June 02, 2006

The death and rebirth of the MLE?

Writing about web page /caseyleaver/entry/mle_learning_platform/

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

In a recent blog entry, Casey cheered the demise of Managed Learning Environments. I suggest that new web technologies open up the possibility of a new kind of learning environment that is both lightly managed and decentralised.

Yes, the rotten decaying body of the corporate Managed Learning Environment stinks. We should bury it.

Hold on a minute, i detect a heart beat. Can it be revived? Should it be revived? Perhaps it will come back having undertaken some kind of near–death moral transformation. Born again.

Sorry, i'll get to the point. We are seeing the emergence of a kind of self–assembled, loosely coupled, lightly managed learning environment (LCL–MLE?). This is made possible by the increasing ubiquity of RSS data feeds, single sign on, and keyword tagging, along with service development and provision strategies such as agile development and managed diversity.

The idea behind the old fashioned centralist MLE (OFC–MLE?) was that the user could see a range of data about the learning process, all in one place. So they would see their timetables, list of courses, marks, tasks, courese content etc all together. And furthermore, it would be possible to join them up. OFC–MLE systems would contain all of this data in a single repository, as a tightly coupled system. Years of painful experience demonstrates that such monolithic systems are hard to develop, difficult to maintain, and harder still to engage the wide range of people and processes. The answer has been to grow more independent services, with responsibility distributed more widely and designed to meet the requirements of each type of user (academics, students, administrators, communications professionals).

The trick is for each of these two make its content available openly to the people and systems who need to use it, but in a filterable, secure and timely manner. This adds up to a LCL–MLE. And that means a data environment in which people can:

  • advertise information so that it gets to the right people (using directories and search based upon keyword tagging);
  • find relavant information (using directories and search based upon keyword tagging);
  • recommend information to others (by building their own del.icio.us style directories or by adding additional tagging);
  • combine information in a single location, and present it in a useful way (see how RSS feeds are blended in the left hand panel of the E-learning at Warwick web site.
  • allow the user to return information to the systems from which it was harvested, or to get diverse information to interact;

The last of these is enabled by Single Sign On, which is the key to allowing people to easily go from information, presented anywhere, to functionality that allows them to act on it. For example, on a page that I have constructed from a combination of sources, I could see that there is an interesting event happening, and easily add that event to my personal calendar without having to go off into a separate system.

Keyword tagging also contains some revolutionary force. Remember how OFC–MLE systems where built on the assumption that learning processes were constructed by a single individual (or well coordinated team) with a strong overview of all of the contents and connections that should be contained in the learning experience? That has always been the antithesis of the kind of research based learning (RBL) that makes a top UK university what its is. RBL is more like a mentoring and guidance model, in which less centred and hierarchical teams develop a shared understanding of the direction in which the students should be steared, and then input resources, links to resources, and feedback that does the work of moving the students in the right direction. The student is themselves expected to gradually (or sometimes quite quickly) take over the helm and navigational responsibility. OFC–MLEs tend to work against this. But imagine a technology that allows the teaching team to create and select resources, and then annotate, tag and connect them for the students. The students can then explore these resources, and even create their own tagging, annotation and networks of them, to be shared with others or even assessed by the teaching team.

The E–learning Advisor Team are already working on several projects that exploit these possibilities. Our web architecture (Sitebuilder, Warwick Blogs, Warwick Forums etc) provides many of the tools that we need to make this a success.

The second generation of online learning technologies are developing in a very different direction to the Old Fashioned Centralised systems. The direction is, happily, much more akin to the kinds of activities that a university like Warwick encourages.

See this interesting paper on Connectivism presented to Google by George Siemmens.


: 02 Jun 2006 11:06 |  Tags:       |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 31, 2006

Partial Objects

A few scraps of mental shrapnel:

1) Pierre Boulez defined three forms of electronic music:

  • sounds that mimic non-electronic sounds;
  • sounds that are pure invention, with no relation to pre-existing sounds;
  • sounds that take non-electronic sounds and extend, distort, deterritorialize – these are the most interesting.

2) Synthetic versus analytic cubism – what is the concept of synthesis?

3) Rauschenberg’s artwork as a mirror (relation to D&G’s monumental art), minimalism, the “gap between art and life”. Escape from shame into zero intensity. Re-emergence from minima – Lawrence and the clock in the rape scene.

4) A geophilosophy of shame should be written, demonstrating that the shame/glory mechanism (of rising and falling intensities) is not a product of some foundational ontological truth, but rather a product of space, history and theatre (the theatre of battle, the theatre of the Idea, the theatre of cruelty). In my entry on Lawrence and Abu Ghraib I ask whether there is a moral distinction between the nomadic war machine and the state war machine. Lawrence seems to claim that the former exists without shame, the latter sadistic system imposes a moral of shame/glory. And what of Lawrence’s theatricality and masochism? How is that an attempt to escape the state war machine? And the there is the conflict between the writer and the war, the eloquent creator and the illiterate destroyer. WWI as the most brutal and direct manifestation of the states glory/shame machine.

5) Concepts – historical events, conceptual components are historical (can disconnect and reconnect with each other).


Robert O'Toole : 31 May 2006 05:43 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 30, 2006

Blog styles for better academic writing

If you write a blog using the Warwick Blogs system, you can modify its style to make it look more interesting/pretty/cool. These same techniques can also be used to make your writing more effective and readable, with clearer structure and purpose. I have done just that in this blog, and am finding that it is improving my writing skills. This entry explains how.

