Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts

Monday, April 10, 2017

Comedy of the commons?


"I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler 
from Manchester way.
I may be a wage slave on Monday 
But I am a free man on Sunday."
Ewan MacColl.

Free men 

 We ramble, we ramble...

We roam, we search, we browse, we surf, we hack.

We are nomads of the steppes.

We are urban flâneurs.

We rove the range.

We free-ride, we couch-skate, we long-board, 4G wifi, 360°




Wingsuit revolutions will now be televised.

Red Bull crashes Go Pro - viral death spiral.





Olé.

Internet Service Provider Free has its Freebox Révolution.

La Révolution Française.

(designed by Starck.)

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!


Declarations of independence.

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." 


John Perry Barlow, Davos 1996

(The Economist)


Dreams of freedom.

Stories of freedom are pervasive. 

Imagined communities.

 Mass movements have powerful hold. 

 Massaged egos, echoes of the twenties.

TALE SPIN.

 Viral market crashes into a Wall, echoes of the thirties on the streets.

Some have more money, more time to dream...in neoliberal eagle's nest, Davos.

Une Révolution (virtuelle)

Don't worry about the mob.

Let them eat Youtube and Fifa 2017

Let them eat Semtec.

Sad losers will get to ruffle the feathers of the great and good, only occasioning the odd Breivik.



Who gives a fuck for collateral damage?  

Bigger bangs for their bucks.

Dream wilder, think bigger, grasp further, dig deeper, sow hate, love and manipulate.


We'd have to be an ostrich with our heads in the sand not to hail this virtual reality as "freedom."






 Building the Commons.

Any doubters among you?  

We can save the world. 

We can build the commons "freely."

(With a modest fee for charitable Free or your local friendly ISP)

Not happy with that?  

We shall build fucking Jerusalem...bigger.




Or Middle Earth, complete with brave hobbits and trolls.

Pure fantasy?

We shall hark back to untrammelled images of Empire and hymns of colonial philanthropy. 

We shall nurture our green commons "freely."

 We shall scatter seeds...or bomblets.





We shall provide "public service" "freely."


We shall save some millions, "freely."


Tragedy of the commons.

No worries of spoiling the commons is there?




We can't overload the virtual information commons, surely?

OK, you can overload the wifi, I give you that, above all, in soon to be "developed" corners of the globe.

What use is the world with no wifi?

The more you share your lol cats the more lol cats and joy there is for the others!

The internet commons does not deteriorate like land!

No sirree!

OK, so there are piles of tech waste in soon to be "developped" corners of the globe, out of view.


Comedy of the commons.

Wikipedia is a great example of the comedy of the commons! 

Contributors distribute widely, give freely their expertise to inform the world!



What a beautiful sight, an army of erudite slave ants!

Joy to the world.

We shall train them.

Hail Wikimedia!



Recant deviant!

Attack wikiants!


Comedy of commons.

 'Tis a comedy of commons, the internet.

Oh ha, ha.

NOT!


IT AIN'T!

Funny.


...you shall not pass!

"I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler 
from Manchester way.
I may be a wage slave on Monday 
But I am a free man on Sunday."
Ewan MacColl.


Come on ramblers!

Get your laptop backpacks, your sarnies, let us occupy the virtual commons!

ER?

Sorry?

I'm a game-keeper.

Come again?

I'm going for a pint.

Well whatever did happen to public space?

Er, well, after the pub, he rambles.








Blimey! 

 Who are these bleeding game-keepers? 

Well there's us and...then  there's....them.






Don't forget the Kinder Scout.

We're going to need that mass trespass, feet on the ground, in the street.

Act local.

Think Global.

Mass trespass.

Do a public service.

Fire the game-keepers.

Reclaim the commons.

Tragedy of the commons.

"I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler 
from Manchester way.
I may be a universal basic wage slave on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 
But I am a free man on Twitter."

 With apologies to 

Ewan MacColl.


 Footnotes.

 The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
Mayo Fuster Morell proposed a definition of digital commons as "as an information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusivedible, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources".[15][16]
Examples of digital commons are Wikipedia, a type of Free Software and Open-source hardware projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons#Digital_commons


Afterthought.

 Are we their commons?

Oh what the hell.


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Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Web We Weave.



The Spider and the Fly


“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
 'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
  The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
   And I've a many curious things to show when you are there.”





