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H: Attractors for Affordances

Page history last edited by dustcube 14 years, 12 months ago

‘Connectivist’ (Digitally Enhanced Ecology) Hypotheses

 

 

This is a draft zero of an ecological analysis based on ‘attractors’ / ‘resonance’ / ‘dissonance’,

using some complexity theory and a musical /wave theory metaphor.  The references (CRP Ref) are to the numbered hypotheses in the Hypotheses page.

 

 

Comments:

1. Section 4: I haven’t got enough clarity in my own mind to do this section.  Maybe later!

 

2. For my own clarification, I needed to separate out what I think are generic blog affordances from affordances of blogs-in-RSS-networks.  Similarly, I needed to separate out generic online forum affordances from the particular ones in CCK08.  It is quite possible to merge the two blog matrices, and to merge the two forum matrices, and I will do so if that would help.

 

3. As I said elsewhere, this reflects the way I (try to) organise my thinking on the issues of hypotheses, it might not suit everyone else, in which case, regard this as an interesting but peripheral blog post that got lost here by mistake!

 

 

4. I must add that being part of this collaborative team  has (is? you're not leaving us are you? :-)) [no, wouldnt miss it for the world] really been more than worth the effort.  Thanks.  This looks like a good example of "the knowledge is in the quartet" and possibly "the knowledge is in the wiki", or not?

 

5.  The most interesting part of an 'ecological' or 'connectivist analysis is probably in the three right hand columns, but I havent done more than just start filling that in.  Any thoughts?   

 

Blogs per se are attractors and enablers for the following (affordances): (B)

Where I have added CCK08, it is because I think the affordance statement applies to the CCK08 course, which is what we are investigating and it seems they all apply, no?

 

 

 

 

 

CRP

Ref..

Affordance, competence (etc)

Resonates with …

Dissonant  with …

Creative tension with ?

B0.1

1d

Personal sense-making and self-expression CCK08

 

B0.2

 

 

F0, F7

B0.2

Id??

Creating and integrating attractive layout with ideas and presence CCK08

 

B0.1

 

 

 

 

B1

1a

Developing a personal voice CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

B2

1a

Developing personal connections, beyond the immediate task, group (in fact a dynamic micro-global network - would community be a better word for the CCK08 course?, but that might be ‘another story/) sure

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B3

1b

Front porch for meeting visitors, with (implicit) front door control CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

F3

 

 

1b1

Bounded by protocols on ‘tone’  - (across many discourses) CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B4

2e

Quiet, slow, reflection CCK08 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B5

1d

Own / published space / presence / pace CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

B6

1b, 1d

Protected space CCK08 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B7

1d

Building and protecting self-esteem CCK08

 

 

 

 

F8 ???

B8

2a, 2c, 3a

Building good  ideas individually / intensive personal learning CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

B9

3d

Drawing explicit connections between (fewer and) more distant concepts, that are initially weak and strengthen through time CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

F9

B10

 

 

Focused development of side branches in own space and time, which make (build?) explicit, well formed connections to seemingly distant topics. CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

F10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

Blogs in an RSS network  are attractors and enablers for the following (affordances) (Br):

.

 

 

CRP

Ref..

Affordance, competence (etc)

Resonates with …

Dissonant  with…

Creative tension with ?

 

 

 

 

All of the above, plus …

 

 

 

 

 

 

BR1

1a

Developing thoughtful long term relationships and networks CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BR2

 

 

Developing relationships with a blend of personal / ideas focus. CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BR3

 

 

Rapidly tracking multiple, parallel, blogs and bloggers. CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BR4

1c

Ties which are initially weak and strengthening CCK08

 

F5

 

 

 

 

BR5

 

 

 

Checking against Matthias' spreadsheet QuestionsToHypotheses.xls we may need to add some statements about deeper connections (although this might be implicit in the above); personal freedom (although this might be implicit in the above);  and personal control It would be good to make it explicit - any suggestions? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               

 

 

 

Moderated Online Forums are attractors and enablers for the following (affordances) (F):

 

 

 

CRP

Ref..

Affordance, competence (etc)

Resonates with …

Dissonant  with …

Creative tension with ?

F0

?

Collaborative Peer learning CCK08 for the assignments - would it be more cooperative for the CCK08 forums? Yes!

