Posts Tagged ‘Sherry Turkle’

Hamlet on the HoloDeck

Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. Free Press.
https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/qoo6di/alma990011592830104318
Since 1992 I have been teaching a course on how to write electronics section. My students include freshman, writing majors, and media lab graduate students.
As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellspring Safari time, causing the in animate circuits to sync with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here in about we mean to one another.
p. 12 A New Medium of Storytelling
p. 18 Aldous Huxley Brave New World
(more on it here https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huxley)
Set 600 years from now, describes a society that science has dehumanized by eliminating love, parenthood, and the family in favor of generating engineering, test tube delivery, and state indoctrination. Books are banned, and science has come up with a substitute form of storytelling to delete the masses.
p. 20 Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
p. 22 this accounts of a digital dystopia but eroticize and demonize the computer. Cyberpunks surfers are like Cowboys on the new frontier motorcycle hoodlums with a joystick in their hand instead of a motorcycle between their legs. They are outlaw pirates on an endless voyage of exploration throughout the virtual world riding and plundering among the invisible data hoards of the world in many states by the stronger pirate parents who reach in and reprogram their minds.
p. 22 William Gibson Neurmancer
p. 28 The Harbinger on the the Holodeck
The technical in economic cultivation of this freestyle new medium of communication has led to several new varieties of narrative entertainment. This new storytelling formats very from the shoot them up video game in the virtual dungeons of Internet role-playing games to the post modern literary hypertext. This wide range of narrative art holds the promise of a new medium of expression that is S varied SD printed book or the movie picture.
Books printed before 1501 or cold incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that this books are the work of a technology still in its infancy.
The garish video games in tangled websites of the current digital environment or part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.
p. 29 now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer. We can see how 20th century novels, films, and please have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling. We therefore have to start our survey of the harbingers of the holiday back with a look at multiform stories, that is, linear narrative straining against the boundary of pre-digital media like a two dimensional picture trying to burst of its frame.
p. 30 The multiform story
Frank Capra’s It’s a wonderful life
p. 34 Robert Zemeskis Back to the Future
p. 35 Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day
Multi forms stories often reflect different points of view of the same event.  p. 37 Kurosawa Rashomon, the same crime is narrated by four different people: a rape victim; her husband, who is murdered; the bandit who attacked them; and a bystander.
p. 37 Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars
p. 37 Multi form narrative attempts to give a simultaneous form to this possibilities, to allow us to hold in our minds at the same time multiple contradictory alternatives.
p. 38  active audience
When the writer expands the story to include multiple possibilities, the reader assumes a more active role.
p. 40 although television viewers have long been accused of being less active engaged in readers or theatergoers, research on thin culture provides considerable evidence that viewers actively appropriate the stories of their favorite series. In addition to sharing critical commentary and gossip, fans create their own stories by taking characters and situations from the series and developing them in ways closer to their own concerns.
p. 42 role playing games or theatrical in a non-traditional but thrilling way. Players are both actors and audience for one another, and events the purple tree often have the media seat of personal experience.
p. 43 Live theater has been incorporating the same qualities of spontaneity and audience involvement for some time.
p. 43 MUDs have allowed distant players on the Internet to share a common virtual space in which they can chat with one another in real time. A the social psychologist Sherry Turkle has persuasively demonstrated, mods are intensely “evocative” environments for fantasy play that allow people to create and sustain elaborate fictional personas.
p. 44 movies three dimensions
p. 51 dramatic storytelling in electronic games
p. 55 story webs
p. 59 computer scientist as storytellers
p. 65 Chapter 3 From Additive to Expressive Form
beyond multimedia
Sept 28, 1895 Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station
p. 66 photoplays
p. 67 one of the lessons we can learn from the history of film is that additive formulations like photo play or the contemporary catshall ‘multimedia” or a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and it is still depending on the format derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power. Today the derivative mindset is apparent in the conception of cyber space is the place to view “pages” of print or “clips” of moving video end of cedar rooms is offering “extended books.”
p. 60 ELIZA, 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum
p. 71 the four essential properties of digital environments
Digital environments are procedural
Digital environments are participatory
Digital environments are spacial
Digital environments are encyclopedic
p. 90 Digital structures of complexity
p. 95 part to the aesthetics of the medium
chapter 4 immersion
definition
The experience of being transported to an elaborate please simulator please it’s pleasurable in itself regarding of the fantasy contact. we Refer to this experience as immersion. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different is water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.
p/ 99 entering the enchanted place
my note: ghost in the machine
The computer itself, even without any fantasy content, is an enchanted object. Sometimes it can act like an autonomous, animate being, sensing it’s environment in carrying out internally generated processes, yet it can also seem like an extension of our own consciousness, capturing our words through the keyboard in displaying them on the screen as fast as we can thank them.
p. 110 the active creation of belief
In digital environments we have new opportunities to practice this active creation of belief. For instance, in an interactive video program set in Paris that may research group designed in the 1980s for language learners, we included a working telephone, represented by a photograph of a phone who’s keypad could be clicked on .
p. 112 structuring participation with a mask .
p. 119 regulating arousal According to Winnicott, “the pleasurable element in playing Carris whit eight employee Kasian that the instructional a razzle is not excessive”; that is, the object of the imaginary world should not be too enticing, scary, or real let the immersive trance be broken. This is true in any medium. If a horror movie is too frightening, we cover our eyes or turn away from the screen.
p. 126 chapter Agency
Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double click on a file and seat open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. However, we do not usually expect to experience agency within a narrative environment.
p. 129 the pleasures of navigation
One form of agency not dependent on the game structure yet characteristic of digital environment is spatial navigation. The ability to move through virtual landscapes can be pleasurable in itself, independent of the content of the spaces.
p. 130 the story of the maze
the adventure maze embodies a classic fair-tale narrative of danger and salvation. as a format for electronic narrative, the maze is a more active version of the immersive visit (chapter 4).
p. 134 Giving Shape to Anxiety
p. 137 The Journey Story and the Pleasure of Problem Solving
p. 140 Games into Stories
p. 142 Games as Symbolic Dramas