“Oh no, no,” said the little Fly, “to ask me is in vain,
 For who goes up your winding stair
     -can ne'er come down again.”

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Sunday, March 6, 2016

Platform Game.



That's when we get to the next level..


Question:
Does "rhizomatic learning" exist without the internet?

Possible answer:
Of course.

Possible responses to possible answer:


  • OK but does it matter? 
  • OK does it count? 
  • OK if it matters/counts  why?


Possible supplementary question:
Do indigienous/native/aboriginal people do "rhizomatic learning"?

Possible answer:
Er...

Possible response to possible answer:
Why may your hesitation be important?

Question:
What images does the word 'blockchain' suggest to you?


Supplementary question:
Do any of the images you associate with the word 'blockchain'  correspond to what you consider to be your concept of freedom?

 Possible answer:
Yes. Validation will be distributed. Everybody will have access to the ledger.

 Possible response:
Everybody can access music 'knowledge' 'information', 'books',  'freely''...Is that freedom?

 Possible answer to possible response:
Er...

 Possible response to possible answer:
Why may your hesitation be important?

If you are reading this it is thanks to a platform.

Touches of the sense is 'my' platform.

I am accessing the platform 'freely'. 

Though I am paying the ISP, the EDF (electricity company), for the PC, for the pleasure...

I am giving up access to this 'data' contained on this platform.

When you read this 'freely' you will be enabling the collection of more 'data' for this platform.

I and you will receive more acutely targeted commercial messages thanks to this 'data'.

I may receive more acutely targeted government surveillance thanks to this 'data'.

 This is for purposes of security.

 I am not sure that that equates to freedom.

If we must access the net to be free what does that say about our freedom?

If we must manage our 'personal data' what does that say about  the use of the word 'personal'?

Is 'data' freedom?

Why do I need 'data'?

If I don't need 'data' who does?

Do indigienous/native/aboriginal people need 'data'?

If we must rely on a "globally-stretched net" and be a "global citizen" what does that say about freedom?

I must now submit my tax forms via the net to the French state.

I accept to pay taxes for services which are "for the common good".

I am not sure to what extent my vote guarantees me having any voice in what 'services' are considered 'for the common good'.

 I don't have a vote in France.
I don't have a vote in England.
I am voteless.

 Unlike Google I pay my taxes here.

Who is paying for my "freedom" here?

Do they have our best interests at heart?

To what extent is Google not evil?

Will Google pay for my health care?

Will Facebook pay for my education?

What will be the cost?

Will I get a vote on how they design my education?

I read an article about indigineous people:

Murrumu: one man's mission to create a soverign Indigenous country inside Australia.

I read an article about platforms written by Douglas Rushkoff on the Medium platform:
Corporations weren't designed to run on code.

It appears to me that corporate monopolies don't have our best interests at heart.

To what extent does Uber feel concern for taxi drivers in France?

It appears to me that national governments don't have our best interests at heart but at least there is the means to exercise a minimal level of local pressure on such institutions to consider the implications of their policies on the local populations.

What means are there to exercise pressure on an algorithm?

I read an article on a bank blog (unusual for me) entitled:
Blockchain-based digital identity will disrupt commerce and government.

I am always suspicious when I hear the word 'disrupt'.

 I found an article from the New Yorker entitled:
The disruption machine - What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.

"Disruptive innovation" is 'better' for some.

The question is what is this 'better' and who are "the some"?

"The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved."

Social improvements have generally come through conflict within communities.

People in power care little for the life of slaves as long as they have fine linen and a nice view.

Moneyed ignorance is bliss.

Moneyed vulgarity becomes a platform for presidential candidates...

Is freedom access to a platform?

Whose platform will guarantee our freedom?

Do our 'democratic' platform politics guarantee our freedom?

People have challenged exploitation, slavery, working conditions...in the streets.

How do you challenge a distant, distributed platform with its artificial intelligence and weaponed drones?

Is Facebook Irish if I use it in France?

I note the Pyrrhic victory of Alan Levine in his battle to protect himself against catfishing:
We regret to inform of the passing of Malle Gottfried's Facebook profile.

I fear that much of "rhizomatic learning" will concern learning to live within this net.

Is this learning in the wild or corporately husbanded learning?

Will access to such platforms be our only means of sustenance?

