Yeah, for the scale of classroom Wait Proper and
meat and price. So to do as we say
in church for me to walk around a bit and
reinforce the idea that while there are folks voices today
expertise and authority within the environment, there's not necessarily
just one from very pleased as someone walking around.
And what I now understand is the catwalk within the
scallop classroom to introduce this afternoon Speaker. And I
just want to say before you started Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. I
work. Yeah. Uh huh. At any rate
, truly thank you for being here today. We
were snowed out last and now spring once again for
at least the next 24 hours. Perhaps I haven't
looked at the weather lately. In the last,
I hope that I have a I hope the distinguished
innovator in residence program is third interest. Well,
here last year Uh huh. About this time on
the ground, then Cameron Kneeland came last fall,
now our third in Russia. Murray, think this
is a program that represents a partnership forged between human
libraries, university libraries and learning technologies became clear shortly
after I got here. That We had very good
Qadri of folks who are and fresh ideas and do
tag, Line says. But perhaps is honored in
the breach, sometimes inventing the future. And when
the libraries and learning technology together and our friends get
together okay, actually believe we're doing other, then
why not have and our home inspire us to bring
fresh ideas and most of all, an example of
perseverance? Because, as I understand it, innovation
always welcomed with wide open arms. And oh,
please come invent the future for us, really,
it's a little harder than that, but today we
are very. Murray, who has persevered through at
least three or four iterations future and is unrepentant,
has not slowed anything. Her pace is faster and
even more visionary, like it is began. Dr
. Murray is at Georgia Tech now to work on
bidding wars now to see if we can't get it
up here more often and for even longer has recently
joined the administration, proving that her perseverance and innovation
truly knows no about all over to what I was
told. You're welcome, um, innovation to the
structure of the associate, deeper research and liberal arts
. Mhm is also a program inventor, an educator
in correct. Later, in the very idea of
what it is I wanted to share with the words
I find particular moving realize I had left her book
in my backpack in the car. And then I
realized you to her influence on my own work and
are important. No, would be simply to read
it off of my latest publication because at every single
opportunity I try to quote mhm, we are pitching
the ideas at the appropriate level. Here's what it's
in inventing the media. Her introduction to the new
media reader Janet Murray writes quote the task is the
same now as it ever has. Familiar. Thrilling
, unavoidable. We work with all our myriad talents
to expand our media of expression to the full measure
. Sorry, very pleased to someone who has expanded
all of our Coleman with her. And thank you
. Thank you, Carla, for that very generous
introduction and for the inspiration of spending these days.
But there it's been really very, um I can't
say that you haven't worked me constantly. Uh,
but, uh, it's been very nourishing to me
, uh, to to be part of all of
the exploration in this community. Uh, and I'm
very touched that so many of you who have already
listened to me enough are here again. And,
um uh, and that you're here at this hour
on Friday. Uh, and as I say,
I'm sure that that is yet another testimony to your
incredible gifts of community making with a really impressive and
inspiring to say, Um, so I'm gonna talk
about some of the ideas that are at the heart
of my, um, latest book and that I
touched on and Hamlet on the Holodeck. I,
um and that I've been I've been obsessing on since
I came to Georgia Tech in 99 uh, to
, uh, join, uh, the, uh
, graduate program, which was then an information design
and technology and which is now, uh, called
digital Media and which I have brought some propaganda about
which, And I hope you will help me to
recruit your wonderful students to this program because we have
not yet had a graduate of Virginia Tech, uh
, in our program, and I think that's a
big gap. Um, so we have a master's
degree and a PhD. Okay, So what is
the design of digital media. So it is not
what is it not? It is not designing a
toaster. We design a toaster. We understand what
toast is. We understand the components of a toaster
, and what we're doing is introducing maybe a new
, uh, material like ceramics or where, uh
, we're refining and existing accordance, Like, make
the slot big enough for bagels. Or maybe we're
doing a playful artistic version of a toaster where it
becomes a projectile toaster. This is sort of the
Y chromosome toaster. I guess you have a target
aiming at the target. So, uh, you
and of course, in addition to the ceramics,
there is this kind of decorative stuff that you could
do with the toast, but pretty much we figured
out toast. We figured out toasters, and we're
just gonna optimize it. And we know how to
evaluate it as a toast. Is it not that
it burn. Right. So, um, okay
, but what does it mean to invent something out
of bits? What does it mean for Douglas Angle
Bar to invent the mouse? Nobody had any specs
for a mouse. Nobody had any idea of why
anybody should want to direct a cursor on a screen
, uh, to do word processing that we had
the the notion of word processing, Uh, let
alone of a system of networked information that was going
to expand human cognition and human efficiency. Um,
this is according keyboard that was So this is this
is a This is from the patent information that goes
with the what we call the mother of all demos
, which I hope that you have all seen or
will not look that up on YouTube, which is
Douglas Englebart inventing the modern computer before Xerox parc and
before Steve Jobs. Uh oh. Nobody's written a
glamorous biography of him. Yeah, um, and
in part because he's still a lot, I thought
we nobody there was. There's no specs for that
. When you go to invent it, there's when
you go to reinvent the magazine because all of a
sudden we realized that that we never knew we wanted
a tablet. We can't live without a tablet,
it turns out, And though we thought the newspaper
and the magazine was dead, in fact, we
really need to read those newspapers and magazines on that
tablet. So how are we going to evaluate it
. They certainly aren't the same as those old things
. Um, And then, uh what? A
lot of people had made MP three players before Steve
Jobs came up with the iPod and with iTunes,
but they hadn't rethought the whole business and the whole
social ritual of buying and selling music. Uh,
so how do you think about approaching that design problem
or training people as we do in my program to
and as my book tries to make available for other
programs to do, to invent things that we don't
know what they are yet and we don't know how
to judge them? How would we know if they're
a good one? Luckily, I can tell you
first, let me tell you what I mean by
radically humanistic in my town. So I said,
the way to think about it is we have to
think about it a radically humanistic way. So we
have to first locate the job of making media objects
as a cultural enterprise and think about culture as our
collective effort to maximize the well being of one another
, um, and to pursue expanded expression and expanded
knowledge for their own sake. Uh, And so
this is the ethos of the Renaissance humanist. But
it's also the esos of the Wikipedia. Ian's right
is that it's good because we're all working together.
