Words versus pictures Video versus books

Words versus picturesVideo versus books

Professor Richard Harper Microsoft Research Cambridge, England

How to approach the idea that learning is altering……

Isn’t the visual obviously

better than the textual?

I am not an expert on learning. What I am an expert on is:

what gets invented by computing and telecommunications companies and why

I think something can learnt from reflecting on this ‘what’ and ‘why’

There is often a rush to easy similes

And, following from that,an easy slip into other

ideas

And these can lead you away from where you thought you wanted to be

a biographic experience…that can help me illustrate temptations….

in my world an ethnography of a life….

twenty years ago: (was it that long ago?)

(and then I will talk about something recently done)

Xerox PARC: A question: what is (or, how is it done)

knowledge work?

work? (what’s that?)shared editors….

But text…was not enough….we wanted to offer ‘more’

We thought something richer would enable work:

our media space

To see others, to ‘be’ with themThe problem of knowledge work is to bring bodies together

We converted our topic, knowledge work, into another topic,communication,

and then that led us to think of bodies separated by space –

not knowledge

And this led us to other problems in turn

Looking wasn’t symmetricLooking past, looking away‘Hey, look at me!’The invention of ‘video tunnels’

Fitting ‘lookings’ togetherParallax and perceptual

symmetry

now (the past two or three years): (has my world altered so little?)

now the cameras are smallernow the distance between the one

being looked at and the one doing the

looking is smaller

But the goal is (still) to see into each other’s eyes

lookings are one element but there are also other actions

…….other interactions

C-Slate: Touching documents(Fitting touchestogether)

C-Slate: Touching documents(Fitting touchestogether)

so in this view what is knowledge?

No – that is lost from viewRather, what is communication is the topic:

why is it done?

Communication is… a geographical fitting of

lookings and touchingsa mechanical fitting of

bodies to communications acts

as if it’s a biomechanical jigsaw puzzle

What am I suggesting?

That we came to treat ‘knowledge’ as bound up withthe physical location of bodies

We came to think that ‘understanding’ could be attained by being together

in the digitally enabledhere and now

Versions of this view is common

It often leads technology organisations to

develop things which fight distance: they seek to attack communications delays

they try and make messaging ‘instant and real time’

Who needs email when you can teleconference?

Google wave

And then think of time – how to solve ‘it’ –

make everything instantTime is like a property of

communication

what technologies?

BROWSERS

How are search engines designed?

Current studies

Kids and young people

How do they communicate?Won’t they Skype

(if it’s easy and especially if it’s free?)

Some data from interviewsThey will have multiple concurrent IM sessions (18 in one instance!)

Plus FacebookSometimes Flickr

But only occasionally video

‘I don’t want to see. I want to write because I want to get it right’

How to explain this?It’s a kind of time travel

‘well you can go back to the beginning and say it again whereas

you can’t undo what you say’

Learning?Communication?

Why IM – because your words go when the session ends

Why Facebook - because what you post always stays thereWhy Skype – when looking says something

specialA

Dionysian tribalism?

The shared editors at Xerox did get used…but not for work (so what for?)

I have written about this in relation to communications technology. People don’t behave as technology companies expect. People leverage diversity of channels to create a texture, with diverse acts of expression bind people together in a complex, delicate weave

So, back to our beginning:

the visual versus the textual

Youtube versus MIT Press

In the case of learning?What Remington Wrought

The problem is that the views of technology companies on this topic might not help you

Those views might be based on different starting places, places that sometimes lead to interesting technologies but sometimes also turn around odd views about the human ‘users’

What is knowledge gets replaced by an odd idea about communication

It’s really a question of when is the visual better

and when is text better

What, why, when. Then the answer to how

Who answers that?

Technology organisations see the world and the people in it oddly

Don’t trust in us!Trust in your own expertise!

You tell us what it is to educate and what are the tools

you needWe are the ones who need an education

Thank you