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The Digital Culture and “Peda-Socio” Transformation

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The Digital Culture and “Peda-Socio” Transformation

The internet and computing (as technologies) are no longer tools, but have been integrated into human communication. They have become a part of the communication and is a part of meaning creation. Such technology is now more the environment than the tool. 

Snyder asserts that young people are immersed in the digital age – where technology is the norm. Why then, she asks, are adults not learning from children how to integrate digital culture into schools? Data shows that 89% of students find school boring. A similar percentage are actively engaged in online communities. 

The lure of online communities is the ability to create an identity and explore an online life with people from around the globe. Through imagination, young people are engaging in a “reality” where they are able to ask questions, foster social relations and develop knowledge.

Considering this reality of life outside the school, in which youth are actively and captivatingly engaged in social networks, creation, exploration, self empowerment and identity development, we begin to see that youth have both the motivation and the skills to connect and learn. 

This is a motivation that is crucial to understanding and improving learning. Snyder claims that educators need to explore the implications for learning and digital citizenship which are beyond the classroom and school’s borders. This relates back to how young people see technology – as a part of the process of creating meaning.

The idea of studying technology in education (when technology is perceived as a learning device) is too limited. The growing importance of cyberspace reinforces the divide between schooling and society. Young people are creating new connections, networks and resources for learning that mirror 21st century life.

This is the thrust of Synder’s view – that technology has an integrated role in society. Following a constructivist theory framework, we are co-creating our realities together alongside technology.

Through this co-construction we give meaning to our realities, resulting in common language, symbols, values, behaviors, norms, and understanding. As learners, we make sense out of our world by analyzing and synthesizing our experiences in an attempt to give meaning. The elements that contribute to our sense making process are those parts of an event or experience with and through which we interact and act. In contemporary society, technology and media have become a part of this social interaction process. 

Technology is changing our behaviour and perception, influencing the way we socially construct digital culture of meaning. We are shaping, and are shaped by, the technology we use.

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More hate for gamification

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More hate for gamification

The problem with “critics” is that they’ve got lots of opinions … but don’t usually contribute anything productive (other than their verbosity) to the discussion. The problem with gamification is that it has become so popular so fast that critics are lining up to take a swipe and feel good about themselves.

Margaret Robinson’s article from 2010 on gamification goes down the same road as many other critics, including Bogost’s scathing attack (mentioned in the previous post). Robinson is determined that gamification focuses on the least important part of the game. She, like Bogost, says that badges and progress points aren’t intrinsic to the game at all.

But she’s wrong … they are important. Gamification isn’t about the game itself. Gamification is about how a game layer (game elements) can be used as motivators. If we look directly at games we can confidently say that games have motivators. One motivation is to win, to be the best. That motivation is represented by a scoreboard (leader boards can be used as a gamifying technique). If there’s no score or no winner, then many will find the game to be less fun.

Let’s make it more clear through an example. I’m a bit of a poker player. I enjoy poker and I play it when I can. It’s possible to play poker without money and without talking to the other players. But doing so would take away most of the fun … it would take away the motivation to play. See, that’s an intrinsic part of gaming. Sometimes the game itself is not that interesting, but socialising and gambling add to the enjoyment. I play poker so that I can experience the adrenaline rush of winning a big hand and, at the same time, talking with friends over a few beers.

Sometimes the game is just a tool. The mechanics of the game are not that important. This is what gamification represents. If we add a game layer to other tasks then we add a motivation. Gamification includes rewards, and it also includes socialising.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/gaming/2011/03/i_dont_want_to_be_a_superhero.html

More criticism. This time targeted at gaming guru Jane McGonigal. Through her Tedx talk, McGonigal talks about her heal and some experiences relating to that. Particularly she relates how she used gamification and roleplaying to help her recovery. 

Heather Chaplin, the author of the piece, says that games aren’t that fun and “gaming” isn’t for everyone. This is another common criticism of gaming and gamification – it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

Well, no … of course not! Nobody who is a proponent of gamification is saying such a thing.

The truth is that we all DO play games. We play various games in our daily lives. Some people play cards, some collect coupons or air miles. Some play sport and others play tetris on their smartphone. Everyone plays games … but not everyone plays the same type of game. That’s not the same as saying not everyone finds games appealing, which is a falsehood.

