[Xmca-l] Re: [External] Re: Are Zoomspace and Meatspace Equally Both Mediated?

Sun May 24 08:07:53 PDT 2020

I've been part of a small group of friends that do Zoom karaoke together on Saturday nights during quarantine. It's a lot of fun, but it's also been very helpful in practicing and calibrating a sense of presence over Zoom. Every song is an opportunity to practice a different sort of character, a different emotional style, and the fact that you can see yourself while you're doing it provides some feedback. We all know each other a bit offline as well, so there's that sense of social presence and history that we can compare to whoever we are when we are singing Don Henley or Portishead or whatever. Michael, your post helped me understand why it's felt so important to me to keep this up - I feel like it's helping me figure out a wider range of conveying myself, and observing others, through this medium.
Best,
Elizabeth

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Glassman, Michael <glassman.13@osu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2020 10:17 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [External] [Xmca-l] Re: Are Zoomspace and Meatspace Equally Both Mediated?

Hi David,

For what it’s worth I can give you my take on why Zoom does not work in the same way as face-to-face (I have never heard the term meatspace before. I am not sure I like it, although it is very descriptive).  There are a couple of things missing from Zoom that we are used to in face-to-face. There are two issues I can think of which have been termed but have not been deeply explored. I am not sure where mediation fits with either. They are teacher presence and social presence. Garrison’s Community of Inquiry model discusses these but does not go deeply in to them. Teacher presence actually goes back to face-to-face research.  Teacher presence is the way students read their teachers when they are together in a classroom context. What early research suggested is that language is actually one of the least important aspects of teacher presence. Much more impactful are things like body language, tone of voice, eye contact. Students over the course of their academic careers come to read all these, and those who are best at reading them (I would say usually people who shared similar historical and familial backgrounds – but this is conjecture) do the best in classes. From how my Korean students have described the education system there, teacher presence is extraordinarily important, perhaps because of the subtleties of the culture, perhaps because the student populations can be very homogeneous. With Zoom you loose almost all of these qualities and students are desperately trying to understand their immediate relationship with the teacher, or just anecdotally just give up and go play games. It can be incredibly frustrating. It also works the other way I think. We sometimes take for granted how important it is to read a room from the qualities of the audience. I have been on a number of Zoom meetings where speakers who are very aware in face-to-face meeting just went on far too long, losing the room. It can be very disconcerting.

The other issue is social presence. This is actually a concept that goes back to the dominance of the telephone but we still seem to know incredibly little about it. It is the sense that there are corporal beings out there, acting as an audience and as a point of reflection. We tend to lose momentum and interest if we feel we are throwing out feedback into a void. My experience is that unless you have critical experience with individuals off-line, more than just being in a classroom, it is really difficult to build social presence. The earliest research suggested that when there is a distance most of what we can do is give orders and respond. Zoom does not do well with social presence, but perhaps worse it gives you a false sense of social presence. You think, well I can see them and they can see me so why shouldn’t there be social presence? It leads to dangerous assumptions and frustrations and I think it also a reason why so many instructors and students become frustrated with Zoom classes. A sort of “this should be working better than it is.” But actually, maybe it shouldn’t.

Vygotsky has an interesting passage in chapter six. Where he talks about teaching the student in school and then having them go home and continue exploring the concept. I sort of think I know where he got that from (because it comes out of nowhere it seems) but this also might be because as I have mentioned I have been reading Stanislavski.  In the chapters Vygotsky obviously had access to the narrator talks about starting to work on a role and then going home and continuing to work on it. The theatrical context can give us a good start. We can do good things working on the character by ourselves (facial expressions in front of a mirror) but, and this is the part Vygotsky does not include, or does he, you need to consolidate this development with others. You must bring the concept back in to a caring audience where it congeals with the work of others (a zone of proximal development). If Zoom does not give us an audience do we miss this really important step, because the students do not have a sense of social presence, and those that struggled with reading the teacher and reading the room struggle even more as they try and bring their conceptual thinking to fruition.

Just some random thoughts on a coronavirus Sunday morning.

Michael

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2020 8:34 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Are Zoomspace and Meatspace Equally Both Mediated?

I have been teaching three classes on-line through Zoom since mid-March, and I have noticed very big differences in response patterns in Zoomspace and the same classes taught face-to-face in "meatspace" one year ago. Like Elizabeth Warren (when she taught at Harvard) I don't ask many "Anyone know?" questions; like Elizabeth Warren I have found that when you use "Anyone know?" questions, the rich just get richer and the poor stay poor.

So I tend to ask a question and then tag it with a name. On the one hand, Zoom makes it easier to "go down the list" and make sure everybody gets a question (and you can change the list each time you do this, e.g. by switching from the Korean alphabet to the English one, so it doesn't LOOK like you are following a fixed order). On the other, Zoom produces very long pauses between the time I tag the question with a name and the time the tagged person starts a reply, much longer than face-to-face classes do. Last week I noticed, while transcribing the orals for some analysis, that the wait time was almost proportional to the scores: with some correction for male vs. female and Chinese vs. Korean students, I could predict the final score from the length of the pause. It also seemed to me that in general students who had fared worse with the conceptual material when I taught them in meatspace fared even worse with Zoom, while those who had done well in meatspace did even better on Zoom.

Assuming all that is true, why should it be the case? Meatspace is, of course, mediated, but it's mediated face to face, through "nun chi" (that is, "the color/tone/ambiance of eyes"); Zoom makes it impossible to know which student the professor is looking at, approaching, gesturing to. Sight is one kind of mediation, sound is another, and of course silent text is a third, with all of the difficulties of mediation that LSV points out in Chapter 6 of Thinking and Speech. But LSV also points out that these difficulties represent not only difference but development. Students who can deal with silent text mediation of concepts are "higher" in the sense that by dealing with it, they prove that they can also deal with sound mediation, but the reverse need not be true. Similarly, students who can deal with sound mediation of visual-illustrative complexes (generalized representations, such as we find in school children) can deal with sight mediation--but not necessarily vice versa. Zoomspace and meatspace may be very similarly related, and it's in that sense that they are not equally both mediated.

David Kellogg

Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.

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