July 2011 Archives

Recently I've become very interested in the concept of digital diplomacy, which is a central focus for the activities of the Center for Public Diplomacy (CPD) here at the University of Southern California. The CPD is a fascinating research center, and I hope to get more involved in their projects at some point in the near future - but until then, I wanted to briefly discuss a thought-provoking report that came out of the research of the CPD's former director, Joshua Fouts, and which I think is extremely relevant to our discussion of virtual learning spaces.

Now a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Fouts, together with his colleague Rita King, has recently released an insightful report on Islam and digital diplomacy, focusing on the immense potential of virtual worlds to bring about a better understanding of Muslim culture and break down some of the barriers that have notoriously strained intercultural relations with the Muslim world in recent years. "Virtual interactions, while they involve real people, do not involve physical contact and therefore provide a medium for exploring productive ways to channel conflict (and the anxiety created by change) without the threat of violence and intimidation," Fouts and King write. "Additionally, the Internet gives individuals a chance to be highly creative while strengthening the relationship between local and global communities."

Although the authors explored a wide array of digital communication spaces, from Facebook to Twitter to blogs to MMORPGs, their principal focus is the virtual community of Second Life, and the report examines several case studies of Islam-centered virtual spaces in SL. One of the most interesting examples is the virtual community of Al-Andalus, named after a real nation that existed in medieval Spain, where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together harmoniously based on the principle of "convivencia", or cohabitation. The SL community of Al-Andalus was founded by Georgiana Nelson, a Houston-based attorney who goes by the avatar name of Rose Springvale. Al-Andalus - which is composed, in roughly equal parts, by Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and atheist SLers - now has 350 contributing members and is visited by thousands of users every day. Its visitors can attend religious services in the community's mosque, synagogue or church, and even take an aerial magic carpet tour, enhances with audio information about the history and principles behind Al-Andalus.

Virtual communities like Al-Andalus, the authors note, are instrumental in enriching the experience of non-Muslims and Muslims alike.  For instance, via the virtual reproduction of traditional mosques, women who are denied access to this in real life can not take part in a virtual service and see, for the first time, the interior room of the mosque, where only men would be allowed to enter.

In addition, the report informs, it turns out that a lot of internet users in the Muslim world are eager to share about their culture and religion and engage in conversations about these topics. Mulsima Questi, the avatar for a 21-year-old Syrian student, is one such example. She has created a mosque in SL and serves as an important source of information for virtual visitors. "I came to Second Life to meet other religions-to seek out a different view of the world," she says. "Islam was the best choice for me. My goal is to display as much as I can for the others if they're interested."

Similar initiatives that Fouts and King's report describes are the digital recreation of Mesopotamia, as a research and learning hub, and a virtual pilgrimage - or "haj" - to Mecca in Second Life. However, it is important to understand - and this is a point that the authors make repeatedly - that these findings and successful case studies "do not recommend replacing physical world activities with virtual ones, but rather supplementing the critical experiential element that is found so richly in exchange programs and sponsored professional visits". Instead, by examining this type of virtual public diplomacy as a blueprint for tolerance and international understanding, "we can draw on the art, creativity, and interaction of individuals in the virtual world and take what they've learned into the physical world." While the digital divide still renders digital participation as contingent on a certain type of cultural and economic capital, and while the role of governments and public institutions in virtual diplomacy remains to be determined, I am certainly intrigued by the potential of such initiatives to impact the future of intercultural relations.

Building on my last post about techno-skepticism, I want to continue this conversation and, in a sense, balance the debate by allowing myself to adopt the techno-enthusiastic view. I have always been fascinated with futurism and technological predictions, and the excitement I get by reading about these topics is overwhelming. Yes, I am one of those people that bet on the future on LongBets.org. Yes, I spend a considerable portion of my free time talking to all kinds of chatbots and artificial intelligence experiments, trying to probe their limits and challenge their character in my own version of the Turing tests (my favorite so far is Cleverbot!). And yes, I spend way too much time trying to figure out what exactly I'll get to see in my lifetime, and how my own children will learn and communicate in the more distant future.

