Architec Tradure

Category: theory and toy.

  • 23JanVideo making: technology vs face-to-face

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    Moving Pictures

    Recently, Kimberly Smith contacted me to discuss my work on Textable Movie. Textable Movie allows, by improvising movie-stories created from a personal video database and by suddenly being projected into someone else’s video database during the same story, to be surprised during the visualization of video elements corresponding to a story that correspond to someone else. I later introduced him the different stages of design from Textable Movie, Moving Pictures and Terraria. Review on these projects.

    I originally created a methodology for international workshops on creative media making and sharing. My workshop is designed to engage teenagers from around the world in digital media making using the “textable movie” tool set. The workshop features a design cycle that begins with concept development and continues onto storyboarding, video production and editing; as it is realized, participants test and evaluate their video-stories using Textable Movie. Textable Movie is a graphical interface that takes text as input and allows users to improvise a movie in real-time based on the content of what they are writing. More about my workshop
    The workshops global strategy focuses on fostering intercultural visual communication and play. One goal of the international program is to generate a cross-cultural study focused on the creative construction of media by teenagers.

    Kimberly and I talked about the art of motion pictures being a language in itself.
    For the past fifteen years, he has been passionately involved in using improvisation as a method for sharing what has been discovered about the language of motion pictures. His main concern is finding ways to emphasize the human element and de industrialize the process. He works with diverse groups of people ranging from severely disabled to experienced filmmakers.

    All of his thinking tends to revolve around the idea of empowering people to acquire eloquence and skill with visual language and to be able to take control of the frame and thus the audience’s attention. Responsibility for community and each other can be learned through this creative process. So it is more about social renewal and human development as it is about making movies, dixit Kimberly.

    Kimberly sent me some samples of group movie making activities. All of these games use the same guide lines -or rules- found here.
    I had integrated a few of these ideas in my international workshops with Textable Movie, but some of them are inspiring and new to me.

    Ping Pong The idea is to move the audience’s eye from left to right on the screen. This can be done a number of ways. dialogue is the easiest. Simply jump cut from one actor to the next and frame accordingly. Or pan from left to right. Or get the performers to move from left to right in the frame. Now the challenge is how do we smoothly accomplish this in a group where each individual gets a turn with the camera? We need common movie making language. In this case, each time a person hands off the camera, they have to tell the next person which side of the frame the visual focus was on. Thus the continuity is maintained. People learn very quickly when it is not. This game requires alertness almost the same way as something like Zip Zap Zop does. It can be timed or not. I’ve even had two teams compete.

    In The Moment The idea is to emulate a fast paced current event news show. I did this one with the Irondale Ensemble in Halifax. We had a couple of cars so we were able to go to various locations across the city and stage “Live” interviews with group members posing as ordinary citizens. We payed attention to our framing (either left or right) and we shared the camera round robin. All edit-in-camera. Everyone had to pay close attention all the time and try to remember what had happened in the previous location as well as keep on top of the framing. The energy level was quite high. Our finished movie looked like a real live news show.

    First Shot, Last Shot This game is built upon the idea that each individual shot contains an action that moves a story forward. So the first thing I do is have all the individuals in the group write down on little scraps of paper single shot ideas. For example: “angrily throwing a wad of paper in a trash can” or “biting a delicious apple or a bad one”. I encourage the group to save these shot ideas on little scraps of paper that can be kept in a box or a hat. These can be used in a variety of games, but in this one, we break into two teams. Each one picks a first shot out of the hat -then a last shot. the object of the game is to create a story sequence that gets from the first shot to the last shot in twelve shots. The camera is passed from individual to individual. No one is allowed more than one shot at a time and each shot has to be no longer than thirty seconds. All members of the team must appear in front of the camera at least once. Again this is all done edit-in-camera. So everyone has to be on their toes at all times. The game can be timed or not and the sequence can have more than twelve shots or less. We’ve done this as an easy going, inclusive recreational activity on a Saturday afternoon and the movie was played after a pot luck supper.

    Power Shift This game is challenging for performers and shooters because it requires strategic freezing of the action without losing the flow of the movie. Other games do this too, but this one emphasizes the problem. This requires a group of five or more. Three or more people must be on camera at all times. The idea is to have a spontaneous feeling, dynamic group discussion or argument where individuals come and go because they have been bullied out or are pulling a power trip. The point of focus with the camera is to be aware of the axis at all times. So when a person hands the camera to the next person they can pass the information along and maintain directional continuity. This is an advanced game and again it can be done like a team sport with two groups competing within time parameters or limited numbers of shots.

