Ecology of learning with new media tools

Ecology of learning with new media tools

Lecture for the master of semio6cs program in Helsinki University for the course “Semio6cs and media, sciences and technology studies”.

Kai Pata

Ecology of…

•  I do not use ecology concepts merely as a metaphor to describe the analogy of the system components interrela6ons and func6oning in digital and hybrid environments, but I believe ecology principles are directly applicable for describing…

•  A metaphor is an analogy between two objects or ideas, conveyed by the use of a word instead of another. An analogy is a comparison of certain similari6es between things which are otherwise unlike.

•  A principle is a rule or law concerning a natural phenomenon or the func6on of a complex system.

•  NOTE: By Lackoff a "metaphor" is a maPer of thought, not merely a decora6on of words, so his “metaphors” are directly used in embodied cogni6on framework.

…learning and designing learning •  …in hybrid new media spaces, using the ecosystem model.

•  Who learns, what is learning? •  …the cogni6ve process in which learner is acquiring knowledge, behaviors, skills, values or

preferences.

•  … the process in which learner ac;vely searches for meaning and constructs the reality based upon their mental ac6vity and shares and nego;ates it socially

•  …a rela6vely permanent change in learner’s behavior that occurs as a result of prior experience.

•  …the process in which learner and system (community, culture) detects and corrects errors in order to fit and be responsive

Compare with Adapta6on ‐ the adjustment of an organism to its environment in the process by which it enhances fitness to its niche

Why should we use ecological principles?

Internet 18 Feb 1999

•  We cannot use predetermining learning principles and designs for autonomous learners who are interac6ng within the self‐organizing knowledge ecosystems

•  Ecological learning is self‐sustainable

Ecology is not synonymous with environment and environmentalism (environmental conserva6on), but it explains the structure, func6oning and evolu6on of the ecosystem at different levels.

Learning ecology in hybrid ecosystems Behavioral ecology Ecosystem ecology Community ecology

Associa6on of communi6es (community)

Person (individual) Community/culture (species)

Ac6vity system

Personal environment

Personal network

Affordances

Community/cultural habitat

Community/cultural niche Distributed cogni6ve niche Geo‐conceptual (ontological) space

Community/cultural taskspace

Community/cultural affordances

Affordance network

Ar6fact‐actor network

who

where

Abstract space

Hybrid spaces

how

Digital ecosystem

Affordance network

why Person adapts behaviors to be fit to the niche, and niche has evolu6onary pressure on him

Community/culture and niche evolves

Ecosystem evolves

Person and the environment…

•  Are these two separate realms? –  Persons: The realm of mental phenomena located within the domain of one person (experiences, thoughts, emo6ons)

–  The environment: The realm of physical objects (the features of the objects in the environment, external representa6ons of mental phenomena)

•  How can the body can be viewed as func;oning as an intermediary between the environment and the mental realm?

Who? Where?

Associa6on of communi6es (community)

Person (individual)

Community (species)

Personal environment

Personal network

Social so[ware space Community habitat

Hybrid space

Ar6fact‐actor network

Habitat is the type of environment in which an organism or group normally lives

Us and the environment

Which of these cogni6ve models do I follow?

Cogni6ve model: Processing internal representa6ons

•  The tradi6onal view to informa6on‐processing has assumed that people constantly process mediated representa;ons of informa6on from outside environment and informa6on retrieved from the long‐term memory, in their working memory in order construct dynamic mental models that mediate their awareness of themselves and phenomena, and trigger ac6on performance.

Distributed cogni6on: Processing distributed representa6ons

•  Patel and Zhang (2006), maintain that affordances can be also related to the role of distributed representa;ons extended across the environment and the organism.

•  These kinds of representa6on come about as the result of a blending process between two different domains: –  A) on one hand the internal representa;on space, that is the physical structure of an organism (biological, perceptual, and cogni6ve facul6es);

–  B) on the other the external representa;on of space, namely, the structure of the environment and the informa6on it provides.

