paulhazel.com

Just in time for 2012 here is the School of Digital Media showreel with its new soundtrack (by BSc Music Tech graduate James Radford):

Students should be taken to the edge of the precipice beyond which knowledge does not exist.

Harold Innis

Sir Ken Robinson is a sane, reasonable, and extremely funny man. You can find a previous post on him here. Today’s video is one of the excellent RSA Animate series: it covers some of the same ground as the TED talk but it’s developed further, and the visualization really adds something. Needless to say, in the current climate of student protests this is all too relevant.

These observations are not confined to schools; it is more-or-less the same at university. A couple of comments:

1. The separation of subjects is embodied in the division of universities into faculties. In my experience, it is very difficult to work across these divisions.
2. Universities are still organized like factories, and it may be that under the current political and financial climate this tendency will be exaggerated. As Sir Ken states, the opposite should be the case.
3. The idea that there are multiple answers to most important questions—not one “right” answer—is crucial. In fact, as Jerome Bruner has suggested, it seems obvious that to know something well is to understand it from multiple points of view. Meaning is context-sensitive.
4. Learning is primarily a social activity. Meaning is socially negotiated.

All together now: the process is the product.

[Via Gareth Whittock. Thanks.]

Here’s a slick bit of online augmented reality hi-jinx created—I’m very pleased to be able to say—by two ex-Swansea Metropolitan University students, Rob Chalmers and Tristian Ballard (now both working for media production company FauvelKhan). Everything you need to know is in this video:

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Every from Coventry University. During the course of the meeting we were both in there was a good deal of discussion about engaging students in their University courses and retaining them on the course for the duration of the degree programme. A short while after the meeting, Peter sent me the link to a video that he’d made, documenting an experiment in teaching and learning that he and his colleagues had carried out at the beginning of this academic year. Here it is:

A few comments:

• A well-made little film, and a very good promotional tool for the Creative Computing team.
• Nice new building going up. I’m jealous…
• An interesting project taking students through the whole production cycle.
• A lot of emphasis on the social and  collaborative aspects of learning, and on individual and group identity. Equally, a relatively light touch on the technology.
• The video really highlights how unsuitable their current facilities are for the type of open, flexible, and student-centred learning that they are experimenting with. From my own experience these types of facilities are, unfortunately,  typical of most HE institutions (including where I work). This is a big issue in education, in my opinion: the learning environments to a large extent dictate the types of activities that go on in them, and they are conceptually way out of date.

So. All very thought-provoking. Thanks Peter.

Peter Every Links

Website:    http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~pevery/
Courses:    http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~pevery/cc/
Blog:         http://ccatcu.blogspot.com
Music:      http://www.neophyterecordings.com/

On Tuesday 9th March I attended the Computational Turn conference at Swansea University. Very good it was too, with the wide range of speakers packed into a single day all having a diverse set of approaches to the main theme. Some of the papers were very challenging, and—whilst not all were of particular interest to me—many shone light into areas I had barely perceived previously, let alone considered in any deliberate way. The highlights of the day were the day’s two keynote speakers: N. Katherine Hayles opening the conference and Lev Manovich closing it.

N. Katherine Hayles

Hayles outlined the rationale for the “computational turn.” She began by asking how many books could we read in a lifetime. If we read one a day between the ages of 15 and 85, that turns out to be 25,550. Not many compared to the total number of books available. The question becomes, what if we could analyze a whole corpus of books—all the books ever written on WWII, say, or all the books written about Aristotle—using computers? What would this type of mass analysis reveal?

Of course the next question would have to be, an analysis on what basis? Computers can’t “read” in the same way humans can. They may be able to detect patterns in the data—frequency, repetition, structure—but that is a far cry from the type of hermeneutic interpretation that humans are so good at. Quoting Tim Lenoir, she suggests that we “forget meaning and follow the data streams.” Starting with meaning always embodies too many assumptions: if we start with the analytics we can work out what it all means later. She then went on to illustrate her thesis by showing the initial results of her computational analysis of Danielewski’s Only Revolutions.

The Q&A session ranged across a wide range of topics, all of which Hayles dealt with expertly:

• Nigel Thrift’s “technological unconscious” was discussed, the observation that assumptions and limitations are embedded within the technologies we use which are largely unnoticed and unseen. (An idea that seems very close to McLuhan’s theories about media.)
• There was talk of the “adaptive unconscious,” which posits a mind that is effectively a type of internal distributed network where the unconscious is not a Freudian dark place but an active participant in cognition and decision-making.
• There was talk of the “Baldwin Effect,” an elaboration on evolutionary theory which suggests that specific inherited traits are emphasized by cultural behaviour.
• Finally, Hayles talked of culture moving from a deep-attention mode (related to print) into a hyper-attention mode (related to electronic media).

All heady stuff. How some of these issues relates to the computational turn I’m not quite sure, but the whole session was never less than stimulating.

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich’s talk was mainly concerned with his projects, all of which are related to visualizations of large bodies of visual data: one million Manga pages, all 3480 Time magazine covers, Vertov movies, the way saturation changes over time in modern painting. He also showed off the Cultural Analytics software his Software Studies initiative has been developing. Here’s one of his Manga visualizations (stolen from his CultureVis photostream):

Visualization of 50,000 Manga pages

The accompanying text reads:

X axis: Grey scale standard deviation (measured per page)
Y axis: Entropy (measured per page)

This visualization shows how cultural analytics approach allows us to map continuous style space of a cultural data set. In the current visualization, the pages which have more contrast appear on the right; the pages which have no grey tones but only black and white are on the bottom right; and the pages which have a full range of grey tone (and thus more “realism” ) on the top. Every page in the dataset is situated in the space defined by these extremes.

Here’s another example (from here) showing a subset of the Time magazine covers mapped out in the Cultural Analytics software:

Time Magazine analytics

The accompanying text reads:

Exploring a set of 450 Time covers (sampled from the complete set of 4553 covers 1923-2009 by taking every 10th image). Mousing over points reveals larger images and metadata.

I’ve only really presented here the bookends of the Computational Turn conference. There was much else of value, some of which I intend to follow up in my own work. A special thanks must go to Dr. David Berry for organizing the conference, for attracting such marvellous speakers to Swansea, and for the invitation. Thanks also to Sian Rees for coordinating the event and for providing such a warm welcome.

Here are a couple of excerpts from a 90-minute programme shown on PBS on February 2nd as part of their Frontline documentary strand.

The clips here obviously relate mainly to the uses of technology in education. Other highlights of the programme are seeing a lecture at MIT in full swing with almost every student paying more attention to their laptops than their lecturer, and chilling insights into the uses the U.S. Military is making of the technologies.

A very, very good documentary, asking some very hard questions and not necessarily having any pat answers. I would recommend watching the whole thing.

This should give my students something to think about:

So. What does it all mean? Well, for those currently studying in Higher Education it means things like these:

1. The idea that your education will be finished when you leave University is patently daft. You will need to train and retrain yourself many times during your working life.
2. You will almost undoubtedly changes jobs many times. You may also change careers more than once. The only constant will be change.
3. Consequently, the most important skills you need to master are a) the ability to bootstrap yourself whenever necessary, and b) the ability to critically evaluate new information. The principle function of a university degree is to teach you how to do these two things. You need to learn how to learn.

End of lecture.

[Thanks to the G-Man for the video link.]