Um, and we are open about knowledge, and
we're finding sources of knowledge, and we find them
. We're not gonna worry if they've been validated by
a religious body or by other forms of orthodoxy.
We're going to share them. Um, and we're
going to negotiate. What is what is the commonly
accepted knowledge, uh, that we that is worth
sharing. Okay, um, so thinking about culture
that way and about the, uh, the media
as part of this cultural enterprise and media, as
McEwen called it in its widest sense, the extensions
of man It should have said of humans, but
19 sixties 1950. So the extensions of those they
extend our humanity, um, and so media are
every every medium of representation that we have developed over
the ages is a way of having shared expression and
shared knowledge. And each time we invent a new
one, we can expand what we can express about
our individual experiences and our tribal experiences, and how
far we can share it And what? How far
and how, um how precisely and how, uh
in what detail we can collect and share knowledge.
Um, And this picture there is a uniform,
uh, text from the earliest evolution of writing.
Okay, So thinking about media theories there are there
are several ways that are useful in thinking about them
. And, um, I'm gonna These are the
ones that we're familiar with in that that are useful
for thinking about media. But I want to also
add a new one to it. So we think
about it in the Shannon and Weaver way. What
is the media? It's a way of sending a
message across from a sender to receiver, decoding it
in a way and decoding it and worrying whether how
the signal, uh, is transmitted. How much
? Nowhere. How much is noise? How much
A signal. How how faithful it is to the
original composition of the message. So that doesn't answer
the question of what is a message. And how
does it mean? So for that, we have
semiotics, uh, where we think about how we
establish a third object that we negotiate the meaning for
and that we can be meaningful in different ways.
It can be meaningful. As you point to something
. It could be meaningful by its connotations. We
know that meaning is very complex and culturally determined.
So that's another way of thinking about it. Media
is a place in which we we add layer,
negotiate the meaning of our symbol systems and or a
place where we transmit symbols. Uh, we can
think about them as angle barred and McLuhan does as
part of the general technologies of human culture so similar
to transportation, McLuhan says. When we get a
railroad, our feet are extended. When we get
, uh, a written technology for writing, our
voice is extended that we have this human being,
and then we invent gizmos that are sort of like
prostheses, uh, to extend our reach. Uh
, and then we could think about media as ways
of, uh, inscribing and, uh, performing
power relationships. So one might think that the Trekkies
are, uh, controlled by an evil capitalist,
you know, uniform. Uh uh, system.
Or one might think, was Henry Jenkins that they
, the people who are appropriating mass media uh,
symbol systems are in fact poaching them and making different
meanings out of them. Uh, so we could
talk about what the power relations and people who talk
about mass media often are talking about their. So
and And if you look at media theories, I
would say they pretty much fall into these categories.
If you find some other categories that I've left out
, I would be interested to know them. I
want to propose another way of thinking about it.
That's that is concrete that exists along these. All
these aren't either or and this is another one.
And it's one that's been really useful for me,
and that is that media are a way of focusing
our shared attention. Uh, and so let me
tell you what I mean by that. So,
um, so I'm getting this from two theories.
So the first one is Michael Thomas, Ella,
and neither of them actually talk. Uh, well
, Thomas l doesn't talk about media. They get
the next government mentioned. Does talk about media.
Um, uh, Thomas. Several studies, developmental
cognition. And he tries. He's, uh,
working at the boundaries of primate intelligence, trying to
figure out where our our our ape cousins and where
are we? And and One of the things that
is crucial, it seems in human development is a
moment that we've all observed with babies between six and
nine months. When they point at something and they
expect to direct your attention to it. And once
they can do that, they are ready for symbolic
communication. Because if you both know you're pointing at
the bottle and you say bottle and the baby can
start to say Baba, then you begin to associate
the sound with the thing and we've got language.
Uh, and there must have been some moment in
human culture that corresponds to this and and I have
a theory and I've talked about it elsewhere, and
I can talk about it. Uh, today I
might have it on the slide here, which is
that games are our our our the the human races
way of creating situations of shared, limited focus of
this joint. Attentional seen that is the prerequisite to
symbolic communications. And so that. And it's because
the game involved and I have this picture of Let's
see, yeah of, um yeah, I do
have a slide of of of of knuckle bones.