Sherry Turkle 2016 book

Sherry Turkle Says There’s a Wrong Way to Flip a Classroom

By Jeffrey R. Young     Oct 13, 2016

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-10-13-sherry-turkle-says-there-s-a-wrong-way-to-flip-a-classroom

“Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,

It’s much more likely that students will get lit up by learning if they come in for office hours and they present a very imperfect argument and the teacher says, the mentor says, that’s not really right. That’s not really where it should be, but come back again. Come back here again. I’ll be here for you again.

So many faculty are kind of going in the opposite direction or saying we’re putting things online and you can take the course online.

definition flipped classroom
In a flipped classroom the idea is the students are learning the technical material at home and then the classroom time is designed to be about discussion of the material and questions about the material.
part of the narrative of a flipped classroom is that it’s somehow responding to a crisis of a deadened classroom instead of an enlivened classroom and that isn’t necessarily true.

an open laptop or an open iPad opens up a kind of cone of silence and attentional disarray around itself because students’ attention has sort of been taken by the open device.

We’re not using the technology really the way we should. And I think that education is a tough case because so much has been pitched and so much has been sold. Schools have been told that this is the future, and parents are told that this is the future. Actually, it’s not clear, it’s not clear how much of this is the future and how much some of this is just our feeling

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more on Sherry Turkle in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=turkle

Digital Minimalism

‘Digital Minimalism’: How To Hang Up On Your Phone Addiction

February 07, 2019 Jeremy Hobson Serena McMahon

Cal Newport, author of the new book “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” and an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, argues that phone use is getting in the way of too much of our lives.

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more on contemplative computing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative+computing

 

digital text is changing

Digital Text is Changing How Kids Read—Just Not in the Way That You Think

Holly Korbey, Aug 21, 2018

According to San Jose State University researcher Ziming Lu, this is typical “screen-based reading behavior,” with more time spent browsing, scanning and skimming than in-depth reading. As reading experiences move online, experts have been exploring how reading from a screen may be changing our brains. Reading expert Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid, has voiced concerns that digital reading will negatively affect the brain’s ability to read deeply for sophisticated understanding, something that Nicholas Carr also explored in his book, The Shallows. Teachers are trying to steer students toward digital reading strategies that practice deep reading, and nine out of ten parents say that having their children read paper books is important to them.

“Digital reading is good in some ways, and bad in others,” he said: in other words, it’s complicated.

According to Julie Coiro, a reading researcher at the University of Rhode Island, moving from digital to paper and back again is only a piece of the attention puzzle: the larger and more pressing issue is how reading online is taxing kids’ attention. Online reading, Coiro noticed, complicates the comprehension process “a million-fold.”

Each time a student reads online content, Coiro said, they are faced with almost limitless input and decisions, including images, video and multiple hyperlinks that lead to even more information. As kids navigate a website, they must constantly ask themselves: is this the information I’m looking for?

digital cleanse

 

intelligent chatbots

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/14/magazine/tech-design-ai-chatbot.html

TWO YEARS AGO, Alison Darcy built a robot to help out the depressed. As a clinical research psychologist at Stanford University, she knew that one powerful way to help people suffering from depression or anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T. It’s a form of treatment in which a therapist teaches patients simple techniques that help them break negative patterns of thinking.

In a study with 70 young adults, Darcy found that after two weeks of interacting with the bot, the test subjects had lower incidences of depression and anxiety. They were impressed, and even touched, by the software’s attentiveness.

Many tell Darcy that it’s easier to talk to a bot than a human; they don’t feel judged.

Darcy argues this is a glimpse of our rapidly arriving future, where talking software is increasingly able to help us manage our emotions. There will be A.I.s that detect our feelings, possibly better than we can. “I think you’ll see robots for weight loss, and robots for being more effective communicators,” she says. It may feel odd at first

RECENT HISTORY HAS seen a rapid change in at least one human attitude toward machines: We’ve grown accustomed to talking to them. Millions now tell Alexa or Siri or Google Assistant to play music, take memos, put something on their calendar or tell a terrible joke.

One reason botmakers are embracing artificiality is that the Turing Test turns out to be incredibly difficult to pass. Human conversation is full of idioms, metaphors and implied knowledge: Recognizing that the expression “It’s raining cats and dogs” isn’t actually about cats and dogs, for example, surpasses the reach of chatbots.

Conversational bots thus could bring on a new wave of unemployment — or “readjustment,” to use the bloodless term of economics. Service workers, sales agents, telemarketers — it’s not hard to imagine how millions of jobs that require social interaction, whether on the phone or online, could eventually be eliminated by code.

One person who bought a Jibo was Erin Partridge, an art therapist in Alameda, Calif., who works with the elderly. When she took Jibo on visits, her patients loved it.

For some technology critics, including Sherry Turkle, who does research on the psychology of tech at M.I.T., this raises ethical concerns. “People are hard-wired with sort of Darwinian vulnerabilities, Darwinian buttons,” she told me. “And these Darwinian buttons are pushed by this technology.” That is, programmers are manipulating our emotions when they create objects that inquire after our needs.

The precursor to today’s bots, Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, was created at M.I.T. in 1966. ELIZA was a pretty crude set of prompts, but by simply asking people about their feelings, it drew them into deep conversations.

educational technology

The Overselling of Education Technology

By Alfie Kohn     Mar 16, 2016

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-03-16-the-overselling-of-education-technology

my response to ed tech is “It depends.”

Some people seem to be drawn to technology for its own sake—because it’s cool.

Other people, particularly politicians, defend technology on the grounds that it will keep our students “competitive in the global economy.”

But the rationale that I find most disturbing—despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it’s rarely made explicit—is the idea that technology will increase our efficiency…at teaching the same way that children have been taught for a very long time. Perhaps it hasn’t escaped your notice that ed tech is passionately embraced by very traditional schools: Their institutional pulse quickens over whatever is cutting-edge: instruction that’s blended, flipped, digitally personalized.

We can’t answer the question “Is tech useful in schools?” until we’ve grappled with a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?”

Tarting up a lecture with a SmartBoard, loading a textbook on an iPad, looking up facts online, rehearsing skills with an “adaptive learning system,” writing answers to the teacher’s (or workbook’s) questions and uploading them to Google Docs—these are examples of how technology may make the process a bit more efficient or less dreary but does nothing to challenge the outdated pedagogy. To the contrary: These are shiny things that distract us from rethinking our approach to learning and reassure us that we’re already being innovative.

putting grades online (thereby increasing their salience and their damaging effects), using computers to administer tests and score essays, and setting up “embedded” assessment that’s marketed as “competency-based.” (If your instinct is to ask “What sort of competency? Isn’t that just warmed-over behaviorism?”

But as I argued not long ago, we shouldn’t confuse personalized learning with personal learning. The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.a recent review found that studies of tech-based personalized instruction “show mixed results ranging from modest impacts to no impact” – despite the fact that it’s remarkably expensive.

 an article in Education Week, “a host of national and regional surveys suggest that teachers are far more likely to use tech to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning.”

OECD reportednegative outcomes when students spent a lot of time using computers, while Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) concluded that online charter schools were basically a disaster.

Larry Cuban, Sherry Turkle, Gary Stager, and Will Richardson.

Emily Talmage points out, uncannily aligned with the wish list of the Digital Learning Council, a group consisting largely of conservative advocacy groups and foundations, and corporations with a financial interest in promoting ed tech.

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more on educational technology in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=educational+technology

students and social media

Students and Social Media: How Much is Too Much?

THURSDAY, MARCH 15, 2018 | 1:00 PM CENTRAL | 60 MINUTES

Instant communication with one another (and the world) has tremendous benefits. At the same time, it has serious drawbacks that tend to offset those advantages. The evidence is mounting that students’ overreliance on their cherished devices is interfering with their critical thinking and problem-solving skills, ultimately impacting their emotional health, mental health, and academic performance.

How can your institution assist students in the digitally-obsessed information age?

Register today for the Magna Online Seminar, Students and Social Media: How Much is Too Much?, presented by Aaron Hughey, EdD. You’ll explore ways to develop and implement a blueprint for effectively assisting students who are experiencing emotional and mental challenges due to their overindulgence in social media.

BENEFITS

Through the evidence-based best practices and insights gleaned through this seminar, you’ll be able to respond more effectively to the needs of students who are experiencing emotional and mental health challenges due to their overinvolvement with social media.

LEARNING GOALS

Upon completion of this seminar, you’ll be able to:

  • Understand how today’s students are qualitatively different from their predecessors 15-20 years ago
  • Articulate why technology has both benefits and challenges
  • Describe the prevalence of emotional and mental issues among today’s college students
  • Describe the emerging relationship between overinvolvement with social media and emotional issues
  • Educate students, faculty, staff, and student affairs professionals regarding social media and how overinvolvement can precipitate stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicide and violence
  • Recognize basic symptomology and warning signs associated with overinvolvement with social media, as well as response techniques

TOPICS COVERED

  • Characteristics of today’s college students and the similarities/differences from previous generations
  • How technology has affected the way students learn
  • Emotional and mental issues among today’s college student population
  • The increase in addiction disorders in today’s college students
  • Overinvolvement with social media and emotional and mental health issues
  • Social media and stress, anxiety, depression, violence, and suicide
  • Emotional states and their connection to social media
  • Symptomology and warning signs
  • Intervention techniques

AUDIENCE

This seminar is designed for anyone at any institution who is responsible for the mental and emotional well-being of college students, especially faculty, administrators, and staff of departments that provide direct services to students, including college counseling centers, student health centers, career and academic advising services, housing and residence hall professionals and paraprofessionals, student activities and organizations, academic support services, and programs and services for at-risk students.

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more on social media and students in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media+students

smartphone detox

Smartphone Detox: How To Power Down In A Wired World

February 12, 20185:03 AM ET

says David Greenfield, a psychologist and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut:When we hear a ding or little ditty alerting us to a new text, email or Facebook post, cells in our brains likely release dopamine — one of the chemical transmitters in the brain’s reward circuitry. That dopamine makes us feel pleasure

“It’s a spectrum disorder,” says Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, who studies addiction. “There are mild, moderate and extreme forms.” And for many people, there’s no problem at all.

Signs you might be experiencing problematic use, Lembke says, include these:

  • Interacting with the device keeps you up late or otherwise interferes with your sleep.
  • It reduces the time you have to be with friends or family.
  • It interferes with your ability to finish work or homework.
  • It causes you to be rude, even subconsciously. “For instance,” Lembke asks, “are you in the middle of having a conversation with someone and just dropping down and scrolling through your phone?” That’s a bad sign.
  • It’s squelching your creativity. “I think that’s really what people don’t realize with their smartphone usage,” Lembke says. “It can really deprive you of a kind of seamless flow of creative thought that generates from your own brain.”

Consider a digital detox one day a week

Tiffany Shlain, a San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker, and her family power down all their devices every Friday evening, for a 24-hour period.

“It’s something we look forward to each week,” Shlain says. She and her husband, Ken Goldberg, a professor in the field of robotics at the University of California, Berkeley, are very tech savvy.

A recent study of high school students, published in the journal Emotion, found that too much time spent on digital devices is linked to lower self-esteem and a decrease in well-being.

 

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more on contemplative computing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative+computing

Qi Gong

Dr. Jerry Wellik will lead
When: every Monday
Where: in Atwood’s Maple Room
FREE Qi Gong sessions. Here is more info: https://www.springforestqigong.com/

Who: Faculty, staff, students and all community members are welcome.

Please consider also introducing in your classes to contemplative computing. Here is more information:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative+computing

You may have heard the names of
David Levy (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/06/01/mindful-tech/ )

Dan Barberzat (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2013/11/05/getting-unplugged/ )
and, naturally,
Sherry Turkle

Please let us know, if you need more information, regarding the well-being of you and your students in relation to technology.

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