness these processes, but they can facilitate them. Just like the architect, institutions can refrain from imposing structures and pre-determined tools, wait to see what their students prefer and then provide them with the best possible conditions to support self-determined learning.

Image by justpeace


Learning pathways by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Semantic technologies and learning

The January special issue of Interactive Learning Environments is out right now. Our guest editors have done a great job drawing together 5 excellent papers under the banner of 'Semantic Technologies for Multimedia Enhanced Learning Environments' and for Learning with 'e's readers, here is the editorial in full, with excellent summaries of all the papers by our special issue editors Marco Bertini, Vladan Devedzic, Dragan Gasevic and Carlo Torniai:

Widely available learning material is recognized as a key asset that enables aggregation, provisioning, retrieval, reusability, adaptation, and personalization of educational content. Besides being able to author, publish, discover, and use high-quality learning objects, it is equally important to use multimedia-rich learning objects. Many domains require very advanced content, where different concepts and processes require the use of multimedia (e.g. image, sound, and video) to provide students with a better understanding of concepts under study. This inevitably sets new requirements in multimedia-enhanced learning environments for the advanced representation and creation of learning metadata. The goal is not only to have a richer representation of learning content but it is also important to consider multimedia learning objects in various learning situations where interaction and collaboration are required features. For example, interaction needs to be improved across all the six dimensions of the well-known interactivity triangle with the three main participating nodes of interaction - instructors, students, and content (Anderson & Garrison, 1998). Yet, students are also content creators. This is nicely facilitated by Social Web technologies (e.g. blogs and wikis), which better enable learning environments to support principles of social constructivism. While today user-created multimedia content is a commodity in learning environments, we need to have pedagogical strategies to show how to make the best use of the available technologies. Creative solutions are needed and new perspectives are more than welcome. Just as we can expect learners to easily create and publish multimedia content, we should also facilitate interaction between learners, their peers and educators through multimodal channels of communication and help new users benefit from the experience of previous users of multimedia learning content. Spector (2009) of Google Inc. refers to this phenomenon as “fluidity among the modalities,” where many new modalities will come in addition to the more frequently used ones - text, video, voice, and image.

Scope of the special issue

This special issue analyzes how semantic technologies can be leveraged to address some of the above-mentioned challenges of multimedia-rich learning environments. To perform this analysis, it is first important to define the concept of semantic technologies. Traditionally, the Semantic Web is associated with semantic technologies (Gaevi, Jovanovi, & Devedi, 2007). Ontologies, as the backbone of the Semantic Web defining formally and explicitly represented shared domain conceptualization, are the main way for representing and sharing metadata. Current research in learning technologies has shown that in learning environments Semantic Web technologies can integrate data about learning objects, learning activities and learners captured from various e-Learning systems and tools. Due to the intensive use of Web 2.0 techniques (e.g. collaborative tagging, social networking, mash-ups, and wikis), lightweight representation of semantics and metadata is used in the form of folksonomies, user comments, and ratings. Despite the initial perception that Web 2.0 opposes the Semantic Web, these two efforts are being jointly used to create a common space of semantic technologies (Hendler, 2009). Therefore, semantically enhanced metadata for learning multimedia cannot be considered without the social and interaction context, in which learning constantly happens (Jovanovi, Gaevi, Torniai, Bateman, & Hatala, 2009). Metadata is used to facilitate the discovery and sharing of learning multimedia objects and metadata created through the interaction of learners and educators among themselves and with the learning content.

This special issue solicited papers focused on the use of semantic technologies in multimedia-enhanced learning environments. In this call, we were especially interested in publishing research reports and lessons learned in the following research tasks:

• Ontologies and semantic annotations for multimedia learning objects.


• Collaborative tagging and folksonomies for multimedia learning objects.


• Semantic social networking in multimedia-based learning environments.


• Semantic technologies for enabling pedagogical theories in multimedia-enhanced learning environments.


• Semantic-enhanced learning designs in multimedia-enhanced learning.


• Semantic technologies for personalization and adaptation of multimedia-enhanced learning.


• Semantic-rich service-oriented architectures for multimedia learning environments.


• Semantic multimedia content for (collaborative) mobile learning.

Selected papers

After an enthusiastic response to the open call for papers, followed by a rigorous peer-review process, we are pleased to present five papers addressing some of the indentified research topics. While it would be unrealistic to expect a complete coverage of all research topics due to their vast scope, the paper selection reflects thoroughly the state-of-the-art in this area and some promising research results. More importantly, we can also see many needs for future research, which will hopefully be addressed in the years to come.

