paulhazel.com

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environments to a large extent dictate the types of activities that go on in them, and they are conceptually way out of date.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.]

Just before Xmas I had a paper published in the Interactive Learning Environments journal. The paper is entitled Toward a Narrative Pedagogy for Interactive Learning Environments.

Last year I published a part of it on this blog: here it is. You can get full-text access to the paper here.

A great little video created by Stefano Ottaviano with music by Ben Williams:

Stefano and Ben have both just graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University (Animation and Music Technology respectively).

Good stuff.

As mentioned in my previous post, I recently attended the Designs on eLearning conference, organized by the University of the Arts, London.

Over the two days I heard a dull introductory speech by Charles Saumarez Smith, an excellent keynote address by Gráinne Conole, and attended a series of parallel sessions where 17 presentations were made on various subjects including: blogging, podcasting, the use of 3D environments in design teaching, visual literacy, teaching rhetoric online, Second Life, and various always fascinating takes on e-learning practice. I met some very nice people and exchanged a lot of useful information with colleagues. One balmy summer evening we were all treated to a superb dinner at the Tate Modern, and whilst chatting amiably on a terrace high up on the river side of the building watched the sun go down over the city. Marvellous.

I came away from the conference with two over-riding impressions. Firstly, that teaching staff universally loathe the Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) they use. I didn’t meet a single person who had one good word to say about either Blackboard or WebCT. Frankly, I’m not surprised: as pieces of software they’re slow, clunky, lumpy, and plain butt ugly. The only VLE anyone seems even vaguely enthusiastic about is Moodle, which I can’t comment on because I’ve never used it.

Secondly, a theme that emerged from the presentations was that students were using a wide range of services and devices as technological support for their learning: iPods, mobile phones, blogs, wikis, search engines, and other “peer approved” social networking sites. Communication was seen as being mixed mode, and, importantly, not necessarily routing through institutional channels. (For example, how many students use their university email account? That would be roughly, er, none.)

Now clearly these two observations are related! They suggest to me that the current generation of VLEs are not fit for purpose. They’re totally outmoded; huge, lumbering, expensive dinosaurs. The softwares available on the open market—usually free—are vastly superior in terms of both their technical implementation and the underlying design principles: they’re open, adaptive, ever-evolving, personal, social, creative, involving, and yes even fun.

They are truly software.

***

That’s it. An excellent conference that provided much food for thought (if not necessarily any answers).

[Note: Looking at the Blackboard and Web CT websites it seems they've now merged into one company. Shudder....]

Last week I attended the Designs On eLearning conference at the Fashion Retail Academy in Gresse Street, London W1. I hadn’t been aware of the Academy before and it’s hardly surprising: it’s brand new. According to The Guardian it was set up with money partly from the government and partly from industry, and provides education at FE level (Levels 2 and 3 on the national scale).

Anyway, it’s gorgeous. What a fabulous place to work and learn in. It’s cool and modern without being cold and detached. It’s stylish but utilitarian. It’s been designed. Here’s some pix I took whilst there:

Where I currently work the environment is quite poor: shabby, grey, drab, and with learning spaces laid out like factory floors. It’s completely out of date, both physically and conceptually. How are staff and students alike supposed to be inspired, enthusiastic, and empowered in such an environment? These days when I teach I want a multi-purpose space: perhaps I’ll start a session with a demo using the computer and projector before breaking off for small group work. Later you might find me scribbling madly on a whiteboard in answer to some questions that have come up. We might use cameras or video, and someone might bring in a laptop or a mobile phone with work on and we’ll need to see it and to share it. At the moment this means I often swap rooms in the middle of a session, or else I’ll have to arrive early and set up equipment borrowed from elsewhere. Sometimes—far too often—I can’t do what I would really like to do at all…

The modern learning space needs to be flexible, social, and egalitarian, with technology embedded into and integrated with the space. It needs to be wireless. It needs to be bold and stimulating, because in the 21st Century we really, really, really need to throw off the ball and chain of the 12th Century teaching methods we still use, and that we remain forced into using by the straightjacket of our archaic working environments. JISC published an excellent report last year called Designing Spaces For Effective Learning and in it they say:

A learning space should be able to motivate learners and promote learning as an activity, support collaborative as well as formal practice, provide a personalised and inclusive environment, and be flexible in the face of changing needs.

Well, at least The Fashion Retail Academy look like they’ve got most of the way there. There is hope for us all…

Inspiring!