The appearance of a Warwick Blogs blog can be altered by its owner using a language called CSS. This allows for the appearance of elements on the page (such as the calendar) or classes of elements (such as the entries) to be modified. The Admin –> Appearance page of your blog contains a text area (bottom of the page) into which you can enter your custom CSS. It also contains a warning that should be taken seriously:

Caution: If you don't know what CSS is or how you use it, then you should probably leave this textbox empty.

Despite this rather forbidding note, there are some things that you can do very easily. You can, for example, create custom styles to indicate extra semantic class differences between various items of text in your blog entries.

What do I mean by semantic class differences? Within a well written text, especially an academic text, different paragraphs do different kinds of work. For example, this is a definition paragraph. Marking this paragraph out as such helps me in constructing my text, and helps others in reading it.

I have defined text types for:

  • Overview, used as the first paragraph of each of my entries.
  • Conjecture, used when I am making a claim to be assessed.
  • Definition.
  • Example.
  • Technote.
  • Conclusion.

If you look at one of my recent blog entries using the Firefox browser (as any sensible person would), then you will see various paragraphs that are marked up as having one of these specific roles. In Internet Explorer 6 (an older browser) each of these types of text looks the same, with a grey background and a dashed edging. In the more recent Firefox, however, each type of text is prefixed with the name of the type of text.

Firefox supports the more recent version of CSS, called CSS2. This includes many neat tricks such as the 'before' and 'after' pseudo-elements. Pseudo-elements are so called because they create extra elements in the page view, onto which styles can be applied. In the case of 'before', some extra content is placed at the start of the element to which the class is applied, and styled as specified. In my case, each special type of text has its title added at the start of the text to which it is applied. Most of the time I write my blog entries for my own use, with a few other readers in mind who all use Firefox, so I'm not that bothered about Internet Exploder users. I'm also not interested in how my texts appear out of context in RSS aggregators, so it doesn't matter that they lose their additional formatting in such systems.

If you want to have a go at this, you need to add two extra styles to your CSS for each of the types of text. For example, for overview I have added:

.overview {margin-bottom:10px; padding:3px; border: 1px dotted #A1A1A1; font-family: georgia, Times, serif; background-color: #EAEAEA; }
.overview:before {content: "Overview: "; font-weight:bold; font-style:oblique}

The first of these styles changes the background, border, layout and font. I could, if I wanted, use different colours and fonts for each type of text, but I personally like to keep things visually simple. The second style adds the 'before' pseudo element. In order to apply this to a paragraph of text in your blog, you need to wrap that paragraph in special tags that apply the style to the text:

<div class="overview">This is an overview text.</div>

I also have some styles that change the background colour of selected phrases, allowing me to highlight them with some extra meaning. For example, I can mark them as key terms or just apply a yellow highlighter pen:

.highlighter {background:yellow}
.keyterm {background:#BBE9F6}

In these cases, I use a different tag to contain the text to be effected:

<span class="highlighter">Highlighted text</span>

Highlighting is particularly useful when I am working with a qoute from a text.

Marking up parts of a text as being of a specific kind, doing a specific type of work, makes writing easier. The logical and semantic construction of a text becomes easier to see, assess and modify. Using CSS, this can be done consistently across a very large number of pages. Just define the styles once (in your custom CSS), and use them repeatedly.


Robert O'Toole : 30 May 2006 07:32 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 28, 2006

Academic connectors and academic dissectors

In a conversation this week, Kay Sanderson of the Warwick Skills Programme used a continuum to describe two character tendencies amongst academics and students: some people, it is said, are dissectors whilst others are connectors. Kay has much experience with getting students and researchers to think reflectively about their work. She has also had a long standing involvement with learning technology development, which for many, is tinged with a degree of dissatisfaction. I wonder if this dissatisfaction is related to the dissector/connector division?

Kay's analysis of my own work quite rightly places me towards the connector end of the line, meaning that my intellectual habits tend towards seeking out related phenomena in distinct realms, looking for connections, and searching for a common underlying dynamic. Other people tend towards the dissector extreme, they are primarily concerned with analysing a single phenomena by dissecting it continually into more fine–grained constituent parts.

The more speculative claim is that our systems of higher education are increasingly biased towards dissectors, and that this is a very bad thing indeed.

I'll leave that conjecture open and unassessed, as there are two more immediate questions that interest me:

  1. Are the two modes of operation in fact just two aspects of the same intellectual process? – inseparable;
  2. Does the application of one without the other lead to empty meaningless results?
  3. Are our learning technologies capable of supporting each mode in the right way and at the right time?
Connective synthesis and disjunctive synthesis

The notional connector person and their counterpart dissector are characterised as such because they tend to make things following one particular pattern. The product of their creativity being conceptual structure, developed within and expressed by various forms (texts, diagrams, programmes, maps).

