The new community anthology

Tom Sergiovani believes vision is at the heart of developing community. A community's vision is a promise to uphold certain values and it is articulated and promoted through story.

It should not be suprising then that MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice, in conjunction with Creative Narrations, are using digital stories to voice and promote the values of three very different communities. This innovative community development strategy is described in The New Community Anthology.

Love thy neighbour

Technology has, as Marshall McLuhan argued, electrically contracted the globe so it is no more than a village. The implication being that we can connect with people across the globe as easily as we can with people across the street.

Neighourhood and community participation is declining and ironically, the same technology is now being used to encourage people to meet their next door neighbours.

• In the the UK, UpMyStreet is helping people have conversations about local community issues.


• Across the Atlantic, Jared Nissim has launched a similar venture called Meet the Neighbors.


• Keith Hampton, sociology professor at MIT, hopes to encourage neighbourliness through his web-based i-neighbors project.


• John Geraci at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program is connecting neighbours by placing wireless nodes with bulletin boards, called Neighbornodes, on each street.

de do do do, de da da da

Sting believes metaphor is everything to songwriting: "…without a central metaphor, you ain't got nothing." Yvonne Aburrow, Liz Falconer and Manuel Frutos-Perez have been thinking about the Metaphor and meaning in e-learning.

In designing metaphors for e-learning we have borrowed heavily from the book and from the classroom. This is not suprising given the observation that, in the first stages of technology adoption, new technology is used to emulate the old. However, in an age when information resources are no longer scarce the relevancy of these metaphors must be questioned.

Aburrow et al. argue that maps provide a more relevant metaphor for navigating information spaces. They are proving their concept at the Research Observatory, a research resource that uses a star map as the metaphor for navigation, grouping related resources into constellations.

Coming back to Earth for a moment, my prefered navigational aid is the concept map—I've blogged about this before, so forgive my indulgence. Concept maps have several benefits for learning: they promote meaningful learning through the recognition of prior knowledge and make explicit, conceptual inter-relationships, which assist in the identification of misconceptions. Two tools take advantage of these benefits:

1. Tuft University's VUE project allows teachers and learners to visually organise content, whether stored locally or within FEDORA-based digital repositories. Learners can create their own pathways through the content, or explore paths predefined by their teachers. The VUE project team provide cases which outline some exciting possible uses.


2. CmapTools is another free Java-based concept mapping application with similar functionality to VUE. Unlike VUE, CmapTools cannot delve inside digital repositories, however significantly CmapTools' client-server architecture supports network-based collaborative development of maps.

Rather disappointingly concept maps created in either application are not interoperable. VUE will bundle content and map together, exporting them as an IMS Content Package; CmapTools will export maps as a Topic Map.

Update: Sting has also provided the inspiration for Brian Alger to eloquently question "What have we learned from history?" Sting's metaphor in this case is written history as a catalogue of crime.

da da da dum

E.M. Forster described Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as "…the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man." The dramatic silence after the opening four notes is an example of the use of space in musical composition. To quote Gordon Sumner: "Great music's as much about the space between the notes as it is about the notes themselves."

In her presentation EduChaos: Facilitating the unpredictable Marie Jasinski highlights the importance of leaving space when designing learning experiences: "…it provides an opportunity for learners to self-organise and let learning emerge."

Marie believes role play simulations facilitate "space for participants to interact and create learning experiences for themselves." So I'm eagerly awaiting Albert Ip's ICCE pre-conference tutorial on web-based simulations. As Marshall McLuhan famously said "The interval is where the action is."

Out of control and thriving!

Marie Jasinski doesn't have a problem with lack of control—in fact she embraces it:

When you lose control, it's amazing how quickly your learners find it and make better use of it than you.

Marie is a self-described edge worker, balancing on the boundary between order and chaos. She has written seven articles for the Australian Flexible Learning Community dealing with applying the "edge of chaos" concept to an educational context—what Marie calls EDUCHAOS!

1. Out of control and thriving!
2. Disruptive Technologies
3. Using improv and storytelling in business
4. Job Sculpting—in tune with making work WORK!
5. Patchworking—showing off your assets
6. Go Conative—where there’s will, you’re away!
7. Tuning in to your own voice!

The third article in the series is a transcript of an interview (MP3) with improvisor and storyteller Kat Koppett. Kat believes as the world becomes increasingly chaotic we can learn from the skills and attitudes of improvisors and storytellers.

At their virtual resource centre, The StoryNet, Kat and co-founder Matthew Richter promote the use of improvisation and storytelling. In the article How to Use Storytelling to Increase Learning Kat and Matthew give practical examples that support their claim that stories offer an alternative to the order and structure of traditional learning, enabling us to "learn without feeling like we are learning."

Learning to swim

If the novel is no longer novel, what will take its place? Perhaps online writing, the subject of last week's Radio New Zealand technology show Digital Life. (You can listen to the show as a RealAudio clip.)

Dale Spender might have reluctantly accepted the death of the book, but Sue Thomas of trAce is not ready to bury her books just yet. For her, new media represent a new kind of reading experience, but one which "is not superior or inferior, it's simply different."

According to Thomas our familiarity with the book has rendered its interactivity transparent. Similarly, Thomas says the acceptance of digital texts will come when writers see through the technology and focus on the narrative. As Janet H. Murray points out in Hamlet on the Holodeck:

A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us.

Thomas believes that until people become fluent in digital media they will not feel comfortable with the kind of narratives it produces. Technological transparency and digital media fluency will be brought about by familiarity. To again quote Murray:

…in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.

So we must bath ourselves in bits if we are to be strong enough digital swimmers to take advantage of the new media, but as Thomas points out there are sharks in the sea.

Writers, like the rest of the networked world, are struggling with issues of control. Traditionally writers have had control of their reader's experience; new media change the old rules. Thomas suggests we look to the gaming world to learn from their use of participatory narrative. Educators are facing the same issues and Thomas' conclusion is equally valid for them:

…there is an increasing audience who actually do want to engage with the work, and want to engage with other people through the work… it is interactivity that will make the big difference.

Update: Listen in to Digital Life this week to meet a US trading company that recruits on the basis of video game proficiency. Now if it was only available as a podcast!