135 Big Brother is Watching; The Eye in the Sky; Environments of Control

Message no. 135 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, January 27, 2007 10:05pm Subject: Big Brother is Watching; The Eye in the Sky; Environments of Control

Hi y'all,

Here are some things for you to think about vis a vis our learning environment on-line:

Many of you noted the eerie feeling you got knowing that anybody on earth with a computer and internet access can google map your home or workplace or recreation space and peer down upon you. It may comfort you to know that for security reasons (to prevent attacks on our strategic arsenal or politicians for example) the satellite photos released for use by the public are usually as much as six months to a year old. This gives plenty of time for resources and capital goods and weapons and key personnel to be moved out of harm's way. And then there are places (Bahrain is one) that will not let the computers connect to google maps (the Bahrainian elite got upset because average citizens were beginning to see just how luxuriously the upper class live -- they were seeing all the Mercedes and Swimming Pools and grassy gardens that are usually hidden by big walls, and they could see the spatial size difference between what the rich owned and the rest of the population had to put up with. So the government shut down Google Maps this year!!!!)

Mapping can be a tool for war or peace, for tyranny or democracy, for ill or good.

My own feeling of course, as an educator, is that everyone should have access to the same technologies and tools and ideas so that no dictator or small elite group can control the rest of us. But free access to things carries its own risks, as parents in particular know!

The computer revolution has brought many other forms of environmental control to bear in our lives and I want to let you in on a few of the secrets so you are fully aware of what kind of environment you are operating in in an online class, and think about how it affects the psychology of your behavior:

For one thing, attendance and grading are a completely different phenomenon on-line. Did you know that we can see every time you log into WebCT? Did you know that we have access to records that show exactly which pages you visited, how long you stayed on them, how many posts you've made, even how many keystrokes and clicks you make? The computer records all.

Many on-line teachers use this to great advantage and it helps the students -- we know if you haven't been visiting for a while, we know what times you generally come on line and how much time you spend there, and we can help out students who haven't been active, and get an estimate of who is putting a lot of effort in the course and who isn't.

To get around this, we are told that some students log in frequently and click around alot to make it look like they are active, but actually read little or nothing. We are told that we must be careful of this. I find this amusing, because it shows me that there is some carry over from the old days when school was seen as a prison. In those "hardscape" days of bricks and mortar schools, when the industrial revolution was occurring and we were trying to build a labor force of factory workers who wouldn't question authority and would do boring repetitive tasks over and over and over, we emphasized attendance and rote learning. We ruled student's lives by bells to get them ready for factory whistles.

In the information age, I can't for the life of me see why anybody cares about "punctuality" and "attendance" except in so far as human beings agree to get together for meetings and need to arrange schedules so they can all be together at the same time. Assignments have deadlines now only because we have busy lives and have to set aside certain times for certain tasks -- after a deadline we need to move on to other things, so we can't easily go back and look at things that come in "late". But beyond that, we are very rarely ruled anymore by clocks and timelines in the external environment.

As you probably know, schools generally started at 7:30 because they evolved in an agrarian society and the whole family had to get up in the morning to feed the animals. Factories followed the agrarian pattern and we all got hooked into getting up at first light and getting our work done before nightfall. After all -- it got dark! And before electric lights it was very difficult to work in the dark!

Nowadays we can work anytime we want. The environment of "nature" or "the farm" no longer dictates our schedule. The limitations of sunrises and sunsets no longer affects our productivity. We are detached from our earlier environments and are now ruled by virtual landscapes that have their own demands. We work when we can get online. If the wifi goes dead or the phone lines die or there is a power failure, we can't work. If the hard drive crashes, we can't work. We organize our schedules around these new environmental affordances.

Here in the on-line world, you could say that big brother is watching, but the real question is "watching what?". What good (or bad) is all this control we now have over our learning environment? And what role is there for anonymity in society?

