Tag: networks

Types of relationship and communities of ‘ought’.

Posted on November 7, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Introduction

The most fertile time of my week, ideas-wise? Sitting listening to sermons in church every Sunday. For whatever reason – perhaps because I can think at least twice as quickly people talk – I end up scrawling ideas for blog posts and reminders of things to look-up on the back of my service sheet. Other members of the congregation no doubt think I’m making notes on the talk.*

Today’s sermon was on The Gospel and Witness, which made me think about relationships within communities. I consider the following a work-in-progress, but share my thoughts in a quest for rejection-or-reinforcement – and perhaps even examples/counter-examples.

Types of relationship

At the lowest level are fleeting relationships, those in which we expend very little energy. We offer politeness but no access to our ‘inner world’. This kind of relationship is transactional and, indeed, is perhaps best illustrated by purchases made in shops.

Next up comes networks. Acquaintances, perhaps friends of friends, people you follow and rarely interact with on Twitter. This sort of relationship is give-and-take. I give some small part of myself and in return get something back of use. An example might be indicating that I’m looking for a new car or music recommendations and in return gain some generic feedback.

Further up the chain are groups. These are defined either implicitly or explicitly and exist for customised advice and support. These too can exist via social networks, but – online at least – are perhaps best facilitated through forums. Examples include getting constructive criticism of a new document you’ve drafted, advice about a particular situation encountered, and so on.

After groups come communities of practice, as defined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger:

A community of practice (CoP) is… a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession. The group can evolve naturally because of the members’ common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally. CoPs can exist online, such as within discussion boards and newsgroups, or in real life, such as in a lunchroom at work, in a field setting, on a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment. (Wikipedia)

Whilst informal, communities of practice are focused on a particular end and have pre-determined boundaries. Their focus means that communities of practice are likely to be more successful than groups. Relationships are likely to be predicated upon either informal or formal entry requirements (e.g. job, ownership of an item, previous experience)

The final type of relationships are within a community of ought. This is a term I’ve invented to describe those organizations that have the power to tell individuals (or at least strongly advise them) how to behave. This, of course, includes most religious organizations, but really any organization where an individual defers in some way to authority. Such deference does not have to be formal in nature, but must include adherence to some kind of code or set of rules. Others in the organization must be able to tell whether an individual is ‘doing as he/she ought’.

Conclusion

Although some may feel my description of ‘communities of ought’ sounds somewhat controlling and scary, people do in fact, in some areas of their life (he says, making a huge generalisation), prefer to defer to authority. And, if so, it’s much better to defer to an authority within a community than an individual earthly authority.

This post is more an observation of my own thinking than a statement as to whether such communities of ought should or should not exist. I’m currently thinking that communities of ought are more likely to get things done. I’d be interested in your thoughts, however.

* Before you castigate me for my irreverance, I’m fully able to have a debate about the theological implications of the sermon afterwards as well, thank you very much. :-p

Literacy -> Digital Flow: Tetrads & Connectivism.

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

This follows on from a previous post Literacy -> Digital Flow: digital epistemologies & ontology. References can be found on my wiki.

What we are asking here is, effectively, what changes when a new technology is introduced? How does affect how we interact, how we think and how we communicate? Useful here may be Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘tetrads’ (as set out in his posthumously-published Laws of Media).

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

Any medium or human artefact simultaneously enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsolesces – although the effects in each area may take years to manifest themselves. If we take the mobile phone (cellphone) as an example to place in the centre of the tetrad, we observe the following. The mobile phone enhances communication by voice whilst reversing the need to keep people close in order to communicate with them. Public telephone booths become obsolete, but certain behaviours (such as infantile shouting) are retrieved.

McLuhan also believed that technologies have to be understood in their historical context, using the idea of ‘figure and ground’ to underpin his famous phrase ‘the medium is the message’. The figure (or medium) operates through its ground (or context) with both having to be understood together to make either intelligible. McLuhan believed that each technology reflects a way of understanding the world, especially in terms of time and space. Attempting to understand a particular technology or medium without the culture in which it was used would be at best anachronistic and at worst useless and misleading.

