Emotions in Motion and other transhuman notions #edcmooc

Robbie - A Short Film By Neil Harvey from Neil Harvey on Vimeo.

What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be self-conscious? Are my friends missing me?

Robbie – a short film by Neil Harvey – transposes the fundamental human questions onto Robbie, the narrator and the voice of the monologue of the film.

Robbie is a NASA robot that was built in 2011 and who got self-awareness in 2032 when NASA refurbished his CPU.

The story departs from ordinary sci-fi when we learn that in 2045 something drastic happened and Robbie lost all contact to Earth and to his friends. After that he has been wondering what happened. Why was he left alone to the space station? Are his astronaut friends missing him?

Now Robbie's battery is low and he's about to turn into sleep mode. Some 6,000 years have passed as he has been orbiting the Earth.

The story succeeds in getting me emphatic for Robbie. Albeit his logic board is only a programmed AI, his story tells about feelings, about thoughts, and about curiosity – emotions that are in the core of being human.

Mimicking it for the learning's sake

Remember when Tamagotchi came around? Those little gadgets small kids took so intensely care of in their heyday.

The story of Robbie and nurturing Tamagotchis have a similarity that says something about defining what is (trans)human. In both cases we project our own feelings to stuff around us. We form relations with objects and deal with them as if the feelings were mutual.

A very similar reaction happens when one is "discussing" with Eliza chatterbot. When Eliza recognizes certain words in your sentence, it replies with choosing one of the pre-written answers.

This psychological transference can be utilized in many ways in eLearning, too. For example in the virtual world Second Life we coded a biology teacher-bot that requested avatars who came nearby to watch an educational video, and started to examine what the avatar-student had learned.

Of course it was pre-programmed, and a very elementary and robust use of the Stimulus-Organism-Response model, but it succeeded in arousing feelings of a human relationship, which in turn triggered emotions and led to a more meaningful experience of learning.

Chatterbot teaching biology in the Second Life.

MOOCifying public education ( #edcmooc )

Sometimes schools are like space labs

I hear a bell ringing in my head when I read Bonnie Stewart asking: do the (c)MOOCs work as Trojan horses for the sociocultural growth and spread of digital literacies?

That bell reminds me how I've been telling a similar story about similar benefits when I've been training vocational teachers to utilize another platform – Facebook.

Before getting back to Facebook and VET, let's look at MOOCs and digital literacies.

*   *   *

The article Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation? leans on Lankshear & Knobel's formulation that new digital literacies have an ethos component as well as a technological one.

This ethos "celebrates inclusion (everyone in), mass participation, distributed expertise, valid and rewardable roles for all who pitch in." (cit. Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 18)

According to Stewart, being digitally literate is about being able to make meaning as a social practice via interaction with mediating digital technologies. I agree, couldn't have said it better.

Right now I'm making meanings as a social practice via Coursera and the course E-Learning and Digital Culture, organized by University of Edinburgh. This MOOC is a collective, distributed and dispersed way of sharing the yearn for new knowledge.

#edcmoc hangout in an informal setting

As such, it suits an adult learner who has good learning skills, understanding of the meta frameworks and own inner motivation and goals. On this course there hasn't been collaboration that would steer the action, and e.g. massive participation in the hangout sessions didn't "generate new knowledge" as Stewart thinks size and capacity make happen. So, it's all up to the learner him/herself.

Innovating the public education

Reading Stewart at the dentist's waiting room

The larger the course, the smaller the role of the teacher, and the more emphasis has to be laid on peer interaction, course materials and tools for knowledge creation.

I'm interested in what we can learn from (c)MOOCs and apply to public education, particularly to secondary vocational education and training, and to adult education centre courses.

If social learning and one being the subject of his/her own learning leads to making new meanings and sense that will transfer and affect in one's lifelong path after the very learning process, a lot is gained for the VET or the adult student.

Can the (c)MOOC model be transferred to public education? The idea behind cMOOCs is the autonomy over one's own learning, an essential factor for being the said subject. If there is such a fundamental autonomy, how can courses like these scaffold learners who have less tools, skills, knowledge, or self-steering ability?

In the beginning I referred to Facebook. It has provided a great platform for many students in our own VET organization. We can reach and communicate with students a lot better than with email or Moodle. Facebook has strengthened our digital literacies, and it can be said to be the learning platform of digital literacies for most middle aged people.

