The [Dys]functionality of the User Interface
[slideshare id=9577669&doc=doingwithiconsmakessymbols-111006112620-phpapp01]
A recording of a presentation I recently gave at the annual meeting of the (German) Soceity for Media Studies in Potsdam, Germany. The theme of the conference was “Dysfunctionalities” (Dysfunktionalitäten; see the conference Website — in German).
**A draft of the paper is available here.**
Many important characteristics and tensions in computational and other conceptions of communication find remarkable resonance in the words of the Jewish carpenter from Galilee. For example, Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory and a proponent of digital computation (i.e. not analog, but “on” or “off”), was fond of quoting Matthew 5:37:
Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
More recently, John Durham Peters (and after him, Sybille Krämer) has considered how Jesus articulated a powerful counter-model to “erotic” dialogical and consensual conceptions of communication that have been dominant from Socrates to Habermas. As indicated in the illustration above, and as described by Peters, this counter-model is enacted through a kind of expansive multiplication and dissemination:
“Socrates” in Plato’s Phaedrus offers one horizon of thinking about human discursive activity since then: the erotic life of dialogue. Parables attributed to “Jesus” by the synoptic Gospels provide a countervision: invariant and open dissemination, addressed to whom it may concern. These two conceptions of communication—tightly coupled dialogue and loosely coupled dissemination—continue today…
Jesus is represented in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8) as delivering the parable of the sower by the seashore to a vast and mixed audience. A sower, he says, goes forth to sow, broadcasting seed everywhere, so that it lands on all kinds of ground. Most of the seeds never bear fruit. Only a rare few land on receptive soil, take root, and bring forth fruit abundantly, variously yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. In a mighty display of self-reflexive dissemination, Jesus concludes, Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!
The meaning of the parable is quite literally the audience’s problem. In other words, when the distance between speaker and listener is great, the audience bears the interpretive burden. …It becomes the hearer’s responsibility to close the loop without the aid of the speaker. The point of such “indirect communication,” said Kierkegaard, “lies in making the recipient self-active.”
This same model also underpins Apostle Paul’s evangelical epistles, which were broadcast to churches around the Roman Empire, and from there to all nations. The multiplication of these words, like Jesus’ parables –and his fishes and loaves of bread—stil` l resonates with contemporary ways of thinking, for example, about knowledge, truth or culture (of whatever quality) being “free.” However, this understanding still sits uneasily with other conceptions that would see communication more as a dialogical or intimate joining of minds, at once precious and irreplaceable.
All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace from Norm Friesen on Vimeo.
“All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace” is the title of a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan. Among other things, it is a rich record of what new technologies and technological ways of thinking can evoke. “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace” is also the title of a 2011 documentary by Adam Curtis. The video above, is where the latter references the former. Here is the full text of the original poem:
ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
Richard Brautigan
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
This paper, posted earlier as a slidecast, recently appeared in AERA’s Educational Researcher.
I’ve posted a formatted version with graphics improved (compared to the published version).
I’ve also posted, on the left, images and a table that link to full-fledged documents:
Finally, see Larry Cuban’s coverage of my article here.
Just posted a short report on the E-Textbook in higher education.
I look at a number of studies of recent e-textbook implementation, and conclude that adoption is a few years out –but that changes in price, functionality or student priorities could accelerate things considerably.
Here’s a sample: “The widespread availability of textbooks in convenient e-formats, the inclusion of interactive and audio/visual contents in these texts, and the sharing of highlights, annotations and responses between readers are all exciting possibilities. However, they remain just that: possibilities. These potential functions would form a major comparative advantage for e-textbooks against their print counterparts, but they are all waiting for popular, technical solutions and practices to make them realities. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that most students will not be working with e-textbooks until 2015 or later.”
Resistance in the ‘Face’ of Relentless Conviviality
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I recently gave this presentation with Shannon Lowe, postdoctoral fellow at my New Media Studies Research Cente.
Here’s the draft presentation text from the conference Website.
If we have a different and generalisable post – or hyper – modern conjuncture of these flows called body, then, as media researchers interested in how this generalisable experience is imbricated with media, we would like to turn to a media theory account of modernity to gain purchase on the present – and suggest that the work of Friedrich Kittler on literature, together with theories of the pre-modern, gothic body, provide an opportunity to outline a generalisable mediatised body of the present.
The one-day “Digital Future of Higher Education” took place at Thompson Rivers University in February 2011.
It proved to be a stimulating and controversial event (as planned!):
The videos of all of the keynote and panel presentations are currently online, including the one above, which is Tony Bates’ opening keynote.
The lecture as a trans medial pedagogical form
[slideshare id=6827539&doc=thelectureasatrans-medialpedagogicalform-110205234907-phpapp02]
A presentation given in Kamloops, Barcelona, Magdeburg and elsewhere, with the full text soon to be appearing in AERA’s Educational Researcher.