Gamification covers this problem too by acknowledging multiple approaches to motivating people to play. Level up systems, for example, are a combination of small (like an incremental number) and big (like a major “level”). This is important because some people are motivated by different goals. Some people like to see the incremental gains (immediate, short term goals) and others prefer the larger gains (long term goals). Both work together to motivate. The same with leaderboards – global leaderboards motivate those who wish to be the best. Social leaderboards motivate people who want to try and beat their friends. Some people are motivated by certain badges. Others are motivated by completely different goals or achievements such as social status.

A great “real world” example is scouts. Scouts get badges for proving that they have a certain skill. Once they demonstrate a skill they get a patch or badge. The badges give a scout status in the community (global leaderboard) and amongst their friends (social leaderboard). When the scout gets a certain number of badges they can get a promotion (level up). 

All of these ideas are older than the internet and computers. Gamification isn’t creating something new, it’s just identifying systems and motivational strategies that have been around for centuries.

The main criticisms of gamification is that it doesn’t focus on the most important part of the game (ie the actual game) and that games don’t appeal to everyone. 

Complete rubbish! The game and the rewards for playing are equally important. Everyone is motivated by different rewards, so gamification is a multi-faceted approach which acknowledges such. Finally, whether critics want to admit it or not, everyone DOES play games. Grandma may not play shooter games like Call Of Duty, but she does collect the supermarket discount stamps (that’s a game) and she does play bridge on Thursdays (another game). She doesn’t collect stamps because she thinks its fun (it’s not fun at all). She collects the stamps because there’s a reward (free stuff). She doesn’t play bridge because she enjoys the technicalities and math involved in the game. She plays because she can chat with her friends and is motivated to beat them (and win status as a good player).

See, gamification is everywhere. 

It’s too easy to criticise something because it’s popular. It’s much harder to take a more measured approach to understanding that gamification offers real potential in education. Games and gamification are valid tools for motivating people to participate and learn … it’s sad that we still have to fight this war over justifying the place of gaming in our culture.

doctorate education gamification phd pokemon effect triforce

Why I Blog

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Why I Blog

Lupton’s short explanation of why she blogs is worth a read. Not only is blogging immediate and personal, but it breaks down academic walls which act to keep society and academia apart. I like the notion that academic though need not always be so formal, which is an attitude many academics (but few academic institutions) are embracing.

Mostly I agree with her assertion that it’s important to keep our writing away from academic paywalls. This is very high on the list of my pet-peeves – paying for scholarly works. While google scholar, academia.edu and other sites are helping to remove paywalls, too many sites are still profiteering from paid access to academic writing. 

I own my writing. It’s mine. As I progress through my studies towards completing my doctorate, I intend to make all my work free for anyone to read and share. This is the way the internet works and academia needs to get with the program

doctorate education gamification phd pokemon effect triforce

More Fun Writing Than Playing: The Critical Videogame Blogosphere as Emerging Approach to Knowledge Creation

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More Fun Writing Than Playing: The Critical Videogame Blogosphere as Emerging Approach to Knowledge Creation

Blogging has risen as a powerful form of community on the internet. I’m writing a research blog at this very minute. You’re reading these words and, as such, we are both part of the research or academic or education communities. Maybe all of them, maybe a mix, maybe just one. But that’s how you found me, through your interest in research relating to education.

The blogosphere is an umbrella term for those who write blogs and consider themselves a part of the blogging community. Within that community are categories of blogs such as ‘tech blogs’  or ‘news blogs’ or ‘education blogs’.

Abraham, in talking about blogging, identifies the community mindset relating to bloggers. They have a kind of collective knowledge or extended mind which is a way of thinking beyond the individual human idea of knowledge.

This is an interesting notion. An analogy could be suggested (by me) that the way we think is becoming less individual and more collective – like a hive. The community pools its knowledge and uses that as to become a self-perceived community of experts. This community perceives itself to be creative and productive, as if providing something to the wider internet. Indeed there is an apparent relationship between expert bloggers (who are positioned as game critics) and their readers. The blog acts as an intermediary for the ideas of their authors.

