Total Recall & Education

There is no doubt in my mind that education in all its aspects from schools to life-long learning is changing rapidly. In a very near future, e-learning and the use of technology in blended learning environments will be a commonplace. Information technology and social networking media are presently receiving a lot of attention from entrepeneurs in the classrooms of schools and higher education, but still the use of technology in education is not the rule. What is happening now is very difficult to get a real sense of. Many insitutions use virtual learning environments to bring information and study materials onto the portable networked computers of the students. With the new technologies learning is moving outside the classrooms and are changing the very ways in which learning takes place in the classroom. I cetainly feel that my teaching has changed a lot over the past years. I am not lecturing so much as I am facilitating and coaching learning. I think Gordon Bell is partly right when he states in his book Total Recall that:

Total Recall will have an impact on all approaches to and practices of education (117)

However, judging from the examples that Bell is offering, and his view on education and learning provided therin, I do not think that Total Recall is what will be the defining factor in the use of technology in learning and education in the future. What Bell is talking about is basically easy access to source materials, to past lectures, to notes. He calls it “an e-memory vessel”. To educators today, the image of the vessel sounds strikingly old fashioned. It suggests that learning is something that is poured into the brains of our students, and when full, quality learning has taken place. Or, one may think that as long as learniers have access to information, then they will also be able to do complex reasoning or effective learning. This is of course not so. Having easy access to relevant material, and access not bound by geography or time, is of course fundamental to learning today, but what is really challenging about the new media situation is to get students to participate in the creation of these “vessels”, to interact with them in effective ways, and to share, remediate and remix those “vessels” and their content. It is not enough to have access to institutional memories in the big Total Recall vessel – this already exist in many ways and is not very productive in terms of learning, I feel – but to find ways in which educators can facilitate and coach students in order for them to make qualified judgements and effective ways in which information may be remixed in order to produce new “memories” that are relevant for the future life and work of our students.

it will be a new world for the teacher, looking out at a class-room full of lifelogging students

It would indeed be a frightening world! Bell says that lifelogging is fundamentally a private matter, if it was up to him. If my studetns were only lifelogging, I would wonder about how to get them to widen their perspectives, how would they be able to reflect on the unknown, how would they leave their own life-world, their traditions, in order to engage creatively with the unknown future?

Am I a lifelogger?

When I was reading Bill Bells’s book, Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything, over the past weeks, I found myself constantly wondering, “how strange is it really to imagine Total Recall (what he constantly terms a “revolution”, a “new era”, something so alien to us now ” as the first automobiles must have felt to the horseback riders they roared past (174)) – how much of a leap of imagination is it really that Bell asks us to perform? I was continuously taken with the number of things we are already doing in terms of preserving and retrieving well-archived digital materials from our PCs or from the web, but I wasn’t really gasping with wonder. there was no “my God, that is just too strange or hard to imagine (I also doubt that horseback riders were really that shocked when they saw a car for the first time, I mean, it wasn’t exactly the first motorised vehicle).

Well, am I a lifelogger then? Surely Bell has been doing and is doing a heroic effort in making lifelogging easier, more intuitive, and less time-consuming. For this good software is definately needed – and nobody has a better sense of the myriad of ways in which we can use a variety of software to log the more or less important aspects of our daily lives. His big effort as I see it, is to develop practices and software that can help us, possibly with one piece of software only, to easily store and retrieve information abour ourselves and sometimes created by ourselves.

I am lifelogging a great deal, I realized while reading Bell’s book – and sometimes due to conscious decisions. My digital photos are an absolute mess, and I haven’t paid attention to giving individual photos good metadata for easy retrieval. However, after I started using Picasa, so I could share my family’s migrant life with the rest of my family. I started giving good metadata and sound folder structure, at least to the images I have chosen to share, which are many. Here my family in Denmark and Sicily, my friends in the states and all over Europe has been able to follow weddings, births, holidays, the construction of our house etc. Great.

As a researcher I decided early on (five years ago when I started my phd in English literature, that I needed a good system for recording notes for easy retrieval. I decided to use the then quite new OneNote programme, which now has turned into thousans of pages with more or less extensive notes on things I might find important in the future, today, or never. At least I can now search in full-text for key words shoudl I wonder if I ever read something about that. What I still would like to have is more intuitive integration of the many folders of pdf files and word files  I have with articles, books etc that I have either read or written myself, so I could search everything on my laptop maybe even including web-resources such as Google Books and the electronic journals I have access to through my library, and be able to narrow down my search to find what I need for a lecture or a new article or book. Bell talks about these possibilities as central to his work, and his confidence in their being made available in the near future is reassuring.

So lifelogger I am in parts, I guess, like so many of us already working and living with digital information. And it is not that alien to point to the need and to imagine that this need will be satisfied sooner rather than later.

Total Recall – Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits

No thinking about digital memories today can avoid the pioneering experiment of Gordon Bell,  MyLifeBits:

Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

Having followed Bell for a while, I am looking forward to his book, Total Recall, which will come out this month. In the book, Bell proposes to answer the question: “How the E-Memory revolution will change everything”.

Some will probably reply that Bell, who constantly wears digital recording devises around his neck, has not only gone paperless but also amnesic, while others might claim that Bell has freed his brain (and his personal archive) from an unruly mass of experiences and paper leaving more space in the brain for other, more important stuff.

With this experiment we are back at Plato’s dialogue Phaidrus and its retelling of a legend of writing and memory: The Egyptian God Theuth offers King Thamus the gift of writing as a remedy for the memory, but Thamus will have nothing of it. He thinks writing will have the opposite effect; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering; it has the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. The problem for Socrates being that words when written down have ceased to be controlled by the speaker, they are detached, they cannot speak on their own or come to their own defense.

While our reluctance to commit our memories to writing (by hand and in print) has vanished over time as we have become familiar with the discursive technologies of words and writing, a new reluctance (or at least scepticism) follows Bell’s exploration of the very limits between corporeal and digital existence – well, more will be said when the book hits the stores (or ebook readers) on September 17. Until then, I am following the blog anticipating the book.

digital memories – an introduction to the blog

The cultural landscape that provides the nodes around which we form our identities and communities is undergoing a process of re-territorialization within digital media. As we fly over the pixilated landscape in Second Life, we realize the human capacity for imagined world-making and how new media are being”settled” by people who carry their identities, cultures, their pasts and memories, into new virtual worlds.
This blog explores how virtual worlds, new media and technolgies, structure our cultural and personal memories in new ways. How do we read cultural memories that are formed in a digital world wherein national and global paradigms conflate? How do avatars commemorate? What is the difference between museum exhibits of the Holocaust in actual and virtual life? What happens to our memories and our cultural artifact when they are stored and communicated in digital formats – and what happens to us? These are some of the issues that will be discussed here on this blog.