I think of the French farmers who are obliged to sell their produce to hypermarkets.

Will denial of access to such platforms guarantee our extinction?

While the French farmers are considering suicide, the market platforms are thinking about profit.

What is the cost for cheap milk and big profit?

Who cares?

What is it to talk of a 'global platform'?

Who cares about the indigienous/native/aboriginal people who are dead in the name of progress?

Who cares about diminishing fish stocks, polluted rivers, impoverished farmers?

Shareholders?

Is this platform to be our water?

We are platform game...

I fear my friend we are netted dead or alive.




There it is, we are stripped of all that is marketable, skinned, gutted and recycled.

These are the bare bones of it.

 This is 'data'. 
This is 'data'.
This is 'data'

Tread softly on 'my' 'data'.






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Wednesday, January 27, 2016

My lawyer is a dog.


"Wuf, wuf, snarl"

I am, against my better judgement participating in conversation with people talking about...
(who is this better and why is he/she speaking to me?) 

  INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN.

"wuf, wuf, snarl...huh?"

I felt it wasn't for me.

I never read instruction manuals (until it is too late).

I once worked with people who called themselves  'Ingénieur Pédagogique'
(instructional designers).

I was impressed.

I am just a teacher.

I asked annoying questions about LMS's.

I obviously didn't understand.

Serious Business.

In France if you are the business you are an engineer of something.

I blame Napoleon bloody Bonaparte, that great liberal thinker.

I looked at the invitation to participate in #MOOCMOOC it included the words:

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN.

I had nightmares of Skinner and bloody CD roms.

 "It's a nice day today, isn't it? [REPEAT] It's a nice day today isn't it?"


 

"Oh gawd!" I thought.

I didn't feel that it would be for me.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

I have been conned into participating.

It happened on Twitter.

I fell into a dialogue with PEOPLE.
They have my attention now...at least for now...



I now have a bloody Storify to work on from last night and then blog about.

There aren't even any deadlines or badges.

Shit!

What am I letting myself in for?

Shit!

Coffee break.

So I sat down for coffee with a bunch of playmobil and a few students.

We started talking about their research questions.

With about two hundred students to help get up and curious, I need coffee and a comfortable chair.

Banter scaffold.

Some are immediately curious and are looking for a sounding board for their ideas.

(It was pretty much like the conversations that I am still working on for #moocbloodymooc.)

We engage in a bit of banter - throwing ideas, pictures, and sounds off of each other.

They go off with enthusiasm...(like me here.)

 Banksy approach to education.

I was delighted to be learning in the company of some of my fellow co-learners (students) this morning.

With one, we started talking about Street Art and its influence on political debate.

We framed and reframed the debate...together.

Is Street Art still Street Art when it is shared as a photo on Twitter?

Is it Street Art when Deborah De Robertis 'exposes' herself in the Musée Orsay? 

Is her performance art pornography?

Why is Manet's painting of Olympia not pornography?




What is the relationship between viral images like 'Je suis Charlie' and the 'traditional media' and the politicians and mass demonstrations in Paris?




I wasn't expecting to be co-framing such a debate with one of the students from Sport Science...over coffee.

Coffee tables, and comfortable chairs restructure relationships.

 I never know what I will learn.

That is the joy of what I do, it is never predictable, I have to jump from Drugs in Sport, to Perfect Pitch in musicians, to Sport Fishing, to mushroom hunting.

I feel energised by our dialogues.

Other students have much more difficulty to ask questions.

They seem to have little practise in asking questions, most of their time is taken up by content.

Changing symbols...playing with people.

We sat around the coffee table and a bunch of Playmobil.

We started playing with the little people, the dog, the cow, the house, the boat, the medical bag.


Manipulating the toys seemed to help them to disassemble the tortured sentences that they had been trying and failing to write.

Were we talking about all the people, the kids, the women, the doctor, the policeman?

Were we talking about all the world, a town, a village, a house, an organism?

 Do I have to speak dog?

Confronted by the request to define a research question, one student was freaking out and came up to me to ask:

"Est ce qu'il faut que la question soit poussée?" "Does the question have to be sophisticated?"

What he meant was:  does the question have to use that language that the experts I don't understand in class use.

We sometimes forget that others don't understand us
We sometimes forget that others are not all as enthusiastic as us.
We sometimes forget that others don't have the same literacies as us.

