Cargo cults, wooden phones and superficial learning

During a conference at Plymouth University recently, my colleague Oliver Quinlan told us all a fascinating story about the Cargo Cult movement, and equated it to superficial learning responses. Cargo Cults are an interesting socio-cultural phenomenon, because they derive from a collective misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the world, brought about by simplistic beliefs. One example of cargo cult can be found in the Melanesian Islands of the South Pacific, where, during World War Two, the islanders were invaded by the Japanese and then liberated by the Allied forces. Both occupying armies were far more technologically advanced than the society that hosted them. On both occasions, the primitive islanders were exposed to the advanced technology, and the alien culture and philosophies of their visitors, which altered their world view. They benefited for a while from them. Both the Japanese and Allied forces gave them manufactured goods such as clothing, tents, food and other commodities, which expanded their consciousness and increased their collective wealth.

When finally the war ended, and the Allied forces departed, the islanders were left with an interruption to their new found wealth. They attempted to regain this wealth by creating replicas of many of the iconic technologies their visitors had used. For example, they created landing strips and aircraft from straw or made wireless radios from coconuts.  One could perhaps imagine them today carving a mobile phone out of wood. They attempted from their collective memories to fashion their society into the image of their technologically advanced visitors. Some staged marches and parade drills using sticks to represent rifles, and painted military style insignia on their bodies to make them look like soldiers. They tried to recreate a set of circumstances that they believed would attract the wealth back into their communities. Essentially, they fell into the trap of commodity fetishism, and an entirely new belief system grew up around it.

Oliver drew our attention to the manner in which many novice learners, and in particular undergraduate students, attempt to build into their work what they believe their lecturers require from them. This is a superficial response to learning. For example I have often heard students asking 'how many references should I include in my essay?' to which my reply is: 'include what is relevant to support your arguments and justify your choices.' Just as the Melanesian islanders failed to understand the inner workings of technology, but attempted to recreate it from its surface appearance, so undergraduate students who 'don't get it' attempt to write critical essays by stringing together references into some form of meaningful narrative. It barely scratches the surface. As Oliver pointed out, we send our students a better message if we ask them to 'inform their essays' from the literature, rather than asking them to 'reference their work'. I go farther and advise students that they need to engage with the theories and published work they incorporate into their work, rather than quoting them disjointedly. Once students get the idea that they can write critically by going deeper, actually understanding the concepts and theories rather than simply creating replicas, they will begin to assimilate these ideas successfully in to their professional practice.

Photo by Erik Wilde


Cargo cults, primitive cultures and superficial learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning in round spaces

Plymouth University's Immersive Vision Theatre

Traditionally, classrooms have been rectangular. Square buildings are easier to design and cheaper to build. There is a door at one end, some windows on one side, and at the front end stands the teacher, in exactly the right place to direct the educational process. Situating learning in rectangular spaces naturally promotes some forms of pedagogy at the expense of others. It is of course possible in traditional classrooms to create opportunities for learning to be driven by learners, where collaborative and cooperative learning can be facilitated, and where students can move around the room as they investigate and experiment, create and discuss. It's possible, but it has to be a conscious decision by the teacher. The natural default education mode in rectangular space classrooms is to place students in a passive and controllable situation, where chairs and tables are configured to face the front - the 'presentation area'. You can easily recognise this area because it is where all of the presentational materials and tools are fixed in place (whiteboard, projector and screen, teacher resources) and where the teacher tends to stand much of the time. Such organisation of tools and resources is fairly permanent and inflexible, and it is easy for teachers to lapse into 'teaching in the same way they themselves were taught'.

So what happens when we change the shape of the learning space? What if we make the classroom circular instead of square? Think for example of theatre that is performed 'in the round'. The action happens in the middle of the room, and all those who participate face inwards towards the performance. Many feel as though they are actually in the play rather than simply observing it. Change it again, and face the participants outwards instead, and what is the effect? Each participant experiences something different, perhaps unique and personal to them. This is the concept behind vision immersion, where 360 degree projection and surround sound provide enhanced sensory experience.  Learners feel more involved in the learning process, and each learns through watching, engaging, conversing and discussing. This is the idea behind the Immersive Vision Theatre at Plymouth University, a converted planetarium that employs fish-eye lens projection systems to render 3 D moving images on a concave surface. Audiences sit in cinema style seats, and their field of vision is saturated by the images, supplemented by surround sound. High powered Blade server technology renders the video in high definition and real time to create the illusion of movement and immersion. Sit there for long enough and you feel like the entire room is moving around you.