Both these two domains are described by constraints so that the blend consists of the allowable ac6ons.

Distributed cogni6on: Processing distributed representa6ons

Zhang, J., & Patel, V. L. (2006)

Crea6ng and ac6ng upon ecological chances

•  Humans turn environmental constraints into ecological chances when facing the challenges posed by the environment itself.

•  Human cogni;on is chance‐seeking system that is developed within an evolu6onary framework based on the no6on of cogni;ve niche construc;on.

•  We build and manipulate cogni;ve niches so as to unearth addi;onal resources for behavior control.

Bardone, 2010

Eco‐cogni6ve engineering

•  Humans constantly delegate cogni;ve func;ons to the environment

•  Human beings overcome their internal limita;ons by (1) disembodying thoughts and then (2) re‐projec;ng internally that occurring outside

•  to find new ways of thinking. Bardone, 2010

Eco‐cogni6ve engineering

•  Human cogni6ve behavior consists in ac;ng upon anchors – the affordances ‐ which we have secured a cogni;ve func;on to via cogni6ve niche construc6on.

•  Affordances can be related to the variable (degree of) abduc;vity of a configura;on of signs.

Bardone, 2010

Embodied cogni6on

•  Hommel (2003), assumes that ac;on control to all behavioral acts is ecologically delegated to the environment – when planning ac6ons in terms of an6cipated goals, the sensory‐motor assemblies needed to reach the goal are simultaneously selec6vely ac6vated in the environment, and bind together into a coherent whole that serves as an ac6on‐plan, facilita6ng the execu6on of the goal‐directed ac6ons through the interac6on between the environment and its embodied sensory‐motor ac6va6ons.

Embodied cogni6on

•  Embodied cogni6on is an alterna6ve standard for cogni6ve sciences. Three important themes in embodied cogni6on are (Shapiro, 2010): –  Conceptualiza;on – the proper6es of the organism’s body constrain which concepts an organism can acquire.

–  Replacement – the organism’s body in interac6on with the environment replaces the need for symbolic representa6onal processes. (systems do not include representa6onal states)

–  Cons;tu;on – the body or world plays a cons6tu6ve role rather than causal role in cogni6ve processing.

Embodied simula6on

•  Together with the “father” of embodied simula;on ViPorio Gallese, George Lackoff wrote and ar6cle “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory‐Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge.” (2005).

•  The argue against the cogni6ve processing: “A common philosophical posi6on is that all concepts—even concepts about ac6on and percep6on—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory‐motor system.”

•  They suggest embodied simula;on, assuming that: “sensory‐motor regions of brain are directly exploited to characterize the so‐called “abstract” concepts that cons6tute the meanings of gramma6cal construc6ons and general inference paDerns.”

Embodied simula6on •  Discoveries in cogni6ve and neuroscience about the func6oning of mirror‐neuron systems (Gallese et al., 1996), claim, that cogni;on is embodied through grounding knowledge directly in sensory‐motor experiences without the media;on of symbolic representa;ons (Pecher & Zwaan, 2005).

•  Research indicates that from observa;on of others and the environment (Rizzolan et al., 2001), from listening narra;ves (Rizzolan & Arbib, 1998; Iaccoboni, 2005) or from reading narra;ves (Scorolli & Borghi, 2007) and looking everyday images of objects or works of art (Gallese & Freedberg, 2007) we perceptually ac;vate certain mul;‐modal ac;on‐poten;alites of embodied symbols that mediate our purposeful and goal‐directed ac;ons (see Gallese & Lakoff, 2005).

hPp://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/pubs/pdffiles/Gallese/PhilTrans2007.pdf

Embodied simula6on: ac6on

Embodied simula6on: movement

Embodied simula6on: context

Ac6ons embedded in contexts, compared with the other two condi6ons, yielded a significant signal increase (Iacoboni et al., 2005).

How?

Ac6vity system Personal affordances

Affordance network

Cultural affordances

Community affordances

Iden6ty as a mul6layered (distributed) self

•  Every iden;ty is constantly mediated through mul6ple plasorms and standards.