 Being literate...being illiterate.

Playing Minecraft with my son made me realise how our joystick/gaming literacies are so far apart.

 We are playing the games of others...

Working with high-performance athletes makes me realise how amazing their physical literacies are...

Moving around a dense text (network) requires the ability to connect, engage, orientate, select, synthesise...

It is not quite the same as pole-vaulting.

There is not quite the same exhiliration...for them.

Maybe we are blind to our/their literacies?

We could imagine 'scaffolding' which might be more or less adaptive to the individual learner.

(often text based or computer based - no good for people who are allergic to text.)

Liberté pour tous?

We could imagine 'scaffolding' which is deliberately opaque to certain groups of learners so that they are excluded from a knowledge community.

Language is clearly a hell of a great way to include and/or exclude people.

"Quoi?"

Language is clearly a hell of a great innovation to enable sophistication of connections between people(s) and their environments.

Cultural/narrative environments...(networks) are clearly more or less apparent to us.

After all, I'm a fish what the hell is water?

 Fish interlude.


Scaffolding may be deliberately, or unconsciously conceived to protect certain groups' privileges.

(The LMS anybody?)

I AM AN ADMIN. 
(I am ingénieur pédagogique)

 Dog speak.

My lawyer is a dog.

He is deliberately bred to obscure contractual relationships, for the benefit of the privileged.

When I read the small print on terms and conditions of internet services...

I can't be bothered to work through every clause...

 Is this web freedom?

I submit. 

We go for a walk.

Dog translation

There are others who are prepared to translate dog into English.

But God, those guys are necessary.

 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/i-read-all-the-small-print-on-the-internet

Our relationships have become so complex...(complicated?) ...we need experts.(we do don't we?)

They can give us a cheat code to get to the next level...
(for a small sum)

I suppose this is what we try to do in education.

We unpick dog.

We teach dog.

 HOLY DOG!!

 Science, technology and text literacy are holy untouchable.

OUR HOLY BOOK (s).





I understand much more now one of Dave Cormier's provocation:

"Books are just stupid people."

KILL THE DOG

There is a question which keeps dogging me.

Are we so used to unpicking dog that we kill the dog?

Is our frame of reference, our Western culture: this frame we have had since the Lumières... killing us?

LIBERTE

Are our frames of reference the only way to live the world?

Are our frames of reference killing the world?

We frame so we are human.



We encourage agency of the individual. We live by freedom-Freire. Does that kill (a) people?




In encouraging agency of the individual do we lose sight of how we are connected in this tapestry we ourselves have woven?

Our tapestries are so beautifully diverse....yet.

Are we missing this essence beyond our words, beyond our ken?





"wuf, wuf, snarl..."

My dog is trying to tell me something...






















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Sunday, October 26, 2014

Driftwood curiosity.

The window sill was full of junk.

Arranged in some sort of pattern were miscellaneous finds.




The objects were certainly curiosities.

The objects were perhaps memory aids.

The objects were perhaps an artist's exhibition.

There were no legends to explain.

We will have to assemble our own meaning.

The collection certainly attested to a love of nature.

In no apparent order there were:

Collections of shells.

Broken clock mechanisms.

Pebbles from a beach.

An asparagus fern.

A driftwood stallion.

There was nothing of any saleable value. 

The objects were beyond value.

Shall we call it a treasure chest of scrap?

Shall we call it an animistic shrine?

 Here lies buried, a story-teller's hoard.

For today, I shall keep the plot simple.

I will not weary you with interpretation.

I beg your forgiveness.

I don't suppose you will see interest here.

I don't suppose you will see value here.

How can one be attached to a piece of driftwood?

I am content you see no value.

I see myself standing on a beach.

You have left me quite alone.

Objects are washed up by the ocean.

Something catches my eye.

I bend down to pick it up.

It will spin my yarn a while.

Gulls' cry in the wind.

There is a strong smell of brine.

Waves crash on the shore.

Pebbles drawl.

I am home.




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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Russian dolls...

It is an image which keeps coming back to me.

I escape one enclosure to find that I am in another larger enclosure.

It is the image of a Russian doll.

I have been spending much time reflecting on my place on the web, on the earth over the past few years.

I have recently been working my way through issues connected to the 'Reclaim your domain' movement.

