03 Readings (which means they ‘live’ in week 4)

Adrian Miles

A mixed bag.

Two important speculative pieces, both imagining in different ways the future. Both have been enormously influential. The Vannevar Bush essay influenced many original technologists, including Ted Nelson and the inestimable Douglas Englebart, and helped establish the vision of computers as machines to help and augment intelligence and human capacity.

Prehistory

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945. The Atlantic. Web. 19 July 2013. (PDF)

Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print. (Apologies for the strange scan, the scanner freaked out a bit – PDF)

Now, nearly

David Weinberger is a popular tech writer, making a living as a sort of tech journalist come populariser of ways to think about what it all means. This book is now dated, to some extent (the pace of development online in relation to pre internet technology is treated as a dog year, so 1 year = 7 years of development and change online), but the deeper principles he describes remain, and go to the heart of what the ‘network’ might be.

Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. New York: Perseus Books, 2002. Print. (PDF)

Like Was Said

Adrian Miles

In both unlectures so far. The world is now very small courtesy of the internet. If you want to make and publish media, go ahead and do it. There is nothing except yourself stopping you. It is flatter, people formerly distant (in space, reputation, authority) are now near by. Your reputation is now being created and travels with you, and this will become part of your portfolio to indicate your professional ability. If you’re any good, you will get noticed. This subject is about helping you become good. The noticing is up to you. (Thank you for a lovely example from Denham.)

The Blog Empire

Adrian Miles

Have added blog roll here, it’s over there, on the right. You’re right, not mine. If your name is missing (some will be) it isn’t because you done somethunk rong. (It’s very hard to type that with autocorrect on.) Email Adrian with your name and it will be added.

Lost at Sea

Adrian Miles

Isabella writes:

With further consideration, it seems this subject is perhaps about taking risks, being creative and independent whilst still following what seems to be fairly loose guidelines to set tasks. The ‘shore’ (our goal or artifacts perhaps?) is not yet seen but will come organically as we navigate our way through the semester, find our strengths and weaknesses and learn the skills that will enable us to be creative.

For me there is no shore, it’s fine if others think we will find a continent, island, or reef, but for me it is all ocean. There is nothing solid, a part from the boat

Dominic recognises that the public writing makes a difference. Yes it does. Studio teaching, which is what all creative disciplines are premised on, has the tradition of the studio critique. You present work, in progress, all the time. And it is discussed by everyone else. Blogs let us humanities scholars get some of that work in progress feedback happening. Even if there are no comments, it is public and so matters.

Jake picks up the metaphor of exploring the unknown, which is what all good education should be anyway, don’t ya reckon (it’s actually called Project Based Learning, and to some extent Problem Based Learning)

Serendipity

Adrian Miles

At some stage in your university degree I hope you learn that what you think you mean when you say something, versus how people intend what you mean, is open, multiple, and always negotiated. There is no way I can so saturate what I say or write with context that I can guarantee how it will be interpreted. This is the deep, unsettling, play of language and meaning (which begins theoretically with de Sausurre’s elaboration of the sign, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, and langue and parole).

This is a rich, unexpected, surprising, intriguing, unintended (by me) and very productive reading of the boat sketch. Read it.

Walking and Bumps (aka Loops)

Adrian Miles

David writes:

Single and double-loop learning is confusing me, but as far as I understand it, single-loop learning is when we detect an error, address it, and carry on with our lives as if nothing happened. Or, in my (no doubt severely wrong) analogy, when we trip over a crack in the pavement, steady ourselves, and keep walking. Double-loop learning, on the other hand, requires a total rethink of “the learning systems” involved when we come across that error. So, if we tripped over a crack in the pavement, and then tore that pavement up and built a new street. Yeah, that’s definitely it.

This is sort of why we read, write about it, then commentate and discuss via blog post. It makes the readings richer, thicker, and also lets everybody weave more complex understandings, simply based on what you bring, not what I or others assume.

Good example, wrong way round, which is why it is such a great example. Learning to walk is deeply double loop. It’s how we learnt to do it in the first place. So to trip, then to flatten the entire road and so not have to learn how to negotiate unevennes, that is the definition of single loop. I don’t change how I walk, I flatten the world before me. (This is much the same as declaring, in week 2 of a rather difficult subject, that it is broken because it isn’t working – a tautology if ever there was!) Double loop is what our brains do, and us, by directed practice. This is where we concentrate and practice it again and again, trying different things each time. It’s why toddlers are called toddlers. It’s why a toddler will spend an hour playing on the steps, or stepping over cracks. It is trying out different things, jump, small step, big step, step where foot is at different height, slide my feet, lift so my toe doesn’t catch. A whole panoply of testing each of which changes the deep wiring of how we walk. Pure double loop.

