Here you go. The first ever live broadcast of the Ragged University, broadcast live in July 2014 in the The Counting House Edinburgh. This is the technology which we were exploring in the month of July for all those who want to learn media skills and have their stuff out there on t’interweb. As a pilot it was a part of a string of experiments of format exploring the uses and affordances of the digital in producing educational environments. See down the page for notes and sketches reflecting on technologies and education…

 

You can watch the recordings of this straight forward live streaming via Google hangouts, a Digital SLR camera, a 4G phone and a laptop. As a proof of concept it showed that it is indeed possible to live broadcast with commonly available technology:

‘Memoirs of An Edinburgh Poacher‘ and ‘Placebo‘

 

 

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Pedagogical Notes and sketches in Update:

As an experiment in the search for format proofs live broadcasting produced a great number of technological barriers which, it was felt, are not helpful to building learning environments.  Generally the technology costs were weighed up with what was being gained from the activities afforded by being in a room with other people endeavouring to communicate and conversationalise around physically meeting. Live broadcasting, even with all the promises of the telephone and satelite network along with all the interfacing software and hardware configurations, is still a very uncertain area.

 

Despite Further and Higher Education institutions becoming intoxicated with the syrupy dreams of silicon valley and the “Inshitification” of digital offerings, it is yet to be fully realised the tightrope which is walked when the learning environment is lossy compressed from a three dimensional sensorially enriched meaningful environment with legacy-producing-physiological-pneumonics to constrained 2D information environments.  The consequences of the denudation of the learning space by over digitising are yet to be fully accounted for and culturally parsed.

 

What gets discussed about ‘digital learning’ and what technologies afford which means of learning has been greatly influenced by educators specialising in this area at the University of Manchester in the Ellen Wilkinson School of Education.  Distance learning using computer systems needs to be informed by the successful experiments of the generations of educators having had digital technologies and software constrained environments imposed on their practice, previously situated more substantially in the interpersonal geolocated place. It is the educator skilled in using digital and multimedia tools who is to pioneer practices which resolve the tensions put on the modern educator as best as the formal institution will allow.

 

My current belief is that the more that what is done in the digital can be balanced in the material world, the further understandings can extend. I suspect that healthy digital practice will come more into view with effective digital practice; a metaphor in the biology of plants, the larger the root ball, the plant above ground will grow correspondingly large and/or healthy.  The person who invests large time real estate to cognitively inhabiting the digitally curated world of information, the more greatly their experience is similarly anchored in the sensorial physical sociological world they are rooted in then the fewer problems which digital technology can theoretically produce.

 

Starting the Ragged University project as an exploration of developing the infrastructure to informal learning networks and practices which afford individuals to utilise available infrastructure and common technology to develop exercising activities which equate to higher education levels of learning and mastery within the context of the lives of people.

 

Reading digital technologies has involved being more interested in the technologies resilient to the violence of the effect of finance on digital tools as products.  This has required pragmatics and the utilisation of counterintuitive experiments in order to reach towards practices which are resilient enough to facilitate long term production of means to ‘self-educate’.  The practical side must be found in the defacto real.and situationally accessible, so the reliable, the open source, the complex which is open to scrutiny as an assemblage of simpler parsings offers the meat of everyones plate.

 

Extending from this ‘the project’, or at least the fork of the social practice I, Alex Dunedin, has pieced together from a long string of interactions which did not involve finance got interested as what has partly become a researching of pedagogical means available to whatever human being, what ever their material means.  Moving to study what might constitute a learning environment assembled through direct engagement of the context-mixed experience of world offers a foundational matter to develop landscapes of knowledge codified in language.

 

Adding to this the sequencing of scaffolding-generating-constructive-tasks throughout life and orienting these via language shifting and model borrowing from different disciplinary fields as expressive modalities and means of extending memory. This places central to practices associated with learning the use of language and its tools a primary instrument of knowledge.

 

As such the presuppositions, hopes and dreams about digital technologies have changed over the years as the technologies and access to utilising the technologies has inevitably shaped my practice forcing a reformulation, and falsification, of the promises of digital tools for sustainable practice.  The great advances are often accompanied by a lack of situational awareness through mass baptisms and the promise of geesers of commerce.

 

Producing compasses to navigate the progressing hyper abstraction of homo sapiens from immediate environmental information we cognitively have co-developed with has become a guiding star in the sketches of pedagogical research I have been pursuing.  In practice this has meant paying more attention to the affordances of conversation, discussion, handwriting, pencil, pen and paper as a key to more ‘technologically advanced’ tools like the computer.

 

I liken the principal to what I would argue as something I hold true; if you cannot write your information in the form of a paper document then you will struggle to produce that information in a digital format as the skills which are exercised in putting things into words in a way which is meaningful to others are most easily exercised and bug fixed through the material organisation of written information.

 

The task of written language has in it an inherent organisational challenge, which as an exercising medium and extension of types of memory, facilitates the process of ‘coming-to-know’ (formation of knowledge) producing as legacy a material artifact which embodies notations of axioms, observations, statements, arrangements and dynamics of a mimesis as a character of itself.  Each written arrangement of words is unique, as much as each loaf of bread, each assembled table, each situational moment set in observations framed in languages of time.

 

A medium offers a means of producing an artifact which can be set on its own and be understood by its character-plurals.  It is through reading these that people may know more about the nature of what it is which composes their experience; a burnt piece of toast will tell a story to which information can be added to and deduced in order to reliably infer what the senses or the situational.

 

Producing a physical book could be understood in the following way. Project oriented learning using digital tools mixed with other methods of doing in order to manifest a legacy artifact which other people can use to understand what you are expressing sufficiently to take on understandings which can be operationalised independently of the authors company, but at the same time be equipped to have a discussion about the contents and premises of the information encoded into it through different techniques utilising text and image.

 

Through the project based learning method of producing a book the sequence of acts and corresponding levels of mastery are required in order to bring into being a physical manuscript as an artifact of assembled effort.  By doing this the realised artifact has inherent in it all the storied aspects of a tangible, externalised physical object in the world which has inevitably required the use of specific tools, effort applied over time to arrange a medium and through doing so generate skills which strengthen, extend, and mature through their exercise.

 

The creation of a book offers a fully scaffolded generative and ancient task which recapitulates the knowledge technologies of human culture.  Wherever you will find a book, you will find a human being which created that material book; although they are made out of wood, they do not grow on trees nor do any other thing we know of craft a book out of materials.  As an act the project offers a medium to learn all the technologies which can be used to sculpt and craft, change and render, knowledge – or ways of evoking knowingnesses in other people so when they come to encounter the world they re-cognicise/recognise what you have produced as related.