On the subject of choices …

This nicely-entitled blog post brought a smile to my face last night. I’d spent sometime during the day looking at images of the mood boards created in the Explore, Map, Build workshop, and I was particularly taken by this one (click on it  for a larger image), created by Laura D. as she talked to us about SocialLearn. Specifically, I was considering the image of the woman looking at various kitchen appliances.

Actually, during the workshop I did point out to Laura that serendipity had been kind to her as she got her hands on an image that pretty much everyone there might have liked to pick . The thing is that, when I saw the post, I immediately thought of the image: a person overwhelmed by technology.

My musings on this image, though, were a bit skewed. I don’t usually see kitchen appliances as the most flexible of technologies – a blender blends, doesn’t it? So, to learn how to use it is mostly a mechanical thing, that is, you learn how to operate the thing at different speeds according to what you want to blend and to which consistency, but, unless you use the thing in a biology or chemistry lab, or (hopefully not) throw it at someone and make it into a murder weapon, that’s pretty much it. What about a coffee maker or a pasta machine, same reasoning?

Is there an implication here that a given learning technology is built to do something, so you choose a tool by knowing what the technology offers, match that to your needs and, preferably, get hold of a few tried-and-tested ‘good practice’ recipes?

Is that it?

I don’t think so. I think the relationship between technology and applications is far from trivial. Actually, I guess the most interesting uses of technologies are probably those that designers did not consider originally (tape recorders being my most favourite example – if you’re interested, see this).

In other words, it looks to me that it’s in subversion of the original uses that lots of interesting things happen. So, perhaps there are, after all, potential uses for a pasta machine that don’t actually involve making pasta or dough for Brazilian pastel - if you know of one, let me know, I’ve got mine stuffed in the cupboard for years.

One detail, though, comes to mind as I think of what I used to present as a ‘golden rule’ to my MA students:  ‘you need to know the rules before you can break them’.

Un-sensible and un-simple …

Yesterday I had a Skype text chat with a friend that set me off considering choices. This friend is also an academic,  but that’s not the basis of our connection. Actually, we’re in a small group (all academics!?) that is based on a kind of tacit agreement: avoid talking about work (hence very little or no ranting) and avoid talking about  ‘academic’ stuff beyond a point-of-no-return (when the mood of a perfectly good conversation changes into something unpleasantly somber). Yesterday we did talk shop, though, eventually moving on to the territory of ethics.

We started the conversation talking about something else entirely, but it doesn’t really matter what that was as far as what I want to write here is concerned. The thing is that we had (still have, but this isn’t relevant to the point I’m trying to make) very different views on this particular topic, views that are, basically, irreconcilable. Neither were (are, but, again, this isn’t relevant) willing to concede.

I wonder if the medium might just have been what allowed the conversation, a bit of a displacement activity for me (and possibly for my friend), to go as far as it did:  I guess it’s harder to monopolise a conversation when you’re typing, no matter how fast you can do it… In other words, it’s harder to get on a high horse on a text chat or, at least, to stay on top for too long (before you lose the punters on the other side) … I wonder if it was politics (again), in this case, the ‘politics of friendship’ that opened up the possibility that we, at least, were trying to listen to one another. That’s certainly not a small blessing.

I think we were both really trying to see one another’s points, even if each of us were only able to do that through our respective lenses. At that point, I brought in the question: if we were at a negotiation table, how would we get ourselves out of that dead-end situation?

I don’t have an answer to this question – let me just clarify this to spare you the trouble of continuing to read this post if you happened to land on this page looking for answers …

This brought the whole ethics business into play. If we were decision-makers trying to find a solution to a particular problem that led to irreconcilable differences, how could we do it, how could we move past this dead-end? If we were both utilitarianists, we would agree that we’d have to come up with an agreed-upon solution, which, I guess, would mean that we’d need to find some common ground to get started, and then build that up. For example, we could start from the position that we wanted to avoid war or that we needed a result quickly, if the situation were catastrophic and action required urgently (OK, this was a bit far-fetched for the purposes of the chat I’m writing about, but not really for many a talk where people are under enormous strain to come up with solutions for things yesterday).

I wonder if my tacit agreement with this friend has something utilitarian in it?

In any case, I was (I think I was, anyway) making a case that the whole thing about teaching ethics outside academic philosophy isn’t really about teaching people what is ‘right’, which sounds awfully like catechism to me, but about helping people to understand what an ethical issue is, to get people to see that, more often than not, there are irreconcilable differences when you’re trying to determine what is ‘right’, ‘wrong’ or just ‘the lesser of two evils’.  It doesn’t have to be anything related to a major catastrophe: it can be something as simple as choosing words in a conversation.

