Open Thinkering

Menu

Month: April 2011

What I talk about when I talk about ‘user outcomes’ #4

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and ForgettingI re-read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting last week. It’s not a straightforward read but it’s certainly a challenging and rewarding one. Kundera describes it as “a novel in the form of variations” and “like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme”.

To my mind, that theme is the importance not only of History, but celebrating it in its multiple forms and from a variety of perspectives. In terms of user outcomes, therefore, I think that there’s a delicate line to be drawn between influence and obliteration:

The future is an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and it’s countenance is irritating, repellant, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history. (p.30-31)

“You begin to liquidate a people,” Hübl said, “by taking away it’s memory. You destroy it’s books, it’s culture, it’s history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster.” (p.218)

History is a series of ephemeral changes, while eternal values are immutable, perpetuated outside history, and have no need of memory. (p.257)

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. First in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, then several decades later in Paris and the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the nineteenth century it conquered the cities of Europe one after another. It settled in Vienna and Prague around 1900, then spread eatward to Budapest, Belgrade, Istanbul.

From the planet’s point of view, the blackbird’s invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationship among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet.” (p.267-8)

This idea of one of the most important changes from our planet’s point of view taking place without us noticing really made me sit up and think. But it was this last quotation which was the clincher for me writing this post:

The best possible progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make it’s supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd.” (p.273)

In other words, if you want to change things for the better and achieve improved user outcomes, you need to build a constituency. You need to make an idea powerful enough that people are attracted into its orbit.

Hog roasts, Amazon EC2 and traffic lights.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I feel that these images, some of the last taken by photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya before their deaths earlier this week, link in some way to the following. I’m just not sure how to work them in whilst retaining any form of subtlety.

Question: What links a hog roast, the recent Amazon EC2 outage and traffic lights?

Answer: The notion of Civil Society.

The London School of Economics’ Centre for Civil Society defines it thus:

Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups. (via Wikipedia, my emphasis)

At lunchtime today my family and I are heading down to the pond and newly-formed wildlife reserve behind the small cul-de-sac in which we live. The pond was formed by some kind of mining-related sinkhole that I don’t pretend to understand. What I do understand is that it’s now a beautiful space that adds value to our life (and to our house). Today is the opening ceremony at which a hog roast will be enjoyed free-of-charge, with people coming together to celebrate the space. More spaces for meeting means a greater likelihood of unmediated interaction.

Last March I was in Turkey with my good friend and collaborator Nick Dennis at the request of EUROCLIO which is doing some work on behalf of the Dutch government. Nick and I helped train History teachers on the use of technology in education (see presentation here), part of a many-pronged strategy by part of the Dutch government aiming to raise the level of Turkish ‘civil society’ in preparation for the latter eventually joining the European Union.

With the Turkish educators, technology was a trojan horse as the whole point of the programme was to get across the ‘multiperspectivity’ of History and, once that was established, equip them to be able to communicate that to the next generation. The only other strategy I can remember from the ten or so mentioned was that of making sure that traffic lights both worked properly and were sequenced in ways that were ‘European standard’ (i.e. enabled a good flow of traffic). It’s the little things that make a big difference.

So far, so obvious. The wildlife reserve and our work in Turkey fairly relate directly to the definition of Civil Society given earlier. But what about the Amazon EC2 outage? What’s that got to do with anything?

First, some context:

Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark.

Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard.

Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre. (TechCrunch)

Having recently considered moving this blog to Amazon EC2 because it’s ‘never down’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Bluehost may be slower at serving up content than it used to be but at least it’s never completely failed me. Outsourcing via set-it-and-forget-it only works if you’ve got a backup plan.

All of this reminded me of Unhosted.org which, no doubt, has received a boost because of the EC2 outage:

Unhosted is an open web standard for decentralizing user data. On the unhosted web, data is stored per-user, under the user’s control. That’s where it belongs.

I’m no fan of privatising everything within society but I do think that sometimes we rely on the state and big businesses a little too much to provide things we can organize through communities and networks. Despite the #fail that is the Big Society in the UK the idea behind it remains sound. Unhosted is one way in which we can developers can come together as a force for good in the online sphere – just as the wildlife reserve and training Turkish educators were strategies in other spheres.

By way of conclusion, therefore, I’d like to challenge you. Be the change you want to see in the world. Small changes can have large symbolic actions and lead to a domino effect. Take next week’s #purposedpsi event in Sheffield, for example. There’ll only be about 50-60 people but, due to networks (and networks of networks) we’ll have a disproportionate effect on people’s thinking and conversation. There’s a few tickets left if you’d like to join us.

So, get out there and do something! Go and make the world a better place.