 

 

 

 

B0

F1

1b

Close Immediate community CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

F2

1b

Variable paced asynchronous interaction My perception is that it was all fast in the the CCK08 course - but I wasn't a moodler  You are right, it was pretty fast.  In my own mind I needed to separate out the generic online course affordances (if there is such a thing as a typical online course??) from the exception that was CCK08 - mainly because I wanted to systematically try to identify just where there were differences, if indeed there were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F3

1b

Marketplace to bump into people / ideas with front door control CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

B3

F4

1b1

Bounded by protocols on ‘tone’  - (emphasis on academic) I don't think there were protocols on 'tone' in the CCK08 forum. They weren't apparent to me, although the tone was often academic. See MSOF3 Ditto F2 above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F5

1c

Ties which are group-like, uniformly medium-strong CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

BR4

F6

1d

Close immediate community (see F0) CCK08 Does this need to be separate from F1 or is this an error Delete!

 

 

 

 

 

 

F7

1d, 3a

Fast, Provisional, exploratory expression and knowledge drafting CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

B0.1

F8

1d, 2a, 2c

Building good  ideas collaboratively / intensive collaborative learning CCK08 - as above I'm not sure that collaborative is the correct word I would go with your term, cooperative.

 

 

 

 

 

B8, B7 ???

F9

3d

Conceptual connections which are more implicitly present, closer in time and space and more numerous CCK08

 

B9??

 

 

B9

F10

3f

Big picture discussions with digressions, disparate topics.  CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

B10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MassiveOpen (i.e. "self-organising") Forums are attractors and enablers for the following (affordances) (MSOF):

 

 

 

CRP

Ref..

Affordance, competence (etc)

Resonates with …

Dissonant with …

Creative tension with ?

 

 

 

 

All of the above, plus …

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSOF0.1

 

 

Sparring alpha-fe/male contestation CCK08 

 

 

F5

 

 

MSOF 0.2

1b

Free-for-all Marketplace without a regulator. CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSOF 1

1b

Fast paced asynchronous interaction CCK08

 

 

 

 

B4

MSOF2

1b

Developing relationships biased towards ideas. CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

BR2

MSOF3

1b1

No restrictions on ‘tone’ (supposedly self-correcting!) CCK08

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSOF4

 

 

 

Other statements which we may want to include - because they appear in Matthiass' spreadsheet QuestionsToHypotheses.xls are

- greater number of readers/responses (although you may think this implicit in what is above); the ability to track back through discussion more easily; the lack of links. I agree - greater number of prompt responses, ability to track back through discussions, and scan across one person's discussion postings - these should be included in the generic forums section. 

 

Lack of links - I was surprised at the lack of links in the forums.  Question: how would this be an affordance?  "Direct interaction without the distraction of links?" perhaps, or did you have something else in mind? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

.

Jenny, a rather lengthy response to your question, which is why I have posted it here, rather than in the discussion.

 

Jenny ... what you do in forums, for example, (you dont have to use the term affordance) sometimes reinforces and optimises what you do in other media - like blogs, email, etc.  So in connectivist terms, different paths and connections in the use of blogs may reinforce other paths, in the use of forums, or email, or clash with them.  

On the other hand, the tension between a particular affordance in one medium and different affordance in another (see BR2 and MSOF2)  might be neither a relationship of 'reinforcement' nor a 'clash', but rather a creative tension.  

For example, I tend to cross link, and even cross post between blogs, wikis, forums and emails, although generally speaking with a light edit or two as I transcribe from one to the other.  And although the content of the post is very much the same, I am 'doing' something different in each case - in the forum I might be looking for a rapid response mainly to the ideas, in the blog I might just be weaving my own thought (and the quoted thoughts! MM30.3.09) together within a coherent, but narrative, train of thought, etc. I think the same happens with bloggers, who quite often post links to blogs in a forum, or copy parts of a blog to a forum, or (more rarely) reference and perhaps quote a forum post in a blog.

  • "More rarely" linking from blogs to moodle: This supports the hypothesis that forum is still the more common one that yields more readers. Thus, this copying & linking is no sign for a transmodal culture, even thogh I like you term transmodal. (MM30.3.09)

I might be the exception, but I think not.  The core hypotheses, (however we express them, and I am happy to go along with the more other formulation of hypotheses) must, for this research, be focused on blogs and moodlers.  But the question of whether there are only two type of people that are relevant to this research (bloggers and moodlers), or whether there are also other important groups of people, who cross the borderlines, and exhibit blog-ish and moodle-ish behaviour simultaneously is a question that we need to investigate empirically, even if it is not the core issue in the research, as it affects the framework within which we set up our hypotheses.   

  • I fully agree, the questions needs to be investigated. But given the small overall base population for this experiment, and given the expectable sample size, the transmodal cases seem very hard to grab with statisticically significant evidence. Therefore I think it should be covered in the "suggestions for future research" section of the paper. (MM30.9.09)

And if we are going to collect some data on our trans-modal colleagues, we must think through some hypotheses about what we think they may be doing, and then test those ideas.  So I started to think about how this could be done, and thought well, first of all, some things are quite simple - the slow, reflective development of a narrative of ideas (in a blog) could link very positively ('resonate, or reinforce) the tentative development of thoughts in progress (in forums).  And equally simply, the cooperative exchange of ideas in blogs cannot in any way be compatible with testosterone overload behaviour in a forum.

