Wise crowds (and stupid mobs)

I'm reading James Surowiecki's excellent book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' at the moment. I was particularly taken by his introduction in which he relates the story of Sir Francis Galton, and his discovery, against his own assumptions, that collective intelligence not only exists, it is generally correct in its judgements. Galton's experiment was based on a 'guess the weight of an ox' competition in which 800 people participated. His statistical analysis of the results showed that as a collective mean score, the people guessed accurately to within one pound of the actual weight. This discovery of the people's collective ability ('democracy' as he called it) to make decisions that are of the most benefit to the people, attracted me for a number of reasons. Firstly, Galton made his discovery in a farm show in Plymouth, England (my home town). Secondly, Galton was one of the UK's first psychologists (I trained as a psychologist too), and although I disagree profoundly with many of his ideas about intelligence, which led him to champion eugenics, I can't help but admire the way he trailblazed his ideas about human behaviour, forensic psychology and statistics long before other, more famous psychologists. Thirdly, his scientific integrity is inspirational. Against his own deep seated beliefs, and in opposition to his previous scientific studies, the results of his 'West of England' regional fare research showed that in fact, when a crowd is asked to make a decision, they usually get it right.

James Surowiecki goes on to argue that the principles behind this idea can explain everyday activities including the stock market, democratic voting processes, gambling and even the fact that when you go the a convenience store at 2 am for a carton of milk, there is one there waiting for you. The wisdom of crowds even explains the phenomenon of Web 2.0 and social networking tools, and specifically, as we have long understood, it defines why web services such as Wikipedia and Google Search have become so popular and accurate over the last few years. Surowiecki argues that in many cases, the judgements of larger diffuse crowds of people is actually more accurate than the decision making of smaller, more elite groups. I have clung to this ideal in the development of many of my recent teacher education programmes, into which I have incorporated collaborative and co-operative online tools such as wikis, so that students can create, share and negotiate their learning related content.

If you haven't read Surowiecki's book yet (it was first published in 2004), do try to get hold of it. You can purchase it quite cheaply on Amazon (another wisdom of crowds example) and I promise you, it is a very good read. It's also, dare I say it, an effective foil to Andrew Keen's book 'The Cult of the Amateur' which warns against the dangers of Wikipedia and similar web repositories, describes what I can loosely term as 'stupidity of mobs'. If anyone has read both books and cares to provide a valued judgement on them, the comments box below is ready for you...

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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Inspired learning

Anyone who has been involved in academic life for a while will tell you that research interests change over time. Mine certainly have. When I first became involved in learning technology research in the early 1980s (it was called 'educational technology' in those days) personal computers were in their infancy, and multi-media was breaking as the next 'big thing' in education. I spent my time developing software packages for 'computer assisted learning' which were text heavy but interactive, and then assessing how effective they were as tools to engage learners. I wanted to know why students were interested, excited, inspired, and why they got bored or demotivated.

Moving on into the 1990s, I began to get interested in distance education and open learning. I changed jobs and became less technically oriented, more learning focused. Over this time, I met several leading lights in the field and through a number of conversations and extensive reading, I began to develop an interest in human behaviour, cognitive processes and then human perception in learning environments. My subsequent degree in psychology then led me on into doing a research degree specifically studying these effects in distance education.

With the advent of the Internet, I began to develop an interest in how people learn in environments where they draw on a number of different sources, such as the Web, television, video, and audio. I could see early on that everything was pointing to convergence. My time spent between 1996-1998 on the RATIO project firmed up my ideas on distance learning, and how students could be engaged remotely using a choice of tools.

Press the fast forward button to the early days of Web 2.0, at the turn of this century, and my thoughts turned to how learners could be engaged in social and collaborative environments, where the rules of ownership were being fractured and where notions of authority and knowledge expertise were being challenged. The emergence of concepts such as personal learning environments, many-to-many broadcasting and user generated content all piqued my interest, and that is the point I have now reached. Most of my current talks and presentations centre on the new technologies and how they engage learners. And that to me, seems to be the theme that has threaded its way through my entire research career - engaging learners. Whatever the technology, whichever the environment, if learners are engaged (motivated, captivated, excited and inspired) I want to know how and why. That's why I'm a researcher in learning technology.

