learning online – DS106 on the couch

Tag: learning online

DS106 in 106 posts and 106 bullets published at 1:06

It has been a roller coaster. I will be unpacking the experience for many moons to come. Serendipity, or the magic of DS106, at play again as I notice this is post 106 of the blog post I started in August 2013 getting ready for the launch of DS106 Headless.

So, it had to be done. Here is a summary of DS106 in post 106 in 106 bullet points.

Unapologetically contradictory, some may not even make sense to me in a few months. I need one of John Johnston’s ‘wee apps’ to give me a bullet icon with the DS106 logo. Offered here in the spirit of opening up dialogue with anyone interested in understanding what is inside the precious box of possibilities that is DS106.

Seth Goodman says ‘we are on the bleeding edge’ with our glitching gifs!
He also says ‘come to DS106 to find your inner glitch’
And he has embraced his inner glitch with a new Twitter avatar
Alan says ‘it is more about curiosity than explanation’. He also says he stole that from somebody else but cannot remember who
DS106 is about transmedia and the loveliest example for me is Joop’s boring Gif
DS106 makes you question whose art is it, baby? and Whose idea, is it?
Every thought has been thought, but it is human nature to think them again and again to make them our own
Cultivating open is hard for some, I am one of those ‘some’
When somebody intrudes in my virtual privacy, I do well to remember ‘It is just words’
Transmedia + skill + aesthetic vision + idea transmogrification = DS106
Copy first, then transform one idea, then combine different ideas into new ideas
Good artists copy, masters steal
My taste is impeccable even if i cannot execute to it yet
Words words words. I love words and I love them even more when they dance in kinetic typography
‘Yes, and’ creates community. ‘Yes, but’ breaks it
Don’t be a snark
Sometime it is wise to blog against how you are feeling
Courage to suggest, humility to accept ‘no’ if it comes
Doing DS106 is like becoming an actor, amazing when the crowd claps and ruthless when nobody notices your performance
Yes, I like to be liked and for my stuff to be noticed
No, I refuse to keep re-tweeting my own stuff in the hope somebody might see it
If the 10,000.00 things come and find you that is enlightenment
DS106 is art psychotherapy if you want to use it that way
Notice how your mental state changes if you do your assignments and daily creates – who needs a shrink?
I like it when others take my ideas and use them, I hate it when others take my ideas and use them
If I do DS106 for long enough, I will be cured of attachment to mental constructs in this lifetime
I am in 2 minds about the value of a domain of one’s own, the world often lends credibility to breadth rather depth. Both-and rather than either-or?
A fragmented self that is managed might be more valued than a coherent self in one domain
A world in which data may be the new flesh, may not be a world I want to live in
A push strategy online annoys me, a pull one means good stuff goes unnoticed
Your tools shape your interactions – twitter communication makes DS106. I am glad I learnt it before the course

