In September this year, I published an article titled Digital media observed: Distribution Media or Communication Partner (transl. from Danish)¹. In this article, I discuss how we, from a system-theoretical perspective, can understand communication when using digital media. My argument was that computes that use AI and Machine Learning can be observed as “communication partners.”

Yesterday I searched for “interesting stuff” on De Gruyter (part of the query was “zettelkasten” (don’t ask…)). Here I found an article written by Elena Esposito titled Artificial Communication? The Production of Contingency by Algorithms². To my surprise, Esposito makes the same argument as I do in my article (laid out in a more professional/academic form, of course).

One of the issues is the concept of double contingency and whether it should be present on both sides (two psychic systems engaging in communication knowing that they don’t know what the other is thinking and has to decide on an action). The problem in the context of digital media is that a computer (or as Esposito writes: the algorithm) does not operate consciously like the psychic system. The question is, therefore, if communication can emerge in this situation.

Esposito even referes to the article Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen: Ein Erfahrungsbericht by Niklas Luhmann³. Something that I omitted in my article because I did not dare.

With my new knowledge, I feel the need to write an article about this topic again.

For my project at the course I store my data in a SQLite database – basically a database stored in a single file. I often copy the file with a new name. If something unintended should happen in the database I can always go back to the previous version. I name the file with the current date. The pattern is like: YYYYMMDD[...].db and the result is: 20180317_project.db.

To make it easy to import the data from the right database file I created a small script that selects the most recent database file from my directory:

# select the most recent file in a directory
dir.dir <- "~/project/db"
dir.files <- dir(dir.dir, pattern="^[0-9]{8}.+db$")
dir.files.dates <- sort(substr(dir.files, 1, 8), decreasing = TRUE)
dir.mostrecentfile <- dir.files[grep(dir.files.dates[1], dir.files)]

Explanation:

1. Set the directory to ~/project/db
2. Get all the files with the pattern ^[0-9]{8}.+db$, so starting with 8 digiats and ends with db and with something in between.
3. Sort the list of files/dates (even though it is not necessary)
4. Select the the file name from the list using the first element in the sorted list.

I know, it is not rocket science, but it’s really helpful.

So fare a good experience; nice people, a good office and accommodation. My primary contacts are Anders Mørch and Anders Kluge and they are also in charge of one of the PhD courses I will attend: Collaborative use of interactive digital representations for learning.

I stay at one of the researcher bedsits near the university, a 10 min. walk to the office. I arrived here by car and brought my skiing gear, so I know what to do in the weekends…

The course was asking all the questions that you would ask a quantitative project – sometimes hard to relate to my project. Here is just a few point that I found important.

Hypothesis I never thought that hard about writing a hypothesis. And maybe with good reason. If I look at my problem statement it starts off with a “How”. How can I ever make an investigation on “how” into something that is falsifiable? Maybe I can challenge previews findings (if I could find any), but I will never get close to a conclusion that answers my problem statement in a true or false.

Systematic review Another thing that I found interesting was the purpose of the systematic review. I have a systematic review, but I can see that there is potential for more then just referring to articles that more or less match in topic. I know that I'm not able to do a meta-analysis (from the diverse set of qualitative research articles), but still I need to look into the findings in a more quantitative sense.

The topic of todays lecture was Niklas Luhmanns Systems theory, part of “science theory and didactics”. Systems theory is interesting in itself and on top of that it's the theory behind the methodology of my thesis.

As always I used a milk carton as an example to illustrate complexity. Not only a good example when it comes to the reasoning behind selecting milk (at least in a danish supermarket), but also what it takes for the milk company to meet market demands. One of the exercises was new; a drawing exercise where one student explains a drawing to another student who then draw his understanding of the drawing. They have two minutes for the exercises and afterward we discussed elements like what it takes to understand one another, information, meaning and understanding etc.

I had fun and I think the students felt the same.

Problems started when some of my references (I use Mendelay) had special characters in the URL field. The pragmatic solution – I just removed the URLs from the references. Then at some point underscores (_) started showing up in DOIs and this is a must – I'm not going to remove whose.

In my search for a solition I read: BibTex URL entries using underscore, Solving the bibtex problem with underscores in DOI and Underscore in bibtex url. I have no use for hyperlinks in my PDF-file, so I settled on a solution adding:

\usepackage{nohyperref} % This makes hyperref commands do nothing without errors\usepackage{url} % This makes \url work

Thanks WWW.

“Writing as a routine”: Ok, I could do better here. I'm often thinking about my blog, and I have ideas about what to write, but then forget it again.

“Become a more confident writer”: I need this, and this is the starting point of some of the other points from the blog post – confidence, being concise, getting to the point etc.

Just to say that I'm working on it...

Off course things could be improved (and luckily I have something to write about in my thesis). I have a set of question categories related to PLE (consume, aggregate, produce, share, networking, collaborating). It's clear that some of the categories (like consume) are more “present” in the mind of the students then others (like collaborating). It will be interesting, to what extend I can “unfold” the more difficult categories.

One thing that we all have to learn is to stop thinking about what to share and not. “I'm a novice, so what can I contribute with?” This is the wrong question! First of all, writing about something that you learned (or present it etc.) is a good thing. It makes you reflect on the things you learned – and how knows where that will lead you. Second, don't be afraid that what you write about is too basic (or whatever) – you can probably find somebody that are a bit more novice than you and will appreciate what you write about (on top of that, on WWW, there are no restrictions on who can write about what). Third, with a little practice (publishing more and more stuff) you get the habit of publishing and at some point you will be the expert. The question should be: “How can I improve my learning and engage other people?”.

It's always a good idea to force yourself to reflect on things. Writing things down is one way – presenting your stuff to somebody else is definitely another good way.

Isn't it exactly what this project is about? We can sometimes set learning aside. Just because you are enrolled in some education and call yourself a student doesn't mean that your knowledge just grows.

Just like this website. Just because I have this website it doesn't mean that it's magically fulled up with interesting content. And most important, that I magically begin to reflect on my findings in the project and start to share them. There is place for improvement.