So, unless you want to go to war, something’s gotta give.

The thing is that, while I was making a case that ethical reasoning is profoundly related with how we make choices, adding that negotiation is the way forward, my friend suggested that negotation actually removed choice: the choice of war, precisely.

We couldn’t continue the chat (work got in the way?!), unfortunately, but I kept on mulling over the last lines and, later on, the potentially productive role of conflict.  In a discussion later in the day, I found myself thinking about these things within the context of academic life, argumentation and discussion, which should make way for another post …

But just to try and put some sort of cliched finish to this one: because something’s gotta give, you can’t have your cake and eat it, I suppose …

While having lots of fun with twitter (and restarting on this blog), I’ve been thinking about complaints that micro-blogging is killing blogging, or complaints that blogging isn’t ‘good’ writing, or, better yet, serious objections that all of this is killing ‘good writing’ overall. Coincidentally, a few days ago one of my twitter friends pointed to an excellent interview with Jose Saramago, a Portuguese writer, where he voices his views on twitter. In a poor translation, this is what he said: ‘those 140 characters reflect something we already knew: a tendency to the monosyllabic as a means of communication. Step by step, we’re descending to groans’.

Being a bit of a worrier, I often wonder about the implications of our ‘broadcast thyself’ culture. But I’m not really worried about the descent that Saramago talks about. I’m worried about something else: when it’s so easy to ‘talk’, what happens to ‘listening’?

Both things are needed for a conversation to happen, and this seems to me quite crucial as far as online ‘living’ is concerned’ :  to me it makes sense that, in the absence of  the ‘physical’,  it’s conversation that provides the links. Granted, this is a big debate and could do with much more unpacking, but I’m supposed to be on teaching-only duty this week (!), so I’ll just get on with the sketched thoughts.

I don’t believe for a moment that no one listens, of course, but there is so much that is called ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ that pretty much amounts to monologues, people putting forward pitches, trying to convince others of specific things, giving their so-called ’side of the story’. Offline and online alike. But then that’s what makes rhetoric a fascinating business, isn’t it, this constant struggle to sell something, to convince, to persuade?

And what’s this got to do with online communication?

If  rhetoric is an ‘art’, then I’m inclined to think that ‘listening’ to online conversations and conversing online are like that too. These things have so much of trying to build stuff, images, faces, without really knowing much about who’s on the other end – a bit like the work that writers do?

But online conversations move all over the place, a bit like a magician’s ‘now you see it, now you don’t’. Some of the conversations you can see, others you can’t, some bits are old, many bits are left to be written. It’s a whole time-space mess, really, but it’s all pretty much somewhere. There is competition and contradiction, redundancy and lack, there are multiple possibilities of understanding and misunderstanding. Is the thing as a ‘whole’ a bit like a deconstructed text? The boundaries around this text are blurry, the boundaries around the ideas in the text are unclear, and the question of who the ‘author’ is is difficult to answer.

Whether the author is really dead or not, if it’s all really somewhere, all those nice little contradictions and conflicts, just waiting to be ‘aggregated’, I guess we’ve got yet more reason for honing in on those listening skills …

Thinking about twitter, blogging, communication using these things and learning theories (I’ve finally found the time to learn a little bit about connectivism), I’m reminded of a story …

In a summer towards the end of the 80’s there were some devastating floods in Brazil, which, for some reason or another, I happen to remember only too well.  I lived in Rio, where the rains were especially ruthless, and I remember spending quite some time sitting on the balcony in my parents’ flat, killing time by watching people float by on mattresses or anything they could use to maneuver the streets that had turned into rivers. It was all quite  scary, actually, very different, longer and stronger than the usual storms that tend to hit the place in the summer. The waters wreaked havoc with a lot of the city’s infrastructure, and, in particular, the phone network went nuts.

Someone then found out, bless him or her,  that if they rang a certain number they got a kind of ‘open line’ that an unlimited (or obscenely large – I’m not quite sure) number of people could hook up to. The word spread around very quickly, and this created a phenomenon known as ‘The Line’. I wonder if other cariocas remember this -  it was all over the news for a long while (i.e. I’m not making it up! ) …

Anyway, ‘The Line’ was this totally bizarre set-up in which you had God-knows-how-many people, all connected to this number and, quite literally, talking at the same time, on top of each other. Depending on where you were in the city, I think, chances were that you’d be shouting, actually.

Yet there were conversations going on.  Though the whole thing was chaotic, there were different things going on – an amazing feat of auditory streaming, it was, to take part in those conversations. And conversations they were … While some people  exchanged phone numbers to move on to private spaces, others just stayed connected and talked (or shouted, as I say), told jokes, discussed politics or flirted, some using pseudonyms, others giving out their full name and home address.  There were love affairs, fights, friendships, you name it.