Igloo Vision 360 System

Another example of circular learning spaces is the Igloo Vision 360 portable round classroom (pictured) which I experienced at the recent Welsh Digital Learning Conference in Cardiff. The Igloo Education system uses five mounted projection screens housed within an igloo shaped tent structure, to create a digitally 'stitched together' panoramic video and/or still image display complete with high quality audio. Children sit on the floor and face the curved walls of the igloo to experience the full 360 degree effect of the colour, movement and sound. Imagine a geography lesson where you are sat in the middle of the scenes, experiencing the sights and sounds of the country you are studying. Or imagine a biology lesson where you see what it looks like to pass through the human arterial system as a red blood corpuscle. It's true that the experiences we remember most in school are those that impact on all our senses. Such technology can do this. It is quite expensive though, and investing in a system could make a sizeable dent in an average school's annual budget.  However, those schools who decide to either purchase or create their own circular spaces will probably discover that - whether they have projection systems in them or not - round spaces can radically change the format of lessons and can challenge the perspective of just about any educator who participates.

Photos by Mike Smail and Igloo Vision


Learning in round spaces by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A quiet invasion

This image shows students taking notes. Whenever I show this image, I see many people in my audiences nodding in recognition. It seems to be a familiar, every day occurrence in some classrooms. In others it is rare or unlikely, because mobile phones are banned in some schools and colleges.  

Teachers might respond to this image in two ways. Either they can bemoan the fact that they have spent an enormous amount of time developing the content, only for students to capture its entirety in seconds with just a few simple button presses. They will ask whether this a trivialisation of their content, or an undesirable development that leads to superficial learning.  Alternatively they can celebrate that learners are adept enough at using their personal technologies to make learning easier and more productive for themselves. They can support the idea on the basis that most learners will use that content later for reflection.

We might argue that the first response is based on a model of learning that privileges the teacher as the arbiter of knowledge, whilst the second response represents an approach that places students at the centre of the learning process. The first response, I suggest, might indicate that those teachers feel learning should follow a prescribed track of content delivery that is assimilated and ultimately re-presented by learners in an acceptable format to demonstrate that they have internalised that content. The second response suggests to me that students can be freed up to capture content, archive and organise it, repurpose and develop that content to facilitate deeper learning experiences, and share it with their peers to widen its influence in a discursive environment. Which model are you most familiar with in your classroom?

Personal technologies are proliferating and they are multi-functional. They are quietly invading the classroom, in the bags and pockets of your students. Mobile phones can be used for many purposes, most of which can either support good learning or undermine it. As educators we each need to ask ourselves some serious questions, such as: What is my attitude to student use of technology in the classroom/learning space? Am I threatened by its use, or do I feel comfortable when students use their personal tools in the learning environment? The answer to these questions will possibly reveal to you not only your attitude to personal technology, but also how you view yourself as an educator and as a professional.

For some teachers, students recording lessons is anathema, whilst for others it is fully encouraged. There are many who are ambivalent. What about students Googling what you say during a lesson to check whether you are correct or accurate or telling the truth? Some teachers feel that this is an undermining or their authority or a challenge to their professionalism. Others see it as a liberating and democratic approach to learning, where the onus is on the student to check all facts and to be critical.  Some see the use of personal technologies in the classroom as distracting, disruptive and potentially dangerous. Others see them as an essential, and natural progression of contemporary learning culture. Which are you?

