Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See, 1991
About the Author
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately.
His interests include Open Education, metrical poetry, science (philosophy, history, and methodology of), amateur astronomy and astrophysics, solitary rambles, language and composition, democratic citizenship, concert music, pens, tea, and the colour brown.
Posted by Danny on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 1:40 am
I’ve been spending more and more time in Second Life as I prepare to do my fieldwork for my thesis, and I’m enjoying it much more than I expected. A few days ago I stumbled onto a community called Thothica, full of folks with academic and casual interests in philosophy, science, literature, and education—this is much more readily appealing to me than the live music, bars, and shopping I’ve mainly seen. When I arrived at the community’s parcel of space, I joined in listening to a live reading from the last chapter of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; the reader, Elaine Lorefield, does public readings in the space twice a week—she’s read Stranger to members of the community from start to just about finish over the last few months (the unabridged version, even!) and weekly reads thought-provoking short stories with discussion to follow. Tonight, we heard “Ephemera” by Steve Rasnic Tem, and then had a two-hour conversation that ranged from curacy to e-reading to open access. All the stuff I love.
What thrills me about this is how readily the experience became wholly legitimate and embodied—how there was almost no distracting contemplation about the “inauthenticity” of the “virtual experience.” Practically speaking, Elaine and the rest of us were sitting at our computers (dotted in this case across Canada and the US, as far as I know) while she read into a headset from her Kindle. It may as well have been a conference call. But, “in-world,” we’d assembled at the community’s library in Thothica at the scheduled time, took seats in the circle of couches and armchairs by the fire (in a configuration damned reminiscent of an actual gathering of this sort, with clustering around the reader and avoidance of text-chatting to other members or walking in front of her, even though these things in no way had an impact on the content delivery), and we listened for about an hour and a half. It was a cultural event rather than an audiobook. Understand, when I say the following, that I’ve been a long-time player of multiplayer games, including socially rich MMOs like Ultima Online in its heyday; I know that this sounds worrisome to people both with gaming experience and on the outside looking in, but I honestly concluded the evening feeling as if I’d spent a night out.
I know the experience is more transparent for me than others because of my fluency with the interface and my fast typing speed, but I really, really see this as a viable educational environment. Before today, I would have been much more cynical when one of the founding Thothica members described the space to me as a sort of campus pub. (Maybe active drinkers could disagree more reasonably.) Second Life is the earliest example I know of as a mainstream “free-to-play” game, so if anyone wants to give it a shot (and see if I’m just bonkers), let me know, and you can join me in the field. There’s a sonnet writing and discussion group on Sunday…
Posted by Danny on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 11:56 am
I’ve spoken before about the two archetypes of Internet-based distance education: asynchronous (typically using message boards, email, etc., and allowing participants to contribute at times of their convenience) and synchronous (text or video chat, immersive environments, etc., which permit instantaneous communication and feedback, but require participants to adhere to a common meeting schedule like a traditional classroom). My interest is mainly in the latter, but there are awfully neat asynchronous environments being designed at OISE and elsewhere to plumb the affordances of time-independent communication, such as deep organization, refinement, and archival of ideas while the communities involved collaborate to build knowledge. We’ll be talking with Stian and Marlene Scardamalia at my research meeting in an hour or so about Knowledge Forum, which you can learn about quickly with Stian’s video, below.
Stian mentions a common problem with information overload when approaching a typical threaded conversation on a forum; this is something I experienced acutely during my two online courses, and it’s exciting to see the idea-map style of Knowledge Forum work to address this. However, when a space in KF is mature, it can seem at least as impenetrable as the index for a huge threaded conversation. I hope to raise the following point today to address this:
Posted by Danny on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:54 pm
A whole bunch of Evenings for Brainses ago our conversation turned to the decline of funding for orchestras and the loss of public interest and understanding in concert music generally. I remember I was advancing (in part on behalf of Satan) that the end orchestras would not be synonymous with the end of culture or even with the end of sophisticated music—that, though tragic especially for the last few, lonely members of a moribund species, species do go extinct; languages do go extinct; crafts do go extinct, and life continues impoverished in that sense but certainly able to develop new species, languages, crafts, etc. For music specifically, there are neat, crowd-sourced newcomer-species like Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, arriving with the growth of access to the Internet and to creation tools; the musical language in which one needed to be fluent to understand the ideas of complex concert music is changing, like any other living language (if also simplifying); multi-track digital audio workstation software, sophisticated digital signal processing, and especially physical modeling synthesis, challenge the definition of “musician” and the nature of the craft. Rah, rah, rah. At the time, even though I was exploring the above position in earnest, I was pontificating far outside of my aesthetic: I abhor extinction because I like information; not—and this is a much better reason—because diversity of species, of ideas, and of skills makes for a more resilient system in which to live.[1] It doesn’t really matter, though, since at the time, I didn’t go to concerts or speak Concert Music; my positions were tediously academic.