In a similar way, I believe the public education and its e-learning courses can achieve a lot from putting (c)MOOC ideas into practice in this new context. Autonomy over one's own learning is familiar also to the education authorities who at least here in Finland have a strong trend towards personalizing each learner's studies and in the VET sector a system for recognizing of prior learning in other institutions and of non-formal learning.

Previously I worked for Sotunki Distance Learning Centre that offers all upper secondary school courses online. It had similar challenges in developing quality and participatory practices as our VET institute and organizations that it's likely to merge with in the beginning of 2014.

Sotunki found answers to many of those challenges. Now, in another city, I'm facing a bit similar situation.

This is such an interesting realm to study, innovate, and develop. I feel lucky that it's part of my work and my personal interests – a combination I'd like every student to possess.

Student counseling in SecondLife in Sotunki.

Whose world is it anyway? - Level 1 - #edcmooc

They all went in, the housekeeper with them, and found more than a hundred volumes of big books very well bound, and some other small ones. The moment the housekeeper saw them she turned about and ran out of the room, and came back immediately with a saucer of holy water and a sprinkler, saying, "Here, your worship, senor licentiate, sprinkle this room; don't leave any magician of the many there are in these books to bewitch us in revenge for our design of banishing them from the world. (Cervantes: Don Quixote)

Once upon a Don Quixote who read countless chivalric novels, got immersed in the fictive stories, and started to live them true.

He got carried away by the new media of his time. After that era, practically every new media form or technology has had its critics, been deemed suspicious or even malicious: newspapers, radio, movies, tv, computer games, the internet. Yet, they've been happily adopted by the masses.

Fiction and entertainment have a mission to tickle our imagination and to carry us away. First the audiovisual technology, and now augmented reality not only glues our imagination, but also swallows up our senses, the perception of our corporeal environment around us.

David Croteau, William Hoynes and Stefania Milan paraphrase Sven Birkerts in their Media/Society: "We do not need to know about the world; instead, we need to know how to access the data that will tell us about the world." (p.306)

Science fiction is eager to ask us what the real world is like – and what does it matter if we take our daily dose of soma. If one feels it a nice place to live in, and if one has the feeling of control, does it matter what's the boring truth?

Sight from Sight Systems.

So, if it were not for the bad of Sancho Panza and of his horse Rosinante, should one leave these self-made knights to live their dreams? Should we let Patrick hover on the living room floor and use his might when dating Daphne?

For now, the author stretches his back and pauses. Level 1 finished.

Is it too challenging: Google Hangout & Twitter in an #edcmooc learning session

Five course teachers chatting in a Google Hangout, hundreds of learners watching it online. Dozens of them commenting on the Hangout page, in G+, in Twitter.

An hour of studying like this is an intensive experience. One listens to rapid discussion in a language not one's native, scans #edcmooc tagged tweets and their variety of subtopics, plus the comment flow on the hangout video page.

It required a lot of concentration to maintain focus and to be aware of what's going on around. It was actually a fascinating quest, and a very interesting experience.

One gets busy by scattering attention like this. I bet that many chose to focus solely on the hangout discussion, but there were a lot of us who addressed questions to the teachers and discussed with each other along the hangout.

Can we say anything about the quality of learning of the learners who chose this latter tactics?


The topic of the hangout was derived from the theme of the first study week: deterministic (utopian/dystopian) views on technology, and how the theme was addressed in the week 1 materials.

Jen Ross, the chair of the hangout, lead the panelists along a line of thought, which got some curve balls from the audience. Every once in a while some Twitter comment was picked up and addressed briefly.

The technical side of the situation had to be brought in the discussion only twice: in the beginning to know if all's ok, and towards the end when some of the audience lost the video connection.

The learning environment and its informational organization play a major role in how a learner will stay focused. There is a vast body of research how the distractions hinder learning in the classroom (see eg. this literature review) and some on e-learning (mostly juxtaposing curricular and extra-curricular activities at the computer, eg. here) .

Even though external distractions (physical surroundings, extra-curricular online activity) were in my case absent, there were too many channels and simultaneous discussions going on to give myself time to structure, to scrutinize and to invent new knowledge in that situation.