This is this is a Roman, uh, era
picture. But knuckleball, not the bones of animals
, were an early medium of symbolic communications and games
. And then we first for auguring, you know
, for for telling the future, uh, and
then for gambling type games like dice. They're kind
of dice. So and here is it's I like
this because it's two women playing neck bones. So
they're sitting there, and it's sort of I think
this is an iconic game where you have a game
board or a limited, uh, field of interest
there, just looking at the same area. They
have these limited objects to think about. The objects
have certain meaningful states they can be in, and
they share a sense of what those states mean,
and they are also turn taking. So you can
see in the ability to do this some of the
building blocks of human culture, ability to synchronize activity
, the ability to take turns, the ability to
know that somebody else's actions have intentionality and and are
part of a sequence of actions that's meaningful. And
all of these things maybe not knuckle bones, but
definitely gestural coordination. Um, I often think of
ring around the rosy as an example of this kind
. Although that rhyme is much later in human culture
, people were probably holding hands and marching around much
earlier and that that that, uh, proceeds And
this I got from Donald Merlin. Um, I
always get confused. Merlin Donald, Right? Merlin
. Donald. So, uh, Thomas Hello And
Marilyn Donald, The two, uh, evolutionary,
uh uh, And developmental cognitive scientists that I'm basing
this idea on, um, that, uh,
that he was from him that I learned that games
precede language. And this was very meaningful to me
, because when I published Hamlet on a holiday,
Jack, I got attacked. I always say that
I got attacked by the nation of Finland, but
it was actually a subset of the nation of Finland
. I It was a group of young men in
Finland, particularly in Nordic countries, Who but the
fins were the rudest, um, who were,
uh, who saw me as a useful straw woman
. I think the gender was not irrelevant, uh
, to attack in in their struggle to differentiate game
studies from narrative studies. So in Europe, games
were held in this evil to them hegemony of narrow
tautology. And they wanted to say something that was
true, which was that games were their own form
and did not have to be validated by narrative.
Now I had written a book about the possibilities of
narrative, and I had talked about some games as
narratives. And so, uh, so they they
used that as a as a springboard to say all
wrong. You know, Why is she contaminating this
beautiful thing of games which they with these evil ideas
of narrative? Um, their arguments were faulty in
a lot of different ways, and I enjoyed teasing
them about it for years at conferences, but but
that that only. But I'm grateful to them,
if only because they sort of primed me for this
revelation that that games and have this very early place
in human cognition and actually a Merlin Donald Michael Thomas
selling never mentioned games. But whenever they want to
describe the difference between a bonobo say and human,
they talk about some experiment they did with the game
. Um, so and they talk about, um
and and so Merlin. Donald talks about the stages
in human cognitive development and where media fit and so
so moving from games as a medium and gesture as
a medium thinking about language, which is the,
uh, the most important human making technology media we
have. Um he, uh, describes it,
uh, as focusing our minds in a way that
we can share. So I'm not going to read
this to you since you can read it for yourself
. Or maybe I should read it for the so
I'll read it for the tape. So words and
sentences focus our attention. They elevate our awareness of
whatever they specify. But moreover, when stories and
ideas that juxtapose so that their meanings collide, they
can shift our focus to new semantic spaces. In
a word, languages clarify the experienced world. So
a medium changes our cognitive abilities. So we have
experience, but we can't sort it out into pieces
. We can't focus on it individually. We can't
clarify its qualities without a medium in which to represent
it. And language is the most plastic and the
most expressive of these, uh, human, uh
, for dances. And so the brain co evolved
with in this view of evolution, uh, with
our, uh, our media and our culture and
our cognition co evolve that we get smarter as we
invent these media and culture changes as we invent them
and one ratchets up the other. Okay, so
each of these media, from from just the ability
to write and record and to look at how this
, uh, uniform tablet has been divided, I
think this is a commercial tablet and and there's,
uh, things that are being bought and sold,
or or, uh, inventory in some way.
And the different shapes represent different kinds of items,
and the the points may represent quantities of those items
that we can We can summarize experience and order it
and make comparisons between it in a way that we
couldn't without that medium. Um, and this is
, um uh, writing. Uh, And,
um, this is the Rosetta Stone. And this
is our new means of inscription, which is very
blank, which is just those circuits, those bits
, But not just a bit. The bits plus
the human invention of the of the electrical impulses representing
zeros and ones, which gives it this enormous plasticity
. Uh, and that gives us an ability to
describe the world that contains these and other primitive,
you know, preceding media. Uh, and that
increases the capacity with which we can describe. So
, um so what is it about the medium?
And And I talked about this at length. I've
talked about it, uh, first in 1997 and
Hamlet on the holiday. And I wrote in chapter
three I That was I when I was trying to
answer the question. Hamlin on holiday. Uh,
is this really a literary medium? Do I really
believe what I've been saying? Can I really prove
what I've been saying and and acting on since I
had this this moment of awakening in the early eighties
that this was a beginning of a medium for telling
stories? How would I know if it is a
medium like writing, like language like film? Uh
, and I thought about film and how it's different
to fall from just photographing a play that making a
movie has what we often call the language of film
. And the language of film comes to the materiality
of the film. And it comes from the fact
that you can change the lens, and you can
, um uh you can splice the film and you
can assemble it differently. So how would what are
So I said to myself, What are the afford
? Ince's for representing the world that are characteristic of
computation. And so Chapter three I identified them and
then and then I went. I took that insight
back into my design experience, whereas making leading projects
making various kinds of educational applications at MIT. And
I realized that it helped me to, uh,
to assert the prey, the design priorities really clearly
where otherwise I'd be stuck between a filmmaker who would
say no in order to make a good video,
we need this and a graphic designer who would say
no in order to make a good visual display.
We need this. And then the interaction design wasn't
particularly clear at that point. So I realized that
what what the collective enterprise was was maximizing these afford
Ince's that were specific to computation, that we can
represent the world as procedures and that that was unique
to computation and that we make not just space that
you can draw but space that you can navigate and
move through whether it's an information space or a virtual
world, um, and that the objects are open
to our participation participation. It's not just the social
media participation. But it's also the fact that anything
on the screen is something we feel we can manipulate
. We expect to be able to manipulate and then
the incredible, uh, capacity of digital media.