The creation of concepts, of whatever pattern, is an act of synthesis:

Synthesis is always the addition of a further component to existing components. What gets added? A connection is created between the components, a procedure or route of exchange between the components. The connection is itself a component, a real thing. In art, these connections are often deliberately exposed and developed in new ways. However, when such a connective synthesis is turned towards a problem of understanding, we try to use connectors that are as neutral as possible. This is the rationalist deception. In other cases we claim to be merely discovering the connections that are already subsistent in the world. The components being connected are then predisposed to the connection, which bears little of the mark of human understanding, but which either is brought out through the application of the correct procedure, or alternatively suppressed. Sometimes this empiricism works well, having discovered a subterranean connection between worlds. Other times it results in foolish fantasy and fetishism. A second such synthesis is that of dissection: a disjunctive synthesis. A single component or slice of reality is decomposed into separable constituent parts, according to some arbitrary or self-evident facts of antithesis between them. It is important to understand that disjunctive synthesis is not the opposite of connective synthesis. Rather, it is a special case. A connection is always posited. The connection being the fact of difference. Breaking the world down is of course an essential part of living within and coping with it. But we must also distinguish two forms of dissector. If the difference is thought to be already and always present in the component, then no time or process is required with which to render the connection. It is ontologically apriori. Creationists are of course great dissectors. But we don't have to be mad theologists in order to dissect; in fact Nietzsche the great anti-theist claimed dissection to be of paramount importance. The difference between Nietzsche's dissection (selection/destruction/forgetting) and creationism is that for Nietzsche dissection is necessary in order to create a future world, rather than to conserve a past one. Whereas creationists imagine that there is a single blueprinted world of spatially separable identities, with his disjunctive synthesis, Nietzsche presents an active creation or engineering of reality that combines both disjunctive and connective synthesis in order to produce new additions to "all the names of history", new characters and new concepts forged through a conjunctive synthesis.

With the two syntheses defined, the inseperability of connection and dissection (question 1 above) is clear. But why should there be character types that favour one of the modes almost exclusively over the other? Surely the best approach would be to recognize the importance of each synthesis in its own time and place, whilst retaining a critical stance? There are no doubt many reasons why people become inflexible in their thinking, becoming trapped within an obsessive dissection or a delirial search for connections. I would like to raise the possibility that our learning technologies may be part of the problem.

Current learning technologies are good at either linear instructional exposition, communicating a topic by dissecting it, or the un-constrained expansion of connections. What they fail to do effectively is combine both strategies, dissection and connection. Consider how, on any given topic, the web contains a few linear texts, each presenting a constrained perspective on the topic. Each text makes assumptions about basic elements, about how the world is dissected. These dissections serve the particular narrative or connectivity of the text. From the perspective of content packages delivered within a VLE (virtual learning environment), the connections are even more linear and the dissections even less open. Such environments are constructed according to a pedagogy of instruction and completeness, with very clear and quantifiable start and end points to every topic. This is not the whole story with regards to that single topic. The web is also populated with many thousands of pages that relate to aspects of the topic in more or less direct ways. These thousands of other possible connections may act to dissect further, or to expand our understanding of existing dissections. However, most current learning technologies do not support any kind of non-linear relationship between the analysis of a topic into a well structured narrative (of connections), and the exploration and revision of the dissections from which that narrative is formed.

To that conjecture, I added the clause 'most current learning technologies'. I do believe that there are a couple of technologies that do encourage this kind of non–linearity, namely wikis and concept maps. Both of these tools allow us to do the following:

  • Create a set of topics in relative isolation from each other (the MindManager concept mapping tool even includes a 'brainstorming' tool to assist with this).
  • Create a proposed structure drawing upon these topics.
  • Extend the structure with new topics, or old topics further dissected.
  • Create new connections between the topics.
  • Revise topics without drastically effecting the overall structure of connections.
  • Revise the structure without drastically effecting the individual topics.
  • Track revisions and authoring actions.

In these ways, wikis and concept maps actually work to promote a more effective combination of the three syntheses (connection, disjunction, conjunction), and open that process up to the critical view of both students and tutors.

In order to encourage more complete and effective thinking and learning processes, we must teach students to reflect upon and exploit the different aspects of their conceptual activity. Current learning technologies may work against this. However, there are at least two emerging technologies that are designed to effectively combine connective and dissective activity.


Robert O'Toole : 28 May 2006 20:40 |  Tags:       |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Research Notes: The addictive synthesis in theatre

Follow-up to Research Notes: Rosi Braidotti on addiction and ethics from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Our discussion of addiction with Rosi Braidotti led me to propose a positive, social and ethical form of addiction, which I will now call the addictive synthesis. The following day I discussed this with Jon Stevens of Theatre Studies, who has a wide ranging understanding of theatre, virtuality and actuality.

Theatre is a repetition without finality, a repetition/rehearsal (same word in French). The most effective theatre approaches the limit and retreats, taking the audience on that journey to the edge.

In the Spanish Tragedy, Hieronymo’s desperation to get his friends to understand his plight becomes so extreme that he actually cuts out his own tongue and throws it at them. Blood sprays across the front row. The horror seems real. The political implications (in the original staging) could well have seen this violence flood outwards from the stage and into a society seething with injustice and censorship. But the play drives on in its own narrative direction, pulling the players and the audience back from the edge of collapse.