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Watching the MUVEs

Recently, psychologists have been getting quite excited about multi-user virtual environments. Several studies have drawn the same conclusion: that people behave similarly in virtual worlds using avatars as they do in real life. Yee et al (2007) showed that the closer two avatars were together, the less they faced each other directly, and 'eye contact' was reduced. They also reported that two characters of the same gender kept greater distance than two characters of opposite genders. Friedman and his colleagues (2007) found that a robot avatar that was programmed to walk up to people in Second Life caused them to back away to maintain some kind of personal space. Others have discovered that real world group processes such as persuasion and influence can also work similarly in virtual worlds. Eastwick and Gardner (2009) have even detected elements of racist and other distasteful behaviours in MUVEs. Anything it seems, that happens in real life, can be found also in Second Life and other 3D avatar driven environments.

Christian Jarrett, writing in the June edition of The Psychologist (a British Psychological Society Journal) documents these and similar studies to show why psychologists are getting excited about MUVEs. He says 'The fact that people behave in virtual worlds in a way that reflects real life is exciting news for psychologists because it opens up the medium as a way of conducting large-scale social studies with relevance to the real world - projects that might otherwise be impossible or prohibitively expensive to conduct.

Jarrett makes an interesting distinction between Second Life and some of the more popular MUVEs such as World of Warcraft. WoW has game objectives he points out. This may be the reason it has so many more adherents than the somewhat sterile and therefore underpopulated Second Life. Well I wish him and his colleagues a lot of luck. They may have to wait some time to meet up with an avatar in the ghost town that Second Life is becoming.

References

Eastwick, P. W. and Gardner, W. L. (2009) Is it a game? Evidence for social influence in the virtual world. Social Influence, 4, 18-32.

Friedman, D., Steed, A. and Slater, M. (2007) Spatial social behaviour in Second Life. In C. Pelachaud (Ed.) Intelligent Virtual Agents 2007, Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Jarrett, C. (2009) Get a Second Life. The Psychologist, 22 (6), 490-493.

Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F. and Merget, D. (2007) The unbearable likeness of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. Cyberpsychology and Behaviour, 10 (1), 115-121.

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Wiki rebus

I gave my second year student teachers a 7 day project to tackle this week. It involved them going off in pairs and researching the psychology of the internet, as represented in a number of activities including blogging, using social networks, and effects such as the reduction of social cues, respellings through txting or 'rebus', and the nature of online relationships. They were asked to address a number of questions related to their research topic, and not only post them to their Wetpaint wiki, but also create a PowerPoint presentation (some incorporated these into the wiki) for discussion by the whole group.

They uncovered some useful websites on internet psychology - Problogger (Darren Rowse) figured prominently in their reviews with his excellent post 'the psychology of blogging', as did Dr Rudhran's blog on the psychology on the web and a number of other blog sites. They are also using John Suler's superb hypertext book called 'The Psychology of Cyberspace'. All good stuff. It was probably the psychology of online relationships presentation that created the most amusement for the group, but the most heated discussions came about as a result of the presentation on txting. The discussion centred on whether txt language was actually an evolving language, or simply an aberration of acceptable English. The presentations continue on Tuesday and so will the fun. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing what the 'psychology of the wiki' group come up with.

This has been a great group activity, and with the Wetpaint wiki there to capture and link together all of the results, there should be a fine legacy resource for the students to draw on when it comes to writing up their assignments. So if anyone out there is stuck for a teaching idea to try out....

(Image source: gasear.wikispaces.com)

Not a fan of spam

All you ever needed to know about spam, but were afraid to ask is on the BBC news site today. It's 15 years since Joel Furr first applied the old Monty Python sketch term to unsolicited e-mails. It's one of those things we all seem to put up with, and no one seems to complain about anymore. Anti-spam software doesn't seem to work. If you reply, they know they have a 'live one'.

When I used to receive junk mail from insurance or credit card companies, my response was to simply bundle up the contents, stuff them all into the pre-paid return envelope and send it back. The junk mailer then had to pay twice for the privilege of discovering that I wasn't interested. The junk mail soon stopped coming.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could do the same thing to spammers as I do when I received junk mail? Send it staright back to them with interest (say 1000 copies) and clog up their freakin' mailbox??? Patricia Wallace - in her book 'The Psychology of the Internet' says that getting rid of spam is the psychological equivalent of 'weeding the garden'. Well, I have to 'weed my garden' every day. If anyone has a solution I think we should all be told....