I look at the graphs of your attendance and postings and which pages you visit and find it fascinating feedback, but I'm not sure what to do with the information. Except share it with you. Yes, as environmental psychology students I think you should all be aware of this new environment. Then we can work together to explain and understand the trends that we see. We can explore questions such as "why is this page of content or this discussion topic more interesting or more frequently attended than that?". "What makes this particular idea environment more threatening than that one".

Let me return to the subject of anonymity. I notice that as you work on your "getting to know each other" assignment, nobody has so far put up any pictures of themselves. Fascinating!! Why is that? Is it because we want to be liberated from the tyranny of the flesh? Is it because we enjoy the sudden non-judgemental aspect of the internet where age, gender, race, creed no longer matter, and we prefer to wait to share our current phenotypic selves until we are sure it is safe? In a real world class the first thing we would notice are the physical bodies of all the students sitting in the room. In an online class we have no obligation to be seen at all. Isn't that interesting? This is the one thing that "big brother" cannot observe about us without our consent (yet!! -- we don't know how invasive surveillance technology really is -- our president has been allowing the use of phone-tapping and other spy technology on American citizens... we don't really know how far they have gone! Recently I worked with the composer BT on a music score for a new film called "Surveillance" about the mis-use of surveillance technologies. And last summer in Great Britain I noticed that every street corner in the town I was in had a video camera mounted on a pole that swiveled and followed you as you walked down the residential street!)

Take a look around you and see how many cameras are pointed at you all the time these days, taking pictures of your liscence plate as you cross an intersection, videotaping you as you walk through the shopping mall or the parking lot... somebody is watching us all the time!

Could that help explain why we are all reluctant to post our pictures or videos of ourselves as we start to get to know one another?

Or is it merely technological -- no camera, unfamilliar with how to post pictures etc.? Are not people constantly putting videos and pictures of themselves on their blogs and on youtube and myspace? Didn't Andy Warhol say we all want our 15 minutes in the sun?

These are questions for you to ponder and explore.

When you get into Second Life and other virtual environments, how faithful do you make your avatar to your current phenotypic self? Do you change your hair, your colors, your shapes, your looks? Do you change your gender? Your species? Some people transform into hobbits, others into foxes and rabbits, some into robots. What do you do? And why? How does your environment affect your behavior when it comes to appearance?

And, returning to the Learning Environment, think about this -- what is it we want our "professors" to "see" when they are "grading" or "judging" us? Who is the "YOU" you want to be assessed? On what merits, on what basis?

We shall discuss this more! I look forward to your thoughts!

T

133 Relational Summaries

Message no. 133[Branch from no. 128] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, January 27, 2007 9:29pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary Chapter 1 Pat

Patricia and class,

This is great! This is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for in the way of Relational Chapter Summaries -- you have made the book come to life by relating it to musings about your own environment, you have quoted the book several times and giving me several links to outside or ancillary reading that helps us go deeper into your points. Bravo. This is a good model for everybody.

Note that if you would like to share stuff you write for the course with the rest of the world, your blog gives you the opportunity to do that. If you prefer to keep it within house, the discussion area is a good place; you can do both. And if you want to keep it private, send it by email to me, and write "Private". If not, I am inclined to share everything with the rest of the class as an heuristic exercise ("heuristic" here means "leading to further questions or investigations.")

Good job!

133 Relational Summaries

Message no. 133[Branch from no. 128] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, January 27, 2007 9:29pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary Chapter 1 Pat

Patricia and class,

This is great! This is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for in the way of Relational Chapter Summaries -- you have made the book come to life by relating it to musings about your own environment, you have quoted the book several times and giving me several links to outside or ancillary reading that helps us go deeper into your points. Bravo. This is a good model for everybody.