How we walk changes, and we let the world stay bumpy

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More Looping Loops

Adrian Miles

Alois wonders if this is already double loop. No. The word is a descriptor to describe a process so there’s a category error of thinking that a definition can turn something mobile and variable into something static. No. But we do need words to be able to address ideas, even slippery ones. Denham picks up the thermostat as single loop, which is a simple feedback loop and the ‘variable’ is fixed – what is the temperature, double loop means the variable is more negotiable. So even using this engineering example a double loop might be a thermostat that ‘learns’ that in winter people seem to want it a bit warmer inside and on cold days warmer in the morning, cooler in the afternoon, and that in summer people prefer it to be a bit cooler inside than they like it in winter. So the thermostat is able to ‘learn’. Still machine learning, but the beginnings of double loop because the variable (ambient air temperature) is now able to be questioned.

Prani realises that double loop invites a certain type of honesty. Danielle picks up the point of model II needing our assumptions to be also available for question (this is what I did in the first unlecture when I contrasted the example of essay writing with blogs).

This though, is outstanding, from Abby:

Strangely enough, I think outside of the academic environments, my attitudes tend more towards Model II. Perhaps because in a professional working environment, there are fewer definitive measures, and a sense of teamwork and responsibility shared throughout a workplace.

Yes, and one reason I’ve set the reading is for you to all begin to realise that your education, inspite of the nature of the workplace, and the world, has largely trained you to be model I thinkers and doers. But it is model II that will matter for your futures if you want to be more than button pushers (or call centre middle managers).

Alexandra brings acting theory into to single and double loops, accurately noting that we move away from things when we act defensively. This subject intends to disrupt, and we’ve started with what we think learning and teaching is, the disruption is a deliberate positive strategy to make explicit what our otherwise implicit assumptions are. It’s a way of fast tracking double loop stuff.

Ditte has an excellent quote: “It  is  only  by  interrogating  and  changing  the  governing values,  the  argument  goes,  is  it  possible  to  produce  new action  strategies  that  can  address  changing circumstances.” It is excellent because media as an idea, industry, and form, is undergoing rapid change. Some of it will stay the same, but that risks being the modern version of opera, very expensive to run, requiring subsidisation, and only of interest to a specialist audience. Opera is the arts version of a threatened species, it needs special protection. The media is heading the same way. Even something as simple as journalism and the press, in the US there are serious claims being raised that it ought to receive state subsidies to continue. This in the land that most enshrines the idea of a free press and small government.

Cuong suggests that double loop learnings “pretty much similar to single loop learning  but extended with extra steps to undertake.” Not quite, that’s a quantitative answer (do a few more steps). Model II and double loop is a qualitative change. Not more steps but different steps that produce distinctly different sorts of outcomes and experiences. Patrick has a reasonable and mature response, recognising the ways in which what is discussed in the Arygris reading relates to not only learning, but emotional and personality possibilities too. In practice based disciplines (so where making stuff is fundamental, which covers most areas of media pretty thoroughly) the ability to reflect-in-practice is a key marker of those that have ‘mastery’ versus the apprentice, or the just plain not very good practitioner. Reflection-in-practice is in the moment of the making, not afterwards. It is a sort of super charged double loop sort of learning. The more you know about your own methods (or ‘systems’) the better off you are in these contexts. For instance, if you’re already feeling threatened by the subject (and so are deciding it is ‘not working’ and so on) then you probably thrive in situations where what needs to be done is very clear, well defined, and so on. It is important to realise this about yourself now, not in your first job, because it simply means you are very good at some things, and not at others, and you want to know this before your first real job application.

Clay Knowledge

Adrian Miles

Jake describes an elaborate form of information triage as his learning practice. Personally, while I know we all do these things in different ways (though not that different, the general cognitive styles we have as people are quite a small set), this is a model for capturing and so the blog can be good for the last step, the ‘synthesis’. Until this moment, learning has not happened, as learning involves and requires the transformation of information into knowledge. They are two different things (census data is information, using it to make an argument about demographics and culture, is knowledge) and one imagined role of the unlecture is to perform that, to show it happening, rather than just presenting the stability and faux security of expertise as if it isn’t a multi headed wriggly octopus of a thing. Lectures pretend that academics think knowledge is linear, all neatly bundled up. What we do as academics is anything but this, knowledge is stuff, like clay. So, as I write this too early on a Sunday morning, let’s settle on the speculative idea that the unlecture is for sculpting in clay. Spin it, pound it, fire it, paint it. Use tools, fingers, hands, palms, fire, water, colour. It is thickly messy. That is knowledge. Information? That’s the clay, as a lump and not anything yet. The potter, well, there’s knowledge there, and in the hands, and in the clay.