Note: these are the original notes and discussions that Pekka and Michael had surrounding what was later to be termed the Pedagogy of Simultaneity (PoS). These are organized as best as possible below. Please feel free to add comments, questions, or text as you see fit. We look forward to hearing from you all. If you have any sources that might be relevant, please feel free to add that to the bibliography page.
Pekka Ihanainen and Michael Sean Gallagher
I´m here and you´re there - we are connected - I´m there and you´re here. I can share the "I´m here " experience through different tools and ways which means that "I´m here" moment, place and mood popups for everyone and everywhere to their time dimensions. Simultaneity is present in many. It becomes three-dimensional.
The three-dimensionality of simultaneity means a fulfillment of time layers (Ihanainen, Moravec, 2011), place multiplicity and many-fold social presence of each others. When during past times there was only people "here and now" (and will still be) like Tiina, Jyrki and me here on a terrace of Jardin La Punta, nowadays people more often and acceleratingly also are in their own places and presences "there-here and in many-nows" (in their now-dots, -cycles and -continuities) in unique physical-virtual-social places like Anne, John, Tero, Taru etc. in their participation the sharing of my terrace experience in Facebook.
These ‘there-here and in many-nows’ represent a confluence of simultaneous events that the learner actively engages in for variety of purposes. All represent active engagement with the informal or formal learning scenario and make the learner present in the learning environment. These simultaneous events all represent discrete learning scenarios with some cognitive input from the learner, yet they can be and often are contradictory or superfluous for the purposes of the other learning scenario. Learners actively engage on simultaneous learning fronts, often contradictory ones, in a three-dimensional simultaneous learning landscape. This three dimensional simultaneity needs representation in our pedagogy as well.
Three-dimensional simultaneity impacts pedagogy, but does it represent a discrete and valid pedagogy in and of itself. In this article these themes and questions are tried to open for discussion.
As an experience simultaneity means becoming aware of felt quasi-separatenesses, e.g. to grasp a unity of mind and body, an achievement of shared experience in a social setting and a true simultaneous connection between people by online devices. The separateness is a sort of scale misconception. Examined in a certain size, distance, time, perception and experience scales there appears to be separatenesses, but when changing the scale separatenesses attach to simultaneities. The scale change is dependent on people´s ability to understand connections and entities, contexts in which the scale can alter (e.g. the peak of a mountain versus the bottom of a valley) and tools by which to scale (e.g a microscope, telescope and computer with internet connection).
The simultaneity can be approached from ego experience and consciousness. An ego experience first condense in thinking of self: I think therefore I am. Then cognitive identity grows to awareness of unity of mind and body. Separate individuality transforms as us in families, clans and other neighboring circles in daily life, hobbies, workplace activities etc. when determination of a human being in social responsiveness comes a common understanding for people (John Shotter). Finally in the era of internet we all are globally connected and present, and we speak about it in terms of augmented reality and body (cyborgology, Riffkin). Astronomy and cosmology without speaking of religions have always connected us as part of a universe and eternity.
The simultaneity can also be examined through multiplicity and connection (or oneness) of antitheses. The first mentioned refers to emergent connections like in bee and ant nests or bird swarms in which separate contacts of many individuals produce the nest and swarm (Kelly). Villages and towns, communities and networks, systems, discourses and beliefs are human made corresponding emergent entities, which still are difficult to perceive compared with nests and swarms.
These nest and swarm analogies are good example of a natural tendency towards complexity in our social structures and systems. How we, naturally as human beings, look for participation in a system that extends our consciousness and complexity in ways that benefit us. These systems are examples of non-zero sum games ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Q9IRBY/ref=yml_dp. Nonzero: Th ...), where everyone can win/benefit without detracting from anyone else. So our community connection, our family connections, our learning and online connections, they benefit us without detracting from the other. The collaboration of authors for this article (we have been writing this over a year by online tools)I is a perfect example. There is no good reason for us to collaborate aside from the fact that we both love ideas and we each thought the other might help us unlock those ideas. As humans we are naturally experimenting constantly with simultaneity precisely to see which non-zero sum systems will yield the greatest results.