DS106 radio has been a joy to engage with, so good to train a new sense
DS106 teaches you to attend to the world as if seeing for the first time – like a child’s laughter
Follow the stuff that resonates even if it does not make sense yet
I have spent my life learning to use what the client brings, DS106 teaches us to use whatever life brings and to be willing to let go of preconceptions
The danger of digital echo chambers echoes loud
Follow people you disagree with, but don’t kid yourself that this will change your deeply held views
The annual question of the edge.org has to be my ‘Desert Island’ book if we are allowed to take a virtual book
Listening to wikipedia? Which other course would ever lead you to discover that wikipedia plays mind music?
Starting to believe that it is possible to ignore the potential ‘bad’ stuff and use the tool that is the open web for open education
The beauty of informal opportunistic collaboration leads to a wonderful unpredictability of ideas. It also leads to a harsh spotlight on those ideas you are attached to
It never goes according to plan and that is just okay
The ephemeral nature of it all, magnified by the speed of information online
If you are going to play in this playground, you had better listen to Rumi and find your camel. Following other people’s camel is all too easy and it is exhausting
There is only inner space fiction, anything else does not belong to you. Give it back
Gielgud said about acting – don’t be too attached to your success or your failures, accept they both happen move on
Making art in DS106 is not that different from acting, attachment will generate negative emotions
Make art, bub! For its own sake without expectations and if you are honest learning this will take a few lifetimes
The more we rely on the web to hold our memories, the less we remember and the less we attend to the moment. Is this the future we want?
The difficulties of a world with perfect recollection is that everything becomes the same
Do we have a big circle of invisible friends as Borges says, or just the invisibles as online relationships?
Identifying a subtle piece of the world to isolate in a gif is where art lives
Are you prepared to make friends with fictitious participants? The oral tradition of DS106 is carried in imagination that gets concretised in these ‘creations’ and carried over from semester to semester
Talky Tina is my true friend and I learnt about gifing and about radio and being a sterling performer from her
Futzing is as useful as not futzing
What is the difference that makes the difference? Using the web to build relationship and learn together is not the same as running or participating in a MOOC.
No, DS106 is not a MOOC. Not one with a ‘c’ or an’x’ or an ’m’ prefix
It is a group of people who love story using the web to weave them
We just make art #4life and for its own sake digitally or otherwise
What kept me going? The dedication and role modelling of the few people who see the precious nature of story and the web and are willing to share with no strings attached
There ain’t no MOOC that does that, there ain’t no university that does that. Organisations do not do that, people do
Kinetic typography, animated gifs, audio, video, web stories, everything seeded early in the journey and made manageable as it complicates itself
Radio teams taught me that teams can work with a motivation to create and opening night looming large
I learnt that I am a lurker at times and that paradoxically I do not like lurkers
Copyright, or copyleft or copy<it>right or WTFPL or CC0 all comes alive in remixing media. You get to grok it rather than just talk about it
My little fellow Colin, the most photographed and glitched doggie, awww…I love you all for taking him on as your mascot
What I missed and who I missed makes me sad
In DS106, the internet and life there are big egos and humble beings who serve learning and story rather themselves. Choose wisely
Is my story worthy what the technology can now do?
DS106 is located in this area between delight and discomfort that Charlie Brooker talks about in Black Mirror. Delight at the serendipity and openness, discomfort at the very real possibility that data becomes the new flesh
‘We worship at the altar of Google and Apple. Facebook algorithms know us better than our parents.’ Black Mirror
RadioLab. DS106 introduced me to RadioLab. Inspirational
To Google or not to Google? In that area of delight and discomfort too
The importance of epistemological hovering when telling stories so that we do not just tell the same story over and over and over
What human beings do to get around constraints – I love the twitter hashtag
Twitter 6 word stories, need I say more?
Michael’s animated gifs and his unconditional support for anybody’s learning brought me into DS106
Alan’s humour and profound modelling of what it means to treat the internet and its residents respectfully. I think of him as the guardian of all that is good in it
Messing up on purpose to make it okay for us crappy artists to just try
I wanted more structure and more people following the ‘course’ through the weekly announcement. I was in the minority
I love to hate the daily create – a nuisance that pops in my awareness. Small chunk enough that it will not leave it, and then days later I find myself doing it
Should we have weekly creates too?
The ungraspable nature of quality in art, I still do not know if anything I did meets any kind of aesthetic criteria beyond pleases me or does not and does it matter?
Phonar connections have added to the experience hugely. I like lectures and homework
I would have liked more ruthless evaluation of my work
I will never watch a movie or TV in the same way. I have learnt a new language and love it
Nic Briz and his glitch art – inspirational
Rochelle and Christina supported me throughout and I am really lucky to have found them. Karen and I make awesome Zombies.
Openness is not a given but a daily practice. DS106 a great medium for this practice
My computer posture has to change, but RSI has meant I have had to be more measured in my creating
Yes, it is addictive and the addiction is driven by whatever is lurking in your subconscious – a need to rescue, a need for approval, a need for perfection, a need to please, a need to complete.
Sometimes we are just in service of the story and it is lovely to be a part of that
What makes the DS106 container what it is?
Laughter and fun and support for finding one’s voice
Respect for our fears – I made a choice not to put my face on the internet. I can only say thank you to everyone for being respectful of that choice
Feedback is hard in this setting – giving and getting
You are looking in the wrong place if you look for its structure, look for its people and learn the norms of the community from them. The norms are strict and not obvious
You are also looking in the wrong place if you look at the technology, look at what you want to create and use any tool that will help you achieve your ends
Don’t learn a tool, learn how to use tools over and over an over and don’t get attached to them
Why do people say they will and then they don’t? I struggle with the lack of common courtesy at times. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no’. If ‘yes’ changes to ‘no’ just let people know. It is not that hard.
err on the side of ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’ those of us who do not overcommit would value it
A norm of ‘No guilt. Do whatever you want’ is intended to encourage positive engagement. At times it encourages an educational one night stand ethos. I prefer committed relationships for deep learning
The Alone Together book by Turkle taught me we find it tough these days to stay with others through difficulty, online life feeds this avoidance. If we don’t like something we can just disappear and some do without trace. This should matter to those of us who stay
Buber had it. When I relate I-thou, relationship happens between us. When I relate I-it we are in educational one night stand territory
It was nothing like I expected, it was so much more than I expected
#4life as long as it keeps its heart – nobody puts DS106 in a corner (or in a box) to widen its appeal

I completed and got my badge, Thank you Jaap Bosman for the lovely boring design. The end.