In other words, being so busy kept me using the lower order thinking skills, as those categories of the cognitive domain are named in the Bloom's (revised) taxonomy.

Also in the affective domain I see my reactions during the hangout been mostly lower order: receiving and responding.

Even though I didn't make it to higher order processes, I don't regard the hangout as unsuccessful.

Now it's my task to continue the process. I'll listen to the discussion again, analyzing and evaluating, organizing and characterizing. I'll also externalize my thoughts and feelings by writing and discussing about it… oh, well, this self-steered student is apparently on the right path.

The point is, this seems to work if the learners are motivated, responsible and have a good command of their meta-learning skills. I have my doubts about how this works in a situation when the student lacks some of these qualities.


DID YOU participate the Hangout? What was your tactics, and what are your thoughts about the session?

The long goodbye to Chandler's text ( #edcmooc )

Is it just me but Daniel Chandler's Technological or Media Determinism doesn't convince, nor does it give me any new insight. Thus it's hard to get excited and discuss about it in the forums. Being a Finn, I prefer to drop blunt statements of fact here on my own turf ;)

Today I opted to take a train instead of commuting to work by bike in order to have time for this essay, resulting this kind of scribblings.

Ok, I haven't done it yet, I'm only half-way through. I hope my opinion will change before the long goodbye is said.

Bendito Machines, edutech, and BYOX era

On my way to work I kept on ruminating Bendito Machines. I think these films picture us a situation that has been fading away for some time already.

Tech and particularly edutech has been more or less a monolith, a one-size-fits-all solution. Such was the spirit of the industrial era, and in a similar way has the education itself been organized.

Societies are in a flux: personal virtual networks, information flowing through a multipolar social media, crowdsourcing. Digital cultures have been showing the way, bridging and connecting people and forming new sub cultures.

In education, there's some inertia, but at least from the Finnish perspective, new era has begun. First, schools and teachers were free to organize teaching in the way they saw best for their pupils. Nowadays personalization of learning is high even on the agenda of the national authorities. 

Techwise, BYOD/BYOX offers a plentitude of solutions. The attitudes, the norms and the ways work and teaching has been organized in practice are slower to change. 

"Resistance is futile!" Steampunk meets magical realism #edcmooc

Adorable style of drawing, animating and spot-on soundscape! Serious stories with a wry smile!

Bendito Machine, a set of short animations by Zumbakamera, was a good choice as a starter for this #edcmooc on e-learning and digital culture.

 Such an interesting series to watch!  Kudos to Andy Mitchell who made a handy Youtube playlist.

It made a lot of sense to watch the whole series instead of only the one mentioned in the course materials. Well crafted pieces of art. Visually pleasing, though the storyline was a bit one-dimensional.

Bendito Machine I-IV (plus The Sxipmobile) juxtaposed and linked technology with other major Western cultural phenomena, say "industrialism", or "capitalism". Spotting "Coke"  and "Shell" tickled my thoughts, as in recent weeks it's been in the news about Coke being the Numero Uno reason for Mexican obesity, and opposing Shell's arctic projects has put many activists behind the bars in Murmansk, Russia.

The helplessness of the people and their being in the mercy of the machinery was sad and annoying at the same time. Why didn't they take a grip of their life and the situation? Does it have something to do with cultural determinism? What if not only the animated puppets but the animation studio crew as well is reacting to the Progress and to el Sistema in a way their own culture determines, as oppressed by-standers like protagonists in so many Latin novels?

In regards to our subject – e-learning and digital culture – I thought about pupils and students who have the feeling they've got no control over their own life or learning path. Preventing that and empowering the learners at school has been a big issue here in Finland in recent years. There are major programmes helping those with socio-economical or learning challenges. This is one reason why there is not such a stark contradiction between ordinary people and the System here. So, again, not a technological but cultural and societal issue. 

To put my experience short, it was like reading a novel in magical realism: fascinating stories from another world, interesting but quite alien.

School starts tomorrow. What's in a backpack of an #edcmooc participant?

I've enrolled in E-learning and Digital Culture, starting tomorrow. I'm eager to attend the course and engage in the collaborative learning activities.

Uni of Edinburgh somewhere here.

This course is developed and run by the University of Edinburgh. It'd be so wonderful to revisit that marvelous city where I spent a long weekend with our youngest son two years ago.

