sharing knowledge
It is fundamental that the practice of sharing knowledge in the networked environment receives adequate theoretical amplitude. The increase practice of sharing knowledge across different media has lead to the need of finding the right terminology that will define practices of cohesion and stress the current trends of media education in a larger framework.
As Stephen Downes explores what is emerging is a connective knowledge paradigm in the approach to new e-learning technology these learning environments shapes what we would called the model of self-education, where groups and cultural actors themselves produce, consume and share knowledge and information besides traditional educational structures.
“What happens,” I asked, “when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is “delivered,” and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created?”
The answer turns out to be a lot like Web 2.0: “The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read— and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.”
In this e-learning environments sharing knowledge encourage the formation of practices of autonomous productivity, which doesn’t reinforce material or intellectual labour, but builds creativity and exploration of daily life, the engagement with the environment and forms peer groups. This form of creating knowledge goes against the formal traditional structures of acquiring skills that would become distributed in the productive economic sphere, in fact redefines the possibilities where knowledge differs and disengage with the formal education based on nurturing the political economy.
This is an annotations on the Cybermohalla project (Sarai reader 05)
“There are 70 practitioners in the Cybermohalla network. Every morning, each one of us comes to the lab having met at least ten people, wandering through five places, seeing six things, with thoughts and questions. These are different things all of us bring to the lab. And these are all laden and layered with time; they also contain time.
These are things that flow into the lab. But the lab not only inhales, it also exhales. This is through different media forms like wall magazines, stickers, booklets, broadsheets. These are forms that our text take, and roam the city, in search of friendship. They seek out spaces, constellations, groups and contexts where they can get into circulation, be retold and invite more stories to accrete around them.”
“The labs invite different kinds of dialogues. This is not only from the practitioners who live in the locality, but also from the extended network from Sarai and Ankur, and visitors from the rest of the city and the world as well. These encounters bring in different provocations and questions, as different people come to the albs with different curiosities, practices and ways of living. But apart from the interlocutors who come to the labs, we also dialogue and debate with other spaces through events and encounters.”
commodities and the politics of value
In his introduction to the book The social life of things, Arjun Appadurai takes the concept of value developed by Georg Simmel, where he describes that value is not inherent to things, but is attribured to them by subjects that operates with these commodities. In the essence of its social form, economy depends upon exchanges of mutual sacrifices and desires. Appadurai acknowledges that many historical societies, things have not been so divorced from the capacity of persons to act and the power of words to communicate.
“For what we have to follow teh things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things.” (p. 5)
It is in this interesting interconnection of transferring value to practices that are being inscribed in contemporary Indian culture of shared media practices in their physical manifestation that knowledge is transferred to education. Thus, it forms ground upon localized media culture is transformed, shared and produced, apart from the impact of global culture.
Appadurai continues in defining that researching material culture it is part of the field of cultural anthropologist, however they are at the center of interest of most social and economical fields. Here I will not consider the trajectory of commodities as being characterized by their labor value, but will use the definition of commodities as social and cultural things meant to be exchanged. In this perspective the production and the product paradigm closed to the Marxist definition of commodity shall not be taken in consideration; indeed making exchanges the dominant aspect of the technological presence in everyday life in Indian cities.
“Gifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, socialbility, and spontaneity in which theya re typically exchanged, usually are starkly opposed to the profit-oriented, self-centered and calculated spirit that fires the circulation of commodities.” (p. 11)
low tech network culture
During the conference City One at Sarai on 9-11th January 2003, Ashis Nandy presented “The Darkness of the city” his topical and influential definition of the life and mind of cities. He introduces his presentation by saying that each type of study of the city, departing from highly demographical to more philosophical studies, incorporates a tension the notions of ‘the mind of the city’ and the ‘city of the mind’. The first type of study contain something the city is through explorations and study of text or film, on the other hand the study on ‘the city of the mind’ tries to capture something that is not in the city itself, but is invoked in myths or fantasies of the population referring to crucial segments of the city or even outside. He defines three types of cities:
1. the city, which is defined in opposition to the village, which gives life to cultural products and forms the socio-political activity
2. The city that is in opposition to other cities, mainly in the last 100 years cities that developed in large scale refer to other big city conglomeration
3. This type of cities defines themselves priory in opposition to two kinds of anti-cities: the dark cit of the slums and the shadow city of the ghetto.
