An amazing aspect, to me, of dialogue in general and talking via mediated asynchronous spaces in particular is that our normal and typical standards and expectations for communication are generally upheld. And these expectations are a complex lot. I have been reading recently in the area of social identity theory, social categorization theory, and optimal differentiation theory. These theories all have in common the academic study of how, when, and even why our identities and behaviors change and morph across group and social boundaries. How am I in my 'in group' and how is that related to how I 'am' in relation to other groups? How do I talk to my spouse and how do I talk to a blog? Where is the 'me' in these conversations? I come back to the main principle of ecological psychology - the affordance. The affordance is (loosely put) an opportunity for action. It is a way of talking about the very postmodern notion that who and what I am is as much the result of my extended environmental self as it is my compacted personal private self. And so I speak through the twists and turns of these relationships.

Now more than ever....

As I reflect on the past few years and the growth of synchronous technologies involving social networks.... I am struck by how lame interfaces like Blackboard really are. There is very little that I can see happening in the development of meaningful asynchronous technologies. Text and graphics, video & audio are all obviously necessary and good things. But the subjective and unarticulated feeling of being connected is also important. I have been working on an idea that will extend both reputation and awareness into the asynchronous realm. I am particularly interested in 'online' learning applications and situations.

Communication is a plastic word (Poerksen, 1988). This means, roughly, that the word promises a lot but delivers little. The word means many things to many people in many contexts. Spending time making provisional definitions can take whole books, degree programs, and/or study. Relationship is also a plastic word. Unfortunately both of these general ideas are necessary precursors to my talking about or thinking about asynchronous dialogue.

I am interested in asynchronous dialogue because I think it represents one of the primary opportunities that distributed information systems offer. Asynchronous internet based communications is an architecture that can afford the collaboration and coordination necessary to maintain local and global coherence. I understand synchronous and asynchronous as extremes of a continuum. The extremes are concepts that have no ‘real’ referent. The in-between-ness of these extremes do have reference to experience.

Time is relative. Certainly this must mean that proximity (distance) is a fundamental parameter of synchronous/asynchronous time. (t=d/r). Consequently there is little reason to believe that distance somehow determines an absolute distinction between now and not now. This claim is what fuels my interest in understanding how to afford meaningful asynchronous dialogue. How far can we remove ourselves in time from a conversation or dialogue and still have a conversation or dialogue?

But I am straying from the primary intent of this post. Before I explore the time structure of asynchronous dialogue I want to look more closely at the idea of communication and relationship.

I will pretend that communication implies a coherent perturbation. What is that, one might ask? Imagine an entity with a boundary. On one side of the boundary is everything that is ‘not’ the entity and on the other side is everything that ‘is’ the entity. Further imagine that we live in world with entities of various types that all share this property of inside/outside boundedness. Even though this perspective is but a perspective (not a definitive or complete explanation of phenomena) it nonetheless can serve us well in coming to understand the ideas of communication and relationship. (note: it is only our ‘consciousness’ or ability to see ourselves as objects that gives us the opportunity to see that a boundary is ‘two-sided’. This is the essence of the self/other distinction.)

Energy and movement are related. I would like to say that energy is movement but I am not sure what that really means. At the level of organisms movement and energy are related through time and the relationship between time and experience.

From really slow movement (matter) to really fast movement (energy) we participate as movement in movement. This reflexive conundrum is what I understand the ‘observer problem’ to be. We are that which we perceive. The architecture of this conundrum can be seen as the body/mind of human being. That is, looking carefully at how we describe our own form can help us understand its relationship to form in general and the possible origins of our human form. It seems to me that understanding this (the form issue) will help us understand the interaction of forms (a communication like activity).

