Research
From Digital Lyceum Wiki
Contents |
Choreography of Attention
We live in a society where the inability to focus attention is labeled pathological, where millions of young people are diagnosed and treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) each year, and where the ability to focus one’s attention is tantamount to proper socialization. As agents of socialization, the onus of responsibility has long rested on educational institutions to combat the epidemic of wandering minds and diminishing attention spans. Indeed, with the recent clinical classification of ADHD, success or failure at this task can now be evaluated through measurable diagnoses. The pathological designation of ADHD provides a clear backdrop against which educational institutions and other social agencies define and manufacture attention as a property of singular focus. As a result, the possibility of a nuanced appreciation of the complex structure of attention is near absent in the contemporary discourse about knowledge acquisition and modern subjectivity.
Distraction and attention go hand-in-hand. The very same new technologies and landscapes that cultivate a state of distraction are themselves directed simultaneously toward the cultivation of attention. Walking through Times Square the mind is distracted by multiple simultaneous stimuli, each of which is vying for our attention — the moving images, the street vendors, and the billboards.
Now consider the classroom.
Laptops and wireless devices are increasingly present in academic settings. But rather than assuming that their presence "takes away" from an established order of attention, they are capable of reconfiguring that order in ways that might allow for new methods of engagement. In the best case scenario, networked technologies redirects the attention of individual audience members from a single stream of speech to the presence of other audience members interacting with a global network of ideas. In the absence of strong conventions for shaping the conduct of these events, the presence of the network and multiple channels for interaction could, indeed, prove highly disorienting. For this reason, one must make a series of deliberate choices about how to incorporate technologies into the educational context and how to introduce these channels of communication to the participants. If properly choreographed, these channels, just like the organization of chairs and podiums in a lecture hall, can augment the live event in new and powerful ways. Where this intentional choreography is present, the mind wanders from the "focal event", but does so purposively, with guidance from the organizers, the tools, the speakers, and the other audience members. Much as the controlled burning of a forest enables safe and healthy growth of an ecosystem, controlled distraction enables participants to experience richer, multimodal relations without wandering outside the space(s) of the event.
Let's bring the backchannels to the front.
The Digital Lyceum Application
The Digital Lyceum is a web-based tool for the creation and management of digital backchannels during live academic contexts. Whether it’s a large classroom or an academic conference, the Digital Lyceum is designed for two purposes: 1) to enable better and more nuanced discussion; and 2) to archive that discussion to enable a sustained academic discourse that puts the lecture and conference on par with the book and article. The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The prototype application can be found at www.digitallyceum.org. The website includes a blog, a section for research, resources, and a way to contact the designers. The blog includes current thinking on digital backchannels and their use in humanities education. The research section includes a wiki with case studies, a list of similar projects and organizations, and an ongoing list of best practices across academic and professional disciplines. The resources section will include a detailed description of software and hardware tools that are useful for staging this kind of academic event.
Now let’s explore the tool itself.
Users create events. In this case, we have created an instance for the new media consortium conference. Once an event is created, users can create a new session, edit current session, or remove session from the schedule.
Users can also explore past events. The Mixed Realities Symposium has already taken place. But all the conversation that took place during that symposium is still available in the myriad widgets that the Digital Lyceum tool brings together. Here’s the video of the speakers. Here are the slides that the speakers displayed. Users of the system can navigate through the slides at their own pace or align the slides to correlate with the video. This is a list of users that were online at the time of the event. This is where users keep their personal notes. Or where they can access others’ notes who choose to make theirs available. This is where users ask questions during the event. Keep in mind, everything we’re looking at here is connected to an event time code and is in sync with the video. As the video proceeds, we see the questions appear just as they did during the event. This is a simple chat tool. It provides yet another way for users to connect with each other. Users can create RSS feeds. And they can review a live image feed from Flickr. Finally, they can share links. Links submitted to this widget connect to the user’s delicious.com account.
The display of the widgets is completely flexible to accommodate the user’s needs. The user can move them around the screen in their own configuration. Or select from pre-established configurations.