Centuries later, when theatre has lost its ability to go to the edge and back, Artaud sought to recover this power (in his essay on theatre and the plague):

Above all we must agree that stage acting is a delirium like the plague, and is communicable. p.18

...conditions must be found to give birth to a spectacle that can fascinate the mind. It is not just art. p.18

The plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extereme gestures. Theatre also takes gestures and develops them to the limit. Just like the plague, it reforges the links between what does and does not exist in material nature. p.18

For theatre can only happen the moment the inconcievable really begins, where poetry taking place on stage, nourishes and superheats created symbols. p.18

Like the plague, theatre is a crisis resolved either by death or cure. The plague is a superior disease because it is an absolute crisis after which there is nothing left except death or drastic putrification. In the same way, theatre is a disease because it is the final balance that cannot be obtained without destruction. It urges the mind to delirium which intensifies its energy. p.22

Most importantly, this theatre is a mobile plague, sweeping across the country. The movement of the travelling company from one city to another is not incidental. The programme of repetitions/rehearsal is repeated in a new setting each time, a new audience, a new set of reactions and interactions. As the reputation of the players builds and preceeds them, the audience becomes even more receptive and superheated, in expectation of becoming infected. Imagine what it must be like for the players, repeating their words and moves, and each time anticipating the differences both subtle and extreme.

Now consider street theatre, even more an addiction played out in varying circumstances. And the theatre of cruelty – the programme of repetitions melds with the stage and its agents, a single exposed body stripped bare and made mobile.

The addictive synthesis is the life and drive within theatre.

Robert O'Toole : 28 May 2006 10:01 |  Tags:          |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 26, 2006

Podcasting, seminars and e–portfolios

Podcasting is becoming ubiquitous. MP3 players, such as those created by iriver are increasingly capable of recording audio in a high quality but easily handled format. The files that are created can be swiftly transfered to a computer, edited with free software, and uploaded onto the internet. Warwick's Sitebuilder2 web content management system has a built in podcast player. My suggestion is that podcasting could eventually form an essential activity within research oriented seminar based teaching.

Last night I recorded a seminar as part of the What Is Philosophy? project. During the seminar discussion, I made some comments that I suspect may play a key role in my research. It took just a few minutes to edit my comments and the subsequent discussion into a small file, and upload it into my eportfolio and blog. You can listen to this by clicking on the button below:


Podcast play button

This gave me a thought:

Learning to speak in seminars is a key objective of research based learning. When a student achieves success in this skill, that success should be recorded. This offers an opportunity to reflect upon the success, considering the contributing factors. Keeping such a recording may also offer supporting evidence to assessment. Finally, it could also provide a useful resource to present in an e-portfolio, for example, to prospective employers.

Perhaps in the near future, as e–portfolios become more common within higher education, amongst the various snapshots of a student's academic work, we will see podcasts of seminars.


Robert O'Toole : 26 May 2006 21:07 |  Tags:      |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Rosi Braidotti on addiction and ethics

A short note about a seminar given by Rosi Braidotti, and an explanation of my interesting example of an ethically sustainable addictive behaviour.

Yesterday I attended yet another excellent seminar as part of the What is Philosophy? graduate research project. Professor Rosi Braidotti set out to defend Deleuzian research from charges of ethical relativism and providing more efficient control mechanisms for the use of gobal capitalism. This was done with remarkable energy and wit. The result, I believe, was to establish convincingly that Deleuzianism can have a consistent and pragmatic ethical approach to a wide range of situations. However, this requires a rethinking of the role of addiction, [inter]dependency, risk and identities, with an emphasis on positive modes of growth and intensity – an emphasis quite contrary to the prevailing culture of compensation and the valorization of suffering.

Braidotti book
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics by Rosi Braidotti

That is very much a partial and inadequate summary. If you want to know more, I would suggest joining the What Is Philosophy? project, so that you can listen to the full podcast audio recordings of the lecture and following discussion.

As a taster, and as a record of my own contribution to the discussion, I have clipped a short section in which I respond to the claim that addictive behaviour is necessarily narcissistic. Rosi had presented the concept of addiction on two slightly contradictory ways. On the one hand, there was a discussion of Deleuze’s alcoholism (dealt with in the Logic of Sense). This behaviour was a distinctly self-absorbed testing of ‘what a body is capable of’ (Deleuze’s favourite Spinozism). Deleuze was concerned with how the alooholic repeatedly approached the limit of their addiction, the point at which it approaches incapacity or even death, and then swiftly pulls back from the edge. Such a rehearsal/repetition is only ever a reinforcement of limits. Going beyond the limit passes across a threshold (Deleuze differentiates thresholds and limits) such that the addiction is no longer possible. Such a model is, as you can imagine, not what our critics may happily accept as the basis of an ethical system!

We could, as I think Rosi attempted, redress this by arguing that life itself is about addictions, and that there are some addictions that are positive and sustainable, and others that are destructive and lead into ‘black holes’ (Deleuze and Guattari’s term). The obvious problem with this argument is that an economic system like capitalism is quite capable of creating addictions that are both locally safe in this way (for the individual) and at the same time globally destructive, or oppresive to other classes, races, nations or species. Individuals can quite obviously be manipulated, sustained or destroyed where necessary, through the production and manipulation of their addictions. Even when such behaviours seem to introduce constant novelty (fashion), that novelty is carefully controlled and limited. Consequently, the notion of safe and sustainable personal addiction fails to save us from the charge that Deleuze and Guattari simply provide more efficient mechanisms to the hands of global capitalism.

