Onwards and Upwards

The world becomes smaller as you grow up. When you learn to drive and get a drivers license, it becomes even smaller. When you start traveling around the world and flying long distances, it becomes even smaller.

Technology constantly changes the ways in which we interact with the world and people around us and I’ve been fascinated in particular by the overlap between the physical and digital worlds, specifically with location based technologies. But I believe strongly in the value of these interactions in the physical world, actually going somewhere and meeting people.

Which is why I’ve so privileged to have the chance to actually work on site at the prezi office in Budapest for five weeks. I worked on a variety of projects and in another post will share some of my reflections on that.

The day before I started, I posted a blog post reflecting on the idea of communication in a globalised world and this is a tangentially related post (written after my last day while on the aeroplane departing Hungary) about my perceptions of time and space in reflection of my time spent in Budapest while working an intern at Prezi.

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I have always said that I am privileged to have two beautiful countries to call home, both of which call me a citizen. They’re on opposite sides of the world and called home for very different reasons.

I was born in Hungary, my family and heritage are all Hungarian. I’ve been brought up speaking the language and actively engaging in the culture and with the community.

I was three years old when my parents, sister and I moved to New Zealand. I have grown up there, gone to school, learned and worked and made friends, had boyfriends, had good times and bad times. It is where all the major logistical components of my life are tied – I have an address, a phone number, a bank account, a tax ID. etc. Similarly, I’ve grown up experiencing and engaging with the local community, culture and language.

I’ve just spent 6 weeks in Hungary working an internship with Prezi. It was about a week in when I casually referred to the apartment I was living in as ‘home’. I joked about how home is somewhere you have a key to the door, you can help yourself to anything in the fridge, your devices connect to the wifi, you can take off your pants and fall onto a bed.

I’ve been back to Hungary twice before for holidays with family for two weeks each time. This time, I didn’t feel like just a visitor. Hungary has finally become a home where I realised I can live and work and make friends, where I can find my way around as well as get lost, and make it through hard times and have good times too. Where I could come and go and no one would have figured out that I don’t belong or that I hadn’t actually lived there for 20 years.

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We often say ‘it feels like just yesterday when…’, and in fact, it feel like just yesterday I found out I got the internship at prezi, or that I woke up to find my confirmed itinerary in my inbox, or was coming in to land feeling all kinds of nervous, exited, uncertain and apprehensive.

I think that those moments in time which feel like ‘just yesterday’ are more about the emotional highs, good or bad, we tie to them, where they are so powerful that we can accurately recall how we were feeling at that point in time. We remember so vividly that moment that it is as memorable as perhaps something mundane which really did only happen ‘just yesterday’.

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Time and space are all about perception, and this perception changes based on a great deal of influential factors. I’m not a psychologist by any means but this is purely based on my interactions with the world.

Hungary always felt so far away. I think part of this is my parents always groaned and threw their hands in the air when the topic came up of traveling to Hungary. All I ever heard was ‘its such a looooong trip.’ Since I’ve started traveling more often and by myself, I realised that by my perception it’s not really that far.

I was sad leaving again, of course, it is sad saying goodbye to family who take you in without a question even though they hardly know you as a person.

10 years ago when I travelled to Hungary for the first time, I bawled my eyes out when we left New Zealand and then bawled my eyes out when it was time to go back. I was homesick for Hungary for weeks afterwards.

I feel less emotional about it this time because I know it is more in my control now if I ever want or need to come back. At the same time, it has been my longest time away from home. I got asked often if I felt homesick and honestly, I didn’t really. I did miss my parents and my sister and at times felt guilty about the work that I was missing or that I was away from university and disengaged from my study. But I still had ties back to all these things. I made an effort to reply to emails from work, I talked to my parents on FaceTime every single morning, I could send iMessages to my friends and sister, I could keep in touch with what my friends were doing by their posts on Facebook, even if they were in the opposite time zone.

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What I will miss more will be the people and the situations, spending summer weekends with my family, getting to know them, the shared office space with Learn and Support and our daily interactions and laughs we shared. I look forward to returning to my studio space at uni and my friends and colleagues at my workplace. Unfortunately, sometimes we can’t have both worlds, because the logistical fact is that my two homes are still geographical separated by some 17000km. It becomes easier to bridge that gap in terms of how our perceptions of it are altered but that tangible distance remains the same.

Instead, I am happy that I have these opportunities and places and people in my life and I will continue to travel and experience places which will no doubt become an important part of my life.

The intersection of affordances

I’ve written previously that the real power of the the mobile device comes from harnessing the combined affordances of connectivity, access to the internet and rich media. In my last post I was looking at the general current state of existing apps as providing logistical value, ‘business as usual’. This week I was looking at the apps which sit within the intersection of these affordances, start to go beyond the mobile device as simply another vehicle for transmission and consumption of content. The iPad has the ability to bring together rich media, connectivity and internet resources, but which apps utilise all three?

