97 New course content posted to supplement the text

Message no. 97 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, January 26, 2007 4:11am Subject: New course content posted to supplement the text

Hello intrepid 10,

Recognizing that many of you may still not have the book to read, I have decided to shift everything back by one week, so that your first relational chapter summary will be due a week from this Monday, not this coming Monday. Give me a day to shift the calendar and it will reflect this change.

Meanwhile, for those of you hungry to jump into the topics that form the core arguments and foundation of chapter 1 and 2 and illustrate the biggest debates in the field, I have posted my own Ph.D. field papers on the topic of "Environmentalism: Past, Present and Future" which goes heavily into the big question: "what is nature, what is "the environment", what do we mean by "environmentalism" and "what is the state of the world"?

I have posted them in the course content area in two different forms: as an HTML (web page style) that you can click on and read in your browser and, underneath, as a DOC format, which you can download and open with Microsoft Word. The doc format is cleaner -- I am having some problems with fonts and formatting in the html form, but you can access it quicker that way and see if you want to download the document.

My writing in these Ph.D. documents is very very dense, so don't be discouraged. It was meant to satisfy academics in order to get my doctorate, so don't expect easy reading. However you may find very valuable quotes and insights in the papers if you mine them and throw away the parts you don't understand. I'm not expecting you to read them all the way through or understand them since you are not going for your Ph.D.'s (yet!). But if you skim through them you will find a goldmine of ideas that you can add to your own intellectual tool kit and use to build the intellectual capital that you can parlay into real academic and philosophical progress!

So enjoy!

Hope these writings tie you over until the textbook arrives, and that they may supplement the readings if you feel so inclined. I think they raise fantastic discussion points and would love to debate you on them. They really synthesize how I see this whole issue of "how does environmental psychology relate to "environmentalism" and how does this all relate to the "environmental movement".

Cheers!

T.H.

96 How to create the best learning environment?

Message no. 96 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, January 25, 2007 9:57pm Subject: How to create the best learning environment?

Hello crew, this is your cap'n speaking.

I've been reading your "getting to know you" discussions with much interest, and am delighted by the depth of your sharing. We begin to get a much better sense of the social environment in which we are operating. I see the courage and determination of so many of you, whether in your second, third, fourth or fifth decade of life, and get a better sense of what makes you the pioneers of on-line education.

Since there is intimate feedback between the consumer and the producer in an information economy, and so much of the supply side of the market is now "demand driven" (these are neo-classical economic terms...) we are, as Alvin Toffler pointed out years ago (Future Shock, The Third Wave, Power Shift) entering the age of "The Pro-Sumer" -- a producer-consumer rolled into one.

This gives you power. The power to determine the course of the ship we call society.

So now let us ask -- how can the learning environment be tailored to suit individual needs? Many of you have multiple offspring, multiple jobs, multiple demands made on you all the time. You must juggle home and hearth and job and family and education. Is there a way to make the "burden" of getting an education (that coveted degree!) more of a "value added experience"?

Many of you have expressed that your kids or other family members are jumping into this computer-assisted virtual world of text, voice, pictures, music, video and 3d gaming. Some have expressed concern over where it is going and how it will affect them.

Is there a way to get them involved in your education? Is there a way to turn on-line learning into a shared family activity so that it does not take away from your family time, but enhances it?

Since kids generally seem to pick up these new media faster than those of us who have so much to UNLEARN before we can rewire our brains, can we delegate tasks in this course and delegate assignments so that our kids can work with us? Could kids (or younger siblings or friends) be fruitfully engaged taking photographs, hunting for maps, making videos, searching for information, exploring environments, uploading and downloading files and making file conversions?

When I was a teacher in the 'hood (inner city South Central L.A.) for a decade, we had night computer classes for the adults of the community. I had my students (high school age) from the day time come in to teach their parents with me (it was a job retraining program) and invited parents to come in during the day (if they could) to learn along with and co-teach their kids. The classroom became a community center. Agism was abolished. Each shared what they knew.

We could make the learning environment of this class such a place. How could we do that?

I invite your thoughts. I am of the impression that, by being thematic and adhering to the topics of the book without being slavish to the order of the topics we can find ways to dovetail what you are learning with what your kids or younger family members need to learn or are doing in school.

It is just a thought, but since I am a firm believer that environmental psychology is a keystone discipline that helps us explain, well, EVERYTHING, we can find a way to integrate it in your lives in such a way that the theoretical knowledge and skills you gain during the course help on a practical level with both job and family life.