But that leaves out the most interesting part, which is where affordances can be realised in blogs and forums, in slightly different ways, or affordances can be realised quite differently in blogs and forums, but in a creative tension.  It also lead to the question that a hypothetical Stephen, George and Katherine might all answer in different ways, namely: Did Katherine's posting provide a useful, creative tension between her ideas and other people's ideas, and between her style and other people's styles?   

 

Many thanks Roy for this helpful explanation. Do you think then that we need to add some questions which will capture the thoughts/behaviour of those who 'cross the borderlines' or will our Likert scale enable us to capture this? 

 

Jenny, see my suggestions on the final draft page.  I think we can reduce the issue to two questions, particularly if we add a subcategory or two to the pre-questions on own bloggers/ visiting bloggers.

 

@John: Change (your 1.) is too much for this stage. If we start discussing this again Jenny could speak of "going round in circles :-). " as in her To do list 2. And success factors (your 2.) is IMHO also much beyond the scope of the mere preference for, and feeling comfortable with, one of the tools.

So I would plead for leaving all these (however interesting) dynamical and transmodal dimensions for a later stage.    

 

Sure, we can leave the transmodal issues for later.   I am distinguishing, in my own mind, perhaps, between the questions that we need to ask, within the limits of what is feasible to ask people to respond to, on the one hand, and on the other hand the hypotheses which are the issues that I would like to be able to test, even if implictly in some cases, by examining the empirical responses we get from the participants.  The hypotheses can be more extensive and more complex than the questionnaire, by definition, no?

 

Comments (11)

Jenny Mackness said

at 2:56 am on Mar 28, 2009

Many thanks for this very helpful breakdown Roy. Could you explain a bit more about why we need the resonance/dissonance/tension columns. Great work! Thanks

suifaijohnmak said

at 12:25 am on Mar 31, 2009

I have read the above twice. Still need to digest them all. What you are saying is that those statements may resonate with, dissonant with, or having a creative tension with other affordance statements. I have been thinking about a few fundamental questions:
1. Will people's habits change as a result of interaction? Will people change from quiet slow reflection to fast paced asynchronous interaction & vice versa (say after setting a blog post, and then responding to a thread by linking to one's blog) as a result of "learning"? I know it's very hard to change habit, but would a strong attractor/affordance influence how people react to a siutaion, thus leading to a change of habit? Such attractor or affordance (potential to act) could originate from a artifact, a tool, or a community, or a person/expert....).
2. Will the quality of conversation (the art of conversation) be affected by the tools used? For example, we are using wiki to discuss instead of the traditional joint contribution to the contents only. So the conversation is as important as the re-writing of the contents. The mere re-writing of contents typical with wiki may cause conflicts amongst writer and editor if the editor did not give reasons for the changes. Refering to CCK08, we may need to identify not only the success factors, but failure factors. So your tensions analysis could be an effective tool in contrasting the blog from moodle (i.e. the critical success and failure factors).

Jenny Mackness said

at 2:11 am on Mar 31, 2009

Interesting thoughts John - worth holding on to for discussion in our paper!

suifaijohnmak said

at 9:14 am on Mar 31, 2009

Jenny and Matthias, I raise those questions as a resonance to Roy's suggestion at this stage. I don't know if it is cross cutting our research (or out of the scope of the hypotheses or not). I understand that it is necessary to focus on our survey first. And surely I suppose all the statements are nearly finalised. Correct or Not? I hope we are both noting the trees in the forest (the left brain analogy) - checking the statements in the survey tool, and the forest which consists of tress (the right brain analogy) - the technology affordance and competence raised by Roy. I think both 1. habits and 2. quality and art of conversation and its relation to tools are relating to the forest. I hope you don't mind me summarising this up, all of us are checking the statements (trees), and Roy (using the affordance/competence resonant/dissonant/creative tensions) are checking the cross relationship. He is using a matrix approach similar to QFD (quality function deployment) to check if the statements of WHATs AND HOWs people are learning are having high, medium or low correlation etc. (As I have been teaching QFD (one of the most powerful tools in Quality used in Japan and US, though it is referred to as House of Quality - and that now the BRAIN and CMAPS are just derived version of mindmaps of the tools used for QFD to some extent). So, may be this time we will just finalise the statements (the trees), by examining if the trees are identifiable in the forest, and not in the nearby forest (wiki, Ning, FB) or another forest (OTHER THAN BLOG AND MOODLE).