At this point I got quite excited. I have been looking at a range of addictive behaviours that are neither narcissistic nor exclusive of significant and uncontrolled creativity. These patterns of behaviour are entirely dependent upon an engagement with contsantly differing contexts (people and places). I offered the following example:

There is a man who has a powerful addiction to a series of behaviours. These behaviours are repeated/rehearsed according to a carefully controlled programme. Each time the programme of behaviours is repeated, it is done so in a new context. This variation may be subtle or dramatic, and often means the man travelling to new countries around the world. Why does he do this? Each repetition gives him a new perspective on himself, on his stable set of behaviours. In some cases he is exploring subtle fine detail. In others he is searching for dramatic contrasts. But this is not just about the man himself. He isn’t just using the world as a mirror. Rather, the repetition of behaviour each time gives him a register for understanding a new part of the world, its environment and its people. This is where the example gets really interesting. What really motivates this adventurer is that he finds that the people he meets in these locations also benefit from the relationship that is established between their world and his. They learn, and even break out of their stereotypical lives. The man and his addiction acts a bit like a virus. Often he is able to establish new relationships that endure and grow into something big and worthwile. And so, when nomadized in this manner, addictions can be positive and creative rather than entropic and narcissistic.
* To hear my example, and the following discussion, click on the play button below.


Robert O'Toole : 26 May 2006 11:42 |  Tags:         |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 25, 2006

E–learning Research: a Deleuzian method for the evaluation of virtual learning environments

In what sense are virtual learning environments virtual and environmental? I argue that they really are environments, and as such the experience and behaviour of learners within them is subject to the same kinds of determining, enabling and limiting factors as in any other kind of environment. Furthermore, these learning environments each assemble discontinuous multiplicities (quantifiable indexable actualities) and continuous multiplicities (qualitative and immeasurable virtualities) in varying combinations, with differing results for the learner. Just as some environments may sustain certain types of life, different VLE systems encourage different types of learning behaviour. Each environment has its own regime due to the varying composition of virtual and actual. The Elab VLE (a loosely coupled CMS/Blogs/Forums web architecture), through a deliberate policy of managed diversity, is biased towards facilitating the virtual rather than over-determining the actual. The result is an environment that is at the same time cohesive and open and indeterministic. I consequently argue that it therefore offers an environment more suited to the kind of learners for which it is designed, and that VLEs of the type represented by WebCT are inappropriate for research based higher education.

VLE

A series of questions must be addressed:

  • What is an environment composed of?
  • What varies between different environments to create differing environmental regimes?
  • To what extent is a virtual learning environment (VLE) an environment?
  • How do VLEs vary, so as to create different regimes?
  • Are certain such regimes preferable to others?
Environments are composed of filters

Consider the life of a polar bear, out on the Arctic ice flows. A highly attuned brain guides its bodily actions in a constant and inescapable quest for connections. Unlike the human learner (perhaps), its search seems simple and deterministic: its goals are straightforwards, being dominated for the majority of the time with the need to connect with and exploit a source of protein, and on more rare occassions, with the need to mate. What parameters there are in this life are determined by the environment in which it is played out. What form does this determination take? In this case, the behaviour of the bear is largely a process of filtering and being filtered. The environment may seem to be a desert of uniform whiteness, but even in such a simple case the animal must filter out unnecessary inputs and options. Even the act of staying insulated from the cold is a process of filtration: absorbing heat whilst deflecting the cold wind. And in return, the environment filters the bear, along lines of movement, limiting and directing its behaviour. Within a short timescale, the behaviour patterns of individual bears are shaped by their immediate landscape, and the connection with other filtered flows (the flow of pack ice, the flow of prey). On a longer scale, evolution applies filters to the species, whilst ecological interactions change the criteria with which selection exterts its pressure (the interactions of populations of predator and prey).

In this way behaviour and geophysical processes connect through an environment that is the assemblage of all of these interoperating filters over time. This is more or less true of any environment. The physical built environment is well understood in these terms, but also consider how an online application with a variety of user accessible functions filters a pool of back–end functionality. In return, the end user filters out irrelevant or inaccessible functionality. Over time these functions may even die off through lack of interest or the application of an agile development process that in some ways copies evolution.

The case of the polar bear is presented above in a simplified manner. There are many complications and possible combinations of filters that offer other kinds of environmental regime. Reality presents a range of regimes and blends of regimes, many of which occur across widely differing regimes. For example, in his work on the 'extended cognition' model of cognition, Andy Clark proposes that a kind of mangrove effect may well be a significant assemblage in the generation of new ideas. Clark describes how a new mangrove swamp begins by a single plant floating in the water, with extended roots that may catch hold of both food and other plants. This kind speculative drift is another assemblage of filters that may be a viable regime in some environments. For example, in the online world we may use a blog to float a part–formed notion. Effective use of semantic tagging and discovery tools may attract further content to the idea, allowing it to grow. It may also allow it to connect to other complimentary ideas. Over time as the mangrove–idea grows, it attracts further connections and taps into greater pools of energy.

The mangrove is an example of a regime of filtration that the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari have called rhizomatic. There are many other regimes, many of which are diagrammed in their book A Thousand Plateaus. These regimes include arborescent assemblages, which operate by applying rules of exclusion that form hierarchical branches of filtration; a familiar model in both software design and social anthopology. Other regimes of importance include:

  • Gadgets, or filters that follow a reproducible and generalizable design;
  • Animal bodies (which are gadget–like, but less portable and generalizable);
  • Familial structures;
  • Mythologies;
  • Geological and sedimentary processes.

