Zeugma

Social software & DRM

Spent an absorbing day talking with City Law School staff on Friday, undergrad & postgrad courses, about IT and legal education, especially the use of social software like del.icio.us and blogs, and of course the potential of the web for simulation learning.  Travelling back, it struck me that peer-to-peer sharing has led to the development of digital rights management software (Stevens v Sony Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment, etc -- Sony lost this particular skirmish) -- effectively highly sophisticated DRM protection measures, such as region locking -- but that nothing of the same massive effort and finance has gone into the creation of p2p learning software, which still remains limited, unintuitive, undervalued, certainly by the legal ed. community.  Profit, the potential loss of profit, the targeted technological solution as quick-fix -- all these are reasons why this is the case; but it's a situation that definitely needs reversal.

The Rorschach internet

The Internet acts as a type of Rorschach test for educational philosophy.  When some people look at the Internet, they see it as a new way to deliver instruction.  When other people look at it, they see a huge database for students to explore.  When I look at the Internet, I see a new medium for construction, a new opportunity for students to discuss, share, and collaborate on constructions.

(Resnick, M. (1996), Distributed constructivism, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Northwestern University, http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/Papers/mres/Distrib-Construc/Distrib-Construc.html#RTFToC1.  Quoted in Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T. (2003) E-Learning in the 21^st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice, London, RoutledgeFalmer, 39.

This is an interesting quote because Resnick picks up the protean, shimmering nature of new technologies: they become what we want them to become, based largely on our past experience of technologies, and only a little on our future-oriented intentions.  If VLEs, for instance, are used as dumping grounds for large quantities of lecture notes by staff, it is because they interpret the web as a transmission device much like a book.  They do so because they do not think about the web, initially at first, as a constructivist tool in the way that Resnick foresaw it could become. 

The process is repeated with every shift in technology.  Early books were published to look like manuscripts.  Early publishers of such incunabula modelled their products and prices on their experience of the manuscript market.  Lisa Jardine points out how the emerging Venetian book market in the mid-fifteenth century, for instance, collapsed because of the new book publishers’ uncertainty as to where their market actually lay. (Jardine, L. (1996) Wordly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Macmillan, 228)

This is not to say, of course, that technology changes learning radically.  It doesn’t.  But as the Clark/Kozma debate demonstrated, context profoundly influences content, and especially the content of learning.  How one learns profoundly affects what one learns, as much of phenomenographical research has pointed out to us. 

scriptio continua & RSVP

Gave a paper today at the LILI conference on glossae and hypertext -- .ppt version to be put up on the site soon, and it'll form a chapter of the book on legal education I'm writing.  It occurred to me as I was actually speaking (as you do..) that there was an interesting comparison between rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and scriptio continuo -- continuous writing without spaces between words or sentences.  In late antiquity, from around 200AD onwards, it was the main form of writing.  As M.B. Parkes has pointed out, word separation, was first used in the West by Irish scribes, whose first language would not have been a Romance language, and to whose readership Latin was an alien language:

Since Irish was not a Romance language, its speakers tended to regard Latin primarily as a written or ‘visible’ language used for transmitting texts: they apprehended it as much by the eye as by the ear.

It sort of looked like this:

SinceIrishwasnotaRomancelanguageitsspeakerstendedtore

gardLatinprimarilyasawrittenor‘visible’languageusedfortrans

mittingtexts:theyapprehendeditasmuchbytheeyeasbytheear.

As a result, Irish scribes developed new graphic conventions which, as Parkes points out, relied on the ancient grammarians Donatus and Priscus, who gave them a sense of the word as ‘an isolable linguistic phenomenon’.  The scribes arrayed these isolated parts of speech on the page by separating them with spaces

RSVP, as I understood it, was developed in the early seventies for reading research purposes, and now it's being used as a form of reading for mobile devices.  Research has shown it can be useful, but what it can be useful for perhaps needs further research.  The same research problems arise in both contexts, eg same-word blindness.  What interests me is the extent to which these two technologies, over a millenniaum apart, are similar in effect.  Much more needs to be said, I can't think of it at the moment, so I'll leave it there...

Karen Barton