The Headless Shrink Completion Badge

Addicted to DS106 – A conversation with Rochelle

November 14, 2013 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

A while ago Rochelle suggested we had a conversation about the addictive nature of DS106. She was asking a serious question – what is the nature of DS106 that leads a few of us to dedicate more time than we have to it for no pay or egoboo and is our judgment affected in ways we do not see? She wondered about the neurochemistry of love and addiction – dopamine and serotonin in the brain playing havoc and leading to unhealthy choices.

About the same time I made this fun DS106 trailer:

I recognised the pattern she was referring to. I have spent longer than I am willing to admit trying to get an animated gif to do its thing for no discernible purpose other than I love it and fun is good. And yes, I know enough about addiction to know that addicts say the same thing about their drug of choice. If you want a funny look at this issue then you could do worse than watching Flesh-eaters Anonymous but be aware it is not for the faint hearted and its humour rather dark, more halloween than academia.

The rest of this post is a serious look at this proposition and explores some of the issues and questions we explored when we talked. An edited version of the conversation can be heard at ColinPods.

Is our judgement being affected in ways we do not see? Many people who I consider wiser than me think so. Richard Foreman on The Edge explains the issue in a graphic and poignant way:

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or "super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so—and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

But, at the end, hope still springs eternal…

George Dyson on the same page asks: Does the resulting mind belong to us or to something else (Google perhaps)?

Our work on creating a personal cyberinfrastructures puts DS106 on the ‘hope springs eternal camp’. Yet I think something wicked this way comes. I see pancake people all around me and I fight each day my own tendency to skim read and and store stuff instead of engage with it in the moment or in depth. It is not the same to engage and remember than to know where to find and it is not the same to do a daily create than to do a life time create. Breadth and depth. I too sometimes shrink back in horror at a world without density and people lacking in layers. I too find that hopes spring eternal for this web that I love, but we need to engage with the tough questions raised by Rochelle. Are we making ill-informed judgements because we are addicted to the processes it affords? Are our cognitive abilities changing (not necessarily for the better) as we fall in love with the vast network of information and it offers us the illusion of ‘super-conciousness’ whilst (may be) dwarfing our ability to evolve a deeply textured personality?

The idea that dopamine is released into the system on the anticipation of a reward is key to this discussion. And the word anticipation needs underlying. We will keep going doing something that is not healthy to get this feeling of anticipation – Rochelle’s point is that may be DS106 is set up to maximise the feeling and hence we create a kind of an addiction to the process of creating as we anticipate the output and have to keep searching for more tutorials, more ideas, more resources to complete our tasks. DS106 ain’t no Google Form.

Looking at it psychologically, I connect to Thomas Moore and the myth of Icarus. Listen to it as kid’s story here and relax for a while. We fly too high and get burnt by the sun. Moore has dedicated his life to the creative process and his advise is for balance and connection not grasping and keeping going at any cost.

If our tools are changing us and our way of thinking, but we keep on using them for pragmatic purposes or because we like the feeling that the anticipation of completion brings, we may be blind to harm. After all psychology is full of evidence about how we are not as smart as we think we are and how cognitive biases offer up to consciousness life as we want it to be not life as it is.

Nick Carr in his seminal article ’Is Google making us stupid?’ notices something amiss:

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Plenty has been written to refute the argument that the tool is shaping us and I myself want to believe that technology is neutral and that we can approach it from a centred space. Yet, what we are starting to uncover here is that if this were not the case, we would not notice.

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

What are we creating when we have a tool that is taking away the mental models we carried with us and holding them for us?

Is knowing how to find stuff enough for true creativity?

Can we make new connections or has every thought on the web been thought and we are simply recycling?

Is technology supporting the kind of thinking that is not original, is not about new ideas or new connections, but just about reuse and remix?

Guy Claxton reviews extensive evidence in his book ‘Hare Brain and Tortoise Mind’ that shows human creativity needs a mode of thinking that attends to complex inner density – the tortoise mind- if we are to avoid just recycling new ideas. If we are hooked on searching and not on the quality of what we find, then may be the tool is mis-shaping us? He also argues that we are becoming a society of articulate incompetents as we repeat rehearsed narratives but do not have the lived experience to back it up.