We therefore have the first of our tools for understanding the construction of environments: regimes of filtration. As has been demonstrated, the principle applies across environments, and in some cases we see regimes re–occurring in quite different settings.

Environments are composed of networks

A second and relatively rare aspect of some environments can best be understood through the behaviour of a more complex animal: the honey bee.

Karl von Frisch
Waggle dance, plume theory, filters

James Gould Cognitive map
Abstraction

some filters are symbolic or digital, redundancy
codings to promote autopoiesis through symbiosis
simulations to accelerate judgement
dissimulation to exploit weaknesses in the simulations of others
the relation between filters and networks is a matter of ecology

Environments are actual

quantification and index
registers of modification
progress
the actual tends to impose limits on differentiation

Environments are virtual

signal can be quantified, the carrier (the assemblage of filters) is more complex and sensitive – a continuum
movement, freedom, creation
whole system evolves continually
different elements evolve at different speeds
differential speeds provide registers for understanding the different elements

Smooth and striated space

Emergent actuality

Instructional VLEs
Research VLEs

Robert O'Toole : 25 May 2006 06:07 |  Tags:       |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 24, 2006

How to write a communications strategy

At lunchtime today Madeline and I attended a very well taught and useful session by Casey Leaver of the Communications Office as part of a series organised by the CPD Office (which sadly is soon to be closed). Casey gave many good tips on print and online communications, but most vital was her introductory ideas on how an organisation can create a communications strategy.

Purpose

One of the key aims of a communications strategy is to ensure that the best 'channels' of communication are used for each of the different 'stakeholders' with whom one must engage. The use of inappropriate channels is a common and sometimes serious mistake. For example, I do not wish to be told by my doctors surgery that I must use an online diagnosis form, I want to actually talk to a real person. Unbelievably, the obsession with technology has actually caused such obvious errors of judgement. One must think carefully about audience, and match channels to them carefully.

Stage 1: stakeholders

The first stage of the process is to identify the range of "stakeholders" with whom communication must be carried out. There may be some groups within the university for whom this is straightforwards. However, I suspect for the majority there are a range of different and sometimes conflicting groups to be catered for. So what of the E–learning Advisor Team? Consider our rather broad and general aim: to encourage wider and more effective use of learning technologies throughout the four faculties. Obviously the agents of this change are our principle stakeholders. But we should also consider everyone who will beneift, as they are ultimately those who will judge our effectiveness.

Casey provided us with A3 sized grids on which to record our ideas. Along the vertical axis, we listed each of the stakeholder groups. On my grid I added the following:

  1. Lecturers - techies and early adopters. Lecturers who are prepared to adopt new learning technologies without much prompting or convincing. This group presents us with an easy but not necessarily significant or sustained win.
  2. Lecturers - followers. Perhaps an unfair description, as the majority of lecturers simply do not have a great deal of free time to try out new approaches. They have to use well tested and understood techniques.
  3. Lecturers - resisters. This group actually puts effort into opposing the introduction of new learning technologies, even though no one is actually forcing them to do anything. Yes, they really do exist, and can exert a formidable effect within departments.
  4. Graduate research students and post-docs. A group that I take very seriously. They do a big share of the teaching, as well as being users of learning technologies for private study.
  5. Taught students. There is some controversy about whether we need to communicate with taught students. It could be argued that this is the responsibility of the relevant lecturers. However, I believe that it is necessary and valuable for us to work directly with taught students. At Warwick we aim to encourage students to act independently, taking personal responsibility for their skills and technologies. The Learning Grid is a brilliant example of this approach.
  6. Departmental IT. Some departments have their own IT people, who act as key agents of change (or stagnation in a few rare cases). This is more common in the Sciences.
  7. Departmental administrators. Another significant set of agents for change. The Business School's e–learning team had a strategy of working closely with administrators. This is said to be a very effective approach, leading to excellent integration of admin and e–learning systems, something that IT Services has failed to do.
  8. IT Services. The people who run the services upon which we rely must be informed as to the significance and effects of their services.
  9. Central service providers. For example the Library and the Warwick Skills Programme, who are themselves keen to adopt the best technologies, and who may also effect change within departments as they demonstrate successful applications.

That is quite an intimidating range. Perhaps we should consider cutting some of the stakeholders out of the plan? For example, we could take the easy route and focus upon the techie/early–adopter lecturers. But then we risk alienating the vast majority of lecturers by only ever addressing the needs and interests of individuals who are already unique and eccentric. Alternatively, we could simply address the silent majority of lecturers, the 'followers'. That would be a hard and perhaps impossible slog, in which we may fail to encourage and communicate any good examples of the use of learning technologies. Probably the best solution is to prioritise, and work with each group where they offer the best strategic return.

Stage 2: channels

Assuming that we do have to communicate with each of these groups in some way, the next step in formulating a communications strategy is to consider the range of available 'channels' of communication that are available. Once that I started on this list, I quickly realised how many we do regularly use, and just how diverse they are. My list included:

  1. The E–learning at Warwick web site.
  2. Content on other people's web sites.
  3. The E–learning Forum.
  4. The E–learning Blog.
  5. Personal blogs.
  6. Email, personal.
  7. Email, list.
  8. Telephone.
  9. Booklets and leaflets.
  10. How to guides.
  11. Flyers.
  12. Posters.
  13. Billboards.
  14. Personal contact.
  15. Coaching sessions.
  16. Presentations within other meetings.
  17. Seminars and workshops.
  18. Conferences.
  19. Novelty items (I mean fridge magnets, drinks mats etc).