So these are the four media. So, uh
, and then when I went to Georgia Tech and
started teaching design specifically, I developed this notion that
there's a grid and that you can think of any
object in a digital media space is. Obviously they're
all somewhere in the middle and lot, leaning over
in different ways. But some of them are more
in these different spaces. So a game engine or
search engine is making use of the procedural power of
the computer. And a GPS device or a large
information space or maps are making use of the spatial
, um, afford since, um, and,
uh, blogs and recommendation systems that take information from
other users and then offer to you are making use
of the participatory afforded and then all of these large
information repositories and resources like Wikipedia and YouTube. They're
making use of, uh, in part of this
encyclopedia. It is an encyclopedic media. Now,
I would say that these two are the core.
A Florence is that the spatial comes from the procedural
and the participatory, and that the encyclopedic that other
things are encyclopedia. But these are this is capacity
is exponentially more than, say, print in which
we had learned to make encyclopedias. For instance,
Um, but each of these afford Ince's awaken expectations
and users so that whenever we have anything digital in
our hands, we think it's more covers more then
it may. We think it's going to cover everything
. We think it's going to do everything we think
we're gonna be able to manipulate things. We think
that it's going to be organized and spatially. And
as designers, we need to observe those conventions and
and refine them and develop them in order to make
the the interaction satisfying and in order to keep the
medium maturing. Uh, because it's right now,
as we know, every time something breaks, which
is every day it or or disappoints us, then
we know it's not. It's not there yet.
Um, but we sense the possibilities. So how
do we think about different, uh, existing artifacts
on this grid? And in my book, have
a lot of them, but a lot of things
. I just have one here. So Google to
think about Google when it was just a search engine
. Why did it blow everything else out of the
water? Because it understood what a computer was.
And it used the coding power of the computer to
do better searching. Uh, and it recognized that
it could control these encyclopedic reason. It didn't say
this is too much. These are too many.
How many people can we get in a room to
label it? It they it united this and it
did it by exploiting the participatory should be down a
little more because it was it was pretty lame,
especially at the beginning, but, uh, by
But it was brilliant in participatory, uh, wisdom
in that they recognized that a link that what people
wrote when they linked to something was actually an annotation
of what that thing was and that some people were
more reliable than others as annotators. So they recognized
that they had a cultural product in the web,
and then they exploited that those cultural, uh uh
uh, that cultural value that people had put in
it, But with language. Okay, so but
here is where Google was, you know, after
even, uh, five years even, um,
that it got more and more developed the rest of
the grid. Uh, and you can think of
a lot of things this way in terms of opportunities
for entrepreneurship or for new inventions that there are areas
where we are, Um, like, people could
I've often used Flick. I think I did use
Flicker in my book. And then you can see
how instagram uh, expanded where the areas that flicker
did not cover it, and it was just did
much better, Uh, with the participatory, um
And, um uh, and the hashtags really gave
it much more, uh, encyclopedic power and organization
. Um okay, so, um uh, so
So how do we get into the frame of mind
that allows us to see this possibility space? Um
and I So I, um I'm offering a design
process that I think works for any digital artifacts.
So it works with whatever you're designing, and that
is to step back and ask yourself, What is
the core activity that is abstracted away from any particular
media? Uh, in Stan shih ation of it
. So some of you are in an earlier talk
again, where I talked about the very old room
, uh, editions of Shakespeare that scholars create and
how people get fetishized on the book as this the
where you put the Vario of information even though it
is the page of a book is a very poor
, uh, container for information that maybe maybe this
much information for one line of Shakespearean text. So
attorney, and sometimes you have to go back and
forth and you have to put the information in in
Terran with a cryptic abbreviations. Yes, as you
said. But what is a very all room?
What is it that we're trying to, uh convey
? When we look at a play as the sum
of all of its additions, we tell people the
differences. And when we look at the play,
is that some of the most interesting commentary upon it
? And we have to explain different lines. What
is that task and how would we use the afford
Ince's of the digital medium to do that task better
So that really very simple recipe, but it's very
hard to do it because we're very tied to our
print based conventions, Uh, and those are the
ones that validate us. And so for. And
I want to take two examples for the rest of
the talk, uh, as ways of illustrating what
, uh what How difficult it is to approach this
and how we thought we can get when we take
the rap. More radical approach. So, um
, so let's think about newspapers and universities, so
newspapers first. So this is the way people generally
think about newspapers, right? Even Superman can save
us now. Lex Luther has bought the daily planet
. And, uh, uh, Lois lane says
to uh, Clark Kent in desperation. Go start
a blog. Uh um, So there is this
kind of desperate feeling and and I sympathize with it
, uh, that newspapers are folding and that,
uh, there's, uh and that somehow moving information
into digital space has just destroyed the the enterprise of
journalism. But my point is that newspapers are not
journalism, but we have to care about journalism.
So how do we think about that? Well,
first, we would think about all of the different
ways in which we experience news and all of the
rich cultural history by which we have, um,
focused attention on particular news stories and and trained ourselves
. There's a There's a ritual to a newspaper that
allows us to take in what's new because there's a
template that tells us, Oh, this is what
a story Is this a headline? The headline on
the front front page is more important, and headlines
later on the the information is going to be in
the lead. Uh, and there are similar conventions
to television and radio reporting. Um, and then
there are genres that go into news like there's interviews
as features, this election coverage. Well, people
still need to know what's happening in elections. They
still need to have interviews. There's still and so
you have to ask yourself, Where's the expertise here
that makes up the profession? Maybe there is not
a clear, uh, revenue stream for it right
now, but we can figure out what it is
that has integrity that is not dependent on the pieces
of paper being there in the morning or in the
evening, and that then when you think about it
, you think, gee, the pieces of paper
. If you if the stories ever continued and you're
reading it on the subway of New York. It's
kind of it's hard to get to the the inside
page and follow it and remember where it's going.