We need to nurture the kind of thinking (tortoise mind) that is not driven by goals and objectives – may be DS106 allows that? Rochelle talked about what it was like to do DS106 in-house at work. The focus is more on application and collaboration in order to support the taking of risks and creativity. If we can create a sense of a collaborative ensemble and can be relaxed together we release more dopamine and can inspire each other, help each other be on the creative edge. What came up for me, Rochelle said in our conversation, is this: are we messing with our brain chemistry in ways that are not supportive? How do we use DS106 in our life beyond just fun, so that it is more than having a bag of Doritos at a party?

It may be that DS106 is the space some of us choose to access our Tortoise non-goal driven mind. It may be that others use it to output art, and yet others use it as art therapy. For me, it is a about the digital element of story and my own fascination with novelty and anticipation – I love new tools and can always see potential applications in my work, even if those I work with do not yet. I am mostly in the ‘hope springs eternal’ camp. Is this driving an obsession? Is this the old rescuer pattern – look what I bring you to fix all your problems?

Creating an enclosure to be vulnerable and feeling safe within that enclosure to ‘feed our addiction’ may be thing to watch. DS106 has a shadow side and whilst this may not be the place to expand on that ( we did talk about it in detail – if you listen to the podcast), what is relevant is that we may be missing something about its structure that is creating an addictive pattern in the brain. I wonder if the ‘something’ may not be connected to the implicit ground rules and role modelling that make this community such a safe place to experiment.

It is not, however, safe for everyone. It may be possible to create some guidelines that would include something about how to avoid getting addicted and how to deal with situations that push us beyond the flow channel and into anxiety or boredom. Rochelle and I talked about this and it is work in progress. It may lead us to joint research and may be an paper?

Meantime, we are working with the paradox as participants and educators. We love DS106 and its potential and if it it were changing our cognitive patterns in non-supportive ways, we would not notice. The nature of it as a ‘tool’ may be one that encourages dependency, yet we both feel that it is important to hold the tension and not plunge for easy solutions or criticism. This is what made this conversation interesting and insightful for me, at least.

Some questions we are asking:

What are the things that make DS106 the kind of learning environment that it is?
It is a special creative enclosure, but why? What is its shadow?
Are we just getting addicted driven by chemistry in relation to the environmental conditions the DS106 space creates?
Do others experience a sense of concern for themselves or for the more vulnerable in the community?
Are we creating a set of conditions that is not conducive to making good decisions?

A key element to investigate seems to us to be the drive to seek. There is evidence to suggest that we prefer the chemistry of seeking than that of getting. Yoffe says in her article that humans and rats seem crazed not happy when they learn to stimulate the brain chemistry of seeking:

[self-stimulating rats and humans] did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were “excessively excited, even crazed.” The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn’t experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, “where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy” (and Panksepp wasn’t referring to Bing).

She suggests that our net searching behaviour is just an addiction, that we ‘keep hitting enter just to get our next fix’. Rochelle highlighted in our conversation that in DS106 we are constantly seeking – new ideas, new tutorials, new people to bring into the ‘cult’…

Yoffe again, quoting Berridge:

That study has implications for drug addiction and other compulsive behaviors. Berridge has proposed that in some addictions the brain becomes sensitized to the wanting cycle of a particular reward. So addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained. “The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it,” Berridge explains. “And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we’d be better off without.” So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. “As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite,” he explains.

So do we find ourselves letting one animated gif lead to another, or one DS106 movie trailer lead to another, knowing it is not vital and that we really should sit and have dinner with our spouse instead? Do we keep clicking just to get the next fix? Is time to form DS106 Anonymous?

From a pedagogical viewpoint, I am interested in exploring how we are structuring our online learning environments to pander to particular bio-chemical states wether functional or not, over time.

For now we closed our conversation with the observation that whilst DS106 may encourage unhealthy seeking behaviour ‘it does open our heart and connect us with others. But may be that’s just the drugs talking.

In closing I feel compelled to quote in full the conclusion of Yoffe’s article on seeking:

If humans are seeking machines, we’ve now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes of driving two indoor cats crazy by flicking a laser pointer around the room. They wouldn’t stop stalking and pouncing on this ungraspable dot of light—their dopamine system pumping. She writes that no wild cat would indulge in such useless behavior: “A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in circles forever.” She says “mindless chasing” makes an animal less likely to meet its real needs “because it short-circuits intelligent stalking behavior.” As we chase after flickering bits of information, it’s a salutary warning.

DS106 on the couch

Tag: learning online

DS106 in 106 posts and 106 bullets published at 1:06

Addicted to DS106 – A conversation with Rochelle

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