Echo Chamber

Posted on 2nd April 2016 by NomadWarMachine

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

Participants in online communities may find their own opinions constantly echoed back to them, which reinforces their individual belief systems. This can create significant barriers to critical discourse within an online medium. Wikipedia

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

…the echo chamber effect reinforces one’s own present world view, making it seem more correct and more universally accepted than it really is. Ibid

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

Another emerging term for this echoing and homogenizing effect on the Internet within social communities is cultural tribalism. Ibid

I don’t want to be part of a homogeneous tribe

flock of sheep

I don’t identify as part of a swarm

swarm of ants

I don’t need anybody to speak on my behalf

Lorikeet

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber.

Right-wing media has a noted effect on shaping its viewers perceptions.The conservative media echo chamber has been partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, by consistently providing a platform for his ideas and defending him when attacked. In addition, conservative media has created the environment where presidential candidates feel comfortable enough to claim that the media has a liberal bias and therefore shouldn’t be trusted. This leads candidates to mold their candidacies towards what those who listen to conservative media want to hear and parrot popular conservative media hosts ideas and rhetoric. Media Matters

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

if algorithms are going to curate the world for us … then we need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important Eli Pariser

Give me pretty bubbles, not filter bubbles.

Soap bubbles

Sheep pic by James Good shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Ant pic by Troy Tolley shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license

Parrot pic by Nathan Rupert shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Bubbles pic by Kim Scott-0  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Posted in #Rhizo16, Rhizomes | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Calligrams

Posted on 26th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s daily create is  to make a calligram: “to to visualize the meaning of a word, using only the graphic elements of the letters forming the word.” as Ji Lee says. Here’s a couple I created by changing the transparency of letters in Powerpoint.

Words becoming and vanishing

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Bursting

Posted on 26th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day – blue skies and weather almost warm enough to start thinking about barbecues. Niall started cleaning off the patio slabs and I grabbed my camera and took a couple of pics. Here’s our forsythia bush starting to flower and one of our plum trees starting to show buds.

forsythia flower plum tree buds

I was delighted, then, when I saw that Kim’s latest photo challenge was:

Be on the lookout for bursts this week…and share what you find with the rest of us!  I can’t wait to see the bursts in your life.

We have a lot of weeding to do before we plant some brassicas – here’s one of my garden ornaments peeping out of the weeds:

IMG_0351

How’s your garden coming along?

All pics by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

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Rhizome: 7 word story

Posted on 25th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s daily create is to:

Explain something technical in 24 seconds and summarize in 7 words as a video.

I wanted to try something new, so I Googled for animated text and found FlashVortex and quickly made these to – ahem – illustrate a point I keep banging on about:

Which are great, but not limited to 24 seconds. So I downloaded Screencast-o-matic (couldn’t get it to download to run in my browser, so downloaded the full version and extracted it onto my PC), played the animation and recorded it for 24 seconds. I then uploaded it to Youtube, realised the advertising was obscuring the text, recorded it again and re-uploaded it (dang, it’s 25 secs, pfff). That was fun 🙂

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#CERE16 chat

Posted on 19th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

tweey-bird
tweey-bird flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

This Tuesday 22nd March, at 5-6pm GMT, Steve Draper‘s Concepts and Empirical Research in Education (CERE) course is going to be holding a Tweetchat with the hashtag #CERE16, and I’ll be facilitating. The question that we’ll be responding to is this:

What is the most interesting/controversial/idiotic thing that you’ve read/heard about during this course?

If you’d like to join us (and I really, really hope that you will), please feel free to adapt this question. The list of CERE topics is here – you’ll find good topics such as social constructivism and learning as acquisition for example. For anybody who does not have a Twitter account, details of how to sign up are here. (Best to do this beforehand.) I’ll be tweeting, as usual as @NomadWarMachine

Flickr pic by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

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Never Throw Tapioca Down a Mine Shaft

Posted on 18th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s Daily Create asks us to:

Create or write something to explain the origins of this aphorism: “Never throw tapioca down a mine shaft.”

I don’t think it’s a well known aphorism, at least not in English, so I don’t know the actual origins of the saying, but hey ho.