I am struck by the 'self-proclaimed' impassioned pleas of Howard Rheingold and Gardner Campbell to build the web that we want to build.

I am convinced that they are putting their fingers on a burning issue which we need to work through.

An immediate reaction to the question of 'Reclaiming your domain' was expressed in my post of the same name. 

Auvergnat dolls.

I feel that we can not divorce our thinking about the 'web' space with our thinking about the physical spaces in which we relate locally.

One lens which has helped me think about role of technology in education has been Puentedura's SAMR model as presented by Doug Belshaw here:


There is a short presentation in this video 



I remark that the narrator in this video talks about 'the classroom' - transformation of the classroom.  

I can't help thinking that the 'classroom' lens is one which stops us thinking through a wider transformation of education.   

There is no question that mobile web-enabled personal devices are disrupting 'classrooms' and 'educational institutions'. 

Of the obstacles to building new models, we can note 'habitus' of teachers, the 'classroom discourse', we can mention 'standardised assessment' amongst others.

The real question is what are these boundaries obstacles to?  

Who or what is protected by boundaries which have been built physically or virtually? 

Who stands to gain from crumbling frontiers, from blurring of boundaries between work and play?


As a child I never imagined seeing the Berlin Wall fall.

I remember witnessing the moments of joy when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. 

What were we witnessing in these moments? How were once disconnected people connected?


I remember using the image of the Trabant to talk about the contrast between Walled Gardens of the LMS/VLE and the construction of Personal Learning Environments enhanced by Web 2.0 applications and Google cloud computing.  

Institutional enforcement of the use of out-dated communication tools was, I reasoned an obstacle to the learning of the students.   

It wasn't just an obstacle to the learning of students, it was also a means to protect the positions of a technological elite, who had the power to dictate the tools to be used.  

Outsourcing of net hosting and institutional virtual environments would/will inevitably mean de-skilling, cost-cutting measures and dependence on massive corporations.

The Trabant disappeared from production, replaced by Western-made models.  It's disappearance was symbolic of the defeat of a political system and its socio-economic elite.  

A Trabant

There is no doubt that learning spaces in which I am working are being transformed physically and virtually by the possibilities to connect more widely via affinity with people around the world.  

This is exciting, we are moving towards a new era, of that I have no doubt.

I am constantly brought back to my image of Russian dolls.

We can not concentrate our attention simply on education without seeing how it relates to economic, ecological, social, and political contexts. 

One thinker who has helped me reflect more widely on Learning Futures has been Keri Facer.  


'Non-stupid optimism' is an expression which resonates for me and 'educated hope' is what I aspire to. 

Hope and power

As educators we do have real power to enable sustainable change, we must realise together we do have real power, we do have a voice, which can be heard, the young are our hope. 

I come back to 'Reclaiming my domain', again and again.

I am quite happy with the idea of running my own server.

I am quite happy with the idea of building my own WordPress space with a name of my own.  

I would however not want to stop there.  

When I hear, we can build the net together, are we speaking about building our own computers? 

Are we speaking about running our own cables? 

Are we speaking about becoming our own ISP's?  

Building our web is one thing. 

Building relationships locally with those globally is quite another. 

How does all of this relate to the bigger questions of society as evoked by Keri Facer?

How do we react to writers such as Douglas Rushkoff?

“Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.” 
Douglas Rushkoff.

Is this what Howard Rheingold and Gardner Campbell are talking about? 

If this is the case, then we need to start thinking much more widely about the societies in which we are living, and how power is structured.

We need to think through what these Connected Courses are really preparing us for?   

We need to ask our friends:

What it is we are working towards? 

We need to spend much time on this business of building new relationships with ourselves and others. 

We can not expect to embark on new relationships without accepting that our relationships with ourselves will inevitably be transformed.  

New environments require new language.

I can not conceive that this map is 'our territory'.

Do others consider that they own this?  



Might 'owning your own domain' be an outdated metaphor?  

Maybe we need to start thinking over our ideas of what constitutes 'ownership' of what constitutes 'capital'. 

How can 'capital' be other than social?

What are we educating ourselves for? 

I am only too aware of my ignorance, of my inability to find answers for my questions.

We must educate ourselves beyond our 'stupid optimism' to build a web of  'educated hope.'

What will be our legacy my friends?

I am at a loss for words.

And as I ask one question, another appears, incessantly...












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