Recently I came across a rather insightful report from the Acceleration Studies Foundation: the Metaverse Roadmap is a cross-industry multilateral "public foresight project" which brings together experts from a variety of domains (both online and offline) in order to generate sensible predictions about the future of the web environment. They come up with four general scenarios: Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging, organized systematically along two continuums of augmentation versus simulation and, respectively, intimate versus external technologies. This diagram will better clarify this classification:

Of course, these scenarios do not operate in exclusion from one another. Rather, the future function of the Web will represent, according to the authors of the report, a combination of these four scenarios. Indeed, as these technologies develop, the boundaries between them will be less and less perceptible. And as these distinctions crumble, the authors warn that the critical issues which will remain will be related, unsurprisingly, to privacy and identity, trust, reputation, and social rules governing personal interaction in these spaces. Personally, while I was not as surprised by the predictions regarding the future of augmented reality, virtual worlds and mirror worlds, I must admit I was quite taken aback by the notion of "lifelogging" and what this practice will mean to the way future generations will live their quotidian lives. According to the Metaverse Roadmap report,

"lifelogging is the capture, storage and distribution of everyday experiences and information... This practice can serve as a way of providing useful historical or current status information, sharing unusual moments with others, for art and self- expression, and increasingly, as a kind of "backup memory," guaranteeing that what a person sees and hears will remain available for later examination, as desired--what Microsoft founder Bill Gates called a "documented life" in The Road Ahead, 1995."

Lifelogging plays well into the current trend of micro-blogging, online self-presentation and constant updating, as well as a tendency to quantify and store information about the self and one's immediate environment. The community atThe Quantified Self is an early example of lifelogging, but with accelerating technologies that makes this practice increasingly feasible, simple and affordable, it is clear that this is just the beginning. I must admit, however, that I am not sure yet how comfortable I am with this trend. I understand the desire to monitor your daily calorie intake, or the number of miles you ran each day in your morning jog. I understand the urge to let your friends know of a cool new restaurant you've discovered, or your opinion of a movie that just released in cinemas. I understand the allure of Twitter, and the YouTube brand of voyeurism and celebrity, and the hipness of Instagram. However, I am not sure if I am ready to be part of it, and this uncertainty is worrisome in itself. Yes, I think about the future a little too much.

As summer in LA is slowly rolling in, I've been keeping myself busy with a stimulating workshop on Methods in Multimedia Scholarship, taught by Steve Anderson and Sasha Costanza-Chock as part of the Annenberg Summer Institute for Methods and Statistics . I think a lot of the topics that we are discussing in this workshop - online presence, spreadable scholarship, e-publishing, data visualization, and many more - are highly relevant to our discussion of future learning spaces. However, one conversation in particular has been, so far, the most animated and - in a sense - intimate of all. We were talking about techno-skepticism, and trying to make sense of our own personal viewpoints on the future of digital technology, particularly in regards to communication, media, and learning. As a student of communication, and having always had a keen interest in futurism, I really enjoy keeping up to date on technological developments, and (too often) find myself speculating on what our digital futures will look like, and how these transformations will affect the learning and communication of next generations.

And I am certainly not alone in this curiosity - indeed, there's been a wide array of recent books that tackle the future of digital technologies. However, viewpoints range along a debated continuum between utopia and dystopia, techno-enthusiasm and techno-skepticism. While the techno-enthusiast voices are perhaps more prominent (and certainly so in the blogosphere and the digital news outlets), this summer has seen the publication of a surprising number of books warning us of the potential dangers of this rapid technological development, and the adverse consequences that exposure to this media avalanche has on learning, psychological development, communication and human interaction.

Among these, the one that really got me thinking (and perhaps a little worried) is MIT Professor Sherry Turkle's brilliant new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. Turkle, while far from taking an anti-technology perspective - as some critics have mistakenly concluded - reminds us on the increasing erosion of personal space and meaningful interhuman connections. She worries that, by being constantly connected and living in what she calls an "always on" environment, we are paying less attention to cultivating genuine and intimate relationships with each other - or with ourselves, for that matter. Although the center of her focus is on interpersonal relationships, and especially family relationships, Turkle also cautions us that we have also lost the ability to be comfortable in the absence of technology and digital connectivity; we have lost the ability to just sit quietly with our own thoughts. And I do agree.

Also published this year, a couple of other books on the same subject are waiting patiently on my bookshelf. I am genuinely excited for Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), as well as Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion. And of course, a book that has generated a remarkable amount of talk and press, is Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. While I do not expect to agree with Carr's concerns and I definitely think his position is exaggeratedly critical and monodimensional, I am looking forward to reading it and perhaps commenting on it in a future post on this site.  And whereas Mr. Carr's standpoint is well known and has been quite constant in recent times, as he has come to truly embody the loudest voice of techno-skepticism, Mrs. Turkle had been one of the most optimistic researchers when it came to the future of technology and artificial intelligence. Her change in tone, and perspective, is therefore more shocking and perhaps also more worrisome.