Another example is when a learner actively engages in seemingly contradictory learning activities. This learner is actively studying the discipline of ethics and copyright law, all while downloading materials illegally and sharing those widely. One activity seemingly contradicts the other, but the learner is pursuing simultaneous activities of maximum potential advantage in disparate fields. The learner does not know which skill will be more advantageous or serendipitous at a later date.
The simultaneity in connections of antitheses means above all that antitheses cannot exist without each other. A positive needs negative, a feminine masculine, an individual others (community/network) etc. and vice versa. When we think the present world with all virtual practicalities the connection of antitheses comes visible e.g. in how multitasking requires intact mind and sharing mushing-up and vice versa.
Networks require anthitheses and agents, many of them. It can be assumed that the more the participating and collaborating agents that exist in the network, and the more diversity that is present in the form of antitheses, the more productive the network can be and the more simultaneous activity will take place.
The simultaneity in modern world can also be watched from a direction what makes it possible. First but maybe not most important comes forth in technology. Modern leapfrogingly developing (mobile) ICT can be said to make everything possible everywhere at the same time. Technology has become a part of human global body. Second and probably more crucial factor is a human developing capacity to take action in multifaceted and overlapping interconnections. This is a question of discernment. The ability to discern what action is productive and appropriate while simultaneously evaluating and participating in other networks. To act in one while participating in another. The analogy for this is possible to see in an amoeba slowly expanding. Each surface area of the amoeba represents a network or a connection. Each connection is pushed on and some expand and retract; some progress and some merely hold. But all are in motion and all construct the larger whole. Learning as a rhizome is another example (Dave Cormier). We advance and retreat and hold our ground on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Third enabler of simultaneity is a change (or understanding) of stable knowledge as an active knowing (Siemens). The knowing is being in movement like a flowing water. It often is tacit and informal beside the explicit knowledge and it spreads out everywhere touching via knowing people (knowmads) everyone being connected. Also, it is an understanding that knowledge is highly contextual, that it exists as a valid construct in contexts of time, space, and connections (social presences).
The simultaneity has parallel terms like confluence, coexistence and pervasiveness. In this article the confluence is especially connected with time, coexistence with place and pervasiveness with social presence constituents. In a way confluence, coexistence and pervasiveness refract simultaneity from different angles and give more light to see the variety of the three-dimensional simultaneity.
Finally it has to point out that simultaneity does not mean sameness. Separatenesses, individualities etc. do exist and they are necessities inside richness of diversities. The simultaneity of separatenesses is the very webbing factor that creates encounterings, connectiveness and authenticity.
It is possible to speak about pointillist and cyclical times side by side a linear time and when they fold over each other about overlapping time (Ihanainen, Moravec). In addition to them a duration can be included in time layers (Railly, 2012.)
The linear time is familiar for all of us: yesterday, today, tomorrow; at twelve, six pm and one am o´clock. The pointillist time becomes understandable in its name. A time exists in separate dots, which are in a way thrown into time-space. For instance tweets are this kind of produced and experienced time points. The cyclic time means more intensive bursts than bare dots. Yore it was experienced e.g. in seasons of a year. During industrial era a corresponding cyclic activity can be seen in rhythms of work and leisure time periods. A buzzy and bursty activity is experientable also in net chattings, which include both strong white water and slow quiet waters participation sequences. Contents of conversations proceed in these cycles. The overlapping time refers to simultaneous ongoing of linear, pointillist and cyclical time, which is undergone as a wearing and on the other hand as an empowering time constituent. The duration as a time phenomenon is on the other hand empty and at the same time eventful, but sometimes also neutral with respect to above-mentioned. Linear, pointillist, cyclic and overlapping times as if fulfill and empty themselves in durations.
