The human link

We know from media research that the different genres and styles in film and literature are converging, and are being connected and rearranged in order to make new expressions. However, it is not only the “filmatic” or “textual” level of life that has become interconnected; even people have been described as connected to each other and the surroundings, and to a higher degree now than before. I think there is three main reasons for this.

1) The first have to do with the notion of time. When the communicative technologies were restricted to pen and paper, the communicative activities still were binding people together, but the distance between people was defined by the time it took for a letter or a message to reach the receiver. The longer distance between people, the longer time it took to communicate. Now, the relationship between distance and time is somehow “out of sync”. We are no longer bound by the travel of materialised artifacts in order to communicate, and no matter how long the physical distance between us, we can instantly communicate in real time. This is contributing to the notion of the “world getting smaller”, a notion not exclusive for digital (communicative) technology: due to better transportation, the travel time between destinations has decreased dramatically in just a few years. The distance in time, for instance, between my home town and the capital, has been decreased by 33% in ten years.

2) The second reason for arguing that people are more connected now than before have to do with the distribution of meaning. Today, much more than before, we are exposed to the meanings and preferences of each other. (For instance, if it had not been for the technology of blogs, you would not have been able to read my meanings on this subject.) All of us have got a vast number of potential channels to make use of in order to make ourselves heard, and many of us use them in one way or another. This means most of us, at least to some degree, are contributing to an idea of what “the world out there” is thinking about. And further: all this information is making us reconsider our own meanings; at least I know that I do. If I don’t change meaning, I at least become more certain of the opinions I have. When I read others opinions I start to think, and I’m starting to develop arguments about the subject. This way I actually get to elaborate on my stands in life, by means of all the information I receive. This “exchange” of information is binding us together, making us able to elaborate on our meanings and construct new “meaning communities”.

3) The third reason for people today to be considered connected, is that much of our life’s information is stored in more or less centralized databases. Each of these databases store a bit of information about us, and the databases is, increasingly, being connected to each other in order to paint a broader picture about every one of us. The practical effect of this is that we are placed in categories, with characteristics that should apply to all members of a specific category. Obvious examples is the insurance sector, where personal insurance is a question of what medical category one can be placed inside. Different parts of society are starting to collaborate in order to construct the “full” picture of its inhabitants, in order to regulate society “objectively”. This, of course, has some unfortunate side effects, in that the bureaucracy dealing only with categories – and not real people, is taking over the process as soon as the person is categorized. But none the less, we are all increasingly being compared with each other, in order to see who is deviant and who is not.

Gaming through life

One of the reasons the term literacy has to be revisited in the realm of ICT-research lately is because of the highly advanced digital technology introduced into children’s, adolescents’ and even adults’ life. The concept of literacy, in this borad sense, is developing exactely because these new technologies have an impact on how learning must be understood.

One field where digital technology has played a major role is in the realm of games. As children we play, and as we play we learn. As we grow, our play becomes more complicated. Now an entire generation is grown up with a totally different set of playing experiences than any before it. The playing has been brought into the digital world, a virtual reality where linearity no longer applies. To act in this virtual reality is not to read the manual, it is to push the buttons on the controller and see what happens. Through trail and error, players build a intellectual model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play. As the players refine this model, they begin to master the game world. This is a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis, and it results in a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, textbook based approach often advocated in schools. Teachers, on the other hand, without knowledge and experience in this kind of working and learning might not be able to see how this interactive curriculum can contribute to a school context. To borrow words form Will Wright, creator of the hugely popular game The Sims:

“… watching someone play a game is a different experience than actually holding the controller and playing it yourself. Very different. Imagine that all you knew about movies was gleaned through observing the audience in a theatre – but that you had never watched a film. You would conclude that movies induce lethargy and junk-food binges. That may be true, but you’re missing the big picture.”

Knowledge and competence learned in a virtual reality is not something that is considered useless; virtual is not the same as unreal. In the business world, people are hired for their skills, no matter where they learned them. An example of this is Stephen Gillett, senior director of engineering operations at Yahoo! Gillett was employed as a result of his status as “guild master” in the multiplayer game World of Warcraft. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. The master must resolve failures of management without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Gillett says: “I used to worry about not having what I needed to get a job done. Now I think of it like a quest; by being willing to improvise, I can usually find the people and resources I need to accomplish the task”.

Another example of this nonschoolastic approach to dealing with problems is the way Google is recruiting new employees: the company sets up billboard posters with riddles and equations. The ones creative enough to solve the puzzles arrive at an address to a web page that invites them to apply for a job. This way, the borders between the “real” and the “virtual” is becoming blurred. This makes it highly important for teachers to develop competence in creating learning environments where the pupils themselves are in charge of the process, where they can contribute to their own learning in ways that makes them able to draw on their existing knowledge and work forms. And above all, that makes them create new and creative work forms and strategies for problem solving that puts them in charge of the society the rest of us is developing.