•  We feel our iden;ty not anymore as an indivisible whole, but as composed of different pieces that are deeply and reciprocally influenced by our online experience.

•  Iden;;es are formed of layers of the enriched self by mul;ple par;al representa;ons of the self in a mul6layered form.

Alessandro Ludovico hPp://nextnode.net/sites/emst/wp/?p=273

PLE as our way for taking ac6on and construc6ng iden6ty

PLEs in digital ecosystem

•  Personal learning environments (PLEs) that people construct and use in their daily ac6vi6es are not merely the mediators

•  PLEs are dynamically evolving ac;vity systems in which the personal objec;ves and human and material resources are integrated in the course of ac6on.

•  PLE is also distributed ecologically, integra;ng our minds with the environment.

PLE as our way for taking ac6on •  We actualize certain dimensions from the environment around us integra;ng it to the ac;on‐plans, and simultaneously the environment extends certain dimensions to us changing and shaping our inten;ons.

We actualize affordances in every learning ac6on performed as part of the learning ac6vity.

Affordances as a networked system? •  Affordances may constrain each other

•  Synergy may be arrived from using several affordances simultaneously

•  Some affordances may need the presence or the co‐ac6va6on of other affordances to be used effec6vely

•  Using one affordance may actualize another affordance in the network

Affordance networks

•  Barab and Roth (2006) have noted that connec;ng learners to ecological networks, where they can learn through engaged par6cipa6on, ac;vates the affordance networks.

•  Barab and Roth (2006) assumed that affordance networks are not read onto the world, but instead con;nually “transact” (are coupled) with the world as part of a percep6on‐ac6on cycle in which each new ac;on poten;ally expands or contracts one’s affordance network.

Affordance networks

•  Learning is a process of becoming prepared to engage dynamic networks in the world in a goal‐directed manner (Hoffmann & Roth, 2005).

•  Affordance networks are dynamic socio‐cultural configura;ons

•  …include sets of perceptual and cogni6ve affordances that collec;vely come to form the network for par;cular goal sets

•  …affordance networks are extended in both ;me and space

Compare it with taskspace defini6on!

Cultural affordances as an ecological knowledge

•  Vyas and Dix (2007) dis6nguished 3 levels of affordances: personal, organiza;on/community, and culture level, which differ also on the level of how rapidly they can change.

•  He[ (2001) wrote that: “…we engage a meaningful environment of affordances and refashion some aspects of them… These laDer constructed embodiments of what is known – which include tools, ar;facts, representa;ons, social pa<erns of ac;ons, and ins;tu;ons – can be called ecological knowledge”.

Ar6facts allow par6cipants to use their bodily skills and their familiarity of the real world objects

Ar6facts have affordances perceived by the user(s) who then act on them. However, performing ac6on changes the situa6on culturally, cogni6vely, physically (eg. user’s awareness of affordances increases when using an ar6fact). This leads to reflec6on on the poten6al uses of ar6facts and people’s roles (constraints on ac6on). Once the users are aware, their perceived affordances change.

Vyas and Dix (2007)

Where?

Community niche

Distributed cogni6ve niche

Geo‐conceptual space

Community/culture taskspace

Abstract spa;al representa;on of how we perceive spaces

Personal place

Conceptual coordinates Geo coordinates

n‐dimensions n‐dimensions

Conceptual coordinates Geo coordinates

Community niches

•  People with various perspec;ves are simultaneously at present in ecosystems and influencing them.

•  Many abstract subspaces can be formed within ecosystems.

•  Such spaces emerge when parts of the environment are embodied and used similar way by many people.

•  Groups of individuals who have something in common in their iden;ty create abstract learning spaces in the ecology ‐ niches.

Community niches •  Hutchinson (1957) defined a niche as a region (n‐dimensional hypervolume) in a mul;‐dimensional space of environmental factors that affect the welfare of a species.