Movement is the essence of communication. Mead’s social gesture (Mead, 1934) posits the creation of mind and self out of the coordinated gestures of social groups. The conversation of gestures is, from Mead’s perspective, a fundamental property of organisms. This conversation is a way to understand the evolutionary movement of individual organisms in their (our) living. We seek or effort after both value and meaning (Reed, 1996). The seeking after value consolidates gains in the service of survival. The seeking after meaning opens up horizons and the possibility of survival and new learning. Our movement through the environment is a necessity.

The conversation of significant gestures (language) that we experience is an innovation or development coming out of our biological and embodied state. One of the complicating factors in communication theory is the mixture or blending of gestures and significant gestures in the experience of individuals. The physical and embodied nature of our experience is often not available to linguistic consciousness. Further, our linguistic consciousness may occlude the physical experience of being by ignoring or otherwise occluding physical experience (e.g., feeling).

The relationship between our physical experience, our linguistic consciousness, and proximity and time are all constituents of communication on the synchronous/asynchronous continuum.

Language has created for us multiple worlds grounded in the physical world. Our relationship to others in the non-physical (non-proximate) world and the possibilities of making meaning are fundamental questions to me. How can we facilitate meaning making asynchronously? Which of the parameters (embodied feelings, language, time, proximity) required of communication is most malleable?

Computer mediated communication (CMC) design strategies are efforts to optimize these parameters for the purpose of better ‘communication’.

It occurs to me that relationship is a key factor here and one that is not (at least for my purposes) adequately understood. What I am exploring is the design of website affordances that can fulfill our ‘relationship’ needs in the process of ongoing dialogue.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poerksen, U. (1988). Plastic Words: The tyranny of a modular language (J. Mason & D. Cayley, Trans.). University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Reed, E. S. (1996). Encountering the world: Toward an ecological psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Closer is better?

There is a lot of activity these days about trying to make distance education (and distance technologies in general) as much like face to face as possible (as if we have a great record of communication, transformation, and harmony in our face to face lives!). Underlying these efforts is the (I think) unconscious and unreflective assumption that what we do in our face to face encounters is unproblematic, knowable, and preferable. I think that a fundamental issue that isn't much talked about is the basic definition of what learning is - or even more broadly communication.

I recently came across an article that used the term 'bandwidth' to describe the relationship between 'student' and 'teacher' in relation to issues in distance education. To me this characterization assumes the adoption of the 'conduit' metaphor in coming to understand communication - that is, the transmission of content from one brain to the other. I believe that our relationships are more strange than that. Much of my thinking is informed by Maturana, autopoiesis, and a biological/systems interpretation of our phenomenological experience.If, as I believe, we are not so much 'informed' by a communication message as we are 'perturbed' then the notion of distance becomes less Euclidian and more Einsteinian (so to speak).

By this I mean that the 'length' issue isn't as important as the 'like' issue. How much are we 'like' or 'familiar' with our interlocutors? Do we have a basis, need, or motivation to be in this relationship? Obviously this is part of the basic set up of standard educational contexts - many students would probably not be in school if they weren't somehow incented to be there through either force (K-12) or fear (post secondary).

My point is that the question of motivation to stay in relationship is more important than the physics of communication in either proximal or distal settings. I think we conflate these two issues in many discussion of distance in education. There is no question that being face to face with someone - in each other's presence, is our natural and adapted state - however, simple letter writing has historically extended & deepened relationships in a way that has satisfied and motivated people for a long time.I think that what is happening to education with the advent of the web and all its bells and whistles is that it is exposing core inconsistencies in our rhetoric about teaching and learning.

In my opinion the 'factory model' of education doesn't work to educate - it works to instruct and train. For much of instruction and training (say learning to be a physician) it is critical that we be proximal to our patients, mentors, and other necessary personnel. For other types of instruction where simulations will do as well (for example Air Traffic Control school) we can work and learn virtually. As anyone that has taught pre-school or elementary school (or their own children) knows - we don’t so much ‘instruct’ kids into learning how to read as we ‘love’ them into it.