This idea of each medium having its own tetradic influence, along with McLuhan’s borrowing of the concept of ‘figure and ground’ from Gestalt psychology would seem to make the idea of a single, monolithic ‘digital literacy’ untenable. Not only does the ‘digital’ refer to devices that cover many cultural niches and time periods, but each obeys McLuhan’s Laws of Media in different ways. We have moved from a psychological view of understanding literacy (as with Traditional Literacy) to a sociological view where ‘[l]iteracies are bound up with social, institutional and cultural relationships, and can only be understood when they are situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006:12).

As Lankshear and Knobel go on to mention, literacy is always connected to social identity, to being a particular type of person. This is necessarily singular in a world where communication is bounded by physicality, but in a digital world may be multiple. Online I may have as many personas and identities as I have accounts. This has led to what is known as ‘affinity spaces’ – places where informal learning takes place amongst people who have a shared activity, interest or goal (Gee, 2004). This could be a war-game played online through an identity symbolised through a ‘butch’ soldier avatar, involvement of a photo-sharing community where members post comments, ideas and tips on each others’ work, or a fan fiction arena where members share a love of a particular film/TV series/book. It is not difficult to imagine an individual involving themselves in each of these communities simultaneously using a different identity, avatar, and persona each time. These multiple identities are predicated upon ‘the recognition of “difference” and hyperplurality… suggest[ing] that the emerging architecture of world order is moving away from territorially distinct, mutually exclusive, linear orderings of space toward nonlinear, multiperspectival, overlapping layers of political authority. Likewise, modern mass identities centred on the “nation” are being dispersed into multiple, nonterritorial “niche” communities and fragmented identities’ (Deibert, 1996:201 quoted in Hawisher & Selfe, 2000:288)

If communities are defined by communication and creative acts, and if these two activities are based upon some form of literacy, then literacies must be multiple, ever-changing and quickly evolving. In fact, it is difficult to see how such a generalised notion of ‘digital literacy’ would have time to ‘solidify’ and reside within an individual in a pure form. Instead, using theories such as Connectivism to conceive of learning – and therefore literacies – as residing in networks may be more sustainable. Considering education in terms of Discourse(s) rather than as transmission leads to,

thinking of education and learning in terms not of schools and children (place-related and age-specific) but, instead, in terms of human lives as trajectories through diverse social practices and institutions… To learn something is to progress toward a fuller understanding and fluency with doing and being in ways that are recognized as proficient relative to recognized ways of ‘being in the world’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006:196)

Social practices become both all-important and compartmentalized. Learners as ‘nodes on a network’ can gain identity and status whilst simultaneously helping shape what, for that particular community, is an accepted and recognized way of ‘being in the world’. As Siemens, one of the developers of the theory of Connectivism puts it,

The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individuals. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed. (Siemens, 2004:no page)

In a world where the ‘half-life’ of knowledge – ‘the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete’ (Gonzalez, 2004 quoted by Siemens, ibid.) – is shrinking rapidly, such networked learning and associated literacies are essential.

10 ‘Home Truths’ about Schooling and Education

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Doug Belshaw

I was frustrated last night as dougbelshaw.com wasn’t working and I couldn’t post the following. These came to me at various points yesterday and kind of melded themselves into a blog post.

So here’s what’s on my mind:

For there to be ‘good’ parents there must be ‘bad’ parents. The same is true of teachers.
It is almost impossible to effect a fundamental change in worldview in an individual whom you see as part of a class of ~30 for less than an hour per week.
To learn how to ride a bicycle you have to take the stabilisers off at some point. In the same way, Internet safety cannot be taught effectively in an artificially closed, filtered, environment.
More content ? more achievement.
Being good at passing examinations does not mean an individual will be of benefit of society or ‘flourish’ (in an Aristotelian sense)
Technology often serves to magnify talents and, moreover, weaknesses in pedagogy.
If some pilots knew the same about flying as some teachers know about ‘real’ teaching, the aircraft would never get to its destination.
It may be a cliché to cite time-motion studies that show that the majority of time in school, children are waiting for something to happen. This does not mean, however, that the situation has been rectified.
If the school is a business, then each department should know how the others fit into corporate aims and philosophies. If it is not, and is child-centred, it needs to have a holistic approach. Either way, most schools need to improve communication between subject areas.
One of the chief functions of schools in the 21st century is to babysit children for ever-increasing periods of time (think: extended schools).