Photo by Lori Cullen


A quiet invasion by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

An interview with Michael G Moore

I agreed to do a series of video interviews with notable scholars at the Annual EDEN Conference in Oslo earlier this month, and I was really spoilt for choice. There were so many prominent distance education and e-learning practitioners and theorists in attendance, it was a little difficult to know where to start. I managed to get Professor Michael G Moore (formerly of Madison-Wisconsin and Penn State Universities) to sit down and have a chat with me about his life in distance education, the history of the subject and his own experiences as a learner. In first met Michael at a conference in Ankara, Turkey in 1998, and our paths have crossed many times since. He is well known as one of the pioneers of distance education, one of the original team of academic consultants working with the British government to establish the Open University in the 1960s, and latterly, as the long serving founding editor of the American Journal of Distance Education. He is also credited with the theory of transactional distance, which has influenced many studies and publications on the topic over the last 30 years. Michael is quite simply an icon of distance education, and it is worth sitting for a few minutes and hearing what he has to say. Here's the video:



An interview with Michael G Moore by Steve Wheeler was posted from Oslo, Norway and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Shifting sands

I have been blogging, writing and talking about our digital learning futures for some time. Although it is very difficult to predict the future, we are aware of the trends and can use these to detect where we may be heading, and that may take us in one or more directions, hence the plurality of 'futures'. Technology is one of the major drivers of change in our society, and it is easy to see where this is being integrated into schools, colleges and universities. Mostly it is integrated into classrooms, but it is largely left out of most curricula. One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that we are rooted in old practices and outdated frameworks which are in need of change. Seats of learning are notoriously resistant to change, but change is needed if progress in education is to be made. We now live on shifting sands. Allow me to elaborate:

Many of our pedagogical theories and much of our practice in higher education is grounded in, and has been derived from, a pre-digital era, when the lecturer or professor was central to the process of education, and where the classroom was the predominant place for learning to take place. Such approaches to pedagogy were rooted in the behaviourist model of psychology that privileged expert knowledge and formalised its transmission to novices. Education premised on this philosophy has been commonly referred to as the 'factory model' because of its parallels to industrialised working, which included batch-processing, rationalisation of resources, synchronised behaviour and homogenisation of product. In Henry Ford's car factory it was said, you could choose a car of any colour, as long as it was black.

In a time where education was being organised around experts (teachers) and students (novices) and where behaviour was required to be synchronised and content homogenised, such instructionalist approaches seemed to be relevant and appropriate. However, society moved on, the world of work changed, and the industrialised processes were replaced by knowledge working. And yet, although society has moved on, industrialised processes still persist in all sectors of education. It is more comfortable to stay the same, than it is to change. We still see large groups of students sitting in rows (often in auditoria and lecture theatres) struggling to take notes as a professor at the front hold forth on some theory or debate. Someone once remarked that the lecture is the most effective way to transfer a lecturer's notes into a student's notes without having to pass through two minds first. The old modes of teaching are outmoded. New modes will, and are replacing them.

In the digital age, where we are surrounded by new and emerging technologies, pedagogical theories and practices are in need of change. Technology is disrupting everything it touches, and education is no exception. Academic roles are changing. With the agenda for student centred learning, teaching staff should now act more as a supporting cast rather than as leading actors. Learning can take place anywhere, anytime, so formalised education contexts such as those seen in classrooms are going to become less important. Whilst learning is still learning, the pathways that lead us to that learning are radically changing, and there will need to be shifts in our perception and changes in our attitudes as a teaching profession, if we are to make sense of the seismic effects of new technologies.

In a keynote speech I gave to the INTO Staff Conference at Newcastle University on midsummer day - 21 June, 2013 - I explored new technologies and new pedagogies, and offered some evaluation of some of the new digital age learning theories.

For example, social media is encouraging learners not only to discover existing knowledge, it is also enabling them to create, repurpose, organise and share new knowledge. Most of this activity is self organised. The self organising spaces that are proliferating on the web support the spread of these activities and in so doing help to sustain and grow the learning communities of practice that are now so vital to our society. Self organised spaces such as Wikipedia and YouTube have received bad press in the past, but increasingly, such huge, and ever growing repositories of knowledge and learning resources will become more important in education. We will also witness the growth of ambient and transient learning communities, which will spring up and thrive for a specific purpose, and then disappear again just as quickly. That they are ephemeral, from this perspective, will be less important than the impact such communities will have whilst they still exist.

Learning is changing, as are the roles of teachers. Technology will continue to disrupt our lives, and education will be conducted in many diverse ways, and in multiple contexts. Much learning will become informal, but as for formal learning - the expectations of young people will be different from the expectations we had when we were students in university. We can no longer afford to teach in the same ways as we were taught. And we can no longer avoid or ignore the technology wave that is driving these changes.