Good elementary education is based on relationships of trust, respect, and love. Education, in my view, remains apart from these discussions. Education is about relationships that result in transformation. Mutual transformation. I think that too many of our professional educators believe that it is only a one way street. Distance education is possible and powerful if people are open to being in dialogue. In fact, the technology may well afford a greater and greater incidence of this type of transformative relationship.

However, I don't think it will be pioneered by our current professional cadre of 'educators'. They (we) think we know the answers. It appears that we are really just learning how to ask the right questions.

Chris

Commitment & Asynchronous Dialogue (AD)

It occurs to me that another key factor in successful ongoing AD is a commitment to both the process and to one another. In some ways this begs the question of dialogue and may be AD's undoing in any but select environments (e.g., organizations or virtual teams that somehow have a vested interest in transcending the standard 'information only' discourse of traditional communications.

Dialogue as a function of perception?

I recently finished a paper where I was thinking about ecological psychology, William James, and Mary Parker Follett. My basic thesis was that a theory of direct perception (ala James Gibson) is a prerequisite for participatory democracy. By extension this would also suggest that dialogue will happen best when we are grounded in this 'theory' of perception.

The logic goes like this. Theory of perception > epistemology > social and theoretical frameworks > language > conversation > dialogue.

If we change our theory of perception we can change the world!

The reason a theory of perception is so important is not only because it allows us to make sense of the world but also because we feedback our experiences to our basic beliefs and thereby ramify or change them. But if our experience of the world precludes any change in the way we experience the world then we will only ramify and elaborate our already solipsistic view (in the case of the theory of indirect perception - that is, a little person in my brain that sorts all the stimulus out and creates elaborate computational models of the world). And even if there is no 'little person' (we are so much more sophisticated these days) we still have huge problems if we continue to believe that we create representations of the world in our minds that correspond to features of the world.

Direct perception has us encountering the world directly - physically, emotionally, and mentally.
So, I am going to be working on this. My question for now is: How is dialogue affected by our beliefs about perception? And, do beliefs and theories of perception affect us unconsciously so as to affect the way we think, reason, and communicate?

I think this is an important area for consideration. If anyone reads this and wants to read the paper about these ideas email me and I will send you the paper.

Chris

Navigation & Meaning

I am currently involved with a group from Gonzaga University in a collaboration for our upcoming work at the Follett Conversation in Boise, Idaho. For that conference we are exploring the educational underpinnings of participatory democracy. We are looking at what an educational system designed around the goal of preparing people for participatory democracy would look like.

I believe that the art and practice of dialogue is a necessary component of participatory democracy and that an educational system should focus on that component. In thinking about this I am beginning to realize that the phrase 'teaching dialogue' is perhaps a misnomer. Which makes me wonder can we learn things that cannot be taught? Certainly we can't teach things that cannot be learned?

Anyway, I am beginning to think about how perception and awareness as viewed from an organic psychological perspective informs our habits of mind at a more abstract conceptual level.

For example, how is navigation on an interface related to understanding the content that one is supposed to 'experience'? Obviously navigation is important to "get there" but how important is it in terms of what you "see" when you get there? Are there ways to design an interface such that the way we navigate helps us "see" the content presented from a conceptual perspective?

For example, is a series of linked drop down menus (a drill down approach) better for understanding a 'policy document' or would a set of nested ovals with words in them work better? And/or is a 'tip' from a colleague about the importance of a particular issue the thing that motivates attention and engagement (pre-requisites for dialogue in my view)?

This relates to practicing democracy through dialogue if we see the dialogue as the interface (or maybe I should call it the 'navigable interface') and democracy as the content or purpose of being in the space - the navigable interface space....

So, much as my physical environment affords - say... walking so my navigable interface affords dialogue. And much as my physical environment 'contains' the objects of my desire so the navigable interface space contains the participatory threads and connections that make up a 'democracy'?

So, I think this is what I mean.

hmmmm.