It occurs to me that, for example, if any of you haven't done the mapping project yet and you are about to take a trip, or you are starting a new job or have moved to a new area, a map that helps YOU navigate the environment you need to function in would serve as well as a map of home. If you are applying for a job working with, say, battered women or special needs children, you might want to jump into the chapters on social and physical environments and how they affect development and violence etc. and become an expert on that so you can ace the interview or make your job easier.

What I am saying is that while we should be responsible for all the material in the course ideally, we should realistically concentrate on the areas that will help us most, and that differes from individual to individual. So let's think how each person can customize their experience while making sure that everyone gets the basics they need to feel they have mastered the course.

Think about how we might make this work and let us discuss it and see what emerges.

T

87 Putting it all together...

Message no. 87[Branch from no. 85] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, January 25, 2007 1:35am Subject: Putting it all together...

Bravo! Well done Michelle -- and great teamwork (thanks for explaining how Kenisha!).

Now a question: What effect does it have on you seeing the landscape profiles in full color and detail of the various areas where your fellow students live? What effect does it have to see neighborhoods you once lived in as they look today?

It will be interesting to store these photographs, print them out and regoogle each year and see how the landscape changes. Many of you talk about how the areas looked when you first saw them years and years ago, and how they have been altered. We have the impression that change is always for the worse. We have the impression that rural areas and farmland and woods have been progressively turned into urban and suburban developments. Is this empirically true? Are there places where "de-urbanization" has taken place? Are there places where farms that were cleared from forests have gone back to forest? Places where towns have turned back into farmland? What evidence do we have?

Can you find any maps from pre-google days -- aerial photographs perhaps, showing what the environments you lived in looked like 100 years ago?

How about forward up (perspective from the ground) photos?

Without such empirical evidence we can't REALLY be sure that our sense of change is accurate. What do we really know about changing patterns of land use? Can we be sure these aren't just stories we've heard (like the horrible myths that "all Arabs are terrorists")?

Environmental psychology is a SCIENCE, and as such deals in probabilities and reduction of uncertainties. Throughout this course we will strive to collect statistical evidence to back up our sense impressions. This is the only way to conquer our prejudices (how we pre-judge what we believe to be trends in environment and behavior) and get closer to "truth".

What I would love to see now is for somebody (or groups of you) to stitch together the maps and photographs so we can see how to compare our worlds. Anybody up for the task? (Note: I've made a start by posting Pat's word document (the same as she put on her blog) as an html file on our course materials page. When we have everybodies stuff I will put it up as well -- but it would be great if y'all would put the master document together...)

Let me know...

65 -67, 72, 83-84 Fellow students willing to share

Message no. 65 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:12am Subject: Fellow students willing to share

Greetings. Thanks for all of you who have offered to share your textbook resources with one another. I have created this discussion topic for questions related to the textbook. Might I suggest that those of you who wrote me about either not being able to get a hold of it, or about your desire to help out scanning or lending, repost your emails here in this class area so that we can connect those with texts to those without?

We can think of this as a kind of free ebay for text resources.

In addition to telling the other members of the class what you need or what help you can offer, this would be a good place to post links to web resources or outside readings that complement the textbook.

Message no. 66[Branch from no. 41] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:25am Subject: Real vs. virtual

Hi Pat, Thanks for your question. You will notice now that I have created a topic called "Comparisons between real life and virtual life" (or something to that effect) for all your ideas on the subject!

Message no. 67

Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:30am Subject: Are you able to view the course content area, and is it making sense?

Hi group,

This is the discussion topic for posting questions and ideas specifically concerning the course content area, where I will be posting my lectures and assignments and pictures and videos and the glossary and stuff like that. It is found under "Course Materials". Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing anything. I've posted a bunch of trial videos that illustrate ideas from the textbook, and pictures. I may just resort to sending you guys links to my blogs to see stuff, as it is easier, but will also use this area a lot. Also, you can co-create the course material area with me -- let me know what vocabulary words and concepts you want in the glossary, and what resources will make the subject come to life more and be easier to understand!

It is, after all, YOUR CLASS! :)

Message no. 72 Posted by KENISHA on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 12:26pm Subject: PC users

Like to show us your environment? -go to google map -put in your home address -click on Hybrid to see street level -then right click on "link to this page" -save it (desktop.....) -then use it as a attachment

Message no. 83[Branch from no. 74] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 8:26pm Subject: Using web resources like TinyPic -- a great idea!