Please download the draft of the full text, and check out the abstract below:
The lecture has been much maligned as a pedagogical form. It has been denigrated as a “hot medium” to be “superseded” by the cooler dialogical and televisual forms (McLuhan, 1964, p. 256), or as an “oral residue” in an age of proliferating digital information (Jones, 2007), or. Yet the lecture persists and even flourishes today in the form of the podcast, the TED Talk, and the “smart” lecture hall (outfitted with audio, video and student feedback technologies). This persistence provides an opportunity to re-evaluate both the lecture and the status of the media related to it through an analysis of its form and function over time. This paper examines the lecture as a pedagogical genre, as “a site where differences between media are negotiated” as these media co-evolve (Franzel, 2010). This examination shows the lecture as bridging oral communication with writing and newer media technologies, rather than as being superseded by newer electronic and digital forms. The result is a remarkably adaptable and robust form that combines textual record and ephemeral event, and that is capable of addressing a range of different demands and circumstances, both practical and epistemological. The Web, which brings together multiple media with new and established forms and genres, presents fertile grounds for the continuation and revitalization of the lecture as a dominant pedagogical form.
Even though the 90’s was said to be the decade of the brain, education still seems to be fascinated with this wrinkled grey organ. Neurological descriptions, explanations and instructional strategies seem to be everywhere these days. But there are significant limitations to “brain-based education:”
The “brain in a vat” critique is articulated by Alva Noe in a chapter, “the grand illusion” from his recent book (Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain), and in the video above. I don’t agree that the answer to this critique is a new evolutionary biologism (as Noe suggests); I rather think that Noe’s references to phenomenology and other methodologies suggest more helpful alternatives. But in the video, Noe describes consciousness as being “more like a dance than digestion,” and with that I couldn’t agree more.
Mechanics of the Brain 1926 from Norm Friesen on Vimeo.
Education has always been Posthuman
The question of the “posthuman” has recently been gaining currency in discussions of educational philosophy and theory. It refers to the suspension of the “human” as a category that has (allegedly) underwritten education as a process of “becoming [fully] human.” This category of the “human” has been suspended or put into question through a focus on the ongoing blurring of boundaries separating humans, animals and technology in science and philosophy, and the ways that the animal and technical has traditionally been constructed as an “other” in educational discourse. In the context of European traditions of education as Bildung and Apprentisage, it is not difficult to argue that education, as Helen Pedersen says, is indeed a kind of enforcement of “compulsory humanity:”
Western pedagogy is firmly rooted in a ‘humanist’ tradition, where the human subject is considered both the instrument and the end product of education. Second, the church and the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose conventional interpretations include a distinct human-animal boundary, have historically had a strong grip on the school and the formal education system…(Pedersen, 2010)
But claims of this kind miss an important point. In the case of the human-animal relation, they miss the enormous contribution of comparative psychology of Pavlov (see video, above) and Thorndike that is based on the systematic transgression of human-animal differentiation. As the video, above, makes clear (through means both gross and refined), education has, in some contexts, always –or at least long—been posthuman. Much less than being an exception, the dissolution of the “human” underwrites and interpenetrates the field of educational psychology. In the inaugural edition of Educational Psychology no less, E.L. Thorndike declares that “Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man” (1910, 5). Assuming that a normative and exclusive conception of the human underpins education also misses the enormous contribution of cognitive science and cognitivist variants on constructivism. In this case, it is not so much the , again the student is seen as part machine. Recent applications of theories of self-regulated learning, as only one example, locate the student (and teacher) endogenously in a kind of self-adapting network of analysis, reporting, performance and feedback:
Data generated as learners use [specialized networked software] …can be analyzed, aggregated within and across episodes and learners, and reported back to all parties engaged in school reform with a very short delay. In the same way as my stock portfolio can be updated every 20 min[utes], learners, teachers, and researchers can have data upon which to make on-the-spot adaptations. (Winne, 2006, 14)
Equally ambitious visions are associated with developments in neurology in connection with education. In these cases, it is not the human but the neural structures and patterns of the brain that are the proper object of education. Any of these visions are profoundly posthuman. They would see a by-passing or short-circuiting of localized, social and human processes of formation and acculturation. Education is cast as a process of fine tuning neural relationships or optimizing systemic performance rather than as a shaping and realization of individual, human potential.
The discussion of the ambivalence of the posthuman in education is a great opportunity to understand the way that education has always (or at least long) been conceptualized in posthuman terms. Now sometimes critiqued for his assumption that “people were as easy to study as stones and toads” (Berliner, p.20) Thorndike can be seen as a posthumanist pioneer. Looking at his and others’ contribution to the long and influential posthuman tradition in education may allow us to study with new clarity what has in many ways been an untheorized mainstay in education discourse to the present day.
(hat tip to Shannon Lowe)
