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So, we had this meeting and talked about soft and hard things...
I finished the first synchronous sesssion for my bit of the #change MOOC a little while ago. Self referentially, I was a victim of a hard technology of my own devising, a set of slides that formed the background to my talk that, as I talked through them, I realised were in quite the wrong order.
Did that stop me?
Not a bit of it!
Interestingly, however, I could have done so had I had my wits about me. I had found the option where Blackboard Collaborate did give me a menu of available slides to select in addition to the usual back/forward controls. By adding this hard technology to the existing hard technology the makers of the tool had softened it, allowing me to take a non-linear path had I chosen to do so.
But, of course, soft is hard.
The effort of managing the talk, following the chat and grappling with the tools gave me insufficient time to think through a more appropriate path so I took the hard, easy one. As Garrison and Baynton showed in 1987, increasing pacing also increases structure - it is much harder to change the structure in real time than over a longer period. This suggests that 'hard and fast' make a better pairing than one might at first think.
It will be interesting to continue the conversation on Friday at 10am MST - see http://change.mooc.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?event=45 for announcements about how to get to that.
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Jon Dron
Soft things, hard things and invisible elephants
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Comments
It was an interesting session, thanx, and I'm not sure that a non-linear path would have been more profitable for me
- jupidu
Hi Jon
It is interesting to read your comments about Blackboard Collaborate. I think it is sometimes useful when technology breaks, or we fumble or struggle with it. When it fails, it becomes visible, and we are aware of the mediated nature of our communication channels and technologies. Audio artifacts produced as a result of severe compression, the crackle of a radio signal, the banding in the colour gradation of a JPEG image, snow on analog TV (or image lag and frozen frames in digital TV), are all rips in the fabric that make the fabric visible. Mind the gap. Any new technologies is alway visible at first, because it is alien, unfamiliar, a foreign language. We put it on, wear it, and, eventually, are as comfortable with it as we are our own skin. It is so much a part of us that it disappears. We don't think of it any more than we think about our own embodiment. I am reminded of Stelarc, the Australian performance artist, who once said that, if technology can enter the body (he swallowed a video camera and projected images of his stomach), and if the body can enter technology (he hooked himself up to the Internet and let anyone control his body remotely), then the skin is no longer a significant site. His project is about the disappearance of the body and all its senses. I think I am getting off track here, so I'll stop now.
Your change11 session on Wednesday (your time) gave me a lot to think about, as did the comments in the chat box. I heard something about another session on Friday (your time), so I'll look out for that. It's great that these sessions are recorded. I often listen to them after the event to catch the comments that I missed while typing and reading the text chat. Stephen often makes audio-only recordings, which I find particularly useful, as I can listen to them in a more focussed manner, while hanging out the laundry, cutting the grass, or engaging in some other task that leaves the brain free to concentrate.
All the best,
Mark McGuire
Twitter: mark_mcguire
Blog: http://markmcguire.net/
- Mark McGuire
Thanks Mark - I like that idea of alienation through mediation. That mediation gets very obvious sometimes, especially when part of it is divorced from its context - I'd forgotten about the sound recording or might have more often mentioned to what and to whom I was replying in the chat box, for instance.