When time layers are considered in their connections to human experience and doing, expressions (Bakhtin, Shotter) produced and interpreted by people are connected with pointillist time, discussions and their sets with cyclic time, summaries, mush-ups and collages (or messes) of expressions and discussions with overlapping time. Together they are the very human interaction. The duration can be characterized by above said emptying or fulfilling of intensity, which still is in movement either one direction or another.
Before Internet a place usually always was only a physical-social space. Physical-social places are personal spaces of people although they of course are constituted by the actual physical and social context (niche). Also shared places of people like cafes, cities, workplaces and cultures understood as contexts are physical-social spaces. Authentic nature like a forest, see and lake, sky etc. are physical places , which nowadays though have human impact the same way as agrarian landscape has. The true authentic nature can only if anywhere be found today in natural parks.
Modern physical-social places have shown up in virtual sites, i.e. by ICT reachable and produceable places. We are inside them more and more often generated by mobile technology (smart phones, tablets etc.). Virtual places can be textual like documents, written stories and descriptions. Often they are connected with visual and aural elements and they become multimedia places. When virtual places are simulating face-to-face realities they are virtual worlds like Second Life, gaming worlds and simulations. Videocalls (Skype probably the most well-known) are also two and many folded virtual meeting places between people. Complex virtual spaces are different kinds of combinations of above described places.
Physical and virtual places are social. The sociability of places comes true by the fact that people share place and location information with each other. People permeate places by their presence and besides it create new human made places. When a mobile technology has become a part of humanity, i.e. when people are cyborgisized (cf http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/opinion/global/maria-popova-evgeny-morozov-susan-greenfield-are-we-becoming-cyborgs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&smid=tw-share& ) there is no sense to speak any more about separate physical, virtual and social places. There are only places, which are simultaneously physical, virtual and social. They coexist in places of today.
It is difficult to remove people from time and place events. A sociability is a constituent which is necessarily in when it is a question of human phenomena are they embedded in time, place or some other occurrences. Next we pause for a social presence to figure out the three-dimensional simultaneity.
The simultaneity as a social presence feature can better be described by pervasiveness. It means that social interaction and responsiveness permeates in practice all man touched and tangled realities are they visible and understandable or not.
The social presence comes from individuals. The presence between people can be listening, empathic and dialogue/conversational. It can also be non-listening, non-empathic and non-conversational. The latter means in practice social absence in the sense of meeting each other, but it still has a strong impact in an actual social context.
Also a social environment or niche is a state of presence. It can be felt as a smooth, relaxed and approvable room into which one wants to join or it can have a rejecting and excluding status like before mentioned state or aura around a non-listening, non-empathic and non-conversational person. The social presence is an interaction state of a group or whatever gathering of people, which absorbs in or pushes out.
The social presence can be examined as a process or flow as well. This means the question of quality of social movement and progress. It is possible to characterize it for instance as a formal and rather regulated progression like in official ceremonies. The social presence as a process can also be informal and open, which can be stepped in without reservedness.
The social presence is still possible to see as shared cognitive, emotional and intentional mental states or moods. A formal instruction and learning situation produces mainly cognitive social presence (including all other moods as well). Informal and familiar meeting of people is more emotion based than cognitive. An intentional social activity is constituted by more or less conscious aims to achieve something whether it is a question of formal or informal event.
In the pedagogy of simultaneity learning and pedagogy are understood to segue each other. When it is spoken about learning pedagogical issues are handled as well. And when examined pedagogical questions also learning themes are at hand.
The three-dimensionality is above connected with time, place and social presence. They are the reality, in which the pedagogy of simultaneity takes place. A time with its linear, pointillist, cyclic, overlapping and duration dimensions makes a movement to emerge into life and activity. It is important to notice that the movement is not only linear, but all the dimensions mentioned above include to it. Depending on its movement character the time is always emergent and formative. It does not pause. In this sense the time gives to learning and pedagogy a character of incompleteness and being in a phase. The time is an incompleteness context for a pedagogy. A dynamics of break off in continuity and the perception of it is connected with a linear time. The pointillist incompleteness means dynamics of separate time dots. In the cyclic time the incompleteness is attached to occurrence of rhythms and their detection in bursts of events. In the dynamics of the overlapping time the incompleteness means the alteration of disappearance and becoming visible of time layers. In the duration the incompleteness is connected with an understanding of emptying and fulfilling time experience.