Photo taken in Qatar in 2013 by Steve Wheeler


Shifting sands by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sugata Mitra - Charlatan or genius?

'It's quite fashionable to say that the education system is broken - it's not broken, it's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it any more. It's outdated.'

These are the radical thoughts of Professor Sugata Mitra, the doyen of innovative education and a figure of some controversy. Sugata Mitra recently won a $1 million TED prize to develop his ideas around his 'School in the Cloud' and building on his notion of minimally invasive education. Mitra told me the phrase 'minimally invasive education' came from his interest in medical procedures, where keyhole surgery was the least invasive method for surgical intervention, and caused the least amount of trauma.

What if, he argued, we could do the same thing with education? Well, many people now know the answer to that question, because he has disseminated his findings, and whatever the detractions and arguments against the Hole in the Wall projects, it has to be said that this bold experiment has some striking outcomes. Not least, claims Mitra, children when left to their own devices (in this case a computer screen and touch pad mouse in a wall) and when they are in small groups, children will teach themselves an extraordinary amount of new skills and knowledge. Whatever your views on this shade of auto-didacticism - and there have been some vociferous criticisms, do watch the video interview I did with him at this year's EDEN conference, and then make your own mind up. Is he a charlatan, or a genius?



Photo by Steve Wheeler


Sugata Mitra - Charlatan or genius? by Steve Wheeler was posted from Oslo, Norway and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What is it about games...?

Just what is so special about games playing? Why is it so popular with all ages? And what is it that divides opinion so deeply about whether games have a place in the curriculum? Never has there been so much opportunity for schools, colleges and universities to capitalise and exploit the power of games to inspire, engage and enliven learning. And yet a straw poll taken amongst any group of teachers will reveal some strong polemic views. Some teachers extol the virtues of any game, and claim that all games have the potential to support learners as they acquire new skills, problem solving abilities and knowledge gain. Others argue equally strongly that games have no place in the classroom, because they are distracting, take students off task, and that there is no empirical evidence to support the argument that they contribute anything significant to the learning process. I have personally nailed my colours to the mast with several recent blog posts including The games we play and The future of gaming. Earlier today at the EDEN Conference, here in Oslo, I took part in a special session on games based learning.

I presented a paper co-written with one of my students, Lucy Kitching, (@lmkitching) which had originally been her third year research dissertation. Lucy's project set out to investigate whether games consoles have a positive impact on primary school girls' motivation and learning. She found that there are strong correlations between playing games consoles at home and the expectations of playing games in school for learning purposes. She also showed that there were (in the UK schools she studied) a significant shortfall in the provision of games consoles in comparison to those available in the average home. Whilst these findings might elicit a 'so what?' from some readers, the results of her study nevertheless indicate how current contexts can affect the motivation of learners to engage in learning with games consoles in formal education settings.

The second paper, presented by Marie Maertens (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium) showcased some research done into instructional design approaches in games. Marie spoke about adaptive and adaptable game-play and how games can be designed to respond to the individual needs and preferences of learners. She concluded that with the conceptual framework that the team have developed at KU Leuven, it is now possible for the creation of games that are based on valid measurements of student performance, and adaptive mechanisms that will respond to changes learners experience in their knowledge and skills more or less as they occur.

The final paper in the session was from Anne-Dominique Salamin (HES-SO, Switzerland) who continued the theme of adaptive games. Her paper, entitled 'New Tools for Students' also featured a live demonstration of a virtual world within which a variety of different decision making scenarios could be presented. Students were rewarded throughout the game by credits which they could then 'spend' to improve the graphical environment within which they were working. As an added touch, occasional and random insects walked across the screen to be targeted by the learner. One delegate tweeted during the event that they had never before witnessed such a bizarre occurrence at a conference - several professionals in unison shouting out 'kill that insect!'