Isn’t this at least a bit familiar?

Next week I’m on teaching-only duty, so I’ll be enjoying the rest of my Friday getting back to the subject of blogs, twitter and theories of this or that. I’ll probably be smiling every so often as I get reminded of that summer.

Having finally managed to get my and John Monk’s unit Introducing Ethics in Information and Computer Sciences unit published on OpenLearn (here and here), I’m now happily left to ruminate over what we’ve been doing together since early last year.

There’s so much in the unit itself and behind, underneath and around it, lots of quite profound thinking that John has done over many years, really, material worth much more development (in OU speak the unit that’s been published is a D1, that is, a Draft 1) and, in many ways, unpacking. ‘Unpacking’ because the rationale of using dialogue and the types of resources explored in the unit has enormous potential, I think, but I don’t think the materials can be easily re-used without a good measure of further contextualisation.

But I didn’t want to write about the unit itself in this post. I certainly didn’t want to start a new line of reflection at bedtime on how much I’ve been working, over many years, on my skills as a ‘translator’ (it’s quite funny to look back and see this was my first ‘properly paid’ job title)! Basically, I didn’t even want to write a post at this time on a Friday (I do need to catch up with my sleep tonight and with my daughter, properly, tomorrow, as the last 10 days or so have been ridiculously busy) …

I just wanted to capture a question that hit me a few moments ago:

Is ethics the quintessential site of boundary games?

I spent most of yesterday in the ‘Explore, Map, Build Workshop’, an event hosted by the ATELIER-D project in which I’m working with 6 colleagues from the area of Design. We managed to get together a good group of people from the four corners of the university, representing some of the projects around Web 2.0 and Open Educational Resources currently in development across campus (’some’ because there are actually too many and our space was limited!) . The idea was to create an opportunity for people to explore and forge connections across projects, but it was quite nice just to see people meeting others, in some cases for the first time, and I ended my day thinking that some good links were forged or renewed in the process.

I had a go at live-blogging the workshop, but I made a pig’s ear out of the job. Toggling between computer, post-its and mobile just didn’t work for me, though I suspect there is also an element of practice involved, like mostly everything.  Andreia Santos from OLnet, on the other hand, did a very nice job in 3 posts: post 1, post 2 and post 3.  Another OLnet’er, Giota Alevizou also posted some reflections and created several clouds on Cloudwords. So, instead of sharing my dismal attempt, I thought I’d write down some intial reflections on the day as a blog post because, as night fell and I found myself with my dog warming my feet as he likes to do, I started thinking about boundaries once more …

We started the workshop by asking people to create mood boards representing their projects.  Later on, everyone was asked to roam around the room and add coloured post-its with notes onto each other’s boards. Notes on what? Answer: ideas, themes, questions, anything that came to mind. A bit vague, I know, but this was an experiment.

I think everyone found these activities provided fun and interesting possibilities for them to present themselves, their projects and also to strike bits of conversation with others with whom they might share or combine interests – with ‘combine’ being the operative word I had at the back of my mind when we were discussing the aims and structure for this.

So, initially we had a bit of  ‘icebreaking’ combined with ‘brainstorming’ of sorts, but everything rather dynamic and visual.

Working with images (and, for me, sounds too) has enormous potential, and the materials we collected from the walls at the end of the day were quite powerful.  One thing we didn’t do (though we’d considered doing, when we were discussing the activities for the day) was to explore the use of colours on the post-its. But I think we also need to think about another aspect of this that we didn’t quite explore as much as I’d originally hoped (partially because we had very little time), what I tend to think of as the ‘creative gap’.

In music (and arts, generally, but I can only honestly own up to stuff I say about music), there’s talk of  ‘reception’. This is, basically, the way in which the audience interprets what the artists create. It’s quite fascinating that what an artist ‘intends’ (and many will take issue with the idea that they may have ‘intentions’, but I’ll move swiftly on) is rarely ever what the audience (not an homogeneous category, to start with) ‘receives’. There’s a lot of debate (and terminological confusion) around this, but (again) moving swiftly on to the point, I guess that, what remains as a common ground there is what I called above the ‘creative gap’, this space between ’stuff’ and ‘what-we-make-of-it’. For me, this is where the most exciting and innovative things come from.