You know, it's not as if and The New
York Times only you added color or something, like
10 years ago or something. So there's there,
isn't uhh they were not delivered. Uh, my
God, uh, in like, a stone tablet
. And and then we might think about stone tablets
, you know, and not the most, uh
, flexible form of information is so each of these
I think that story, by the way, has
to do with the advent of writing with the way
you can organize a community once you can write things
down. So, um uh, what? So
what are the constraints of newspaper? So this these
are some of them. And this is just not
to fully develop this as a design problem, but
to give you a taste of what it what it
is to think about this problem from a radically humanist
point of view and to see the business model as
just an artifact of a particular historical circumstance. Now
, if you own the newspaper or If you make
your living as a journalist, you have a different
and more anxious, uh, purchase on this,
of course. But if you're if you're a designer
and all of us have to cultivate the designer's mind
in order to remain sane as culture changes, I
believe, um, then you you have to be
able to step back from that, um so you
have to be able to say, Well, let's
see, there's these things that are the same in
news there's something like a headline or a teaser or
lead, or some ways of summarizing giving people the
bigger picture before you go into the details. And
how would we do that in digital media? Uh
, and maybe we could think about bigger, bigger
pictures because we have a more encyclopedic medium. So
maybe, um, we could talk about, say
, health care policy, as if it was part
humanly possible to understand health care policy. Right?
Right now this it's talked about as if all we
can do is tell you what's happening today, but
we have no prayer of really helping you to understand
what the choices are here. Um, so we
have to ask ourselves what is it that people need
to know? And how are they going to best
access that? I mean, there's some things you
might want to know immediately. What about local?
What about those mysterious things that happened down the block
in a big city? And then you never hear
why there were seven police cars? There wouldn't be
nice if you while you're there on the spot.
There's some way that you could be informed of what's
going on or even be informed of. If you
notice the time. By the time somebody is reported
on it, you could find out. Um And
, um so we we these are the kinds of
questions that we need to ask. Uh, so
let's say so. Um uh, okay, um
so and you can see how little by little we
start to develop conventions that are more digital native.
So the New York Times starts out by totally reproducing
the look and feel of the paper newspaper. And
then after a while, it comes up with with
this, uh, a new kind of convention which
is participatory in nature. What what is the most
popular? What is the most email and even these
different versions of what's most popular. Okay, um
, and And this this is a, uh I
think this is, uh, 1996 2010. Uh
, so when The earliest times. Yeah, it
is 1996. And, um uh, and then
two years ago, uh, and you see how
it starts out with the same sections as in the
paper. And then it develops different and multiple ways
of sectioning. It, uh, resolution gets better
. So more is on the front page. Um
, the headline is no longer believe you don't have
to cover as much proportionately of the of the first
screen as you would in a newspaper, but but
it's using columns, which is a web technique,
Web strategy and a newspaper strategy. Um, okay
. An example of a, uh, a of
what people usually do when they are approaching a change
. Uh, is remediation? Um uh, and
this is a very so what people usually do is
they try to reproduce the old medium in its form
in the new medium. And this is a very
much awarded, uh, piece that does that to
the best of people's ability in 2012. And if
people see the snowfall piece. So and what it
does is and I won't. I see I'm running
out of time somehow. So, uh, I
won't. I won't look at it online, but
I encourage you to look at it online. It's
a story that begins as a magazine story. And
it is, um, but it has interpolated into
it. Animated images from video and from simulations,
um, and as well as audio pieces and slide
pieces. But they have been sequenced with the idea
that you're basically reading and that at certain times in
the reading, you will be interested to see this
particular animation. And it's done with a lot of
visual authority. Um, so it's not It's much
cleaner than, uh, it would be trying to
fit this into that, uh, standard times template
. Uh, so this is and this is really
more like the Times magazine, but they had not
come up before this with a way of reproducing a
magazine experience. Uh, it's about an avalanche.
Um, and they they describe the people who want
to go, uh, skiing in this very dangerous
situation. And they show how rapturously beautiful it is
using video, and they have an animation of what
is basically a newspaper illustration. You don't really gain
that much from the fact that they animate the snowfall
. Uh, the most, the most, uh
, lively things they wanted. The most lively thing
they do and surprising is this. And it happens
when you scroll down the page so things are triggered
by scrolling down the page. So watch uh huh
, so that one of the skiers is saved by
having these inflatable wings like an air bag that you
wear. Um, and then they they format the
part of the story that's about the descent in this
descent. And they have lines showing who descended where
, and they remind you of who they are,
but they're not clickable. So you can go click
on this and say, uh, who was that
person again? And they have an animation of the
of the Avalanche, but oddly, the lavallee.
The animation is based on something that's much more computational
the rich, which is a simulation of the avalanche
. But it's made into a una linear video of
that, and this one shows where the people are
the dots show. I think this is the one
where the Yeah, these dots, all our people
. But you can mouse over them to find out
which of the people isn't. So there are all
of these things. This is a beginning of one
of the chapters. Now, if you saw this
on the Web, what would you expect if you
if you clicked on one of these right? Biography
? Yeah, but none of these are clickable.
So there's a complete, um uh, there's a
complete, uh, and and similarly, with this
, um, there's a complete ignoring of the Web
conventions. And then there's a pasting on of a
very good conventional documentary. So there's a very well
written article. There's a very good conventional documentary.
There are some very graceful interpolated pieces, and when
you read it, it's not interruptive of the reading
experience, but there what? What it is not
is an attempt to actually tell the story of the
avalanche freshly using the afford Ince's of the medium.
So next week I'm gonna assign that to my students
as a little surprise design problem. Don't tell them
, uh, that in class take the story.
How would you tell it if your job what you
wanted to do was Tell people about the Avalanche and
the story rather than illustrate this this pretty, you
know, beautifully written. I actually have this beautiful
, let's say, beautifully written magazine piece. So
, um uh, so this is a remediation.