The discussion that followed was productive and discursive, covering such areas as student expectations, constraints of games based learning, teacher and parent objections and design features and graphic rendering speeds in educational games.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


What is it about games...? by Steve Wheeler was posted from Oslo, Norway and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Disruptive education

Earlier today at the EDEN Annual Conference at the University of Oslo, I interviewed June Breivik. June, who is at the Norwegian Business School will be presenting a keynote speech tomorrow at the event on 'Disruptive Education.' She has some strong views on how education needs to be changed, and believes that disruption is necessary to challenge the current paradigms of teaching in higher education. She sees the teacher role changing, and argues that technology is a driving force in that change. She is not technologically deterministic, but sees specific technologies - social media tools such as blogging and Twitter - as a means of liberating learners (and their teachers) into a new way of creative communication, and a new means of representing knowledge. June feels that students should take centre stage in the learning process and that teachers should cede the 'power over the learner' they have held for so long. She takes a positive view on the idea of the Flipped Classroom, and she also practices it in her own professional context. It is refreshing to know that June believes in walking the talk. The brief video interview below provides a fascinating primer for what she will present to the EDEN delegates tomorrow morning here in Oslo.


This post is mirrored on the official EDEN Conference blog


Disruptive education by Steve Wheeler was posted from Oslo, Norway and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The kids are all right

This morning, here in Oslo, it was all about the kids. And why not? Too often we gather to discuss education, to expound on learning theories and to congratulate ourselves for our pedagogical prowess, and yet we miss the crucial element, the context which should be central to everything we do. The learner. Where is the learner voice at learning conferences? This was addressed today at EDEN, and I'm glad I was there to witness it. Kids are generally honest in their opinions, so if you want to know how well a school is doing, ask them. Ask them out of earshot of the teachers, and off the record, and they will tell you.

During the plenary opening session we heard from several frank young students about their experiences at school. It was not good news for the Norwegian education system. One student said 'I don't want my own children to experience what I went through at school'. Another opined 'The way school is structured doesn't enable students to find each other. It is too structured'. A third simply said quite bluntly 'school is boring'. I would image that the same sentiments could be expressed by school learners the world over. It's important to qualify these comments in the context of this year's EDEN Conference, the title of which is: ' The Joy of Learning: Enhancing Learning Experience, Improving Learning Quality.'

Why are students' experience so poor in most state run schools? Friedrich Nietzsche once suggested that education in state run schools is bad for the same reason cooking in large canteens lacks quality. One size patently does not fit all, and one of the students highlighted this, calling the standard student 'a myth'. He was right, and this message resonated around the auditorium. We have been teaching this way in schools for years, and it is about time it stopped, was their message. It was a refreshing start to the event, one that challenged us all, and made us think about the future of education. 

The rest of the conference will now have to - be required to - focus on what we need to do to change the current situation in so many schools around this planet. What will we do to make lessons 'less boring'? More importantly, what can be done to ensure that learners are more engaged? Children cannot vote with their feet in compulsory education, but they can vote with their minds. If we as teachers, are not in the game, and do not convey enthusiasm, inspiration and excitement to our students, how will they become engaged? How can we turn them on to studying serious subjects, if we cannot get ourselves enthusiastic in the first place? How will technology supplement and support these processes? Is learning changing, and if so, what will need to be the changes we will have to make to accommodate these changes? 

Read this blog over the next few days, and we as a blogging team will report to you from EDEN on what is being said, discussed, explored... and promised.... for the future of education.

Photo by Steve Wheeler

NB: This post is mirrored on the official EDEN Conference Blog

The kids are all right by Steve Wheeler was posted from Oslo, Norway and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital beings

This is the third in my series of retrospective reviews on seminal learning and technology books. I have scoured my personal book library in search of a dozen books that have influenced my own thinking, and share a synopsis of their contents with you. Today's book recommendation is:

Nicholas Negroponte (1995) Being Digital. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Nic Negroponte's Being Digital was groundbreaking. It was the first substantial mainstream book to explore the impact of digital technology on society, and demonstrated just how prescient and insightful Negroponte could be. As the man who was instrumental in setting up MIT Media Lab, and also the founding editor of Wired Magazine, much was expected of him, and he delivered, in spades.

He begins with a sort of apology, pointing out the irony (before his critics can) of publishing a book about digital technology as an analogue artifact. Later he labours the point that we live in a society created around atoms, when in fact most of our information is now in bits. This atoms and bits division amplifies and reveals the societal divides we see all around us. Such dichotomous contexts would necessitate the rethinking of social rules, relationships, privacy, ownership and copyright, legal rulings, and just about everything else we were comfortable with. He warns: 'As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation-state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role.' (p 7) In short, Negroponte was warning that disruptive change was imminent.