Because archived events are connected to time codes, users can scrub through the archive looking for certain comments or images.
The Digital Lyceum does not collect static documents; it creates time-based artifacts of live conversations. The steadfast movement towards digital culture has prompted intense debates amongst humanities scholars about the future of the book, the classroom, the archive and the library. It is now time to consider the future of attention and how best to take advantage of the new attentional economy and its corresponding rules of academic engagement. The endless ephemera produced through digital tools might just be the cornerstone of the future of research, teaching and learning.
Organization
One reason to use a term like Augmented Place is that our concern is with the specificity of spatial identification (or place) and the possible benefits of computer mediated interactions. This is more specific and perhaps more productive. On the other hand, it would be working outside established terminology and may in fact work against us.
Then I began to think what we can offer to this much wider dialogue, considering we are not computer scientists and engineers. Approaching this work from a very practical level, we ask: how can technology enhance specific tasks. Hub2 seeks to explore how technology can specifically lead to more defined and sustainable forms of civic engagement. Digital Lyceum asks something similar on a smaller scale. Instead of the city or neighborhood, it seeks to explore how technology can create persistent audience engagement and incentives to participate in typically unidirectional forums.
Then perhaps it makes sense to focus our mission as follows: Mixed Reality Art and Activism Lab (MRAAL), or to continue with a name like C-sap and specify our mission as: the exploration of new technologies in the production of placed-based art and community.
Advisory Committee Meeting
Case Studies
Article Ideas
- "The Presence of Distraction: Back-channels and Live Events"
- "Orchestrating Mixed Reality: A how-to guide for staging live events" for Digital Humanities Quarterly
Related Organizations / Projects
Media Grid : Immersive Education
Research
Examples
Resource Guide/Toolkit
Best Practices
Conferences
International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
References
"Augmented Reality for Collaborative and Ubiquitous Computing." Studierstube Augmented Reality Project. 29 Nov.-Dec. 2007. Vienna University of Technology. 29 Nov. 2007.
- A Vienna University of Technology project focused on researching and developing devices, frameworks, systems, programs, and applications for augmenting reality.
Billinghurst, Mark, and Hirokazu Kato. "Collaborative Augmented Reality." Communications of the ACM 45.7 (2002): 64-70. 29 Nov. 2007.
- Notes that most work on augmented reality has focused on changing a single person’s interactions with her environment. This paper explores the potential benefits of collaboration in augmented reality and some possible interfaces.
Billinghurst, Mark, S Hayes, A Gupta, Y Sannohe, H Kato, and K Kiyokawa. Communication Behaviors of Co-Located Users in Collaborative AR Interfaces. ISMAR, 2002. 29 Nov. 2007.
- Discusses two experiments performed to learn about how people communicate within augmented reality. The two main topics it addresses are the importance of non-verbal communication and that of spatial relationships.
Blascovich, Jim. "Social Influence with Immersive Virtual Environments," {http://tinyurl.com/ynp66m The Social Life of Avatars]. 2002, pp 127-144.
- In this passage Jim Blascovich talks about social influence in Immersive Virtual Environments and follows along a more sociological study than anything else. Using terms, graphs, and empirical data he aims to show the factors that effect social influence and how even in virtual worlds people aim to do things that are socially good and acceptable. His research found that even with avatars, people seek assessment from others for their good or bad deeds, just like in real life.
Childress, M. & Braswell, R. (August 2006). Using Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games for Online Learning. Distance Education, 27(2). Retrieved November 20, 2007, from Academic Search Premier database.
- This article addresses the use of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game to foster communication and interaction and to facilitate cooperative learning in an online course. The authors delineate the definition and history of massively multiplayer online games and describe current uses of MMORPGs in education, including their experiences with constructing and using the MMORPG Second Life
Crang, Mike. 1999. Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space & Relations. New York: Routledge.
- This book explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed and offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments.
Rieser, Martin and Andrea Zapp. 2002. The New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. London: BFI Pub.