The notion of space, and the way we traditionally understand this concept, has been inextricably linked to the process of mapping. From the very beginnings of human civilization, people have created maps as a schematic way of depicting their surrounding environment. Indeed, researchers claim that mapping is an innate human tendency with both socio-cultural (myth-making) and technical (utilitarian) functions (Lydon, 2003). Indigenous people from all corners of the world have represented their physical environment in sand, on tree trunks, on animal hides, or cave walls, in various styles and with different degrees of schematic complexity.

But where does mapping fit in, when we talk about real, augmented and virtual spaces for learning? Can the mapping process - in both its geographical and symbolic or metaphysical dimensions - be meaningfully integrated into the comprehension of learning spaces? And how can the learning experience be enhanced by the visual representation of space - whether this space is physical, virtual, or even mental? Think, for instance, of the role of maps in the history of videogames, and how this evolution from the military map-based games of the Avalon Hill Company to the spatial playground of Dungeons and Dragons illuminated a crucial linkage between mapping, play and imagination. In the case of D&D, the player's ability to actually create the map for gameplay was one of its principal attractions, and a vital reason explaining the enduring popularity of this game.

The ability to create your own map, instead of relying on pre-drawn formalized representations, is, in a sense, a way of taking ownership over a personal space, be it real or virtual. Furthermore, because of the political function of maps, being able to create your own map is also an empowering activity for the learner. In recent times, following the advent of colonialism, maps have taken on a political and ideological function, and have tended to represent the worldview and particular interests of dominant powers. Thus, beyond their function as a source of knowledge, maps have complex implications in regards to the empowerment - or lack thereof - of the communities that populate these spatial realms.

Acknowledging this potential for empowerment and educational enrichment, I have tried, in my own pedagogical endeavors, to use participatory mapping as a technique that encourages students to represent their physical and mental realities in a reflective and empowering manner. Participatory mapping, as a visual communication strategy, attempts to engage communities in the active generation of personalized maps, as a way to both harness the value of individual knowledge, and to concurrently empower community members by inviting them to take an active stake in the visual representation of their spatial environment. I have recently used participatory mapping at the RFK Community Schools here in Los Angeles, and the results have been extremely insightful. In this exercise, the students generated personal maps, where they represented "comfort spaces" as well as areas that are perceived dangerous or unwelcoming; this led to a powerful visual depiction of their own personal geographies, and the patterns of crime, as well as ethnic and racial prejudice, that limit their mobility within the larger urban space.

As a research method, participatory mapping is a valuable tool in eliciting rich descriptions of individual and social perceptions on a variety of topics and across a wide spectrum of cultural backgrounds. The resulting maps, coupled with a subsequent discussion of their personal relevance by the mapmakers themselves, allow for a nuanced process of description, elaboration and theorization, which often surpasses the modal affordances of purely textual methods. In addition, in view of its engaging and co-constructed nature, this is an inherently more ethical research strategy, and one that has the significant potential of stimulating empowerment and self-efficacy among the participants. From a practical standpoint, the process of mapmaking does not rely on formal literacy or linguistic proficiency, making it suitable for use in a variety of cross-cultural contexts, and in work with problematic or sensitive populations, especially children and youth. Especially in recent years, many of these initiatives have also complemented the pen-and-paper approach with digital mapping activities such as GIS or GPS integration, which provides a further point of engagement for digital learners, and an exciting step towards the integration of real, augmented and virtual spaces.

A man boasts his most precious possession in front of his friend. The conniving friend later steals the object in question from him. The rightful owner goes to the police but when they are unable to help, he takes matters into his own hands and takes revenge by killing his thieving friend and reclaiming the precious object.  He then surrenders to the authorities and spends the rest of his life in jail.

Sounds like a Hollywood movie, right? Except that in this case, the precious object in question is an image on a computer screen: a sword in a virtual world. This is the true story of Qiu Chengwei, a 41-year-old Chinese man who was an avid player of the MMORPG Legend of Mir 3 and had spent numerous hours of gameplay in order to finally earn the powerful Dragon Sabre, a mighty virtual sword. When his gamer friend, Zhu Caoyuan, asked to borrow the sword for his own avatar, and then refused to give it back, Chengwei took the matter to the Chinese police. However, the police declared that they cannot pursue an investigation in this case because the stolen object was not a material possession and Chinese laws do not protect virtual property. So Chengwei decided to take the law in his own hands and found and murdered Zhu Caoyuan, stabbing him in the chest. He then surrendered to the police and gave a full confession of the crime, receiving a life sentence for the murder.