suifaijohnmak said

at 9:14 am on Mar 31, 2009

Please note that I am not trying to convince us using the LB and RB analogy, I am using the LB to explain why Roy and I have this interests in RB discussion, is it right Roy? Sorry that I have talked too much, better for me to go to the silence mode and reflect! If the above doesn't make sense to you now, you are right - let's leave it! Finally, are there any way of prioritising our hypotheses in terms of critical success and failure factors (amongst ourselves)? Are the questionnaires finalised?

x28de said

at 8:33 pm on Mar 31, 2009

I like your tree and wood analogy, and I tjink we are now in the laborious stage of woodchopping the individual trees: Finalizing the questionnaire statements. And forecasting where exactly the chopped tree will come to lie, is like forecasting how we will be interpreting the outcome of a given statement. We won't be able to measure it with inches' precision but we need defilade against the falling tree.

dustcube said

at 1:48 am on Apr 3, 2009

Our task right now is fine tuning the questionnaire, and we have to focus on that. But I also think that Matthias's insistence quite recently that we revisit the hypotheses was a crucial intervention, because it got me out of the nose-to-the-tree mode, to be able to step back and look at what we wanted to find out in our research - what is our knowledge of individual plants and events (technologies and people's interactions) going to tell us about the forrest as a whole, and possibly about other similar forrests.

As to resonance ... the metaphor comes from music (anyone play music? - I play the flute and guitar) where the sound from two strings on the guitar,for instance, resonate if their sound waves overlap, in which case they are both strengthened (lasers work on the same principle - they consist of 'resonant' light, which is why they are single, pure colours,and why they are so powerful).

If the sound waves dont overlap, at all, they are dissonant, and the sound of both strings is interfered with, and weakened, if not lost.

So, if bloggers and moodlers have points of 'overlap', they (and their posts) will resonate, and both gain. If the trolls and the peer-collaborators styles have no point of overlap, they destroy each other until there is only one left standing (the alpha-primate model) or until both are exhausted (the ecological collapse model).

But ... in principle, neither of the elements of these pairs has to change - but they might learn that interacting with X is a positive, resonant, experience, and interacting with Y is negative, dissonant, and act accordinly in the future. If both are enriched, they may resonate or they may interact in a creative tension (like a 7th chord, which leads on to resolution, or a 13th chord which slightly and interstingly undermines the basic hamony, if you follow the musical analogy).

dustcube said

at 1:59 am on Apr 3, 2009

I must just add another comment (I have just spent two days in a conference on complex learning - with some interesting talk about complexity)

I find myself amongst a community of superb moodlers (or forumers) on this wiki, which is both enriching and surprising, as some of the community is apparently allergic to forums - in which case how come you are so good at it?

The complexity point (which is very different from the way connectivism was operationalised in CCK08) is that of course this forum/wiki works: it has clearly set boundaries (although Roy tends to look over the fence too much), it has reasonalble degrees of freedom (we all do things slightly differently, and concentrate on different aspects), and what is NOT allowed to happen has been frimly established (implicitly, but its there) a No-Trolls rule for starters, and it is self-organising - it doesnt need an 'editor'.

Jenny Mackness said

at 6:07 am on Apr 3, 2009

Roy - music! Yes - Mattthias and I first linked up on the CCK08 course because Matthias discovered that we both sing in choirs. I sing alto and he sings bass - and I think he sings in a much superior choir to the one I sing in judging by a recording of the music he once posted. I once played guitar and piano and my husband comes from a family who all played intruments together (he played cello) and I have a son who plays in various bands (not sure if you could call it music!) - so the music analogy makes absolute sense to me!

Looking over the fence is fine by me!

dustcube said

at 9:56 am on Apr 3, 2009

Jenny, great. I have to check that my metaphors make sense to others as much as they make sense to me! And I haven't had enough time to get to know your musical background - too busy on the task, but we (you guys more than me) have got an enormous amount of work done, so its good to start catching up on music now.

suifaijohnmak said

at 6:18 pm on Apr 3, 2009

I played harmonica when I was young. On 2 consecutive years in high schools, our harmonica band was the first runner up in the interschools' competition. When the band won, I won too. So, I think I am playing the virtual music with my harmonica in synchronizing with Jenny and Matthias in choirs (alto and bass), and Jenny's guitar and piano, and Roy your flute and guitar. I enjoy the musical rhythm so much that I am absorbed into it.... And I hope my two boys who play piano could join in the musical family, LOL.
The music metaphor towards learning and research - You are welcome to watch and listen the "Lovers in the Air" in the ConnectivismEducationLearning that I posted sometime ago. What a wonderful serendipity? Are we connected through our musical nodes?

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