Note that if you would like to share stuff you write for the course with the rest of the world, your blog gives you the opportunity to do that. If you prefer to keep it within house, the discussion area is a good place; you can do both. And if you want to keep it private, send it by email to me, and write "Private". If not, I am inclined to share everything with the rest of the class as an heuristic exercise ("heuristic" here means "leading to further questions or investigations.")

Good job!

132 Dazed and Confused!

Message no. 132[Branch from no. 131] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, January 27, 2007 9:10pm Subject: Re: confused

Hi Michelle, Don't you worry -- confusion is natural in this new environment. And you are not the only one! I'm forcing everybody to rethink terms that we all had comfortably mapped out in our heads -- words like "environment" and "map" and "picture" and "assignment" -- the first stage in this process of understanding environmental psychology is to break down old ideas and associations that were hard fixed. We have to loosen up the playing field, so to speak. In other words, things are never what they seem, and that is intensely uncomfortable and confusing. Sounds like you are suffering from the "ANOME" that I spoke about in a recent discussion. Don't panic!

All of your questions are good, so I will try to answer them for everyone's benefit! (And by the way, there are no dumb questions, nobody sounds dumb -- your job as a student is to ask and ask and ask until you get the clarity you seek! It is up to us -- your shipmates (if you will allow the metaphor) to make everything as clear as we can -- and I expect everybody to work together to explain things, because we each have our own talents for understanding and making clear to others.

If you are trying to create a blog, that is good! Don't worry about getting the pictures or maps in yet. Reassure yourself that you can at the very least post the text in the blog. That is step one. Once you have done that, try to cut and paste some URLs (the http://whatever.whatever) into your text, linking to your Google map, or to other websites. Then, to get pictures in, save your pictures as .jpg (JPEG) format. You also don't have to successfully get pictures of your maps into your blog, you can simply give us the link. Ask Kenisha for how she linked us all to her Google maps without having to attach them as files.

Also, tell us what paint or photo program you are using. That will help us give you "tech support". This is why I ask everybody to tell me what your "computer environment" is. Each computer environment has different "AFFORDANCES" (to use the textbooks jargon). If we know what your computer affordances (and limitations and constraints) are, we can help you navigate in this new world.

Your photos may be in TIFF format, which is huge, or BMP which is really big (PC's like Dell and Toshiba and all those that run Microsoft Windows generally automatically save in those two formats). So you need to tell us what programs (applications) you are trying to use.

You can't go wrong because everyone gets an A for effort, as I explained in an earlier post. If you tell us where you got lost in your environment, we know you were trying out different behaviors to understand and adapt to your environment. We can help bring you back to safety.

The only way anybody can go wrong in this class is by not reporting what they are doing. If you are keeping a "log" of your activities as you read the textbook, as you explore the internet environments, as you explore your real environments, and participate in the discussions, you are doing great!! I mean it!

I can't stress enough how healthy and important confusion is! It means you are reorienting your COGNITIVE MAP of the world.

Now, as for the virtual reality assignment, it is very open ended. I think it would be VERY COOL if you were to analyze the similarities and differences between board games and computer games -- I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT!! :) Wow -- we spent our whole lives playing board games, from chutes and ladders all the way to Careers and Monopoly and Risk, and I never thought of them as virtual environments. And yet... wow, Monopoly taught us to think like capitalists and property owners, in Careers I always seemed to choose astronaut or teacher... in Risk I always tried to get everybody else to cooperate for world peace... yes, those environments in playtime were serious simulations that prepared me for who I am today.

Buckminster Fuller, the inventor, designer and visionary (look him up in Wikipedia!) created a board game called "the World Game" to help policy makers, politicians, presidents and scientists map out a path to a sustainable future. This was back in the '60s.

So yeah... take a board game or several board games and wander around those environments and flip through your text book and tell us about what you learn! Fascinating!

Does that help?

And remember -- discussing all these things with your fellow students is the key to success . We have a chat room in WebCT for real time communication, and a white board as well, and you can all email each other.

Thanks for asking!

Your prof.

