Knowledge environments

• Environment = key metaphor of interactive media
Knowledge environment: Social, technological and physical arrangements intended to facilitate collaborative knowledge building
Knowledge environments:
• Game environments
• Learning environments
• Collaborative environments
• Social sharing environments
=>KE largely dependent on the concept of knowledge.

Ecologism

Biological and ecological metaphor: Media ecology
• Ecology
"Oikos" (Greek) : "house"
• Related to economy
Ecologism of psychology and cognitive science: Gibson, Neisser
Neisser's perceptual cycle is an example of a cognitive ecology.
Knowledge ecology: 'Household' of knowledge

System of perceptual cycles

'Economism'

What is the currency of 'knowledge economy'?
Contents?
Meanings?
Signs?
Ontoperspectives?

Collaraborative environments

• Collaborative virtual environments

Game Environments

• Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG)
• E.g. World of Warcraft

• Shared virtual environment
• Avatar, first person
• Second Life

Learning environments

• Virtual learning environment
• E.g, Moodle
Often too constraining with respect to the choice of tools.
=> Mashups of multiple applications

Virtual and real

• <- Last time

Real

No consensus on the definition! One of the eternal issues of philosophy.
• Reality
Main ways of dealing with reality:
Realism: Reality exists a priori (before and regardless of whether someone observes it).
Constructivism: Reality is constructed, nothing that exists as such.
=> In Knowledge environments, the community constructs knowledge

Virtual

Etymology: Virtual, "not physically existing but made to appear by software"
• Virtual '07 conference

Brain as virtual simulator

=> Brain is a virtual "reality simulator" : Imagining, dreaming, planning
=> Philosophically dangerous to rely on "reality"

Immersion

• Immersion
Being submerged in an artificial environment.

Mixed environments

• virtual + physical presence
• Virtual environments that support the illusion of getting 'submerged' in the environment with
• holistic experience of physical presence in virtual space
Virtual environments rely on illusory effects:
• Stereo audio
• Stereo vision

Emotional presence

=> Enactment

Enactive environments

• E.g. Enactive cinema Obsession, video
Challenging the concepts of:
• Interface
• Interaction

CAVE

• CAVE automatic virtual environment
• Experimental Virtual Environment EVE, Helsinki
• VR Media Lab, Aalborg
Drawback: Fixed to large lab installation. Not mobile

Haptic environments

• Haptic (WP), illusion created with touchable physical forces, force feedback
• Can be combined with virtual audio and video
• Phantom haptic device (videos)
• Haptic immersion setups (images)
• Article

Online collective skins

McLuhan(1964): housing as "collective skin"
Relation to autopoiesis: binding dynamics that keep a community together.
• Relation to autopoietic "skins" of online communities

Networks

• Network  = core metaphor of the Internet, core architecture of ICT
• Bridges human and technologcal networks
Explanation of how:
• ideas, data, software, viruses etc. spread
• people behave and organize themselves
technical and human networks are interconnected!
=> Implications to design of virtual communities

Network topologies

Network topologies by Foobaz http://petemoss.org

A network topology is the pattern of links connecting pairs of nodes (=knot) of a network.

Line topology

Can be broken by:
• Community/Social problem
• Technical problem

Bus topology

Robustness?

Ring topology

Robustness?
Examples of human rings?

Star topology

• = hub-centered
Examples in organizations?
Advantages?
Disadvantages?

Hierarchy topology (tree)

• Army  model
Advantages? Disadvantages?

Fully connected

Examples?
Disadvantages?

Mesh & hybrid topologies

At least two nodes with two or more paths between them (WP).
• Hybrids of the above

Neural network, brain

What architecture is this?

Topology of the Internet

Complex dynamical systems

Why?
Because two-way interactive systems generally have properties of dynamical systems.
• ... online communities behave like self-organizing systems
• How networks get organized in bottom-up direction (self-organization)
Relates to artificial life => Virtual environments

Characteristics of complex systems

• Complex systems, complexity
• Systems theory
• Feedback loops
Self-regulation of behavior: non-determinist, non-linear
• Self-Organization

Self-Organization

• Self-organization (of newtork topology)
= Spontaneous emergence of order and collective behaviour from...
• ...'democratic' and local interactions of the system's elements
Bottom-up: No top-down organizer => relevance to CCM
• Simple local rules
• Patterns emerge
• (University of Toronto links)
• Images illustrating self-organization

Examples of self-Organization

Self-organization of bacteria
Nature: Waves, formations, behavior
•
Ecology : Journal article: Self-organization can collapse
Climate: Air-pressure systems
Chemistry: Self-assembly of chemicals
•
Neural system: Cortical maps: Tonotopy Retinotopy Somatotopy
Scheme of somatotopy
Artificial neural networks: Simulating cortex, concept-building, pattern recognition etc. Self-organizing map simulation
• Fractal algorithms, Images, Introductory article
Physics: Patterns of boiling oil, turbulences etc.
Language: Consensual meanings of words
Computer science: Cellular automata, Artificial life
• Landscape (article)
• Speech
• Huygens' clocks
• Huygens' clocks
Etc.
• Tagging as community self-organization (article)
Self-Organization of behaviour
Biology: Evolution, ontogenesis

Artificial life

• Artificial life
Part of the large image of digital representation of the world.
• Simulations of self-organization in life, such as evolution or ontogenesis, e.g. Breve (free simulation software)
Karl Sims: Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994)
• Links