words versus pictures video versus books
Post on 23-Feb-2016
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Words versus picturesVideo versus books
Professor Richard Harper Microsoft Research Cambridge, England
How to approach the idea that learning is altering……
Isn’t the visual obviously
better than the textual?
I am not an expert on learning. What I am an expert on is:
what gets invented by computing and telecommunications companies and why
I think something can learnt from reflecting on this ‘what’ and ‘why’
There is often a rush to easy similes
And, following from that,an easy slip into other
ideas
And these can lead you away from where you thought you wanted to be
a biographic experience…that can help me illustrate temptations….
in my world an ethnography of a life….
twenty years ago: (was it that long ago?)
(and then I will talk about something recently done)
Xerox PARC: A question: what is (or, how is it done)
knowledge work?
work? (what’s that?)shared editors….
But text…was not enough….we wanted to offer ‘more’
We thought something richer would enable work:
our media space
To see others, to ‘be’ with themThe problem of knowledge work is to bring bodies together
We converted our topic, knowledge work, into another topic,communication,
and then that led us to think of bodies separated by space –
not knowledge
And this led us to other problems in turn
Looking wasn’t symmetricLooking past, looking away‘Hey, look at me!’The invention of ‘video tunnels’
Fitting ‘lookings’ togetherParallax and perceptual
symmetry
now (the past two or three years): (has my world altered so little?)
now the cameras are smallernow the distance between the one
being looked at and the one doing the
looking is smaller
But the goal is (still) to see into each other’s eyes
lookings are one element but there are also other actions
…….other interactions
C-Slate: Touching documents(Fitting touchestogether)
C-Slate: Touching documents(Fitting touchestogether)
so in this view what is knowledge?
No – that is lost from viewRather, what is communication is the topic:
why is it done?
Communication is… a geographical fitting of
lookings and touchingsa mechanical fitting of
bodies to communications acts
as if it’s a biomechanical jigsaw puzzle
What am I suggesting?
That we came to treat ‘knowledge’ as bound up withthe physical location of bodies
We came to think that ‘understanding’ could be attained by being together
in the digitally enabledhere and now
Versions of this view is common
It often leads technology organisations to
develop things which fight distance: they seek to attack communications delays
they try and make messaging ‘instant and real time’
Who needs email when you can teleconference?
Google wave
And then think of time – how to solve ‘it’ –
make everything instantTime is like a property of
communication
what technologies?
BROWSERS
How are search engines designed?
Current studies
Kids and young people
How do they communicate?Won’t they Skype
(if it’s easy and especially if it’s free?)
Some data from interviewsThey will have multiple concurrent IM sessions (18 in one instance!)
Plus FacebookSometimes Flickr
But only occasionally video
‘I don’t want to see. I want to write because I want to get it right’
How to explain this?It’s a kind of time travel
‘well you can go back to the beginning and say it again whereas
you can’t undo what you say’
Learning?Communication?
Why IM – because your words go when the session ends
Why Facebook - because what you post always stays thereWhy Skype – when looking says something
specialA
Dionysian tribalism?
The shared editors at Xerox did get used…but not for work (so what for?)
I have written about this in relation to communications technology. People don’t behave as technology companies expect. People leverage diversity of channels to create a texture, with diverse acts of expression bind people together in a complex, delicate weave
So, back to our beginning:
the visual versus the textual
Youtube versus MIT Press
In the case of learning?What Remington Wrought
The problem is that the views of technology companies on this topic might not help you
Those views might be based on different starting places, places that sometimes lead to interesting technologies but sometimes also turn around odd views about the human ‘users’
What is knowledge gets replaced by an odd idea about communication
It’s really a question of when is the visual better
and when is text better
What, why, when. Then the answer to how
Who answers that?
Technology organisations see the world and the people in it oddly
Don’t trust in us!Trust in your own expertise!
You tell us what it is to educate and what are the tools
you needWe are the ones who need an education
Thank you
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