Mainly in South Asia, cities have the characteristics of the third kind of cities, since they are primarily formed by ghettos. He specifies that slums are never legitimized in the public consciousness and are a living critique of the political economy of the city, the is a living comment on the failure of the economical life of the city. There civic consciousness can’t be defined without reference to the slum. “The vision of the slum captures something that the normal city can never really recognize. The slum is the constant reminder that there is another side of your city” .
This presentation influence the discourse of educational ICT policy of the national Indian government, which focuses on a rather small percentage of institutions, that are going to implement ICT in their curriculum. This particular policy will not embrace a radical shift in media literacy in India, but will only support a small advantage group of students. Media education through ICT in the slums becomes the living example of the failure of national educational ICT policy.
The Indian growing high-tech economy didn’t escape this process on the macro level of the Occidental paradigm of delivering packaged ICT content and structure, the manifestation of its ideological and cultural expansion into Indian urban and rural regions However the practical example of sustainable and decentralized media mesh networks could offer a different perspective on the possible deviation from this long history of telecommunication ownership and state controlled media.
The attitude on viewing the cityscape from below is developed in Jane Jacobs book The death and life of great American cities (1961). Jacobs wrote the most influential perspective on urban planning in America, where she developed views on urban planning that would concentrate on community based growth of cities. Jacobs focuses on defining and explaining that the social order in the urban space is constructed from below and from diversity of its users rather than above (urban planning). Applying her theory to the networked media, the social structure created from above is formed by the telecommunication infrastructure and surveillance data flows and the structure from below becomes defined by networks and their generic infrastructure.
If we consider the open spectrum of wireless technology that feed shared social, citizen and participatory networks, knowledge and information sharing become less dependent on privatized ICT infrastructure. Indeed it creates its own content and infrastructure, owns different personalities. How are these structured fields of connectivity going to coexist and engage together in these spaces of flow? The citizen public network could become the predominant structure in society and coexist with a commercial and national sphere. By the act of determine a narrative of regeneration of their public space from discourses of private environments and increase their participation in the public domain, citizen networks create their own parallel networks.
Mapping this networks would possibly encourage a definition of how different media incorporate radical culture in their sphere of engagment with local realities. The perception of the urban space through specific installations, performances and media making will shape the mental map of the city and the form upon which the previous map was being used. Networks that open explorations with technological tools differentiate and organize cultural definitions of communication and encounters impacting upon the structure of top down modes of ICT structure.
Bricolab network
“Bricolabs investigate the potentialities of the combination open societies, open hardware and open labs. Its aim is to create a brand neutral and non proprietary generic infrastructure”. Besides surveillance and commerical spaces of flows, parallel ones are being created by DIY practioners, artists, and social scientists. Bricolabs is a collaborative exchange of experts in the field of technology in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Netherlands and Uk, which shares skills and knowledge, create possibilities of practice and theory and form a new type of creative citizenship that is based on self education in low tech. This new form of citizenship was inspired by the need of dealing with technology from inside out, which draw inspiration from the politics of microbroadcast of Tetsuo Kogawa’s practice, the experience of reappropriation of technology for social transformation Metareciclagem and free software labs Pontos de Cultura. The creation of Bricolabs forms the idea of investigative action, which defines political and social relationships of open content, software, hardware and is an example of participative networks described in the experience of Hivenetworks. On wednesday 17. january 2007 I’ve followed the presentation by Alexei Blionov and Vladimir Grafov, who presented their artistic, public and visionary approach of open hardware technology. Against the globalized, commercially owned networks their approach is driven by shared and collective principles of distributed, mobile and personalized networks. Technological devices that are reassemled in a factory and sold to consumers have mainly one function only, that for whay they have been designed for. In fact most of the time they are being replaced when new models that are smaller, faster and cheaper are being reproposed on the shelves. However, if you think that a device, such as a wireless Lan hard drive, has its own memory and its own storage space and is supporting a wifi connection – then this device is smart enough to communicate with your computer, your pda or your bluetooth mobile phone. If you programme this device with adequate software, one small piece of hardware can change personality according to your wishes and needs. it can interact with microphones, webcams and is sensor sensible. The interface for what the device has been re-designed allows to multiply and disrupt your daily habits. You could switch on your device to interconnect, share files, transmit your radio station and you could have a sensor that detects motion or sound – and respond to it… Possiblities are infinite and creativity is just beginning! Thank you again Alexei and Vladimir for your excellent presentation! Indeed the aim of bricolabs is creating a generic infrastructure, such as the one presented by Hivenetworks, that feeds cultures of connectivity, creativity and education in media technology.