•  Niches have been conceptualized as the environmental gradients with certain ecological amplitude, where the ecological op;mum marks the gradient peaks where the organisms are most abundant.

•  Each niche gradient defines one dimension of the space. •  All niche gradients are situated and establish a mul;‐dimensional hyper‐room, which axes are different environmental parameters.

Defining community niches by affordances

•  People determine the personal learning affordances within their PLEs.

•  Any individual conceptualizes affordances personally, but the range of similar learning affordance conceptualiza6ons may be clustered into more general affordance groups eg. ‘pulling social awareness informa6on’ or ‘searching ar6facts by social filtering’ etc.

•  These affordance clusters may be interpreted and used as the abstract learning niche gradients.

Affordances of social tools in a community

Niche gradients

•  Any niche gradient is a peak of the fitness landscape of one environmental characteris;c (Wright, 1931), which can be visualized in two‐dimensional space as a graph with certain skew and width, determining the ecological amplitude.

•  The shape of the fitness graph for certain characteris6c can be ploPed through the abundance of certain specimen benefiYng of this characteris;c.

Taskspace as a kind of niche

•  Taskspace is an array of ac;vi;es related to a certain environment (Ingold, 2000; In: the percep6on of the environment).

•  A taskspace fosters a range of affordances of an environment, delimi6ng some and enabling others (Edensor, 2004, In: Automobility and na6onal iden6ty).

•  We may iden6fy community/cultural taskspaces.

Community niche guides naviga6on of individuals

Taskspace2 Taskspace1

My ini6al place Community niche

Niche construc6on as an ecological factor

•  A recent literature in evolu6onary theory emphasizes the idea of niche construc;on (Odling‐Smee et al., 2003) as an ecological factor.

•  It is argued, the organism has a profound effect on the very environment as a feedback loop.

•  Organisms have influence on their environment, and the affected environment can have a reciprocal effect on other organisms of this species or on other species, crea6ng an environment different from what it would have been before it was modified.

Odling‐Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N., & Feldman, M.W. (2003). Niche Construc6on: The Neglected Process in Evolu6on. Monographs in Popula6on Biology, 37, Princeton University Press.

Niche construc6on as an ecological factor

•  Ecological inheritance, however, does not depend on the presence of any environmental replicators, but merely on the persistence, between genera;ons, of whatever physical changes are caused by ancestral organisms in the local selec;ve environments of their descendants.


Ecological inheritance

•  People create a feedback loop to hybrid ecosystem that influences the evolu;on of communi;es and determines their individual interac;on with the ecosystem.

•  This feedback loop is an ecological inheritance created by organisms themselves into their environment, which has influence on their evolu;on (Odling‐Smee et al., 2003)


Ecological inheritance

Community iden6ty

t

t + 1

Time

Niche crea6on

Adapta6on to the niche Culturally defined

affordances of the digital

ecosystem

Adapted from Odling‐Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N., & Feldman, M.W.

Individual in digital ecosystem

SOFTWARE 1

SOCIAL NETWORK

SOFTWARE 2

DIRECT PATHS TO COMMUNITY MEMBERS AND KNOWLEDGE

PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

PARTICIPATORY SURVEILLANCE

SEMANTIC NAVIGATION COMMUNITY BROWSING KNOWLEDGE NETWORK

INTEROPERABLE TOOLS

ADAPTING TO THE COMMUNITY NICHE

SWARMING

REMIXING MASHING

SOCIAL NAVIGATION

NAVIGATING IN NICHE

COMMUNITY

CO‐CREATING

Pata, 2010

Ecological learning design principles

Personal learning environment Rules for connec6ng community networks

Community creates the environment for knowledge accumula6on

Autonomous crea6on and sharing

Community as the ini6ator of swarming ac6vi6es

Monitoring the community adap6ng to the niche Community evaluates, niche determines effec6veness

Learne

r Teacher

Pata, 2010

Self‐planned learning ac6vi6es

Reflec6on and self‐monitoring Community gives feedback

Community

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Ecology of learning with new media tools