So, basically, I think that yesterday we only barely scratched the surface as far as the possibilities of this creative space are concerned. The addition of post-its onto to others boards was an attempt at identifying boudaries of this space and start playing with them, but I think we need to refine the idea and come up with other, perhaps better techniques to exploit the results of the ‘presentation’ and ‘brainstorming’ stages, something that can encourage play with the boundaries of this communicative type of space in-between people.

I think the themes and model framework that emerged towards the end of the day are brilliant, though, and there were lots more interesting thoughts exchanged throughout the day. I’m hoping all of this will be picked up and taken forward somehow, perhaps on a follow-up event sometime soon(ish)?

As I finished rewriting the ‘About’ page of this blog, after more than a year without adding anything to it, I got started on thinking about a workshop I’ll be helping to run next week. I was wondering if there are interesting ways to get people to present themselves, what they do, what they’re interested in – in short, I was trying to think of different presentation formats.

There are lots of new and interesting ideas around – I took part in a workshop where people were asked to create a 2-minute, television-like type of pitch.  As I come to think of it, some of these things seem to be around imposing limits on time, while other impose limit on space, like the 140 characters you’ve got to twitt with. All possibly related to the medium, register, genre?

I then remembered the introduction to a lecture, given by an incredible teacher I am honored to have known, which used a haiku. The one he used was Basho’s:

Hello! Light the fire!
I’ll bring inside
a lovely bright ball of snow

I thought that was a beautiful way to introduce a course – that one was in musical aesthetics, so I wonder:

Would this link with poetry be an interesting thing to bring into other situations?

Would it work to ask people to say something using only 17 syllables?

While beginning to consider these questions, thinking that formats and form are very much about boundaries, I had a go:

now keep this all in
now leave all that out
this is what makes and breaks you

I was having lunch (of sorts: what’s a sandwich at the office?) and looking through a magazine I received in this morning’s post, when I came across an article on this book. In a previous post I was going on about pantomimes and ‘informal learning’ – the last paragraph of the article (see pages 10-11 here) makes an (essential) past-present-future link, possibly useful to my tentative understanding of ‘informal learning’?

‘So pantomime can be theorised as having a connection to an idealized past and a utopian future even while maintaining awareness of the political and social reality outside the theatre and the theatrical illusion of the event’.

I’m ordering a copy of the book, by the way.

Just couldn’t resist … Looking for dance lessons for my daughter, I stumbled across a video – admittedly, not particularly subtle (only one viewer seems to have bothered to complain, though!), but very, very funny indeed …

For as long as I can remember I’ve made up games for moments of unavoidable boredom – or total overload. My favourite has always been the repeat-words-to-yourself-until-they-make-no-sense game. I still play that sometimes. It’s particularly nice if I’ve got a willing partner somewhere we can repeat the word out loud and make the game an almost-musical thing.  There’s also the alliteration game I play with my daughter (she came up with a long sentence starting ’An amazing acrobatic ant aboard an aeroplane above Athens …’), but this normally leads to funny nonsense, not no sense.

Writing also works as an alternative. I normally tend to draw when I’m thinking or listening – the sophistication of the drawing being directly proportional to my boredom or overload, with trees being my preferred theme at the top of the scale in both dimensions - but often I’ll just choose a word, say, ‘learning’, ‘academic’ or ‘community’, and write it repeatedly, until it’s all but a bunch of lines and dots on the page. Since reading this post yesterday I’ve been playing with ‘creativity’. A title for a metalogue – ‘Daddy, what is creativity?’ – appeared on my notepad last night … But I’ve sort of already written something along these lines (in here), and given that I feel quite overloaded at the moment, the page was quickly filled in with leafless trees.

No offense meant to any of the worlds behind my chosen play words, I’m a live-and-let-live person, really. Actually, if I were to pick an idea that, I believe, could (should? oh, dear …) be more widely shared is just that. I’m reminded, though, of a time when I was chasing after a ‘definition’ of ‘timbre’ and working my way through this book I eventually came across this page (from which I quoted repeatedly) and kept with me the interesting idea of ‘words that are used as wastebaskets’ – words left to account for things that other words can’t or won’t. I guess this is the politics bit, doing its thing, like cookies in your computer?

This un-making sense business used to be more fun than it seems to be these days, but perhaps I’m slowly crossing over to the ‘grumpy old people’ category and taking issue with other games that seem to achieve the same thing (no sense or nonsense): breeding straw men and speaking in buzzwords. Alas, my list of annoying buzzwords keeps growing every day, whilst straw men seem to breed like my daughter’s guppies. 

Oh, well, I’m letting myself out of the ‘outside-the-box space’ asap – as I said, live and let live. Going out of the frying pan may lead into the fire, but getting out of the box seems to lead inevitably to yet another one, even if apparently bigger, more colourful or just plain different.