Negroponte's writing style is acerbic and witty in equal measure, and he has the knack of situating complex and potentially alien concepts into everyday context, so that his reader can apprehend their full meaning and implication. He ranges effortlessly through personal technologies, social spaces and the Internet of Things (writing about all of these technological advances while they were still either in their infancy, or just a gleam in the eyes of the Silicon Valley geeks. At the time of publication there was much discussion about the so called 'Negroponte Switch' - where he had predicted a switch between terrestrial and satellite distribution of content. What became the real Negroponte Switch for me however, was probably more important and useful, and less obscure for everyone. The switch I am referring to is the transition of control over content creation from the producer (film companies, record labels, broadcast media and publishers) to the consumer. Negroponte had already begun to think about how the Web might facilitate this sea change, when he remarked that there would be 'a change in the distribution of intelligence... from the transmitter to the receiver.' (p 19) Much of new Web content in recent years has indeed been generated by individuals using personal technologies. Wikipedia, YouTube and a host of other social media platforms are examples of this switch.

He poses the question how can technology make our lives better? Answering his own question he suggested 'creating computers to filter, sort, prioritize, and manage multimedia on our behalf - computers that read newspapers and look at television for us, and act as editors when we ask them to do so.' (p 20) With almost two decades of hindsight and technology advances, we can safely say that there are dozens of tools that can do just that for us, filtering, aggregating, curating content - but it is often the users and the community that do the editing and sorting for users to read. In being digital, we become digital beings. So perhaps we are half way there.

Negroponte also had much to say about design and multi-modal interfaces in Being Digital. He posited reasons why touch screen interfaces could be so versatile and intuitive, and cited some early research he had been involved in at MIT on the development of gestural tools. He believed then that the best kinds of designs incorporated human intuition into the interface, and that touch screens would become more or less common place. His remark here is revealing and prophetic: 'Wherever the computer may be, the most effective interface design results from combining the forces of sensory richness and machine intelligence.' (p 100)

When I first bought my copy of Being Digital, I read it from cover to cover in a single day. It is that sort of book, and even today, nearly 20 years on, it still has much to inform us about not only what we have already witnessed, but about what is yet to come. I can report that after enjoying dinner with Nic recently in London, he is as witty, engaging and entertaining in real life as his is within the pages of his book.

Oh - and I also made sure Nic signed my first edition copy.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Digital beings by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Identity play

This is the second in my series of retrospective reviews on seminal  learning and technology books. I have scoured my personal book library in search of a dozen books that have influenced my own thinking, and share a synopsis of their contents with you. Today's book recommendation is: 

Sherry Turkle (1995) Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

Life on Screen is a seminal book. It is now almost two decades old, and you may ask, how useful or relevant is a book on technology that was written in the last century? Although technology has moved on a pace - since the book was written we now have social media, mobile phones and touch screen tablet computers - many of Sherry Turkle's ideas still resonate with personal meaning. The reason for this is that she doesn't focus too much on transient effects such as what technology we use, she is more interested in pursuing the questions around human identity and how it can be influenced by technology. Sherry Turkle was, as Paul Judge has suggested, the Margaret Mead of cyberspace. Turkle was to all intents the first digital anthropologist, practicing participant observational research. Instead of sitting in mud huts as did Mead, Turkle immersed herself in the culture of the digitally mediated communication platforms of her day (in 1995 the predominant forms were MUDs - Multi User Domains, and MOOs - MUD Object Oriented). She lurked in the corners of the chat rooms and recorded the conversations she witnessed. In doing so, she created a rich tapestry of knowledge about personal lives, multiple contexts and the construction of public identities. We need to remember that in the mid-nineties, MUDs and MOOs were quite primitive in comparison to the media rich social networking tools of today, and relied mostly on textual communication. Hence, Turkle declares:

'On MUDs, one's body is represented by one's own textual description so the obese can be slender, the beautiful plain, the "nerdy" sophisticated. The anonymity of MUDs - one is known on a MUD only by the name of one's character or characters - gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try our new ones. MUDs make possible the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion.' (p 12)