The community that bloggers are part of is an imagined community; all communities (excluding small face-to-face villages) are imagined. Such communities are distinguished by the style in which they are imagined. Any perceived falsity or “genuineness” is irrelevant.

I’m mostly interested in Abraham’s notion that bloggers are a form of knowledge creation. While they might compete within their community for prestige or to become elite, game bloggers are working together to create a community. That community creates a kind of collective knowledge through a distributed network of overlapping ‘extended minds’. This is an exciting notion as it has implications on social networking and other communities such as web forums. If bloggers (working on independent blogs as part of a game blogosphere) are creating knowledge then this idea can be applied to other areas and communities – especially those with a closer and more collaborative mindset.

I also like the assertion that through the action of repetition (practice) one can become an expert without any formal acknowledgement. 

An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. 

An expert isn’t a person with a PhD, it’s a person who has achieved domain-specific knowledge through the repeated act of writing about that topic over a period of time. This puts anybody with domain-specific knowledge into the realm of expert. Even more interesting is the realisation that expert no longer has to be a embodied as a person. Wikipedia, a collective resource, is recognised for being an expert source – an aggregation of many points of view. Collective knowledge. Extended minds.

When did the definition of an expert change? When did it become acceptable to cite wikipedia as a source? When did an anonymous blogger become an expert? The redefinition of expertise changes the way we see knowledge and knowledge creation,

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Ontology Is Overrated

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Ontology Is Overrated

Shirky’s analysis of the archaic use of categorisation systems is spot on. 

The way humans have classified knowledge has, traditionally, been rigid. The methodology was to create categories under which all knowledge (such as books) could be placed. This was a solution to a physical problem regarding the actual storage of books and represented bias towards formal thinking and strict rules.

However, categorising in this manner is no longer relevant. The internet has revealed a more simple, more direct way of self-organisation (albeit quite still disorganised). Users, instead of adhering to strict categories can “tag” links and resources with numerous identifying words. Tags allow various connections to be drawn between resources more simply and more organically. 

So instead of filing a link under “Entertainment/Movies” a link can be tagged as movie, film, actor, genre, and an infinite number of other tags. These tags allow the link to be cross-compared with other links with similar tags. It’s a really efficient way of organising without forcing everything into predefined boxes.

Core to this thinking are two ideas:

1. The search function. Searching tags is an alternative to finding information. Rather than using a categorised list and browsing through it, users can search for terms, keywords and tags. The results will be more related to the user’s needs without the need for a rigid hierarchy or structure.

2. Signal Loss. The bigger the system gets, the worse the system becomes. Inevitably more and more materials will refuse to fit into categories. This makes a strict category system hard to manage and the problem becomes exponential the bigger the knowledge base becomes. However with tagging, the larger the knowledge base, the less signal loss. Relevant materials become easier to find because the tags allow for more precision.

Shirky presents a thoughtful and compelling argument for reconsidering the way we categorise. Sites like del.icio.us proved that user tagged content is an efficient, self-managing system. Regardless of the problems resulting from how users interpret and tag links, if enough users independently tag a link, then that link will be easy to search for. Differentiation becomes possible on a macro scale with a single link able to have twenty or thirty tags.

Thus, the rise of word clouds – popular tag clouds and tag searching will become more relevant and common.

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Various Social Networking Studies

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Various Social Networking Studies

This is more of an amalgamation of various papers by danah boyd (note the all lower case!) She’s written various reports regarding social networking, some of which are particularly interesting. She’s done a lot of research into teens online and, most importantly, boyd is an advocate of having an online presence.

People who don’t hire a candidate because of their online history will “miss out on the best minds of my generation. Bright peopl epush the edge, but what constitutes the edge is time-dependent. It’s no longer about miniskirts or rock and roll; it’s about having a complex digital presence”.

 

The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip and Bullying in Networked Publics

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1926349

Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices and Strategies

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128

Social Network Sites: Public, Private … or What?

http://www.danah.org/papers/KnowledgeTree.pdf

Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

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Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

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Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

Albrechtslund discusses the notion that online social networking is a kind of participatory surveillance. In doing so, he redefines the concept of surveillance and develops his analysis for how it is both participatory and mutually beneficial.