123 LOST!

Message no. 123[Branch from no. 119] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, January 26, 2007 9:16pm Subject: Lost!

Hi Adrienne, and all:

There is a method to my madness! Indeed you should should feel lost! This is why we start the course with mapping. We view the world in this class as a series of imbricated ("overlapping") environments and assume that environments affect behavior because they evoke feelings of comfort or anxiety. We move toward comfort and away from anxiety, right? New environments evoke the "fear of the unknown" (there could be danger around every unknown corner, either to our physical or emotional or social selves) and familiar environments evoke warm and fuzzy feelings. But when environments become too well known, they elicit feelings of boredom and this leads to understimulation anxieties. Thus we see that there are what our textbook calls "optimal" ranges of stimulation.

Once upon a time, our external environment consisted only of what our five senses could directly pick up. We saw it, we heard it, we felt it, smelt it, tasted it. Before we developed language it affected our behavior only insofar as it impacted those five senses, with the important addition of the effect of our "dreamtime" environments. You will note that your dogs twitch and move their legs as they dream, playing out an imaginative interpretation and remixing of all the stored environmental information in their brains.

Language changed everything. It enabled us to literally create environments with words and "surround" other people with them. (Keep in mind that the word ENVIRONMENT means "that which surrounds". It comes from the verb "to environ" from the French "environ", or "around").

Have you ever had the experience of not being able to eat dinner because somebody said something that made you feel sick? My Dad would never allow anybody to say "shit" at the dinner table because he said it made him think of feces and he would literally experience the memory of it. Words are powerful environmental stimuli, pulling memories out of storage that can feel as real as real sensory input.

Once we started putting words down on paper we invented a whole virtual world of environments. Books could take people on journeys to places they had never been, and they would return feeling as if they had really travelled.

Then we invented picture books and took it another step.

And then we invented moving pictures. And then moving pictures with sound, and dialouge. In color. With SURROUND sound. And then 3d movies were invented. And then virtual reality.

Think about this: When you go into a darkened movie theatre, are you going into a "room" (a square box with four walls) as an environment, or are you entering a jungle, outer space, someone else's living room, a new city, ancient Rome, whatever environment happens to appear on the big screen?

These are all environments and they affect us deeply. How many times have you walked out of the movies feeling excited and ready to conquer the world? Which ones? What about leaving a movie depressed and disturbed about life? Which ones? How is it that a bunch of two dimension moving images on the screen can affect us in this way? Are movie environments more powerful in affecting our behavior than "real ones". If so, which is "more real"?

Now back to mapping -- if we are to be able to make sense of all the "real" and "imagined" environments around us, we need guidance. We need to be able to navigate. We need maps. Maps really do more than lead us places. They tell us where one thing stands in relation to another. They establish relationships and usually have a little sign somewhere (implied or real) that says "you are here". This keeps us from getting lost. At least we know where we stand.

When we don't know where we stand the psychological term for it is "ANOME" , a sense of normlessness, rootlessness. It can be terrifying and depressing.

Nowadays new environments are being thrown at us every minute. This course throws new environments at you on a daily level -- every time we write each other we are evoking images and ideas that are new or unfamiliar. And the authority figure, your professor, is challenging you to join him into these new territories.

Some of these territories are so unfamiliar they evoke a sense of panic. Particularly when they contain elements that seem familiar but aren't. New concepts and vocabulary words are like that. We can all read the words, but we don't know what they really mean in this new context. And worse, when some people seem to catch on and feel comfortable it can make the rest of us feel even more lost -- as if we are missing something that everybody else is in on.

I imagine that those of you who tried to slog through my Ph.D. papers on environmentalism felt even more lost. A doctoral program has its own special vocabulary and nuances and ways of presenting things and it can be a very alienating experience. But you are safe -- I merely want to expose you to all the types of linguistic, ideational and interpretive environments that one gets exposed to in this line of work, dealing with "The Environment". It is deep and rich and wonderful and confusing and scary.