Turkle is perhaps one of the first authors to identify the fact that because human identity is fluid, manipulation of personae can be amplified and projected through the use of digital media. Today, even with the use of images, audio and video to supplement textual communication, people still have the capability to hide behind anonymity and also to manipulate their identity in many different ways. In some ways, she suggests, identity play can be therapeutic. More importantly, Turkle acknowledges that personal identity is often in the hands of individuals to make of what they will, a nod in the direction of the personalised spaces and digital presence construction that were to emerge a decade down the line. Turkle began to pose questions that were to gain a purchase on the rapid development and proliferation of computer mediated communication. She asked:

'Do our real-life selves learn lessons from our virtual personae?' (p 180) and documented how the early users of the Web struggled to come to terms with multiple contexts and manipulation of multiple identities with her ominous and prescient question '... are we watching a slow emergence of a new, more multiple style of thinking about the mind?' (p 180) In retrospect, Turkle was asking exactly the right questions, because evidence now exists that we do apply in real-life many of the lessons learnt on the Web, and we have as a post-industrial society come around to thinking about identity as multiple, and the individual as multi-tasking. We live in a world far richer in terms of social networking than Sherry Turkle did in the 1990s. And yet her studies into the use of these primitive versions of what we now call social media, revealed much of the truth about how we still engage today with each other online. She saw for example that we can easily deceived ourselves:

'... a virtual experience may be so compelling that we believe that within it we've achieved more than we have'. (p 238) This is clearly an experience we repeat time after time, as we spend endless hours immersed in chat, sharing and commenting, liking and favouriting, and ultimately engaging with our personal learning networks. How much of this could be achieved in real-life in less time, and more simply?

Turkle correctly identifies several facets of computers, each expressed as a metaphor, and each rings as true today as it did in 1995. She suggests that computers can be used 'as tool, as mirror, and as gateway to a world through the looking glass of the screen.' (p 267) Here, Turkle makes oblique reference to the symbolic interactionist work of Charles Cooley, who suggested that we see ourselves reflected in the 'looking glass' eyes of our interlocutors, and adjust our behaviour accordingly, simply to be accepted. It is probably true that fewer of us today tend to hide behind fake identities, and we are influenced by the responses, comments and retweets of our peer group. Perhaps that makes us more open and honest, but somehow it also reveals we are becoming increasingly naive.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Identity play by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Power struggle

This is the first post in a new series. I'm going to present retrospective reviews of a dozen seminal books that I think should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to learn more about the social and cultural impact technology is having on learning and education. Here's the first, one for those who wish to understand how media and culture influence each other:

Henry Jenkins (2006) Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press.

The strap line to Henry Jenkins' 2006 book Convergence Culture is 'where old and new media collide'. Collision may indeed be a most appropriate verb to apply, because as Jenkins reveals, there is enormous tension where old and new media intersect. It was clear even in 2006 that the old, closed and controlled media of radio, television, movie making, recording industry and the press were struggling to maintain their dominance against the new, open and democratic media found on the Internet. As we now know, that dominance has slipped, as billions swarm to participate in the new media, creating, remixing and sharing their content. The best that the old media can hope for is that there will still be a significant place for them alongside the new media that have pushed them to the sidelines. As Jenkins warned:

'Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture. Producers who fail to make their peace with this new participatory culture will face a declining goodwill and diminishing revenues.' (p 24)

Jenkins takes the reader on a journey through popular culture and reveals the back stories behind some of the world's most successful blockbuster movies and TV shows, and how many have been defined through new technology. Jenkins also attempts to explain some of the complex issues of our time: the cultural shifts occurring where consumers and producers fight for control over a myriad disparate channels and platforms both in the mainstream media and online. He champions the democratisation of knowledge, and highlights the collective intelligence behind many of the dramatic rises in popular digital culture:

'What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge - which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge - which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the groups' social ties.' (p 54)

Inevitably, he argues, the people will win over the corporates. Power will pass from the corporate boardroom into the teenager's bedroom. We will see a decentralised media environment, free from network control. Control will pass to the communities who invest in knowledge building, and that knowledge will be defined by them. On Wikipedia he says: '...the process works. It works because more and more people are taking seriously their obligations as participants to the community as a whole... what once was taken for granted must now be articulated. What emerges might be called a moral economy of information: that is, a sense of mutual obligations and shared expectations about what constitutes good citizenship within a knowledge community.' (p 255)

This is a somewhat idealistic, but very well written book, presented in accessible language and flowing prose, but for me, the greatest aspect of this book is that it makes you think. It causes you to stand back and take a pause, to contemplate many of the phenomena we now take for granted, and that is often the attraction to revisiting some of the old, seminal texts that have defined our most recent history and cultural development.