I'm sure there are even more, but I ran out of room on the A3 grid, upon which they were plotted along the horizontal axis.

E–learning Team Comms

Now, with the stakeholders and the channels plotted, one can consider matching the latter to the former, that is to say, ensuring that the appropriate channels are used with each group of stakeholders. This immediately throws up some key issues. For example, I expect that content presented via blogs could be more accessible and interesting to undergraduates. However, I have in the past made the mistake of expecting a moderately 'resistant' lecturer to read a blog! My experience is that such people actually expect and demand to be dealt with on a personal face–to–face basis.

During the session we only really got started on using the communications strategy grid. I did immediately start to think about the problem in a new way. For example, our web site contains "showcases" that aim to engage the majority of lecturers. I know that this only provides a small element in the required communications with such people. We need to compliment it with other channels, especially departmental presentations (although we should deal with the resisters and early-adopters seperately first). I will continue developing my grid, and hopefully arive at more solutions that can be applied.

Thanks Casey!


Robert O'Toole : 24 May 2006 21:56 |  Tags:     |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem

May 18, 2006

Research Notes: The conflict between sadism and masochism in Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Follow-up to Research Notes: Bogue on Deleuze on Sade and Masoch from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Relating Deleuze’s analysis of sadism and masochism to travel and Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This starts to make more sene of Deleuze’s Shame and Glory essay on T.E. Lawrence.

It could be argued that sadism and masochism, the formal relations instantiated by each of these conditions, present two different kinds of journey or travel. Sadism as described by Deleuze assimilates every difference to its brutal logic, consuming time, events, into its minimal singularity with an entirely instrumental attitude. The sadist wants to get from A to B without deviation (!), but at the same time must feel some kind of intensity giving matter to the journey. The masochist journey has a plan and material, rehearsed continually. Contrary to Freud’s analysis, the rehearsal is undertaken in the hope of some unanticipated modulation in the script.

The rape scene in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is, contrary to common readings, not some kind of phantasmic product of a sadomasochistic imagination. The continual horror with which T.E. Lawrence recalls the event is genuine. It was in fact a brutal imposition of sadistic practices onto a (moderately) masochistic character. As Deleuze argues, sadism is alien to masochism, hence the terrible effect that the encounter had on Lawrence’s psyche, perhaps ultimately leading to his death.

The clock plays an absolutely key role in the rape scene. To cope with the viscious attack, Lawrence focusses on its sound in order to filter out other intensities. Similarly, in the desert, he focusses on the rhythmic movement of the camel to filter out the pain and the horrors of the conflict. Is this a third mode of travel? How does it relate to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain? Minimalism? Rauschenberg?


Robert O'Toole : 18 May 2006 17:14 |  Tags:           |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Bogue on Deleuze on Sade and Masoch

Follow-up to Research Notes: The concept of recirculation from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In the opening chapter of his Deleuze on Literature, Ronald Bogue focusses on Deleuze's analysis of the conditions of masochism and sadism. These are key concepts linking difference and repetition, circulation and cybernetics, to literary production and psychoanalysis.

Bogue identifies that Deleuze's sigificant claim is that sadism and masochism are formally different conditions, not poles of a single disorder. Sadomasochism is then a 'syndrome' not a disease, a badly analyzed composite of symptoms.

Whereas in Sade erotic scenes are repeated with violent and mechanical reiteration, in Masoch phantasy figures are identified with motionless art objects – statues, portraits, photographs – components of scenes that are repeated in a stuttering sequence of frozen images. Sade seeks the violence of continuous movement and hence abjures the stasis of the art object, whereas Masoch aspires to a world of suspense and waiting, and thus aestheticizes the real as a series of tableaux vivants. p.20

Each is then a solution to the problem of repetition and difference. But they capture and recirculate matter in different ways. Is Sadism closer to mathematics in its relentless application of an algorithm that reduces difference? And Masochism, obviously a theatre focussed on an artistic monument, slowing down differentiation through repetition/rehearsal.

Sade's immediacy – the nomadic war machine? – the desert?
Masoch's theatre – the socius? – the city?
These are conunterposed in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – see my entry on Lawrence and Abu Ghraib

But this is not the phantasm of psychoanalysis. The programme is itself real and complex, with a history of its own. Bogue seems not to see this.


Robert O'Toole : 18 May 2006 13:22 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 17, 2006

Research Notes: Concepts and monuments, philosophers and artists

Follow-up to Review: Naked Punch (versus Collapse) – first thoughts from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

A correction on the matter of 'concepts speed and judgement'.

I recently wrote that repetition and difference are governed by "filters", and that:

some of these filters privelige speed and scope of judgement over care and novelty. These filters render the fine detail of events redundant (in the cybernetic sense), so as to cover more ground more quickly. Concepts are such filters.

Actually I think that D&G, in What Is Philsoophy?, try to rescue philosophy and its concepts from this, aligning philosophical concepts more closely with artistic monuments in the way in which they capture, decelerate and recirculate matter through a network of actual conceptual components. The philosopher (or conceptual personae), following Nietzsche, is then a kind of artist.