Diamonds in the mud

They saved the best 'til last... The papers on the final day really cut the mustard for me. I chaired a session entitled 'pedagogical and psychological issues' (on my own request to the conference organisers) and I wasn't disappointed. An all female crew of 4 presenters took us through a fast-paced spectrum of ideas and research around e-learning. Maja Snyder (University of Maribor, Slovenia) evaluated several e-learning courses from a student perspective. Next up was Erika Pigliapoco (University of Urbino, Italy) who discussed the 'psychological sense of community' needed for all distance courses to succeed. Hot on her heels was Hiba Mustafa (University of Massey, New Zealand) who regaled us with a content superb offering entitled: 'Computer-based Meta Cognitive Training' in which she outlined a new web based tool for supporting problem solving for post-graduate students in medicine, vetrinary services, etc. Finally, in this truly global community of presenters, came Marissa Wettasinghe (National Institute of Education, Singapore) who presented a paper on how ICT has been used to support slow learners. And......I pronounced all their names perfectly.

The highlight of the day was found in two papers that shone out like diamonds in the mud in an afternoon of mediocrity. Lief Martin Hokstad (whom I had previously session-chaired in EDEN, Naples - the guy's a Steely Dan fan!) and his colleague Carl Fredrik Dons from the University of Trondheim, Norway, presented a paper about digital literacies which challenged and illuminated. Why is it that all Norwegians need three names? I don't know, but in conversation afterwards, we agreed that our research interests were so similar we probably need to do some work together...

Finally, last session of the conference....Mark Kramer (Pictured: University of Saltzberg, Austria) didn't disappoint us with a rip-roaring presentation full of hand-held technologies. His talk, entitled 'Learning in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing' was refreshing, providing the audience with new ideas to go away with. He took a picture of the audience and uploaded it to Flickr in under 10 seconds during the presentation just to prove a point. I'm the guy waving at the back...

Well, we were waving goodbye to each other soon afterwards, as we each made out weary way home. I have made some good new friends, and hope to work with some of them in the future. As for Villach and Ljubljana - these stunning cities with their breath-taking vistas of Alpine scenery will not go forgotten.

Mast hysteria ... again

I blogged about the dangers of radiation from mobile phone masts back in April and like the perennial weeds that pop up uninvited in my garden all summer, they’ve raised their ugly heads again. The September issue of The Psychologist runs an article entitled: ‘Psychological origins of phone mast symptoms’. It reports on a study from Essex University where researchers asked 44 self-reported 'electro-sensitive' individuals and 114 ‘controls’ to take part in an experiment. Unpleasant symptoms were reported by the 44 but not by the 114 when they stood close to phone masts (but none knew when the signal was on or when it was off). The researchers concluded that the symptoms the 44 reported were merely psychosomatic - i.e. 'all in the mind'. Well that’s the first time I have heard of leukaemia being labelled ‘psychosomatic’….. (oops – bit of politics there!) Of course, the results might also mean that the 114 were merely less susceptible to any effects from the masts….

So, let’s follow this train of thinking. Whenever I turn on the TV and listen to a cabinet minister holding forth about some new government plan to cut health service funding, raise taxes or send more troops to Afghanistan, and I get an uneasy, nauseous feeling inside me, am I just being oversensitive? Whilst my Government supporting colleagues nod sagely in agreement, does this mean that for me it is all in the mind? Or does it simply mean that I have a better inbuilt bull**** detector than they do? Perhaps we should be told….

YZ on young shoulders....

It's been an interesting and busy week teaching here at the Technical University of Liberec, in the northern Czech Republic. Everything is different here to the UK including, mercifully, the weather (a balmy 28 degrees today). I need to be particularly careful with the keyboard I am using as it has transposed 'y' and 'z' keys. Cognitive load is more excessive than usual....

I have just finished a week teaching 20 German, Czech, Polish, and for the first time, Nigerian students. They are all very young and very enthusiastic and have been asking lots of questions, which makes my job easier, and paradoxically, harder. We have studied the psychology of interpersonal communication, with a section on Internet communication. I created a wiki for them on the spot, which you can visit at this link. It will be interesting to see if there are any cultural variations in the postings and discussions that take place.

Next week I'm back in dear old blighty, and then off to Napoli, Italy to present a paper at the EDEN conference. More later - now I'm off to let my hair down a little, before I catch my flight... Nashledanou....