So what it does is it adds it in.
It starts with the tax, ignores the conventions.
I've told you all this and and it reproduces these
conventions of page illustration. I use this term unisex
. Essential people sometimes say non linear. I don't
like the word nonlinear, because how do you design
something that to a negative? That's not a good
design quality? It's not this, Um, I
think that what we want to think about is how
legacy medium media are, you know, linear.
There's only one way through them. But what we
want to aspire to is our unisex Menschel. And
so I'd say sequential rhythm. But we want to
have a multi sequential environments where you can go through
things in different sequences. But they're all shapely.
They're all meaningful. So it has. Rather than
having not the coherence of a legacy item, it
has extra coherence. Multiple coherence is which together make
a bigger picture. So what is an example of
good use of the afford. Ince's so one of
my favorites. And again, I won't stop to
look at it in detail because But I But you
can find it on the web. Some looking up
right now, the smart money map of the market
. How many people are familiar with this? So
check it out. So it lets you you can
see the entire market. This is in happier days
. Uh, when the green means that the sector
is in good shape, you can see that these
particular sectors are not in good shape. You could
change it if you have red, green colorblindness,
uh, to, uh um, So what would
you make it? Blue and, um, white
? Is that what they do for, uh,
And I'm not remembering the moment, but but you
can change it so that you so that it doesn't
have that, uh, so that it's It's more
, uh, access friendly. Um, and you
can get deeper into the material. You can also
filter it so you can see change over time.
You could look at it at different time. Um
uh, intervals. Um, and you get news
stories associated you can get down to the level of
a single stock and news stories now, because the
stock market is of such financial centrality in our,
uh, society, there's a lot that's been done
with the stock market. But most of what was
done other than this and before this are essentially,
uh, legacy frameworks like a graph. And so
you have to have multiple graphs. Or remember that
all those tables and newspapers so people will reproduce those
tables or just make them searchable or, uh so
those are okay, But this is a radical rethinking
of the problem of understanding the sack market situation,
and it gives you an overview that you can take
in much quicker. And therefore, we're much smarter
when we can take in a complex situation more quickly
and when we can access specific details more easily.
So, um yeah, bench. And this is
based on the University of Maryland bench. Sneiderman's work
with treatment. Uh, and here are some other
examples, which I'll give you these slides and you
can check them out of people trying to make overviews
of complex situations in one place that make good use
of the encyclopedic afford. Ince's of the medium rather
than reproducing the legacy forms. Um, okay,
so now let's talk briefly, and I'll do it
more quickly about universities. So there's a lot of
things in universities that depend on media forms. So
you would start maybe by thinking about all the things
that we do and what kinds of, uh,
print artifacts support those things, Um, think about
the, uh, the obscenity of registration and how
difficult that is. And, uh, and how
much worse it was when people had to go around
and get things stamped and And how much are we
reproducing? Some of those same confusions, Or have
we completely, uh, made use of all of
the procedural power we could to help people to get
all the courses that they need? Um, so
you get in the mindset where you don't take for
granted the current forms of any of these processes.
Why is the certification the diploma? How would we
know if a diploma was real in the age of
Photoshop? Um, what other kinds of certification might
there be? Um, we we want to get
in the frame of mind where you are thinking not
about preserving an institution or reproducing the functions of a
particular institution. But of the core human activity,
the core human need not newspapers journalism, not a
universities, but education. Um uh, and thinking
about all of the ways in which we have gained
in our ability to organize knowledge from the print revolution
. I'm thinking about the ways in which we assume
that knowledge is transmitted and could be disrupted by snowstorm
. Let us say, uh, uhh and,
um mm. And how we how we credential how
we tell, How do we know one thing that's
really interesting about this? You know, I encourage
the radical thinking in a way, the very advent
of digital, uh, artifacts into a field forces
people into radical thinking. And then we tried not
to do the radical thinking. So we have to
say to ourselves, My God, what if coursera
made sense and everything can be put on the Web
? And then, after we put all our courses
on the Web, do we go away? You
know, Is there no value to do meeting people
in person and teaching them? It seems like there's
something valuable going on there, so we're forced to
ask those radical questions. But I would say what
we We need to embrace them because what we usually
do is we get defensive. And then librarians at
first defended the card catalogs because what if that paper
disappeared? The knowledge is the paper. I don't
know if librarians currently think, uh, that there
was things lost when we lost those pieces of paper
. I think I think there's a lot lost when
Google Books, uh, digitized books without using the
catalog, because the metadata is in the catalog,
but not on the paper. So much. Um
, so, um, so we we tend to
defend the legacy format, but we What we need
to do is more passionately defend. But But first
question, you know, we have to question radically
so that we can identify the humanistic heart of what
we do so we can defend it much more passionately
and much more effectively. So we know what we're
defending. Um, uh, yeah. So then
we think about these things, but not about the
tuition, because the economic base is a whole separate
thing. I mean, we have to think about
how newspapers lost advertising. Newspapers lost their local primacy
that classified we have to think about that. And
as administrators, we absolutely have to think about preserving
institutions as part with our administrator had. But in
terms of thinking about the future and of our more
important responsibilities of preserving the function of education, we
have to set aside that material. Um, consideration
. So, uh, and then one thing that
happens when you get these digital interventions is you realize
that this has happened to me over and over again
in various fields, from foreign languages to engineering education
, that we actually don't know what constitutes knowledge of
a field. Yeah, when push comes to shove
, it's very hard for people to say, This
is when you know French. This is when you
know how to make a bridge. It doesn't fall
down. Yeah, so we know mistakes. We
can easily tell mistakes in, in in performance,
but to say what constitutes knowledge of the field,
how do we test for it? It's actually much
more complicated than than, uh then you would think
, um and, uh and so But I would
say again, we need to embrace that those questions
, Uh, and then from there, we can
say, Well, then what kind of learning system
will lead to that? So, um, so
an example to me of remediation approach that I think
doesn't get us very far, but which is,
you know, very laudable. And and And I
think he said that this is made by an adorable
human being. Um, that that is the Khan
Academy. So because what it does is is reproduced
with all these limitations, the the blackboard. And
then look at this completely indecipherable chart. I mean
, this does not really tell me what this complicated
economic situation I think he's explained the Greek debt here
. Um, what I really need, I believe
is some kind of a simulation is some kind of
a drawing that gives me some sense of these values
and which values control which, uh, what the
progression. Over time, I need something that is
, uh that is much more, uh, integrated
, Uh, in conveying this system and these numbers
, uh, together, um, and that.