In the paper entitled “Automatic generation of tests from domain and multimedia ontologies,” Andreas Papasalouros, Konstantinos Kotis and Konstantinos Kanaris look at the problem of automated generation of quizzes for assessment from domain knowledge. The authors recognized that currently there are many approaches allowing for generating and analyzing tests, but they all rely on text-based content. However, in many different areas, it is important to include multimedia content into the questions asked in quizzes. In their approach, the authors make use of ontologies to represent knowledge of a domain at hand. The domain ontologies are then used together with multimedia annotation ontologies to annotate multimedia learning objects. On top of such annotated multimedia, the authors propose several different strategies for generation of multiple choice questions, where the assessment of students' answers is making use of ontology-based reasoning (i.e. subsumption). Besides applications on text-based content, the authors also demonstrate how their approach can be used for images and argue that the approach can easily be applied to other types of multimedia content. With the use of a prototypical implementation of the proposed approach, the results obtained in the evaluation demonstrate some very promising practical prospects.

Semantic annotation of multimedia learning objects is the topic addressed in the paper entitled “Semantic annotation of video fragments as learning objects: a case study with YouTube videos and the Gene Ontology” by Elena Garca-Barriocanal, Miguel-Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Miltiadis Lytras. The authors focus their effort on user-generated content (in particular videos posted on YouTube) that can be used as learning material. The need for effective ways to annotate this content is addressed by an annotation tool based on domain ontologies. The generated metadata are then used as a filter for selecting relevant parts of annotated clips as learning objects.

Another paper also focuses on collaborative annotation of multimedia learning content - “A collaborative multimedia annotation tool for enhancing knowledge sharing in CSCL,” by Stephen J.H. Yang, Jia Zhang, Addison Y.S. Su and Jeffrey J.P. Tsai. The authors investigate various annotation techniques (e.g. comments or tags) as instruments helping students develop their critical thinking skills through collaborative learning. In particular, they proposed an architecture based on the use of semantic technologies (for conceptual modelling of collaborative annotations) and web services (for distributed collection and flexible integration of shared annotations). By developing a novel learning environment for collaborative e-Learning and knowledge sharing, using a personalized annotation management system (PAMS 2.0), the authors extensively evaluated the implications of their architecture and approach in a course involving 94 junior university students. The analysis of the collected data indicates that the proposed approach to knowledge sharing helps learners better comprehend their readings and stimulate them ask engaging questions to be discussed with their peers.

The role that semantic technologies can play in reusing and sharing learning resources is well depicted by A. Yessad, C. Faron Zucker, R. Dieng-Kuntz and M.T. Laskri. In their paper entitled “Ontology-based semantic relatedness for detecting the relevance of learning resources,” they describe a novel approach to the computation of the semantic relevance of learning resources to a learning context of a learner. The idea is to compute the relevance between conceptual annotations for the learning resource (built using its role in the learning process and its learning topics) and the concept of interest to the learner. The proposed method offers promising results compared to both semantic measure of similarity and experts ratings.

While it is important to discover some parts of multimedia content, it is also equally important to validate the quality and relevance of the learning content to be used by a learner. In the paper “Constraint modeling for curriculum planning and validation,” Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Ingo Brunkhorst, Nicola Henze, Elisa Marengo and Viviana Patti recognize in authoring of personalized curricula, a gap between learners' traits (e.g. background knowledge or various cognitive traits) and curricula that educational institutions may offer. To address this research challenge, the authors propose a constraint-based technique based on the use of ontologies, model checking principles, and temporal logic to validate whether personal curricula being proposed for each individual learner satisfy the learner's personal traits. The prototypical implementation of the Personal Reader system for education allowed the authors to evaluate their proposed method and to report on some important lessons learned.

Image source by Taylor & Francis

Up Pompey

When I was a lot younger I was a guitarist in a rock band. We were touring in 1982, and one of our bookings took us to play in the main hall of Portsmouth Polytechnic. It was a time of great celebration in Portsmouth (known by sailors as Pompey), because the Falklands War had just ended, and all the naval warships were returning home. After the gig, the band went down onto the seafront for something to eat before the long trek home, and I decided I would try a doner kebab for the first time. So there we were sitting in the back of our Transit Van, perched on the speakers and amplifiers, chomping away in the dark. I wasn't aware that there were any rules to eating doner kebabs, so I just chewed away at the pitta bread. Suddenly I was aware of a burning sensation. In the dark, I found a pile of steaming hot meat, coleslaw and chilli sauce in my lap. I had eaten away the underside of the pitta bread, and it had all dropped out.

