Scaleless and Placeless#

Where I heard it#

Phrase used by Peter Calthorpe in this Long Now Foundation seminar to describe the type of high-rise urban housing built in the mid to late 20^th Century in America.

Why did it resonate?#

The commmon digital education spaces created in contemporary higher education strike me as increasingly - placeless; and,

Indistinguishable from other places. Devoid of the character of its purpose, people, discipline. - scaleless Unable to respond well enough to the needs of individuals and small groups.

What forces contribute to this?#

Vanilla-isation forces including:

functional stupidy probably fits in here somehow
consistent institutional, marketing-driven livery;
digital technologies designed by vendors to be used (as cheaply as possible) by everyone; and,
the mantra of corporate management and information technology folk that "any solution has to scale". i.e. be usable cheaply by the broadest possible number of people.

It strikes me that each of the vanilla-isation forces are built upon numerous "common-sense" principles, including (but not limited to) - consistency;

"to scale" in part means minimising support resources. Which - following "common-sense" - that everything looking the same (i.e. consistent) is a good thing because this minimises confusion which minimises support costs. - sterile (Zittrain) or hard (Dron) technology. i.e. technologies that can't be changed by people who aren't allowed to. With the move to cloud-hosted services the population of "allowed" people is diminishingly small. Also Zittrain's point about generative technologies - that can be changed - raising costs/dangers.

But the narrow focus of "in my box" means that the bigger picture is lost. i.e. that the resulting learning environments are scaleless and placeless. The emergent properties that rise from all these common-sense decisions are lost. At least to those not directly involved in the day to day use of these digital spaces.

What does placeless and scaleless look like in digital education?#

To be continued, but some earlier ideas, include

Starvation
Workarounds
Product-market fit "in education is extremely hard to achieve even for the very best product designers"

Vendors tend to solve the problem that their customers articulate to them. If the customers are in denial about the true nature of the problem that they need to solve, then vendors provide solutions which reinforce underlying problems, Linking this to wicked problems that aren't tractable to the define/analysis/solution process may get at why there is a problem

Sense of place in Online Learning Environments - ASCILITE 2008 paper
How to make online courses a 'place' for learning - blog post touching on related literature
Sense of place research can inform environmental education - literature review (the paper)

highlight two important sense of place subcategories—place attachment and place meaning. Place attachment typically refers to the bond people feel to a place, which can be positive, negative, or ambivalent. Place meaning refers to more symbolic affiliations with a place that may be influenced by social, economic, or aesthetic considerations. The authors summarized their discussion of place attachment and meaning by describing how these concepts come together to influence a sense of place: “Place attachment reflects how strongly people are attracted towards places, while place meaning describes the reasons for this attraction.” Because of the variety of emotional experiences and intellectual interpretations people may have as they interact with any given place, the sense of place different people experience can vary widely.

Research ideas#

What are the characteristics of a digital education space that has place/scale?
If you find, such spaces, how did they come about? Normal insitutional processes, or not?
What are the causes for this? What are the solutions?

References#

There's gotta be some good stuff out there.