The knowlege of feeling and looking

It is obvious that different artefacts require different kinds of knowledge; you cannot use a calculator based on experiences from using a radio. Hence, the introduction of new artefacts into a setting often changes what is hold to be relevant knowledge in that particular setting. However, this is not obvious in every context; let us use the paper producing industry as an example. In earlier times, to check the quality of the cellulose in such a factory, the workers went down to the big combs, took a little cellulose in their hands and felt it. They analyzed it between their fingers and actually determined the characteristics of the cellulose by feeling it. They new instantly what component to add if the “feeling” was not right. No one could ever tell the workers what the cellulose should feel like; this had to be learned by experience. The workers had a physical contact with the process in which they made use of certain kinds of knowledge to affect the process.

These days, the workers do not need to get “their hands dirty”. What was previously felt and analyzed through the fingertips must now be “felt” through computer screens. The workers are removed from the actual process of making paper; they might never actually see the product they are making at all; they are investigating it from a distance, through numbers and graphs on the screen in the control room. This, of course, demands a quite different kind of knowledge than before, a kind of knowledge that is more intellectual than tactile and “embodied”¹. The machines are trusted in doing the “feeling” on our behalf; all we have to do is to take action when the machines tell us to. The question, however, is what we lose when the brain (apparently) is all we need.

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¹ The question about wheter or not information has to be “embodied” is a big (and interesting!) one, and I will come back to this in a later blogpost.

The question of land and fish

The other day I noticed a postcard in my office that read: “Land is a mystery to fish. By the time fish finds out about land, it’s too late”. The card was a business promotion, I don’t know for what, but still the quote caught my mind. I found the thought intriguing: is there something around us that we are not aware of, something that is crucial to us, but that we have not taken notice of?

I think there is, on several levels. I’m not going to investigate all of them here, of course, but concentrate on a cultural aspect. Some might be familiar with the concept of “tacit knowledge”, but even if not, all of us have made use of the knowledge itself. In every culture it is a tacit dimension, a dimension we are introduced to as children (if we are natives in that particular culture). Because of this knowledge, you know when you are greeted by another person; you recognise what a greeting looks like. Without this knowledge, all the members of a culture would have to explain every single action, and in practise that would be impossible to handle. This becomes particularly evident when we travel; arriving at an unfamiliar place we might observe strange activities and actions that the natives to not even seem to think about. We learn how to act and function in a culture not because (at least not exclusively because) we have been thought explicitly how to do things, but because of our very existence in that culture. We learn it by way of doing it. The things we cannot articulate is (of course) impossible to talk about; it has to be shown implicitly. This is also why we don’t question our practises; we might not even be aware of them ourselves. We have to get a person from another culture to ask us: “Why are you doing this?” This is actually quite interesting; to get someone to fundamentally challenge our ways of acting can be very rewarding.

This is one of the places where the much hyped term “literacy”¹ comes in. To be literate in our world it is not sufficient to be able to read and write mere text, with the term “literacy” we are concerned with being able to “read” and “write” an environment, to “unconsciously see” what is going on. And as our world has become fundamentally artificial, in order to understand what is going on we have to be able to make use and see the relevance of the different technological tools offered to us, and know how it is put to work in subjects that concern us. Technology has become one of the main building blocks of our society. And now (as an educator and interested in schooling) to the point: if we as a society agree that knowledge about technology is important in order to function in this society, why do we not let our pupils and students get more acquainted with it? Unlike fish when it comes in contact with land, we become more apt to the task, better prepared and more experienced when we meet new things in organised environments. Getting experienced with different sides of our culture is not lethal to us; not getting experienced with it might be (at least socially).

I came across jet another quote illustrating this: ”Figuratively speaking, it is as difficult for those who have become fully literate within a world dominated by print to see how their own literacy has been shaped – indeed limited – by the technology used to produce and disseminate printed materials as it is for a fish to think about the water in which it swims” (taken from Reinking ed. 1998).

Perhaps we have difficulties identifying what is most important in our society, depriving the next generation a head start managing it?

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Notes:

¹ This is a concept I will return to again on this blog, and hopefully in a more elaborate form.

Skype – Human communication

Ever been about to phone a friend and wondered if he or she is busy? If it is OK to disturb? I came to think of it the other day, that calling someone is actually a way of intruding on other peoples private life. I’m making a phone call because I want to talk to someone right now. And the thing is, on the receivers end, one feels obligated to answer the phone when someone calls. Somehow it is the callers right to reach you whenever he or she wants; not taking a call when you could (or should) is close to cutting some off by saying “I don’t want to talk to you”. Who says that to a friend face to face? Very few. Of course, this is not face to face, that is the reason we can get away with not taking that phone call. We can always pretend to be busy, not hear the phone ringing or whatever.

However, as we move over to communication technologies like Skype, all that is about to change. One of the most brilliant features in Skype is the ability to indicate to the surrounding world whether you are available for talk or not. This way you don’t have to turn one particular friend down by ignoring his call; tell them all in advance! And from the callers point of view: It is so much more rewarding to call someone who actually wants to talk! If you don’t feel like talking, or got your head buried inside some project that needs your attention, set your indicator to “busy” or something and tell your contacts that now is not a good time to call.

So if you don’t wanna talk, send the message. If you really wanna talk, let someone “Skype you”. You might actually make some new friends while you’re at it. This is what communication should be all about anyway; you shouldn’t have to give up your privacy even if you wanna stay in touch. This, I think, is a “new” and more humane way of communicating. The tools are small, but the social impact is high.