Look, it's no laughing matter. It could have been fatal - the lethally hot chilli sauce could have eaten right through the denim of my jeans and caused untold damage to my future prospects. Driving home from Portsmouth to Plymouth covered in grease and chilli sauce was extremely uncomfortable. Time has moved on. Portsmouth Polytechnic is now the University of Portsmouth, and I still play the guitar, but I now try to steer clear of eating doner kebabs, particularly in the dark in the back of a transit van.

I'm back in Portsmouth this week as an invited speaker at the university. I will be hooking up with old pals Emma Duke-Williams (world famous in Portsmouth for her portrait of me as 'multi-me') and Manish Malik (with whom I have just written a paper on Cloud Learning Environments). Remember 'Wisdom of Clouds'? - Manish wrote that as a guest blogpost. I will be speaking on the topic of 'Learning 2.0: Web 2.0 Tools in Education', which will essentially take the form of a workshop and seminar. The session will take place on Wednesday 31st between 15.00-16.30. There will be some games and exercises for people to do, and some questions and answers time too. I hope to explore some of the possibilities and potential of tools such as blogs, wikis, microblogs and aggregators, and will also explore mashups, social tagging, and concepts such as 'wisdom of crowds' and folksonomies. I'm going to try to place all of this in the context of higher education, student engagement and communities of practice. It will be a tall order, I'm sure, but I'm confident it will be OK. After all, I have survived a direct hit from a doner kebab, and that's serious stuff.

Image source

Folksonomies, memes and misunderstanding

It all started with a message on Twitter from @stephendale who stated: "A taxonomist: One who organizes information in ways that makes sense to content providers, rather than content users." I thought this was a real gem, because it represented all that is 'corporate control' and 'top down' on the Web. I responded (as you do) with my own version: "A folksonomist: one who organises information in ways that make sense to his/her own community of practice or interest." It was retweeted several times by others and they seemed to like my definition. I was thinking about individuals tagging and organising their own content using tools such as Delicious, and then making them available to others. When we tag an object says Mike Wesch, we 'teach the machine'. In other words, the more we tag objects, the more they become visible to others who may be interested in them, and as Andy Clark has suggested, the more they become visible, the easier becomes the pathway to finding them.

@patparslow didn't like my definition though. Taking issue with it in his blogpost he says: "A folksonomy loses its qualities as a folksonomy once you have someone 'organising' it, and will quickly become a taxonomy." I hear what he is saying, but this wasn't what I had in mind and what he describes sounds suspiciously like a meme to me. Memes are units of information or ideas that are transmitted from mind to mind through speech, written word or, more than likely in the digital age, through a social network. They tend to emerge without being planned and spread virally. Look at the trending topics column on Twitter and you will see what I mean. Folksonomy is not chaotic though, and does require some organisation by individuals - there is always some intelligence behind it, or as James Surowiecki has aptly suggested - the 'wisdom of the crowd'. There always has to be some organisation at an individual level, or there would be no folksonomy at the community level - all would remain chaotic.

Then @3quarks said my definition of folksonomist sounded a little like a 'spin doctor'. Well, it might I suppose, but for the fact that the community of interest I intended was one in which people were not trying to influence each other, but simply going individually about their personal learning through organisation of content. The Holistic Web blogpost Taxonomy vs Folksonomy says it all really - a taxonomy is predictable, whereas a folksonomy is flexible. Taxonomies are imposed, but folksonomies are democratic.

Here's my opinion on this for what it's worth: In a taxonomy, the community defines the content. In a folksonomy the content defines the community. So, I don't want to be misunderstood, but neither do I want to misunderstand. Are we all singing from the same hymnsheet, (or are we independently harmonising)?

Thanks to Stephen Dale, Pat Parslow and Mel Phillips for kicking this one off. :-)=

Google-de-Gook

Don't suppose you've seen the latest article from BBC News about language on the web, have you? Web-lish to replace English runs the title, and the author, Ben Camm-Jones writes:

'New words coined to describe things we encounter on the internet can be pretty awful, but 'folksonomy' has been voted the worst of the lot.' Well fancy that.

The article features the self-styled web policeman Bob Young, who is Chief Executive of Lulu, the 'Blooker Prize' organisers, (hang on, wasn't Lulu a singer from Scotland?). Young declares that too many awkward new words are being coined to describe Internet activity, and that 'web-lish is the new English'. He also rules that 'Folksonomy' is a word that makes you want to 'howl in the night'. Well, why confine yourself to yelling in the dark, Mr Young, when you can come up with words like 'Web-lish'?

I despair.... really I do.