Hey Adrienne -- bravo! This is great -- it seems you have discovered a very valuable resource for the class! This website, http://tinypic.com seems to be a great way for us to share our pictures and videos. May I suggest others try this out as well? Good job! And now I can see what you described, which I had previously only seen from the bird's eye perspective of google map. Cool.

Message no. 84[Branch from no. 81] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 8:34pm Subject: Re: My blog address and virtual Maps

Yes, good job! As Kenisha says, you made a wonderful mini-project out of it! The issues about public space and private space that you raise are exactly the sort of issues we want to explore in this course too -- what does it do to our behavior when we know "big brother" is watching? We will talk about Jeremy Bentham's prisons and insane asylums, zoos and other caged spaces, schools and Foucault's "Panopticon". Any of you who have seen the film "The Fortress" with the guy who was in Greystoke the Legend of Tarzan and Highlander --- what's his name -- the French guy -- will have seen the idea of the panopticon taking to its extreme.

How, for example, did it affect you all to have your professor, whom you have never met, asking you questions about the parks and rivers and streets and malls next to your house, before you had even told him where you lived? Did you wonder how I knew your areas so well, or did you think "Oh, he probably just took our addresses from the registrar's page and put them into Google maps and zoomed in and looked and then started writing his questions."

As little as five years ago that would have been inconceivable!! And yet it is now par for the course (especially this course!).

More on this topic later!!!

64 Trouble in paradise? Let's make blogs!

Message no. 64[Branch from no. 61]

Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:05am

Subject: Trouble in paradise? Let's make blogs!

Hey gang,

I am delighted to see the effort and excitement you are all putting into this first foray into mapping our environments. When we get to Chapters 2 and 3 of the text and see how important cognitive maps are to the study of psychology all the effort will make sense!

I also really appreciate the way you guys are already beginning to interact with and support one another, helping out with everything. This is as it should be! It appears that we are spontaneously creating a "cooperative environment" instead of a "competitive environment" and I think that is good. Really good. Most classrooms in the past have devolved into competitive spaces where people's basest instincts surface, usually because the "authority figure" or "teacher" restricts access to coveted resources, such as "time for self-expression" (by choosing who to call on, when and for how long and about what) and those blood diamonds of the academic world -- points and grades.

In this class our technological environment makes us question the very notion of restricted access. Time and space are dilated, distorted, stretched, twisted. The industrial age school system that functioned to create competitive workers (Marx's famous "reserve army of labor") is now giving way to computer age school systems that function to create cooperative players who can cocreate our new knowledge based society.

We will explore in this class how "real goods", "capital goods" and other forms of "hardware" interface in the new economic environment with "virtual goods", "software" and "wetware", but suffice it to say that there is no longer any reason to restrict access to any goods, at least not in the unlimited reaches of cyberspace. This new environment is affecting all of our behaviors.

Our brains have unlimited imaginations that are now being wetwired into the boundless infinity of cyberspace. For this reason, the president of Sun Computers calls what we are living in now "The Participation Age" (read about it here: http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/ sunflash/2006-10/sunflash.20061010.2.xml)

Of course, Hardware is still a problem -- as are the communication protocols that use it. Thus, many of you are still experiencing problems participating -- i.e., sharing your web pages and pictures and whatnot.

I have a potential solution, simply because I find it to be MUCH EASIER.

Now don't get scared -- it sounds new and frightening, but it will actually, I believe, make life more tranquil and save you time and effort. I think it is time you all tried to create a BLOG. Yes, you heard me right -- a blog.

A blog is nothing more than a free web page where the hosting company has made it ridiculously easy to post pictures and text. It is MUCH MUCH EASIER THAN WHAT YOU ARE CURRENTLY TRYING TO DO!!

The fact that you already know how to try and attach pictures to this Mercy site means you are OVERQUALIFIED for making a blog.

Here is all you do: Go to http://blogspot.com. On the screen you will see instructions for making a blog in 3 EASY STEPS. Follow the directions and see if you can post a picture and write some text. Then just give us the URL (the address at the top of your browser) of your blog.

This should solve many of our problems. Then, in our discussion list, you can simply put in the address of the blog post where you put your pictures.

When you get to the stage of wanting to put up videos, you can get a free account with http://Youtube.com and post videos there. Then we can really start sharing.