Then we'll tell me why Greece in some way as
well. Um, so for me, this is
, uh this problem is exemplified by the Intel project
that I worked on for learning statics, which I've
talked to some of you about where I where we
set about to make exercises that would help people to
formulate free body diagrams. And that would also help
to expand the diversity of people who came into engineering
by taking real world situations. So we we made
exercises which I invite you to look at it and
tell that to take that into you that are that
are very helpful. But they don't go far.
But they they surfaced the clumsiness of teaching engineering in
a way that separates statics deaf bodies and dynamics so
that you don't get to manipulate a model. And
when you're trying to learn what it is, what
are the forces, those invisible forces pressing against each
other? You want to get a sense of them
that are keeping up the building. You really need
a bottle in which the building could fall down.
But you But I was told, uh, really
one of the most important learning experiences of my life
by my colleagues in engineering that nothing could fall down
because that would be dynamics. Uh huh. Okay
, So and I understand that they worked very hard
to teach these subjects, but but I and I
think they had these colleagues had the right idea,
which was that it wasn't about plug and chug.
Uh, you know, pulling in numbers in an
equation that the students needed to learn to think like
an engineer, which means to get that moment of
abstraction where they saw the forces and could draw the
diagram. They understood the relation of the forces in
the diagram. Uh, but they did not see
that to do that. They had a whole palette
of possibilities for a much more powerful embodied. Learning
if they would reproduce the the behavior of the of
the experiential world where things fall out. Um,
and I wanted to just as an example of this
similar thing. And I think I'll make this the
last example because we're in this classroom. Now,
let's see which you're good. Um, one of
the first projects I worked on, actually, I
show this first, uh, in, uh,
was, uh, in? Uh, no.
An earlier project was towards the end of my time
at MIT that I were I worked mostly in humanities
at MIT, but I worked with one really visionary
, a physicist who had who was an astrophysicist and
who just was passionate about education. And he himself
described his own cognition as seeing the electromagnetic fields.
And it was his passion that he wanted to convey
this to his freshman students, who, of course
, just wanted to get out of freshman physics with
with a grade and their sanity. Uh, and
, uh and, uh, and he wanted just
to make animations of those electromagnetic fields such as this
. Okay, so this was the t o project
. It had another name later, but John Belcher
was his name. And you could find his work
going, John. So, uh, you see
, there were beautiful animations. Um, but as
soon as he made those animations in digital media,
it blew apart the whole course. And he wound
up in a classroom that looked like this, uh
, where the students faced one another and where they
worked on problems together and where he made manipulative exercises
instead of just illustrative, uh, passively watched animations
. Because as soon as you open up the subject
beyond the textbook, teaching you it and and and
as soon as you engage with the medium that has
these afford Ince's and we just know from all of
our other gadgets and all our other applications and the
rich world of games in particular that these machines can
do all these things. You want to do that
? So it is inherently challenging to move into this
fear. And that's why I'm hopeful, even about
things that I think are really depressing, like,
um, like MOOCs. Um, because I think
that even though they might be limited now, okay
, they don't have to Oh, God. To
think for a minute. Which side? This was
all. Where did I come in to get back
to the screen? No, I think I came
in over here. Uh huh. Please, little
cursor, please come back. Oh, here you
are. Okay, um, that just engaging with
the digital increases our level of expectation. It's sort
of like having that remote in your hand that all
of a sudden those commercials are just intolerable. A
similar project was, uh, Casablanca Project, which
I will. I'll just I think I can run
this. And so So this is a project that
, um uh that described how to teach film.
So we currently teach film Mhm with the film is
very separate from the teaching explanations. And we have
a documentary evidence of film such as outtakes, Um
, such as scripts such as production records that can
tell us an enormous amount about the social history of
, uh, of the country. Because so much
of that is involved in American film culture and about
the art of filmmaking, which is very collaborative and
involves a lot of choices. This is an outtake
from Casablanca. Um, this is, um,
uh, an annotation to a particular moment that calls
up the script. It shows where a line was
invented and where else it's used comparison of the pre
film script that they used to make the film.
All of these things should be apart. And just
an ordinary part of film study as well as the
tradition, the apprenticeship tradition by which, um,
Steven Spielberg comments on the end of the film and
and what reminds him of and what the technique means
to him. Um, we, uh we don't
have this because we have yet to have a information
architecture that has the authority for people to contribute to
it and to access the materials without violating copyright.