I was immediately struck by this story when I found it in a fantastic new book by Greg Lastowka: Virtual Justice. Lastowka's exploration of law and justice in virtual worlds is as timely as it is fascinating. He makes a very convincing argument regarding the critical necessity of opening up a debate about virtual laws - which he calls, within the broader field of technology law, "canaries in a goldmine" - since such issues, especially as they relate to virtual property and virtual crime, will inevitably filter through to the broader environment and affect both online and offline communities in critical ways. As Lastowka notes, the notion of virtual law is further complicated by the very nature of virtual worlds as walking a constant tightrope between the real and the fictional. Although the contents of virtual worlds are not grounded in material existence - in the conventional sense of this concept - the experience of being part of a virtual world is very real, and people devote real time and (sometimes) money to this endeavor. Therefore, as Lastowka puts it, "to what extent should the things that are happening in these environments be treated as if they were happening in physical space or in conventional online forums, email or blogs?"

Another interesting issue to ponder is the relationship between code and legal transgressions. As Lawrence Lessig famously declared more than a decade ago, "code is law" - in other words, the planned structure of virtual worlds completely determines what is possible within the realm of that universe. In the context of our discussion of virtual justice, this seems to imply that if a certain virtual act is made possible by the code, then it must be considered an acceptable choice. If stealing swords would be "wrong", why would the code of the game allow it?

I must admit that I am completely fascinated with the moral, social and philosophical implications of the virtual law conundrum. Given how we envision our social and technological future, it is vital to acknowledge the significance of these implications for both online and offline communities, and open this issue up for debate within these virtual worlds and outside of them as well. In addition, if done right, this could be a valuable exercise in virtual democracy. Julian Dibbell's account of the democratic decision of LambdaMOO community members to "toad" avatars that displayed unlawful or immoral behavior by turning them into frogs is a relevant anecdote in this respect. While the limits of legality will surely be fluid and an unanimous consensus will be difficult to reach, the participation of entire communities in the decision-making process is certainly a powerful model of civic engagement. And since - I believe - virtual frogs cannot handle swords very well, perhaps if Zhu Caoyuan had been toaded by the Legend of Mir community instead of being allowed to get away with the theft, his destiny, and that of Qiu Chengwei, would have turned out quite differently.

A few weeks ago I've had the pleasure of attending the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference in Boston, where I had the opportunity to network with brilliant scholars from all over the world, as well as to present my own original research. However, beyond the wealth of information and exciting research that ICA brought out this year, the structure of the conference also made me think about the new ways that researchers and educators can now present and disseminate their research.

This was the first year that ICA experimented with an online platform for presentations: the Virtual Overlay, which exhibited ICA members' research papers in an entirely online format. By extending the forums of discussion to this online platform, people from all over the world were able to access and comment on this research, even if they were not able to attend the actual conference in Boston. The Virtual Overlay contains peer-reviewed papers from across ICA's various divisions, as well as live streaming sessions and plenaries by noted scholars. Due to its interactive digital format, this virtual platform allows paper authors to enrich their presentations with embedded multimedia content such as hyperlinks, videos and hi-def images, in addition to synced PowerPoint slideshows and recorded narration. Furthermore, each virtual presentation allows for the audience to comment or even engage in live chat sessions with the researchers, thus encouraging an active dialogue between the presenters and their public.

The act of participating in this Virtual Overlay conference and discovering all its features made me think about all the crucial ways that the traditional format of the academic conference is changing (this virtual platform at ICA, moreover, came in addition to full wi-fi access throughout the conference and an extremely active Twitter feed via the conference hashtag). Although this type of virtual presentation allows for a wider public participation irrespective of geographic location, there are, of course, certain inherent obstacles to participation: connectivity and economic capital being the principal ones. However, in my view, it really represents a welcomed addition to the traditional conference format, and a necessary adaptation of this format for the 21^st century. Since a vital goal of such conferences in the communication discipline is to identify and discuss future trends in this field, it is also significant, I think, to "practice what we preach" and use innovative formats that are in tune with the fundamental future directions of the field itself.