Frankly, this WebCT interface, which is great for discussions and chat and email for the class, really falls apart when it comes to posting pictures and multimedia stuff. The web has evolved way beyond it. (To be fair, WebCT is undergoing revision, and a new more powerful and better interface will be available next year! I can't wait. But till then -- blogs and youtube are the way to go! Trust me!)

By the way, many of you had problems attaching the files or opening them because your pictures were in .gif or .bmp formats instead of .jpg. The best thing to do is to always "save as" as a JPEG (.jpg) file. JPEG (which stands for "joint photographic experts group" is a format made by, well, photography experts, who wanted to share pictures easily all over the world. BMPs, which Microsoft PCs use, means "bitmap" and they are huge and hard to open. GIF, which means "Graphic Interchange Format" is good, but may cause problems for some browsers. TIFFs (Tagged Image File Format) are HUGE and will take forever to download. PNGs are okay, but JPEGs are the best!

Well, that's enough on that for now. Try creating a blog and tell me how you do. I think you will be pleased with the results!

Mine are at http://environmentalpsych.blogspot.com, http://thculhane.blogspot.com, http://culbrain.blogspot.com and http://solarcities.blogspot.com. They are very unfinished and ugly, but I put them up for fun so I can quickly get to pictures and videos and writings I do in a hurry and share them with friends.

Welcome to the blogosphere. Happy blogging!

T

48 Are we living in "The Matrix"?

Message no. 48 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:14pm Subject: Are we living in "The Matrix"?

Plato wrote that we perceive reality as if watching shadows on the wall of a cave. He felt that reality was something that would always remain hidden, like mysterious dancers who gyrated behind us around a campfire, while we were bound in chairs facing the wall and could only see their shadows, doomed to figuring out what the real substance of the three dimensional figures might be by examining only their opaque two dimensional forms. Other philosophers have given us the metaphor of blind men each feeling only one part of an elephant -- trunk, body, legs -- and declaring it to be a hose, a clay wall, a tree trunk.

In the early 1990's science fiction author Neil Stephenson wrote a classic "cyber-punk" novel of speculative fiction, peering into the near future, called "Snow Crash". It the book he predicted the creation of a virtual universe called "The Metaverse" where human consciousness inhabits on-line avatars who interact and live out their dreams in a cyberspace virtual world that feels more real than real.

The beginning of the 21st century saw the convergence of philosophical musings, computer technology and popular culture in the creation of the film series "The Matrix".

Now the metaverse, a pre-matrix technology, has become real, with the creation of "Second Life. We must ask ourselves, "what will the consequence of these virtual environments be on the psychology of our behavior?"

We, the students of Environmental Psychology, are the ones who must strive to answer this question, for we have taken on the task of understanding how environment and behavior interrelate.

Here is the place to post your musings and thoughts about this topic!

33 Getting to know our virtual environments:Uploading and Posting Pictures

Message no. 33[Branch from no. 31] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:05pm Subject: Getting to know our virtual environments:Uploading and Posting Pictures

Hi Daniela and all (in academic jargon: et al.)

So far no attachments have come through. from anyone, so I will check with tech support to see if there is a problem with student uploads. Generally you will know if a discussion message in the thread of discussions has an attachment because the icon of the little envelope to the left of the title of the message (which is closed if you haven't read it, and open if you have) has a little paper clip icon next to it, indicating that there is an attachment. You will notice that Michelle's "this is a test" has a paper clip, but that the file type is listed as an .mht, which my computer won't open (please let us know if any of you were able to open Michelle's attachment.)

Here's what we should do for starters:

In keeping with our "getting to know our environments" theme, could you each let us know what COMPUTER ENVIRONMENT you are working in? In other words -- what type of computer do you sit in front of each day -- a PC or a Mac? What brand? Desktop or laptop? What speed connection? Which browser do you use (Internet Explorere, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, some other?), which software do you use (Microsoft Office, Openoffice.org, Paint, Photoshop, The Gimp.... whatever).

This way we will know how that personal computing environment is affecting the psychology of our behavior as we try to communicate through the world wide web environment.

P.S. Remember when you post attachments that you hit "Browse" (the button below) to find the file on your computer, then you must hit "Attach file" and wait for it to show up underneath as an attachment (right now my screen says "There are no files attached" under the words "Attachments:", "Browse" and "Attach file". This indicates I'm not attaching anything.

Hope that helps!

Happy posting!