We could have that with an effort like Wikipedia,
Uh, and, uh, and iTunes together Say
where there's a way of accessing the copyright and there's
a way of organizing the information and that is the
future. So that when we look at other artifacts
, which is when we look at film study and
how we should always have in mind, this is
where things are going. We may not get there
tomorrow, but this is this is the way the
information, uh, afford Ince's are allowing us to
go. And these are the ways that will make
us smarter, uh, and, uh, more
communicative with one another. Okay, I'm gonna skip
this, which is an example of my e t
. V. You can invite me back to talk
about that. And I have been I have three
more slides. I'll be done. So Okay,
so here's the summer. So I think our task
is to extend human expressivity and knowledge. I think
we do that by calling on these conventions of media
by which we have organized our attention and that represents
centuries of cognitive and cultural development. Um, and
I think that the challenge in doing it is that
we are always very bound by the print cultural form
. So somebody hands somebody an article and says,
Look at this beautiful article written about avalanches. Nobody's
gonna say, Oh, I let me start from
scratch and do it. They're gonna say, Oh
, let me see what I can make that will
be sort of like reading a wonderful article and that
only uses a scroll bar. And here's this latest
little Java script Uh uh, Plug in that I
could use that will make it easy for me to
do that. And, um but that doesn't really
lead us forward, but But it does show us
what? How disappointed we are in a good way
so that we can think about what is what?
How do we get beyond the remediation version? How
do we get beyond what we can currently do with
a proprietary move, For instance, so and how
do we respond to the situation? We could lament
and, you know, panic. It's always,
uh, entertaining. We could get into the the
legacy formats, or we could do what Jenna Marie
tells you to do, which is to try hard
to join the collective effort of exploiting these. Afford
Ince's by radically rethinking the activity and building a new
vocabulary of conventions that work to maximize the digital medium
. Uh, and, uh, So I would
say that even if you're not involved directly in design
, that we're all involved in the disruptions caused by
the intervention of the digital. So it's important for
all of us to reserve a part of our mind
where we see this larger view of what the medium
can do and where we embrace it, because we
can see the parts of it that are doing this
important cultural job of widening the circle of shared attention
, increasing empathy and understanding and just making us more
deeply human. So thank you very much for your
attention on a Friday afternoon. I'm Yeah. So
if anybody wants to leave, please do Uh huh
questions Mhm. Obtain those. And then we do
have a I'll be fine as well. Are there
mhm? Everybody agrees with me, so no problem
. Yeah, right. Have thought you so like
you don't stop. Culture doesn't stop. You keep
refining and adapting everything that guys can be made a
point. Yeah, by design. Oh, do
I think that you can reproduce the physical world in
the digital meat. Now, I don't I don't
believe that. But I think that you can serve
needs with the digital media. I'm just like I
don't think that, um, so that, um
you can for, you know, fall into a
book and then that replaces the experiential world. But
I think it's a form of representation, like a
book and that it, um it has a Ford
Ince's that we that we judge by whether they make
us, uh, stronger and happier and more connected
in in our actual lived, you know, inhabited
bodies. Does that help? Yeah. Here.
I wonder if you could lecture, played a game
? Oh, I have a lot to say about
that. Let's see if I can see a little
bit about it. Um, so a standard way
of thinking about it is that games are is play
with rules and play is also important. Play animal
. Other species play play means doing things that are
not directly involved in survival. For for the pleasure
of it, um, and social play often means
sharing that pleasure. As with chimps, it it
often there's often, uh, adaptive, um and
, uh, hierarchical issues involved and uh, and
, um, that are not and bonding issues.
So play has a really important role. It also
I guess the simplest way to think about play and
creativity is it keeps alive. A repertoire of creative
responses that is separate from our programmed responses are wrote
instinctual knee jerk response. Um, and so our
ability for symbolic representation, um, and our ability
, uh, for playfulness is a way of keeping
alive that larger repertoire of responses drift. Of course
, they the critique of game destroys. Exactly.
Yeah. Young man plugged into his computer with his
back to the family, living in a fantasy world
. No doing this. It's not the same.
Well, you know, my mother felt the same
way about reading a book. I mean, families
don't like anybody turning it back, but that doesn't
mean that what they're doing is intrinsically less valuable.
Uh, so though I recognize what you're talking about
, that that can be, uh, you know
, uh, unproductive ways of dealing with media.
But I don't think I think that people use,
uh, other media. They use books in unproductive
ways as well for reinforcing wrote behaviors for refusing to
engage and grow. Uh, But I don't think
that there's a hierarchy of media by which games are
lower at all. And I think that games do
organize our attention and actually even a game that you're
playing against the computer. I think we have a
cultural project now of developing the rituals of shared attention
with machines, and that is going to help us
cognitively. And so I think that games expand the
repertoire, the cognitive repertoire. Um so, yeah
, so I I don't worry about people playing games
too much. Two quick announced before give our his
favorite restaurant work was I first need to do something
I didn't do at the beginning. But I want
to do now is just to give special thanks to
the people in the library who have helped this event
be what it is today. Think of Lindland,
who was honored librarian Man, I'm here just in
the last year to ramp up our awareness. All
these possible played a great part in helping to work
in thank you for like to thank treats Walters,
who is here today behind the camera but has played
a huge role in being able to get the message
out about these kinds of programs work, convention with
location with the library and talk about community organization.
I've never been anyone with any more energy to get
community together. That Therese Walter so really very grateful
for all you've got to help us publicize this event
and all the active done and a special thanks to
a partner in crime. I could not have ordered
one from a catalog and chemicals, but anyone better
? Uh, Brian Matthews, who is not only
the ubiquitous librarian, blogging for The Chronicle of higher
education and trying very hard to re mediate that particular
internal I think, but also someone who is associate
director for the center. All right, a great
deal to help push our horizons out. He's one
of the designers of this very room, and someone
who's been very vigilant about spotting entrepreneurial possibilities for progress
are if you just joined me. First of all
, in taking the folks with the library melted,
we got our snow room for us at the last
minute, and we have Good afternoon. Thank me
. Join me. One more. Thank you,
Janet Murray, for being here. Thank you.