Having a physical learning environment, hearing and seeing the language everywhere around (meaning both the use of English instead of our Finnish, and the discourse of the discipline), meeting the course mates face-to-face... but there's no need to comb one's hair or to load one's backpack for an online course.

I'm curious to find out how the organizers have planned out collaboration and peer learning. What kind of pedagogical scripts will they throw in in order to structure and improve the interaction processes between learners?

I'm keen on learning about the other students and keen on  broaden my current views on the subject from their points of view.

So, this excited learner can't make any other preparations on the eve of the first school day but write his blog. Perhaps it is my school backpack after all. Hope its stories tell about me as a fellow student.

Identiteetin itsepuolustusta verkossa

Lukaisin eilen kirjan Itsepuolustusopas verkkoon (Tranberg&Heuer, 2013). Pamfletti oli hiukan yliampuva, mutta haaviin tarttui silti hyviä neuvoja.

Kirjasin niitä muistiin, tein tarpeellisimpia lisäyksiä ja jaoin kaverien tuunattavaksi Google-dokumenttina. Syntyi pieni vinkkilista siitä miten suojelet omaa identiteettiäsi verkossa:

Henkilökohtaisten tietojen jakaminen

Älä jaa/lähetä näitä verkossa/sähköpostitse!

• Henkilötunnus
• Salasanat ja turvakoodit (ainoastaan luottamaasi palvelimeen suojatun “https”-yhteyden yli)
• Käyttäjätunnukset (ainoastaan luottamaasi palvelimeen suojatun “https”-yhteyden yli)

Mieti kahdesti onko erityisiä syitä jakaa näitä verkossa

• Syntymäaika ja -paikka
• Kotiosoite, yhtestiedot, perheen tiedot
• Lomasuunnitelmat
• Osoitekirja
• Henkilökohtaiset tiedot kuten vakaumus ym.
• Paikkatiedot (missä sinä/mobiililaitteesi on juuri nyt)

Jaettu tietokone/mobiililaite

• Kirjaudu ulos verkkopalveluista
• Pyyhi selainhistoria ja poista evästeet (selainohjelman asetuksista)
• Tallensitko laitteelle omia tiedostojasi? vietyäsi ne omalle verkkolevyllesi, poista koneella olevat tiedostot roskakoriin - ja muista myös tyhjentää se

Googlen palveluiden käyttö kirjautuneena

• Tunne Googlen suojaus- ja tietosuojatyökalut
• Omien Google-palvelujen Hallintapaneeli (kun olet kirjautuneena)
• Näillä perusteilla Google kohdentaa mainoksia juuri sinulle (kun olet kirjautuneena)

Facebook

• Yksityisyysasetukset voit säätää tältä sivulta
• Erilliset ohjelmat (appsit) Facebookin sisällä eivät useinkaan ole turvallisia yksityisyyden suojan kannalta. Ohjelma kerää sen kehittäjän tietokantaan monenlaista tietoa sinun Facebook-tietovirrastasi
• Karri Luoman blogin Ohjeita Facebookin turvalliseen käyttöön

Lisäksi

Yleinen tietoturva

• Muista fiksut salasanakäytännöt: ei koskaan samaa, ei tiettyä kaavaa eikä liian helppoja (tyttönimi, lapsen nimi jne.)
• Varo pöpöjä: sähköpostin liitetiedostot ja linkit sekä nettisivuilta ladattavat tiedostot voivat tuoda viruksia varsinkin pc-koneille
• Tuntemattomien kaveri- ja avunpyynnöt ovat usein ns. nigerialaiskirjeitä tai “khalastelua” (“phishing”)
• Aseta mobiililaitteesi ja tietokoneesi suojaksi avauskoodi/salasana
  
  

Minun mielipiteeni:

Tarvittaessa luo palveluun feikki-identiteetti. Palvelujen käyttöehdot yleensä tämän kieltävät, mutta lasken tämän pieneksi kansalaistottelemattomuudeksi, jos sen avulla voit suojella yksityisyyttäsi esimerkiksi harjoitellessasi käyttämään uutta palvelua.

 
Esko Lius

PS. Valokuvat ovat Taidemuseo EMMAsta vuodelta 2007. En ole merkannut metakenttään kenen tai mikä teos tuo numeroitu peili on. Kirjoita kommentti, jos satut tietämään.