I offer you the immortal words from "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy": DON'T PANIC!! (And always carry a towel ! :) ask your kids about that one if they know the books or the movie!)

We are all going to get through the swamps together and get to the safe shore on the other side!

For now, we have our newly developing mapping skills. We will learn, in time, how to use them not only to navigate "real environments" such as those we can see out our window, but virtual environments as well -- even the ones that exist only in our minds and that we use language to express to others.

Welcome to "the matrix".

Happy mappin'!

T

112-114 A passion for mapping

Message no. 112[Branch from no. 108] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, January 26, 2007 3:04pm Subject: Re: Adrienne-view from my deck

11745 Batley Place? Is yours the blue car or one of the three white cars? The house the one with the green patch of lawn behind it? Do you use sprinklers? Ever get any wildlife in that patch of trees back there? Yup, your efforts worked! :)

When one clicks on what you sent it only gets you to google maps because in your post that is all that is highlighted. But if one copies in the entire address to the URL field, it takes us right to your house. Good going! It must be cool to be on a little peninsula surrounded by water! Growing up on the Hudson river in Dobbs I can't think of living where there isn't some water feature nearbye!

http://www.google.com/f=q&hl=en&q=11745+Batley+Place,+Lake+Ridge,+Virginia++&ie=UTF8&z=15&ll=38.700013,- 77.320318&spn=0.014603,0.036521&t=k&om=1

Message no. 113[Branch from no. 106] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, January 26, 2007 3:39pm Subject: Jungle World

Hi Dana and all -- good job on the bloggin'! It was great to see a map of the bronx zoo too. Did you scan that in, or pull it off the web?

I should let you all know, so you understand my passion for mapping, that for 4 years I was one of the team managers and creators of the mapping project at the Los Angeles Zoo that got us accredited as a botanical garden. Now we are "The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Garden" officially. There was no google maps at the time, so I had to get aerial survey maps from the City of Los Angeles. Then I made a GIS (Geographic Informations Systems) map in a really expensive program called ArcView GIS that I took classes in at UCLA (all Masters Degree students in Urban Planning are required to learn this program). I then had our department (horticulture) purchase a really expensive Trimble GPS (Geopositioning Satellite) system with a massive antenna that we wore on our backs like space men. It also had this massive laser gun attached to it. Every day we would wander around the zoo with tape measures and tags and cameras and record the positions of every blessed tree and shrub at the zoo. The laser gun was for getting the exact location of trees inside the animal enclosures (they wouldn't let us go in with the gorillas or lions and tigers and bears, oh my!).

With this technology we made a virtual map of everything the zoo had (nobody new what vegetation was in the zoo). We brought in experts and made a massive database and identified all the plants down to the species level. It was a kind of Noah's ark project -- take stock of what you got so we know what we are losing and who has what.

With my team (Janica Jones, Cruz Ortiz and Bob Wickham, R.I.P. :( , ) we went around the world to Zoos and rainforests teaching others the mapping techniques and trying to establish one big world map of "where the wild things are". The thought was that if we had accurate maps and knew the value of the resources, nobody could callously erase endangered precious life forms. We also wanted all the zoos and every home owner to know who had what so we could share endangered plants (i.e., maybe you have an ancient Gingko tree on your street and some developer wants to cut it down to build a parking lot. Our network would send somebody to get the tree and move it to the zoo. We did this with big trees that the Los Angeles airport wanted to remove - it cost 40,000 dollars per tree, but it was cheaper than what it would have cost to plant and water and fertilize such a tree for 40 years, and we could build a great exhibit that the public would see with giant trees in it).