Places are physical-virtual-social spaces. A direct and mediated experiencing are weared in them, but the experience as such still is a complex unity. I.e. me, you and them have the world with its events in our pockets here, there and over there. Separate physical and virtual places do not exist. The sinking of virtual into physical means that many and manifold places do coexist. The coexistence of locations like me writing here in a summer hut and talking about it at the same time to my friends and colleagues around the world and also writing together with them, brings openness to learning and pedagogy. They no longer can close themselves in certain discrete places. New places of learning and pedagogy are abundant and complex. A pedagogical complexity comes true in these places. Encountering and interactions of people, different kinds of events and activities as individual and shared acts get executed in places, which are at the same time many physical, virtual and social spaces. The learning and pedagogy are complexified into these places.
The social presence is a human state. It brings man´s fleshness to an emergence of time and complexity of place. The time and place get passed through by humaneness. In principle times and places can be existent without people, but in human scale only social presences vitalize them. The social presence gives for learning and pedagogy a human context, i.e. feelings, perceptions, unseenables, interruptions, interventions, withdrawings etc.
The time, place and social presence are primary contexts for learning and pedagogy, in which they receive blending colors of emergence (confluences of times), complexity (coexistence of intricacies of places) and humaneness (pervasiveness of social presences). The emergence, complexity and humaneness constitute the learning and pedagogy, which are executed by agents like learners, contents, medias and filters. They will be examined next.
Relevant agents connected with a learning and pedagogy are learners (teachers belong to learners as well), filters (filtering and curation are new important tasks of teachers in the middle of information, knowledge and other overloads), medias (interaction and communication tools and systems) and contents as knowledge, skills and intentions for acting.
As said above emergence, complexity and humaneness constitute all agents. Besides them medias are connected also with multimedia factors and interaction. Especially social media includes use of many kinds of medias and social encountering and social intercourse of people. Filters have a special feature of cyborgship, i.e. filters are naturally formed by people and technologies and they both are necessary for modern filters. The cyborgship, however does not mean a hype of science fiction, but quite an ordinary everyday use of mobile technology (i.e. interplay of augmented body and reality).
Learners emerge in complex events humanely. That is for instance that my mental state here in a summer cottage has an impact how I can online respond to other people´s coming alongs (from their physical and mental states) when talking and arguing about learning conceptions. Filters are both tools (feeds, mush-ups, thematic bookmarking etc.) and interactive processes (e.g. in online forums and live discussions something important from some topics is filtered visible and aware by human dialogues). In medias ongoing renewal takes place and in a way new medias are taken in use all the time when old ones are dying down independent of it if they are old or new by their technology. Medias also get selected depending on individuals, groups, situations and needs at hand. Contents are on the other hand produced by individuals, groups, networks and organizations connected with unique needs like tweets, updates and their threads, blogs, writings, photos, videos etc., and then products edited for a purposeful use like magazines, books, sites, games, simulations, films etc.
When learning and pedagogy are seen to be constituted by emergence, complexity, humaneness, and also by multimedia and cyborgship, they get their gestalt in a connection of change, interactive opening (i.e. becoming seen, heard and understood interactively) and separate and even contradictory factors like alone experienced time dots and virtually spread out friends. A search for the pedagogy of three-dimensional simultaneity will next be continued through this connection.
The change (instability) in learning and pedagogy means that it is impossible the get an unambiguous touch with it and to control it. A consequence of it is that one just has in a pedagogical sense to trust in learning. In a way one has to cut out of pedagogical activity. The trust is the first corner stone of the pedagogy of simultaneity. Educationally it means a surrender from control and authority and equal participation by expressions and acts among other partakers. The equal attendance requires an ability and knowhow to be just a one with others. This means both skills to give space to others and tactfully take it back to oneself, when it is proper to do it.