At some point in WiP, they attack marketing, the communications business, opinions, etc – all the traditional enemies of philosophy, and all responsible for the priveliging of speed and scope of judgement over care.


Robert O'Toole : 17 May 2006 13:25 |  Tags:     |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Research Notes: The concept of recirculation

The concept of recirculation (repetition/rehearsal and difference) is the key to unfolding Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari and T.E. Lawrence.

From an entry on Seven Pillars of Wisdom

The nomads were thus capable of becoming an abstract machine, self–motivated, self–positing, independent but at the same time forming a genuinely connected response to every and any possible experience. The nomad, for example, finds the continuation of the journey as a way of life itself. The journey is the purpose of the journey. The narrower objective being to merely keep circulating within a space that encourages the continuation of the journey, making sedimentation impossible.

And another

This was then a new movement, breaking out of the timeless circulation of peoples and their livestock into and across the desert – a sudden and unprecedented mass carrying with it bodies from the diverse geophysical and social distributions of people into places.

On the will to power

Genetic – quality – affirmative/negative – feedback loops – continuous multiplicity – virtuality

On art and collapse

Art is missing, but why do we need it? My conjecture is this (following, I think, Deleuze and Guattari): 1. That events are organized; this is to say, their repetition and differentiation is controlled by filters of selection. 2. That some of these filters privelige speed and scope of judgement over care and novelty. These filters render the fine detail of events redundant (in the cybernetic sense), so as to cover more ground more quickly. Concepts are such filters. 3. However there is always a side–effect of speed: a loss of feeling (subtle detail). 4. On the contrary, there are filters that amplify detail by taking a set of events and promoting their re–occurrence, emphasing different aspects of the events with each repetition. Artists create such filters. The effect of art is deceleration, or perhaps carefully controlled speed. Art may then prevent the dissociation from the world that is inherent in conceptual activity.

On painting

reduce the world and its vast circuits to a small repetitive loop. In the case of Cezanne, the loop circulates and re–circulates between Mont Saint Victoire, the palette and its oils (themselves reduced to a few greens and blues), the hand, the brush or knife, and the canvas. In this way the artwork is built up over time through a kind of mangrove effect not disimilar to that described by Andy Clark.
Everything is invested – "the artist is already in the canvas" (Deleuze, Logic of Sensation). Then make each run of the circuit entirely dependent upon the last, each time applying a filter modulated by the results of the previous passage (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Bacon and others replace an optical filter with a haptic filter). The circuit carves out an escape route within the imprisonment of actuality. The loops are repetitions, movements between points, but across different virtualities or the infinite and irreducible but necessary slices of reality. This opening up of new degrees of movement is the experiment of the diagram.

On art as monument

The suggestion is that the monument encapsulates a rhythm of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, of pleats of matter rising and falling relative to each other, forming tonalities, a whole music of matter that penetrates substance and carries it away into the plane. The monument is then not a static edifice, it is a continual circulation of matter, captured at some point in history, relative to a virtuality which otherwise disappears. It captures a slice of reality, holds it, and then releases it again in the future, in our aesthetic encounter.
Deleuze and Guattari go further: artworks are monuments. All artworks? What does, for example, Cezanne's painting of Mont Saint Victoire commemorate? In paint it captures a circulation of matter ever connected with the mountain. The rhythm of brush strokes is, as Cezanne claimed, the rhythm of the mountain, of nature as he lived it. His method always struggled to capture the tension, the pattern of connections of those rhythms, to make them permanent in a monument.

Next I must relate this to 'the refrain'; the 'journey' of the nomad and its singular rhythm; dematerialization and virtualization; the clock and the rape scene in Seven Pillars; the movement of the camel; and the clockwork running of the engine in Jupiter's Travels.


Robert O'Toole : 17 May 2006 13:07 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Virtuality and character

On my iTunes right now: Mrs Potter's Lullaby by Counting Crows. Not the kind of music that I usually listen to, but quite up-beat and fun, which is useful.

Anyhow, one line is, for me, particularly good, as it reminds me of how my best friend Mari (or Maria as she sometimes liked to be called), her unique and powerful character, is always present in everything that I do:

There's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing.

That I suppose is the "virtuality" that Deleuze and Bergson describe.


Robert O'Toole : 17 May 2006 10:14 |  Tags:  |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

May 16, 2006

Research Notes: The double event, force and the will to power

Reading Ronald Bogue's Deleuze on Literature. In the first chapter he uses Nietzsche and Philosophy to show how literary texts are constituted from forces, of memory and forgetting, of continuity and differentiation.

But forces would never enter into relation with each other if there were no dynamic element within forces that engendered relations. That element Nietzsche calls "will to power". The will to power "thus is added to force, but as the differential and genetic element, as the internal element of its production. Bogue, Deleuze on Literature, p.11

In the first instance, a force is a naked event, experienced as an absolute loss. But a force has two aspects:

  • Differential – quantity – dominant/dominated – discontinuous multiplicity – nothing shared – can be divided without changing.
  • Genetic – quality – affirmative/negative – feedback loops – continuous multiplicity – virtuality – that which changes in being divided or in adding novelty, must have been there, shared from the start – memory – hence genetic.

Bogue – interpretation concerns the differential, evaluation concerns the genetic.


Robert O'Toole : 16 May 2006 07:02 |  Tags:          |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem