Task 14: Final reflections

What I liked about the course:

• The idea of studying human interactivity through activity theory
• Receiving comments from Terje after every task (her responsible feeling for the course)
• Getting familiar with some new tools

What I did not like:

• The course did not have a clear plan
• The course was more theoretical rather than practical (how to apply activity theory into practice!)
• Tight deadlines
• Tasks were not practically useful (for example, summarizing an article!)

A few recommendations:

• Evaluation-driven approach might be obliging to bring theory into practice
• Teacher-to-student approach should change to colleague-to-colleague one

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Task 13: Redesigning activities

Thinking about an activity specially an activity in everyday life made me think of comparing myself in non-digital activities versus digital ones or to say offline in opposition to online! I feel that I am much more efficient and fast in offline activities rather than online ones. Even when a task can been done in both ways, I am faster when I don’t need to use the computer particularly internet. Some examples of these activities are like reading, writing, planning and more importantly thinking clearly.

The problem I have while using digital technologies is that although digital technologies’ aim is to enhance the effectiveness of a task and shorten the amount of time one could spend, it brings multi-tasking and lack of concentration. I suppose, the nature of digital technology as far as it comes with internet brings the concept of multi-tasking. Whatever I need to do on computer, it always comes with other activities around. For instance, when I watch news online or read an article, it cannot be done without surfing around, reading other things and having a glance at other pages. Sometimes I even get lost in other activities rather than the main task I wanted to accomplish.

By the way, how new technology itself can be useful to improve the effectiveness of people working with new technologies. How can it be helpful to prevent people wasting time online, or spend time when it is necessary? In my experience, there was nothing more practical than not staying online anymore. For example, when I had to write an article and reach a deadline, I re-designed the activity by stopping the internet and get myself to concentrate on work. To take another example, planning and time management always help me to organize my thoughts better and reach short-term outcomes. Writing down various tasks on a piece of paper and having it visible somewhere makes me check it all the time and carry it out.  Altering this activity to Google calendar had advantages and drawbacks for me. On one hand, it enhanced the long-term planning; sharing calendars with others, also looked nice and more organized. On the other hand, it was more difficult to remember my task, since each time of reading through, I also checked my emails and some other applications, sometimes even would have forgot to check the calendar.

Having this argument, I am not sure whether I am able to redesign an activity in a more efficient way by using new tech or not. Maybe for a part of an activity it is high-quality to use new technologies (especially when it needs to be done in cooperation with others) whereas recently I am getting to the point that I should keep distance from online world to be more concentrated and productive.

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Task 12: tool or medium?

As Rückriem points out, digital technology has its own logic concerning to be either a tool or medium and cannot be compared with previous tools (such as transportation tools) or traditional medium effects. Digital information and telecommunication technologies nowadays have a revolutionary character that goes further from the concrete concept of “tool” in the activity theory and needs a qualitative argument of a more abstract concept such as “medium”.

The argument he makes sounds logical to me, since computer technology is not used for algorithm and mathematical use anymore but it has an amazing feature to advance the communication and interaction in the modern society thereby, it is very influential on the society structure from the educational, sociology, and political perspectives.

The problem for activity theory is that it is not able to define the sociological changes; also it would not be a good solution to modify the terminology of “tool” to “medium”. I find activity theory inefficient to explain around the issue whereas employing the media theory to indicate the cognitive character of digital technologies would be more useful.

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Task 11: our components versus components of activity theory

To answer the following questions in relation to the components of activity theory (subject, object, tools, rules, community and division of labor); I tried to address each of initial items to an activity theory component:

– did we come up with all the necessary components for analyzing and describing interactive systems?
– what components seem irrelevant? Why?
– currently we have a long list of components, which can be definitely shorten. How would you do that?
– do what degree the list of components is concurrent with the components of the activity theory framework?
– are there components which are not covered by the activity theory framework, but the activity theory framework could benefit from?

Initial items versus components of activity theory:

time frame – rule
schedule – tool
time management – rule
process – rule/object
methodology – tool
options – ?
interrelatedness (relations) – ?
rules – rule
control – rule
aim/goal – object
task – object
start – ?
end – ?
result – object
effect – object
feedback – object
restrictions / limitations -rule
location (located)- tool
tools- tool
trigger / event
software – tool
actors- subject
role- division of labor
participants- subject
project manager – community
sequence – rule
plan- rule
evaluation criteria- rule
resource- tool
learnability-?
model / modeling- rule
quality – object
workmanship- division of labor

They are mostly relevant to the activity theory components but I could not think of any relevant component for some of them (the ones with a question mark in front: options, interrelatedness, start, end, and learnability). All the necessary components had been mentioned in the list but some of them overlap. We can shorten the list by having some general groups for example: aim, task, result, effect, feedback, and quality are all objects that can be under object/aim group. I was not sure about categorization of some components like time frame, schedule and process which I did not know whether I should look at them as method/tool or policies/rules. In addition, there could be more instances of community and division of labor in the list such as: lecturer, task developer, and evaluator/ assessor.

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Task 10: Applying activity theory into practice

The current post aims to compare two courses base on activity theory. The course named “PLENK2010” which is personal learning environments networks and knowledge is going to be compared with “New interactive environments“.

First of all to clarify the motives and goals of the each, I studied the pages related to each. The purpose of the course “PLENK2010″ is to clarify the concepts of personal learning environments and networks. It tries to develop a comprehensive understanding of personal learning environments and networks. While,”New interactive environments” aims to analyze the human activities and activity systems with networked tools and services in collaborative environments.

PLENK2010 is organized by the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University; and the participation is free for everyone, not only the researchers and students but anyone who is interested. For leading the course, in addition to four facilitators, there are guest speakers as well. As I understood, students also contribute to the content creation of the course and can take decision on the content they are going to study. In contrary, there is not much information about introducing the course “New interactive environments”, which is why more or less IMKE students are aware of this course and participates. There are two lecturers for the course and students do not influence on the course subjects and materials.

There seems to be more tools utilized for the first course than the second one; additionally, PLENK is more intensive (almost every day work is required) however the interesting point is that, students are flexible to chose the content. If they find some parts boring they are allowed to move on to the next parts which are more attractive for them. Whereas, the second course is less intensive and less flexible, if somebody doesn’t like a task, she/he would lose points.

One of the common points is that both courses ask participants to share their works and knowledge through social applications; PLENK requires using more applications though. For instance, in addition to blogs; Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, and YouTube can be used.

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Task 9: Activity theory

Activity theory is based on the theory of object-driven activity. By creating new objects which are concerns, and originators of attention, effort and meaning; people continually change. The concepts of artifact-mediated and object-oriented action were devised by Leont’ev which explain that human do not respond to an environment directly but by cultural means and signs. There are two generations of activity theory. Firstly, based on Vygotsky, language has been first utilized between adult and child to communicate with each other then reformed child’s activity. Secondly, Leont’ev brought up the dissimilarity between a person action and a group activity, which depicts a contradiction toward the cultural diversity.

To understand the factors that affect an activity, it has been described in three levels: Activity towards an objective performed by a community; activity towards a specific goal by either an individual or a group; and operation structure of an automated activity. Additionally four basic principles have been considered as an integrated system associated with a range of aspects of activity: To be object-oriented. It means that the reality is objective for people and the properties are socially and culturally defined; Internal and external activities are distinct and transformable to each other; Human activity is mediated by tools which are created in an activity development; and development that is a research methodology in the activity theory. It brings active participation with the developmental adjustments of the study contributors.

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Task 6: Interactivity, a concept explication

The current post contains a summary of an article by Spiro Kiousis around the concept of ‘interactivity’. In the article, it is stated that the emergence of new communication technologies has refined concepts in mass communication and consequently the concept of ‘interactivity’ which has been affected by technologies utilized in communication interactions, although it has been a controversy to define ‘interactivity’ either as a media or psychological variable in various context.

From the media point of view, interactivity is tightly related with internet and World Wide Web. Additionally, it has various levels across media that can be constant in time but differ significantly within individuals’ perceptions. Some authors have noted that feedback plays an important role in interaction which makes participants engage in message transactions. Some other related factors are social presence, transparency, user friendliness, speed, and timing flexibility. Furthermore, two-way communication, one-to-many and many-to-many communication experiences are considered as different ways of interactivity that give different levels of feedback.

In the article, there is a variety of ‘interactivity’ definitions form different aspects. In general, it has been classified as a relational variable. It’s declared that it can be defined as perceptions in individual level and also it can be considered in form, content, and structure of technology in relation to users in media level.

Having such controversies like interactivity as a medium or individual perceptions; differences between human and media interaction; and also content and interpersonal interactions have been created a mixture of concepts for instance, descriptions in communication and non-communication models.

Ultimately, the definition has been offered to consider both media and psychological variables contain three dimensions: Firstly medium structure; secondly features of communication settings; and thirdly the perceptions of users. However, ‘interactivity’ is still a vague and controversial issue to define and requires further experience and research.

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Task 5: ‘Interactivity’

This blog post aims to summarize an article by Jens F. Jensen, named “Tracking a New Concept in Media and Communication Studies” and points out some important notes about the concept of ‘interactivity’.

It has been tried to define the words “interactive” and “interactive media” from various aspects thus it seems that there are lots of confusion about them. The meaning which is a multidimensional concept has been tightly related to the discipline it has been applied. For instance, its functionality either in sociology or computer science can change the meaning. Additionally, it’s been claimed that “interactivity” in media communities is still vague or a “buzzword”, and still is an under-defined concept.

To investigate this concept in communication studies, it’s been declared that the advancement of communication science is affected by information societies’ models and methods; in particular, interactive communication technologies and new media. By the way, there is no definite distinguished concept of “interaction” in the field, since it highly depends on the context in which it has used.  For instance, the meaning of ‘interaction’ in media and communication studies refers to the actions of recipient related to the content of media; which the word has not been used in media technologies for a long time, instead more technically-oriented  remarks like ‘two way communication’ or ‘return channel’ systems were used. Subsequently, in the field of informatics (which is stated to be synonymous in media studies) ‘interaction’ is closer to the relationship between people and machines and does not include communication between two people (mediated by a machine).

In summary, there are three ways of describing the concept: Firstly as a prototype; secondly as criteria; and thirdly as a continuum. Among these the concept as a continuum found to be more suitable to define interactivity since it has various levels and there are different forms of interactivity as well. The different interactivity aspects can be categorized into four dimensions by means of communication models. These dimensions have been recognized as transmission (one-way user interaction by selecting information), consultation (user is able to select or request for information in a two-way media system), conversation (user can produce information in a two-way media system) and registration (media can adopt and reply to user’s request).

To sum up, the “interaction” concept is quite complex as there are a lot of uncertainty around the concept. Even with plotting various dimensions, there is no clear-cut outcome since the boundary is indistinct between user’s actions toward the information and each other or monitoring the users by systems and replying to their request sensitively. So perhaps it is still required to develop a better understanding toward the significance of ‘interactivity’ in media and communication studies.

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Task 3: comparison of descriptions of creating a study plan

I selected five study plans by random: Elise, Maria, Valeria, Reimo and Gert.

All have a factor in common which depict the issues have influenced the decision making for selecting the available IMKE courses, but the level of detail is different in each. IMKE curriculum is considered as the basic factor of course selection. The study plans include from curriculum and study process to study tools and mentioning work and personal life.

Gert and Elise have used a mind mapping tool as same as mine to show the process and items although, they are not demonstrated in hierarchical order. While Reimo and Maria have used concept mapping tool to show the relation between various items. Valeria used diagram which shows kind of hierarchy and the level of process by means of Yes/No answer and also color and size of bubbles.

I liked all the approaches since each can stress a variety of points of a study plan based on features of taking various tools. The general plans seem to show characteristics of planning for this fall before starting the semester and integration to courses while the detailed ones depict more experiences like mentioning study tools and schedule. It is difficult to say what is missing since each study plan has its own character and focus points.

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Task 2: self-observation and analysis of creating a study plan

I designed a map of study plan and process for this semester using “FreeMind”  mapping software. I tried to publish the map as HTML to cover all the features provided by the application; but unfortunately couldn’t succeed! when I used the HTML mode of WordPress to transfer the HTML data, it didn’t show the result as same as the FreeMind HTML export result! So, I just upload it as JPG and PDF here:

My study plan (Fall 2010)

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