As a representative of the L.A. Zoo I made a trip to the Bronx Zoo to meet with their developers and got a great behind the scenes tour of the efforts there -- particularly the new Gorilla Forest. We got to share our database and methods with them. This meant alot to me because I went to the Bronx Zoo on my 18th birthday to see the opening of Jungle World and it affected my whole life. Back then I wished we knew where all the plants and animals were. Ironically, now Google Maps has made all of this work tremendously easier! If we'd only had it back then!

You have a great zoo there in the Bronx -- a world class resource!

By the way, Dana, can you post any satellite maps of the Bronx zoo and your neighborhood on your blog (is there a reason you only use artistic maps? A choice for abstraction? You find them more legible than satellite-art hybrids? Just curious.

In fact I would like to hear from all of you -- let's start using the vocabulary from the text (look ahead to chapter 3) on "structure matching" (p. 91) and "legibility" (p. 73) and complexity, etc.

T Message no. 114[Branch from no. 99] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, January 26, 2007 3:44pm Subject: Posting course material

You are welcome to post anything anytime! Sequence is important sometimes for us to follow a certain storyline, to gain sequential understanding, and for administration and organization, but life is much more complex and NONLINEAR. Feel free to post stuff early. Then we can get to it at our leisure, with more time. And when people post stuff late, it still counts, but it means that we may have moved on and may not have time to give it the attention or credit it deserves. So post, post away!

:)

100 Removing Carriage Returns to Post text to your blog without uneven line lengths

How many times have you tried to copy and paste text from your word processing program into your blog, only to find when you publish the post that it looks horrible, displaying uneven line lengths, weird line breaks and carriage returns, the formatting all screwed up?

If you are like me, you probably wasted a lot of time going through the text hitting delete wherever the text erroneously skipped to the next line and trying to make it all come out right.

Here is a procedure for getting rid of those annoying hidden carriage returns and line breaks that really works great, thanks to Bobbi Kerlin, Ph.D. in her guide to using NUD.IST4 Classic to conduct Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDA). (You can read her description and view pictures of the process here: http://kerlins.net/bobbi/research/nudist/documents/unevenlines.html) The technique she describes works using both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org (open office instructions are here: http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/12/finding_and_rep.html)

(coders, you can find a java code to automate this here: http://jennifermadden.com/javascript/stringEscape.html)

Steps:
1. Open your text in Word.

2. Go to format/reveal formatting

3. Under options (in the window on the lower right) tick the "show all formatting marks" checkbox.

4. Go to Edit/Replace (ctl H if you use the keyboard).

5. Using the replace tab, under "find what" put in ^p^p to find all instances of double paragraph marks (these are usually the true paragraph marks you want to keep) and replace with $$ or && or some other character that is unlikely to be found in your document.

6. Your document will suddenly lose all its formatting but don't worry. Now we have to replace the single paragraph marks (the annoying ones that screw up our line lengths on our blog post) with a single empty space. So now find ^p and replace with a space (i.e. hit the space bar once, moving the cursor in the replace with field one space to the right).

7. Now do another find for the $$ or && marks you put in, and re-replace them with ^p^p (double paragraph marks). When you do that the formatting will all re-appear as you wanted it.

8. Now cut and paste this text into your blog post. When you publish it should look okay!

P.S.: If you have messed up text IN YOUR BLOG, go to edit post, do a select all, copy the text and paste it into Microsoft Word. Now, when you see it, the paragraph marks have been replaced by little back arrows. There will be two back arrows (indicating carriage returns I guess) for legitimate paragraphs, and one where there is a funky uneven line length carriage return. To do a replace for these and other unusual characters you can do as I did and search through the "special" tab at the bottom of the find and replace window. On my computer (running Windows XP) it turns out the code for those arrows is ^l which stands for "manual line break".
Replace the double ^l^l with $$ or && as you did ^p^p before (step 5), and then single ^l with a single space as in step 6. Then follow steps 7 and 8 and you are done.

Hope this helps and saves you a ton of time that can be better spent trying to figure out how to end poverty and suffering in the face of the greed and ignorance of people who have too much and still think they need more!