There are a few apps I began to test and place into the diagram.

Prezi offers real time collaboration with the ability to embed rich media in a dynamic canvas. Cloud based makes it easily accessible but being Flash based limits iPad functionality to a ‘Prezi Viewer‘ app.

Whiteboard Collaborative: This is just one example of many collaborative whiteboard type apps.Users can draw upon a shared canvas over a shared WiFi network.

Popplet: Somewhere between Prezi and whiteboards, Popplet is a collaborative mindmapping app which allows users to upload images, take photos, draw and add text to ‘popples’.

Collabracam: iOS devices on a shared WiFi network can stream and record video to the ‘director’ device which can collate and edit the footage.

Taposé: Journal type app which enables embedding of rich media and very clever interface for clipping content from the internet. Also enables users to create collaborative journals..

Wikitude: An augmented reality app which browsers nearby geotagged media overlaid on a map or directly on top of feed from the camera. Can plug into Facebook to share and access friends’ point created by friends. Integrates hardware affordances: location awareness and compass.

The text at the intersection of the three points highlight what I feel are the key features that will need to be incorporated into such an app that utlises these affordances:

• Collaboration with multiple participants in real time in a web / cloud based system, hence making it context independent.
• Location and orientation awareness to respond to and enhance context.
• AirPlay to share media over a wireless connection to utilise secondary displays in a shared physical space.
• Dynamically generated ‘canvas’ for interaction.

As these ideas become incorporated into my writing, I will unpack in more depth what each of these mean and the implications for app design. In initial discussion of these ideas with a supervisor, we had discussion around what is meant by ‘context’ and relating that back to the core idea of my research questions: the peripatetic learner. The one who is communicating while moving in space, learning by responding to context, asking questions and discussing, leveraging the social dynamic of a space. Context is beyond purely location.

The focus for the two week break will be to put the ideas I’ve been exploring over the first half of semester back into an academic format, beginning to craft and refine my thesis. Part of that will be considering how to best show evidence of my creative practice which has come not just from reading and writing, but generating prezis, experimenting with apps, and tinkering with code. I suspect once again I will find myself battling in the battleground between the creative and the academic.

Connectivity

How is it possible, in a world where we’re more connected than ever, to feel lonely?

RQ Iterations

I was putting together a short presentation about my research so far and ended up compiling a list of the main iterations that my research questions has gone through. It is interesting to see how the focus has shifted over the past two months and I feel it is a representation of the learning process that has occurred.

(1) Starting point: With the emergence of network enabled digital devices, our understanding of the concept of ‘place’ has changed. The research will look the role of ‘place’ and ‘space’ in learning, focusing in particular at the tension between significance of the physical built environment, such as a university campus, and the virtual learning spaces created through networking and collaboration through the internet and mobile devices. By looking at how education inhabits a spaces, I am looking for the common ground where the value of the physical built environment is enriched by the engagement and interaction facilitated by the virtual one.

2 – Rather than perceiving the virtual and the physical learning environments as two separate / divided / standalone entities, this research looks at how can the wireless, network enabled digital device be used a mediating tool between the virtual and physical to reinvent the learning space.

3 – How can the wireless networked device be used as a mediating tool to facilitate learning in atemporal and virtual space?

4 – How can the wireless networked device be used to facilitate collaboration in atemporal space?

5 – This research addresses the current gap in knowledge by looking at how the collaboration potential of the device can truly be harnessed beyond simple translation and consumption of content as a means of learning, but rather a vehicle for the learning that occurs through collaboration. The study aims to develop an understanding of why the existing pedagogies exist by looking at the historical contexts which are based in space. It then goes on to look at the learning which occurs through collaboration and how the device facilitates meaningful interaction beyond the constraints of time and place.

6 – Examine the role of the mobile device in tertiary education. Evaluate the effectiveness of it’s current applications – to what extent do they facilitate collaboration?

7 – In a society where people and knowledge are defined by mobility, the role of the mobile device is to facilitate conversations beyond spatial and temporal constraints. As the mobile device is increasingly becoming appropriated for use in academic contexts, how can the communicative nature of the device be utilised in learner-centred collaborative knowledge building?

Collaboration
As a key point in my research, I felt it was important to start unpacking the mean around the word. The prefix takes several forms – co, col, con, com, cor and implies some aspect of mutuality, togetherness, joint, accompanying, etc.

From a few of the identified words:
– Collaboration can be understood as a recursive process where two or more people work together to achieve a shared goal or objective.
– A community exists around a shared belief, vision, or goal as well as shared resources.
– Trade or commerce originated with the start of communication around the idea of bartering. It can be likened to the idea of long distance communication where different regions bartered their specialized goods and services.
– A conference brings together groups of likeminded people around a shared interest.
– To compare / contrast is to look at two things together in terms of their similarities or differences.