Albrechtslund identifies cyberspace as a spacial metaphor for the internet. There are similar related analogies such as global village, information highway, world wide web, etc. The spatial discourse relating to computers is an attempt to organise and classify the internet. However the internet is not hierarchical and is not constrained by the same laws as physical space. Therefore the internet cannot be described in terms of classic organisation. 

Furthering the non-linear view of the internet, Albrechtslund notes the interrelated space between the cyberspace and physical space. In such, it’s demonstrated that social network is not only an online practice.

Digital society has a number of key issues to be considered. One key issue is that of persistency. All information, including relationships, is stored online indefinitely. This is a consideration relating to social practices being no longer temporary, their organisation and audiences. As well as persistency, social networks are a mediated public space characterised by their searchability, replicability and invisible audiences. Searchability refers to information being made available through keywords and phrases, allowing for collection and sorting of information. Replication is the ability to detach communication (including pictures and video) from its original source. It can be perfectly reproduced, altered and put into other contexts (remixed). Lastly there’s the notion of invisible audiences. This concept is the idea that although we may have an intended audience (friends and family) there is a larger potential audience – everyone with access to the internet. 

Redefining Surveillance. Albrechtslund takes the traditional notion of surveillance and changes its purpose. Surveillance is commonly used in a hierarchical sense – the watcher and the watched – or as data collection. However social networking has created an environment where people are willingly publishing this information online. It’s free for all to see and collect. This, Albrechtslund claims, is empowering. It’s a form of social and playful surveillance. Simply put, it’s exhibitionism. 

This explains the moral panics, conspiracy theories and dystopian views of digital culture – the people who don’t understand why anyone would engage in online social networking and willingly share personal information. 

Thus, surveillance can be seen, in a social networking sense, as a mutual horizontal practice. Instead of top-down, hierarchal surveillance, people are able to watch themselves and their friends, family and acquaintances. This empowers participants, builds subjectivity and promotes sharing. Albrechtslund calls this mutuality – participatory surveillance.

  1. user empowerment
  2. social networking as space sharing
  3. mutuality

As already noted, participatory surveillance is a kind of empowering exhibitionism. It’s the self construction of identity and a tool used to rebel against shame associated with not being ‘private’. Exhibitionism is a liberating force against the refusal to be humble. 

I like this idea. We socialise with strangers and construct identities (both real and anonymous). We move from passive to active by participating in culture creation and sharing. This sharing should not be underestimated, since it is the core of how social networks function.

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Teens and Technology – Pew Report 2013

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Teens and Technology – Pew Report 2013

Pew Internet is a good source for quantitative data regarding teens and internet use. Their recent reports have made some interesting conclusions about teen behavior online. Most of the following data is from the Teens 2012 keynote by Dr K. Purcell.

http://pewinternet.org/Presentations/2012/July/Teens-2012-Truth-Trends-and-Myths-About-Teen-Online-Behavior.aspx

Some of the more interesting findings summarised. For the following data, the term ‘teen’ refers to the age group 12-17 (school age) teenagers unless otherwise stated.

  • 80% of teens use social networks
  • 95% of teens use the internet (the highest age group)
  • 88% of teens use a desktop/laptop computer to access the internet
  • 49% of teens use a phone to access the internet

Phones:

  • 77% of teens have a cell/mobile phone
  • only 23% have a smart phone
  • 47% of teens talk to friends on the phone several times a week or more (decreasing)
  • 69% of teens send text messages several times a week or more (increasing)
  • only 17% of teens send emails several times a week or more

Some surprises there. The low frequency of smartphones amongst teens is likely due to their high cost and relative “newness” in the tech market. Teens are more interested in texting than talking. Email is not a popular option amongst teens, possibly because it’s not considered mobile or immediate. More effort is required to email whereas texting is short and faster.

Social Media

  • 93% of teens have a facebook account
  • 16% of teens use twitter, of which 12% have an account
  • only 2% of teens use tumblr and skype
  • 27% of teens record and upload videos of themselves online
  • 62% of teens keep their profiles private (viewable only by friends)
  • 39% of adults have “friended” their children on social networking sites

Clearly teens prefer facebook as their go-to social networking venue. Very few use twitter (more common amongst adults) and almost no teens use tumblr or skype (which is surprising!). Also, teens seem to be good at maintaining their privacy online and quite a few connect to their parents on social networking sites as well.

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