Digital Media Literacy in Australia

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This is is the draft of a section for my Ed.D. thesis. The bibliography relating to the referenced literature can be found at http://dougbelshaw.com/thesis (I’ve blogged more about my thesis at http://dougbelshaw.com/blog)

Updated and expanded (26 April 2011)

It would be easy to dismiss Australia, a former British colony, as derivative and dependent upon publications, research and policy from the UK, Europe and the USA. Certainly, there is evidence that Australian policy is influenced by outputs from these three. However, Australia has a much more coherent set of policies and strategies relating to New Literacies than other countries.

The dominant form of New Literacy in Australia is ‘Digital Media Literacy’, enshrined in policy documents, strategies and educational frameworks. However, as the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) Digital Media Literacy in Australia: Key Indicators and Research Sources’ document points out, there are many and varied definitions of ‘Digital Media Literacy’. Whilst referencing Ofcom’s (UK) definition – “the ability to use, understand and create digital media and communications” – the ACMA settle upon “the skills and capabilities needed for effective participation in the digital economy” (ACMA, 2009, p.8)

Importantly, resources relating to Digital Media Literacy in Australia are collated, easy-to-find, and demonstrate some coherence of approach. This is possibly due to the structure of government departments: Australia has a Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Interestingly, the focus on the ‘digital economy’ is a result of “a unique opportunity to shrink the distances that have historically dominated our domestic and international relationships” (DBCDE, 2009) using as an example the “remote specialist diagnosis of patients” so important in a land as expansive as Australia. Importantly, there is a growing awareness in Australia of the difference between the so-called ‘digital divide’ (which focuses on access to hardware) and the ‘digital use divide’ (or ‘participation gap’) which involves the Digital Media Literacies necessary for 21st century citizenship.

A 2009 report entitled ‘Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions’ highlights Digital Media Literacy alongside other issues such as ‘Consumer Digital Confidence’ in a section focusing on the successful elements of a digital economy. The three main partners in building such a digital economy are seen as the government, industry and ‘community’ with Digital Media Literacy included in the latter section. Being a government document, however, it focuses upon the economy and social cohesion:

Digital media literacy ensures that all Australians are able to enjoy the benefits of the digital economy: it promotes opportunities for social inclusion, creative expression, innovation, collaboration and employment. People in regional, rural and remote areas can also have improved access to these opportunities. Digital media literacy gives children the capability to effectively learn online; consumers the confidence to search for information and transact online; and businesses the ability to become more efficient and compete in a global marketplace. (DBCDE, 2009)

The seeming Australia-wide agreement on Digital Media Literacy as the accepted form of New Literacies is explained in part by Gibson (2008). He gives an overview of the ‘literacy wars’ in Australia, quoting Ilyana Snyder on how the press and professional journals keep alive the debates between conservatives and progressives (Snyder, 2008). The battleground over different forms and manifestations of traditional (print) literacy allows, suggests Gibson, Digital Media Literacy to show “some promise of a revival of educational optimism” (Gibson, 2008, p.74). He sees Digital Media Literacy as a way to transcend entrenched positions, for:

When my critical or media literacy can be your illiteracy, the concept has become emptied of definite meaning. While literacy is still central to most notions of education, it is increasingly unclear what exactly we mean by it. (Gibson, 2008, p.75)

This ‘conceptual fuzziness’ stems from a shift in the media by and with which we read and write – and also by what we mean by ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ in the first place. This shall be explored more fully in Chapter 3, but in the Australian context there is an indication from Gibson that agreement over Digital Media Literacy provides a welcome respite from argument and debate over traditional (print) literacy.

The operationalising of Digital Media Literacy has led to initiatives such as the ‘Digital Education Revolution’ in New South Wales. The aim is for elements of Digital Media Literacy to be taught across the curriculum meaning, for example, in that in English lessons students work towards a unit entitled ‘When machines go bad…’ where they “examine and explore their own humanity in terms of their relationship with, and dependency on technology” (Digital Education Revolution, no date). Other modules deal with the creation of new media such as podcasts and using a collaborative online whiteboard.

As would be expected, libraries and librarians in Australia have a history of attempting to develop Information Literacy. Definitions of Information Literacy are influenced from work carried out in the USA by the American Library Association:

Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information”. (ACRL)

This definition was adopted in 2000 at the Council of Australian University Librarians in Canberra, revised slightly in 2001, with an Information Literacy Framework (Bundy, 2004) developed in 2004 by the Australian and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy (ANZIIL). The latter organisation, however, no longer seems to be active with the ‘Information Literacy policy’ of universities such as the University of Sydney referencing 10 year-old standards and documents. Either Information Literacy is so entrenched that it no longer needs developing or, as is more likely the case, the zeitgeist has been captured by Digital Media Literacy.

css.php