The interactive opening means that to understand thoroughly something one has to set up her/himself in meeting and conversational interaction with other actors. The discussion, which can expand and deepen toward a goal-oriented and intentional collaboration, is the second corner stone of the pedagogy of simultaneity.
The discussion is a reciprocal process, which waves from a topic and intensity to another pausing meanwhile. The discussion still continues at least as inner dialogues in people´s minds. A birth and actualization of the discussion is at best a self organizing process, but it can and probably has to be made pedagogically possible as well. This means a production of forums for discussions, encouragement and support of participation in them and favorable motivating and even seducing to come aboard equally.
The connection of separate and contradictory factors means that chaotic parts and bits can be combined together. It may happen naturally, but in most cases some or someone factors contribute a weaving together. Filters have here a special role. In filtering processes it is a question of making and understanding of collages. The collage is the third corner stone of the pedagogy of simultaneity. Collages are done individually, together and with different kinds of tools. Collages can also become produced, i.e. one simply allow them to set up and at the same time try to learn to recognize a formation of them. For instance summaries, précis, syntheses, analyses, collections, classifications, connections, swarms, rhizomes, networks etc. can be understood as collages. They may be different kinds of documents, but also social and personal formations. The heart of collages is in their aesthetic quality of being collections of human artfacts, not scientific truths.
The pedagogy of simultaneity is crystallized in a dynamics of trust, discussion and collage. In a pedagogical sense one has to trust in learning executed in expressions and acts, make possible forums for (re)creation in discussions and collaborations, and filter collages and let them come filtered and also learn to identify emerging collages. The trust generates individual learning, the discussion mutual understanding and the collage shared resources. The commitment of the pedagogy of simultaneity concretely in trust, discussion and collage does not barely mean uncomplicated and simple trusts, discussions and collages, but they also and mainly enlarge as manifold and multifaceted simultaneous pedagogical acts. The very three terms however consist of the core of the pedagogy of simultaneity: by trusting each other and creating together mindful entities are developed.
The emergence of time brings to trust, discussion and collage a continuity taking place in momentariness and incompleteness. The complexity of place brings to them spaces of nestedness. The humaneness of social presence make trust, discussion and collage living and experientable. The presence itself is both time oriented, local and social and it becomes visible in attunements of individuals and their gatherings. The attunement is formed by humans and their environments. Today it is especially essential to understand a cyborgic attunement and a figuring out of activity environments as social affordances.
A cyborgic attunement means an everyday and routine relationship to (mobile) IC-technology and use of it. It also refers to an ability to move and work easily simultaneously in virtual and physical places and skills to contact and act interactively using relevant available IC-tools.
The cyborgic attunement also designates cosy attitude to emergence of times, complexity of places and humaneness of social presences. It is also substantial to realize that the cyborgic attunement does not mean inability to offline being and silencing when they are necessary.
An affordance refers to that the environment is not what ever an object, place or event or a construction formed by them. The affordance always makes possible (affords) for agents something significant and is dependent on agents´ attunements as well. The social affordance emphasizes that in affordances there are always one way or another other people present and the use of affordances (possibly only as an option) includes social interaction. For instance a big tree fallen down on the street as a social affordance includes the fact that removing the tree demands cooperation of many people. Or for example that wiki sites as a social affordance embody socially shared production and mutual use of the sites.
In connection with learning and pedagogy social affordances primarily mean joint participation or possibilities (or impossibilities) for it. For instance approachability (or non-approachability), attractiveness (or non-attractiveness), usefulness (or futility), effectiveness (or inefficiency) in time related and place localized social situations are social affordances.
In the pedagogy of simultaneity the trust, discussion and collage have to comprehend as an interplay of cyborgic attunements and social affordances. Then it is understandable that they get actualized only in emergent, complex and human authentic circumstances of gatherings of people coloured by confluence, coexistence and humaneness.