Another reason I wanted to explore this issue in the context of this blog is because we often fail to address advances in e-learning spaces as they relate to us researchers, as we generally tend to focus exclusively on the learners as the main beneficiaries of these changes. While I certainly acknowledge the primacy of these communities of learners, I also believe it is equally important to understand the affordances of the virtual medium as a dialogue-enabling platform for researchers, educators and practitioners to disseminate and discuss new research, experiences and policies. By taking advantage of the unique features of the virtual medium, we are not only opening up this discussion space to a wider global community, but we are in actuality mining the communicative and didactic potential of these new tools that represent a central part of our research.

A crucial issue that keeps coming up when we talk about the learning spaces of the future is certainly the question of scale, and the feasibility (and desirability) of a greater sense of interconnection between communities of learners on a global scale. How localized do future learning spaces need to be? And how can they maintain their cultural relevance and authenticity, while simultaneously catering to a global community and encouraging dialogue between culturally dichotomous groups of learners? Should educational programs - whether real, virtual, and augmented - strive for a greater degree of international scalability, or does that diminish their local influence and relevance?

This is a question that has been preoccupying me on a very personal level for some time now, because my own background - as both a learner and an educator - is evidence of this constant struggle between the local and the global. As a learner, my formal studies in new media have taken me from my native land of Romania to Canada, Uruguay, and now the United States; although I often found it challenging to adapt to the educational contexts of these novel environments, I also know that the different types of knowledge I gained have enriched me in more ways than I even realize. As an educator, I've had a similarly stimulating struggle. Before starting my doctoral program at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, I worked in media literacy education, leading digital storytelling workshops all over the world, from Romania to the Dominican Republic to Uruguay to India. In India, where I spent more than a year as the field coordinator of The Modern Story Digital Storytelling Program, I was also involved in strategic development in addition to teaching, and I often found it hard to make sure our program delivers the best possible media education to students that came from such different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Therefore, from a professional point of view (but not only), this period became a very introspective stage in my career, and I realized that - given the kind of work I want to do in the future, and the transformation of learning spaces with the advent of globalization and digital media pedagogies - the issue of cultural relevance versus global interconnection is one that should urgently and critically be addressed in the context of e-learning.

This is not to say that there aren't some clear similarities between communities of e-learners on a global scale. In my experience, I have been glad to find that, across a variety of cultural contexts, people are increasingly realizing the value of new media technologies, and of incorporating such tools in the formal learning system. Indeed, there is a growing enthusiasm and appreciation for new media tools in younger and older generations as well. One of the saddest but most meaningful encounters I had in India was with an impoverished teenage girl who told me, upon hearing what my work was about, that she thinks her time to gain new media skills has passed, but she will make sure that her children will have the privilege to learn these technologies. "I am now working for a computer," she said, showing me her cleaning supplies. "The children will come when I have saved enough rupees to buy it."

Certainly, we cannot talk about global e-learning spaces without mentioning the participation gap when it comes to (in)equality of access. Earlier this month I took part in the Teachers College Educational Technology Conference at Columbia University, and one of the main ideas that came out of this exciting discussion was the need to explicitly address the obstacles limiting learners' access to such tools, and the effects this has on the larger communities in terms of collective efficacy and empowerment. However, the participation gap is not only strictly about access. It is not a perfect equivalent to the much-debated "digital divide"; rather, when talking about the participation gap, we also pledge to acknowledge the circumstances of access, or lack thereof. As the brilliant Ellen Seiter wrote in a recent article, the process of gaining new media literacy skills is analogous to learning how to play the piano: it matters whether you have a piano at home (and your family's support, and access to the best instructors with connections at the best music schools, etc) or whether you take a lesson at your instructor's house once a week, or play the piano in your building lobby, unsupervised. All these circumstances matter, and so does the economic, cultural and social capital of each individual learner.

Furthermore, if we are talking about technology as a tool in learning, we must also consider the unavoidable question: what do we do when there absolutely is no technology available? How can we breed the same cultural skills that we are trying to stimulate by using new media as a learning tool, without the tool itself? And is that even possible, or are these skills just too inextricably tied to the medium or the technology itself? When I taught digital storytelling in India, even though we fundraised and donated computers to the schools we worked with, the electricity would go out for a few hours a day on an almost daily basis. What do you do when you have 20 students in the computer lab, your lesson has barely started and the power just went out for the rest of the day? Perhaps some may consider this question a moot one in the context of this particular topic, but I'd like to leave you with this thought: in the lack of reliable access to media and network technologies, can you still design valuable e-learning spaces that are not thoroughly dependent on that very defining prefix, that powerful letter: "e-"?