When I was a kid our school lunches were pretty dire, but there was one we really, really dreaded – tapioca pudding – or frogspawn as we called it. The thought of this still makes me shudder. Despite this, I love frogs – here’s a pic from my office wall:

frogspawn

As I was surfing for inspiration I came across the phrase “frog in a well” – another new one for me. Apparently this means to be narrow minded. So I’m going to suggest, with no evidence whatsoever, that you shouldn’t throw tapioca (frogspawn) down a mineshaft (well) because you’ll end up with narrow minded frogs (workers). To be sung to the tune of “You cannae shove yer grannie aff the bus” 😉


Flickr photo by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

 

Posted in DailyCreate, DS106 | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Burying my demons

Posted on 16th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s DS106 Daily Create is to create a tombstone. It’s hard to know what to choose – so many worthy candidates – but we’ve had a rough few days of it in the office so the first one I chose was this:

BBB

which I made quickly with Tombstone Builder Then I made this:

my_tombstone (1)

To “celebrate” our government. Happy days 🙁

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Faces around me

Posted on 15th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

I’ve never done the #DS106 Daily Create before, but today it caught my eye:

Have you ever looked around … really “looked” around … and suddenly noticed faces everywhere?

Ok, so it was talking about seeing faces that were not real faces, but I looked around my work and home offices and realised that I have an awful lot of faces around. Here’s some.

faces

 

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The rhizome is NOT a metaphor

Posted on 13th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Red stamp saying "Can do better. Not a metaphor

Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus is not a metaphor. Let me repeat that. IT IS  NOT A METAPHOR. NOT. A. METAPHOR.

Despite acknowledging this in their recent paper The rhizome: A problematic metaphor for teaching and learning in a MOOC, the authors nevertheless use the word a staggering 72 times in 14 pages – including in the title. If you’d like to see comments by me and others on that article, you can do so as follows:

  • First download the pdf from this link
  • Add the Hypothes.is extension to Chrome
  • Go to extension settings and accept annotate on local files.
  • Drag downloaded pdf to your Chrome address bar
  • Then make a first annotation on pdf
  • Refresh the page and you should see all our previous annotations
  • What is very cool is to be able to annotate with video/images/
  • More info on annotating pdfs here

(Instructions adapted from Simon’s post to Facebook.) This might sound footly to do, but Hypothes.is is a really cool tool for annotating web pages and once set up it is really easy to use.

Anyway, I digress. So what is the rhizome – well, it’s a CONCEPT. To call it a metaphor, as this site puts it: “is to reduce to a mental operation with no real consequences in the world”. Quite. And, again from the same site:

Guattari is Not Making Metaphors. He and his friend Deleuze state and restate this. It is a machine, a connecter a way of organizing and disorganizing and reorder the assemblages. [sic]

Pink t shirt with motto "The rhizome is NOT a metaphor" on itSo: a rhizome is not a metaphor. It’s a real thing. Nothing figurative about it. Of course, you can use it metaphorically, and talk about knowledge branching out, but D&G are not doing that. D&G’s concept of the rhizome is not a metaphor. Look – it says so on the T-shirt.

It’s also really misleading to think of the rhizome as a botanical concept. Sure, irises and ginger are rhizomes, but understanding D&G’s concept (not metaphor!) like this misses out the heterogenerity that is one of the six principles of the rhizome (see p82 here for a visual of all six).

Wasp in purple orchidThe image that captures the rhizome best for me is the orchid and the wasp. The wasp territorialises with the orchid and forms a rhizome with it, then deterritorialises and flies away. Two (real) things connect together then disconnect. Nothing metaphorical about that.

Edit: it’s been pointed out to me that this example might be misleading as it is a symbiotic relationship. I’ll need to find an even more heterogenous one.

Those of you who enjoy reading D&G might also be interested in considering the rhizome as metamorphosis. This from D&G (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 

Discussion of metamorphosis by D&G“Could do Better” Image by @Sensor

Tshirt image by me shared with a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

Orchid and Wasp flickr photo by BinaryApe  shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Posted in #rhizo14, #rhizo15, #Rhizo16, D&G, Rhizomes | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

What’s so good about Digi-CLMooc-Rhizo-ing?

Posted on 7th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

I’ve been asked to give a short presentation to some Psychology of Education undergrads and talk to them about how great my interactions with you folk have been over the last couple of years. I’m finding it hard to put into words what I just think of as messing around on the internet, so I thought I’d ask all of you.

If you were asked to say a few words about what makes these cMOOCish things so fun, addictive, challenging etc., what would you say?

Posted in #CLMOOC, #DigiWriMo, #rhizo14, #rhizo15, #Rhizo16, Online learning, Peer interaction, Rhizomes | Tagged , | 14 Comments