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Words versus pictures Video versus books

Professor Richard Harper Microsoft Research Cambridge, England. Words versus pictures Video versus books . How to approach the idea that learning is altering…… Isn’t the visual obviously better than the textual?.

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Words versus pictures Video versus books

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  1. Professor Richard Harper Microsoft Research Cambridge, England Words versus picturesVideo versus books

  2. How to approach the idea that learning is altering…… Isn’t the visual obviously better than the textual?

  3. I am not an expert on learning.What I am an expert on is: what gets invented by computing and telecommunications companies and why I think something can learnt from reflecting on this ‘what’ and ‘why’

  4. There is often a rush to easy similes And, following from that, an easy slip into other ideas And these can lead you away from where you thought you wanted to be

  5. a biographic experience… that can help me illustrate temptations…. in my world an ethnography of a life….

  6. twenty years ago: (was it that long ago?) (and then I will talk about something recently done)

  7. Xerox PARC: A question: what is (or, how is it done) knowledge work?

  8. work? (what’s that?) shared editors…. But text…was not enough….we wanted to offer ‘more’

  9. We thought something richer would enable work: our media space

  10. To see others, to ‘be’ with them The problem of knowledge work is to bring bodies together

  11. We converted our topic, knowledge work, into another topic, communication, and then that led us to think of bodies separated by space – not knowledge And this led us to other problems in turn

  12. Looking wasn’t symmetric Looking past, looking away ‘Hey, look at me!’ The invention of ‘video tunnels’

  13. Fitting ‘lookings’ together Parallax and perceptual symmetry

  14. now (the past two or three years): (has my world altered so little?)

  15. now the cameras are smaller now the distance between the one being looked at and the one doing the looking is smaller But the goal is (still) to see into each other’s eyes

  16. lookings are one element but there are also other actions …….other interactions

  17. C-Slate: Touching documents (Fitting touches together) C-Slate: Touching documents (Fitting touches together)

  18. so in this view what is knowledge? No – that is lost from view Rather, what is communication is the topic: why is it done?

  19. Communication is… a geographical fitting of lookingsand touchings a mechanical fitting of bodies to communications acts as if it’s a biomechanical jigsaw puzzle

  20. What am I suggesting? That we came to treat ‘knowledge’ as bound up with the physical location of bodies We came to think that ‘understanding’ could be attained by being together in the digitally enabled here and now

  21. Versions of this view is common It often leads technology organisations to develop things which fight distance: they seek to attack communications delays they try and make messaging ‘instant and real time’ Who needs email when you can teleconference?

  22. Google wave

  23. And then think of time – how to solve ‘it’ – make everything instant Time is like a property of communication what technologies?

  24. B R O W S E R S

  25. How are search engines designed?

  26. Current studies

  27. Kids and young people How do they communicate? Won’t they Skype (if it’s easy and especially if it’s free?)

  28. Some data from interviews They will have multiple concurrent IM sessions (18 in one instance!) Plus Facebook Sometimes Flickr But only occasionally video

  29. ‘I don’t want to see. I want to write becauseI want to get it right’

  30. How to explain this? It’s a kind of time travel ‘well you can go back to the beginning and say it again whereas you can’t undo what you say’

  31. Learning? Communication? Why IM – because your words go when the session ends Why Facebook - because what you post always stays there Why Skype – when looking says something special A

  32. The shared editors at Xerox did get used…but not for work (so what for?) Dionysian tribalism?

  33. I have written about this in relation to communications technology. People don’t behave as technology companies expect. People leverage diversity of channels to create a texture, with diverse acts of expression bind people together in a complex, delicate weave

  34. So, back to our beginning: the visual versus the textual Youtubeversus MIT Press

  35. In the case of learning? What Remington Wrought

  36. The problem is that the views of technology companies on this topic might not help you Those views might be based on different starting places, places that sometimes lead to interesting technologies but sometimes also turn around odd views about the human ‘users’ What is knowledge gets replaced by an odd idea about communication

  37. It’s really a question of when is the visual better and when is text better What, why, when. Then the answer to how Who answers that?

  38. Technology organisations see the world and the people in it oddly Don’t trust in us! Trust in your own expertise! You tell us what it is to educate and what are the tools you need We are the ones who need an education

  39. Thank you

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