- The New Screen Media proposes critical tools for discussing the inner design and the immersive effects of the new media forms and their social, political and cultural context. Together with a discussion of how these new stories relate to issues of identity and the body this book explores differing creative platforms such as the Internet and Media Installation, and how they affect their users and how narrative is created and developed.
Gero, J., M.L. Maher, Z. Bilda. D. Merchant, L. Candy, and K. Namprempree. "Studying Collaborative Design in High Bandwidth Virtual Environments." Queensland University of Technology, Australia Retrieved November 21, 2007 ().
- The authors at the University of Sydney present their findings from a study involving high-bandwidth collaborative design processes across both physical and virtual spaces. The results of video data captured across both spaces reveal the nature of group collaboration including the various types of communication methods employed. Furthermore, the authors recommend that a single software platform with multiple video channels shouldbe considered to best aid distributed group work online.
Gordon, Eric, Gene Koo. “Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement.” Unpublished. 29 Nov 2007
- The basis for the Hub2 project discusses a project to use Second Life in order to create meaningful shared experiences by extending placeworlds into the virtual.
Harry, Drew. The Projects
Reitmayr, Gerhard, and Dieter Schmalstieg. Scalable Techniques for Collaborative Outdoor Augmented Reality. ISMAR, 2004. 29 Nov. 2007.
- Addresses the problem of scalability in very large 3d augmented environments.
Reitmayr, Gerhard, Chris Chiu, Alexander Kusternig, Michael Kusternig, and Hannes Witzmann. IOrb - Unifying Command and 3D Input for Mobile Augmented Reality. IEEE VR 2005 Workshop on New Directions in 3D User Interfaces, 2005, Vienna University of Technology. 29 Nov. 2007
- Details of a prototype spherical interaction to help augmented reality interface get over 2D challenges.
Ryu, Semi. "Ritualizing Interactive Media: From Motivation to Activation." Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 2005.
- This paper tries to explain the essential value of interactive media by understanding the complex interactive mechanism of human experience. In the article, the author defines 'the form of ritual', to explain the fundamental human process of interaction and becoming, and also, to find the necessary potential of interactive media. Author Semi Ryu sees interactive technology as an ongoing expression of human desire, "its essential value would be found in understanding human beings, nature and cosmos. Revealing its hidden essence, historical presence and spiritual value will be the next paradigm of interactive art."
Wallace, Mark. "The Future of You." PC World, November, 2006.
- This article takes a look at the future of virtual reality. Wallace discusses how Three-dimensional virtual worlds like Second Life are becoming a very real component of the lives of people, and over the next ten years they will begin to shape the way people work, play and define their identities. Second Life is looked at as a new means of human expression. The collision between the virtual world and data, the metaverse is also looked at.
Yee, Nick. "The unbearable likeness of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments." CyberPsychology & Behavior, February 2007, p. 115-121.
- Every day, millions of users interact in real-time via avatars in online environments, such as massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These online environments could potentially be unique research platforms for the social sciences and clinical therapy, but it is crucial to first establish that social behavior and norms in virtual environments are comparable to those in the physical world. In an observational study of Second Life, a virtual community, we collected data from avatars in order to explore whether social norms of gender, interpersonal distance (IPD), and eye gaze transfer into virtual environments even though the modality of movement is entirely different (i.e., via keyboard and mouse as opposed to eyes and legs). Our results showed that established findings of IPD and eye gaze transfer into virtual environments: (1) male-male dyads have larger IPDs than female-female dyads, (2) male-male dyads maintain less eye contact than female-female dyads, and (3) decreases in IPD are compensated with gaze avoidance as predicted by the Equilibrium Theory. We discuss implications for users of online games as well as for social scientists who seek to conduct research in virtual environments.
Young, Jeffrey R. (August 16, 2007) "Colleges are Building in Second Life, but is Anyone Visiting?" Retrieved November 18, 2007.
- An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, this piece discusses the growing number of school sponsored spaces in SL. It talks about Wired editor Chris Anderson and his switch from being a supporter of SL to a skeptic, and how his change of opinion may alter schools and their support of the space. Are the investments that schools have made in their SL spaces worth it in terms of usefulness and number of visitors?