Joel returned to Toronto from his work in Mongolia this summer and Gid and I became housemates in October, so I’ve had a sudden influx of concert music in my life. Among other things, this has meant three (so far) trips to Roy Thompson Hall to see the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the last two months, after a drought that probably goes back to Grade Nine. I’ve noticed some things I want to tell you about.
Posted by Danny on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This post is written defiantly on paper, in green fountain pen ink, amidst the high-pitched whine of computer monitors and the low-pitched rumble of the subway beneath the building. My computer is dead. It won’t reach the BIOS so I can’t jiggle its software guts from the command prompt or safe mode, and I don’t have time to qualify myself to noodle around with the hardware where the real problem probably resides. My laptop is useless for accessing my online class, so I’m in the computer lab at OISE, contacting the people who need to be contacted, downloading my readings for the week, and gradually pushing through the shock of being without my personal computer into a state of giddy, Luddish novelty that will in turn give way to the awareness that my paper-crunch and correspondence and peripheral device-charging are going to take place in this room, probably for the next two weeks.
It’s a good room! The lights and noises are ugly, but I’ve got space to work, it’s clean, it’s got broadband, and it’s free. I could be so much more unplugged than I am, and the disrepair of my computer could be so much more devastating to me, my family, my education, and my prospects than it is. When my big paper for Student Experience in Higher Education is finished, I’ll have time to try and resurrect Caligula, and if my data is really gone, I’ll be able to panic and writhe then, responsibly. This is such a petty catastrophe.
The potential for online education to obviate barriers of finance and geography continues to drive my research interest, but it remains that for most of the people who stand to benefit from it, online distance education won’t be delivered to personal computers with big, bright screens in private rooms with lovingly-tailored sound systems and a clean bathroom and ready food only seconds away. It probably won’t even be delivered to computer labs as nice as this. I feel like that expectation could probably be planned for, pedagogically. When I’ve got time, I want to look into the design of public computer terminals and quantify the tradeoffs between (say) the savings on fluorescent lighting costs vs. incandescent on the one hand, and student comfort, tenacity, and health on the other. Is the present arrangement of computers and monitors in a sort of wall-less cubicle system ideal for students working in parallel, with screens blocking face-to-face interaction, or could other configurations benefit learning by fostering local collaboration that could subsequently enhance or transfer to work online? I’m not asking this rhetorically–it may be that face-to-face obstructions prevent more disruption than collaboration of a sort we’d deem valuable, or that instant-messaging interfaces will frustrate this kind of thinking entirely as they become more transparent to the way we communicate.
I wish I could make better use of my time and actually explore some of this stuff.
Posted by Danny on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I recently attended my first research meeting hosted by Clare Brett, which concluded with a discussion about the problem of sustaining online communities that form around distance education classes after they’ve ended. It was mentioned that students often request the spaces and accounts remain open so that shared resources, links, and discussion transcripts continue to be accessible (and long-distance friendships continue to be facilitated), but inevitably and usually quickly, attendance dies away and the community effectively dissolves.
This might not be such a tragedy—these environments came into being to serve a particular purpose, as did the communities that formed within those virtual spaces, and upon completion the students who took part supposedly (hopefully) achieved the growth of skills, experience, and knowledge they came for. Nonetheless, even if everyone was given a complete transcript of all posts, chats, documents, and perhaps even the contact information of the other students, there would be a sense of loss when the doors finally closed. Without the physical infrastructure and associated costs necessary to maintain these virtual spaces, those doors probably could be kept open. So why, ultimately, isn’t this successful?
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