Photo by Jonny Jelinek


Power struggle by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

GRIN and bear it

The future may be bright. But the future may also be dark and disturbing. GRIN is an acronym that represents the four big emerging technologies of our times. Many believe them to be the defining technologies of the age and their speed of development will determine how far we decide to travel down the road of post-humanism to the point where humans are physically and intellectually enhanced - Human 2.0. In this short article I raise some of the issues for debate that will shape the future of humankind.

GRIN stands for Genetics, Robotics, Information technology, and Nanotechnology. Singularly, each technology is influential and each is developing at a rapid pace. In combination, GRIN technologies are advancing exponentially. Each technology has courted its fair share of controversy, particularly from the disquiet expressed about their ethical and moral implications, but also due to the unknown long term consequences they may bring. Nanotechnology is so new that no-one is really sure what will come of it (Bonsor and Strickland, 2011), whilst robotics is so mature a science that we now know almost too much about it. Robotics for example, is not governed by the failsafe laws predicted by Asimov (no robot shall do harm to a human being). The use of drones and other military applications of robotics have sadly demonstrated that machines are governed by humans, and robots enables human controllers to kill very efficiently. So concerning is its rapid progress that a United Nations expert has recently called for a halt to military robot development.

Genetic manipulation of the building blocks of life has spawned advances in genetic manipulation, germline cell therapy and genetically modified crops. None of these is without its dangers and difficulties, but each is also making ground on perennial problems such as inherited health problems, pest control and food production.

The potential for the combination of all of the GRIN technologies to advance human capabilities is great, but there are also several important issues with which we shall all be aware of. It is one thing for example, to create an artificial being such as a robot to perform mundane tasks, but what happens if it becomes sentient? Artificial humans have long been a popular topic of dystopic science fiction and popular culture. From the myths of ancient Greece, Frankenstein's monster, through to Terminator and I Robot, the warning is clear. Give a machine a mind and superior strength, and it is liable to turn upon its maker.

More likely to emerge first will be hybrid enhanced humans. What happens when we begin to merge humans with cybernetic systems to such a level that we create super-humans - true cyborgs? Even more likely, how will we justify tampering with genetics to the point where we are cloning versions of ourselves with the sole intent to harvest their DNA or organs for experimentation or for transplantation? All of these scenarios are possible, some are already happening, and some are in the process of being realised, but are they desirable or ethical? Do GRIN technologies give humankind a blank cheque to experiment to the point of no return? Do we have a license to combine man and machine to the point where we can no longer see the join? Are we able to reasonably measure the benefits of Human 2.0 against the potential dangers and threats, when in fact we are not yet able to predict outcomes and consequences?

I suspect that GRIN technologies will appear with increasing regularly in the news as our knowledge advances, to the point where hybrid, enhanced humans are commonplace, and machines achieve equivalent processing power to replicate human thought. At that point we will have achieved the 'Singularity'. According to prophets of the new age such as Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity is the imminent point in human development where technology is advancing so rapidly that humankind will no longer be able to comprehend it. Then we will see the age of the Transhuman - where biology is transcended by technology, and where GRIN technologies enhance humans beyond their natural capabilities. It will be the tipping point, and there will be no turning back.

Perhaps we have already gone too far. Genetically altered human beings already exist and have been with us for more than a decade. We are not talking here about test-tube babies. We are referring to the experiments first conducted by the Institute of Reproductive Medicine and Science at St Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey. Genetically modified babies have been born to women who had difficulty conceiving naturally. The Institute added extra DNA from a female donor egg before they were fertilised, and when the babies were born, they were found to have inherited the DNA from one man and two women (Hanlon, 2013). All well and good, you may think. 30 women who previously could not conceive now have teenage children. But what if scientists next decide to push the experiment further and create humans that have enhanced physical strength or intellectual capabilities? What will be the consequences of this act? Have we now forever artificially altered the genetic structure of the future human race? Will we have to simply GRIN and bear it?

Photo by Yorgos Nikas (Wellcome Images)


GRIN and bear it by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.