    Beam Us Up This game requires a tripod. The idea is to use “lock-off” camera positions to create Star Trek like transporter special effects. The dramatic point is something is wrong with the transporter – some people disappear and new ones emerge. Again the camera is shared round robin. So this is what changes up the personnel, but the real challenge is trying to remember how people were positioned in the last location so when they re emerge, they are still in the same physical relationship with each other. Its harder than people think, but kids of all ages love this game. The way it works is the camera is rock solidly framed wide on a certain empty location and you record a few seconds. Then you bring the group in and have them freeze in transporter position. Simply roll the camera again without moving it a millimetre and the group will appear out of nowhere. Some cameras have an overlap dissolve which makes the group seem to fade in. Its fun and the dramatic possibilities are wide open. This idea can be combined with other games like “In The Moment” to create wild, Wellsian stories.

    Who Am I? This is a P.O.V. game. Again it is edit-in-camera and passed round robin from individual to individual in the group. Camera operators choose a certain P.O.V. either dynamic or static and the actors interact with the camera in such a way that the identity of the camera is implied, but not expressly given away. I usually remind the players not to hog the camera and figure out how to create connecting shots so the camera can be passed to the next player. All the visual rules remain the same. This game is played in teams. One group has to watch the other’s sequence and correctly identify the camera’s character.

    I found very interesting his approach, developed from Viola Spolin’s Theatre Games.

    All of them are designed with specific points of focus and they also accelerate the process of learning the language of motion pictures. But more importantly than all of this is the breaking down of the industrial hierarchy. My main goal is to foster inclusiveness, community pride and creativity.

    For a researcher in HCI, who designs new tools and technology to allow improvisation, collaboration and creativity, it is very exciting to hear what video makers & educators invest and develop from a day to day basis on these subjects.

  • 23JanVideo making: technology vs face-to-face

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to receive the latest Architectradure’s articles in your reader or via email. Thanks for visiting!


    Moving Pictures

    Recently, Kimberly Smith contacted me to discuss my work on Textable Movie. Textable Movie allows, by improvising movie-stories created from a personal video database and by suddenly being projected into someone else’s video database during the same story, to be surprised during the visualization of video elements corresponding to a story that correspond to someone else. I later introduced him the different stages of design from Textable Movie, Moving Pictures and Terraria. Review on these projects.

    I originally created a methodology for international workshops on creative media making and sharing. My workshop is designed to engage teenagers from around the world in digital media making using the “textable movie” tool set. The workshop features a design cycle that begins with concept development and continues onto storyboarding, video production and editing; as it is realized, participants test and evaluate their video-stories using Textable Movie. Textable Movie is a graphical interface that takes text as input and allows users to improvise a movie in real-time based on the content of what they are writing. More about my workshop
    The workshops global strategy focuses on fostering intercultural visual communication and play. One goal of the international program is to generate a cross-cultural study focused on the creative construction of media by teenagers.

    Kimberly and I talked about the art of motion pictures being a language in itself.
    For the past fifteen years, he has been passionately involved in using improvisation as a method for sharing what has been discovered about the language of motion pictures. His main concern is finding ways to emphasize the human element and de industrialize the process. He works with diverse groups of people ranging from severely disabled to experienced filmmakers.

    All of his thinking tends to revolve around the idea of empowering people to acquire eloquence and skill with visual language and to be able to take control of the frame and thus the audience’s attention. Responsibility for community and each other can be learned through this creative process. So it is more about social renewal and human development as it is about making movies, dixit Kimberly.

    Kimberly sent me some samples of group movie making activities. All of these games use the same guide lines -or rules- found here.
    I had integrated a few of these ideas in my international workshops with Textable Movie, but some of them are inspiring and new to me.

    Ping Pong The idea is to move the audience’s eye from left to right on the screen. This can be done a number of ways. dialogue is the easiest. Simply jump cut from one actor to the next and frame accordingly. Or pan from left to right. Or get the performers to move from left to right in the frame. Now the challenge is how do we smoothly accomplish this in a group where each individual gets a turn with the camera? We need common movie making language. In this case, each time a person hands off the camera, they have to tell the next person which side of the frame the visual focus was on. Thus the continuity is maintained. People learn very quickly when it is not. This game requires alertness almost the same way as something like Zip Zap Zop does. It can be timed or not. I’ve even had two teams compete.

    In The Moment The idea is to emulate a fast paced current event news show. I did this one with the Irondale Ensemble in Halifax. We had a couple of cars so we were able to go to various locations across the city and stage “Live” interviews with group members posing as ordinary citizens. We payed attention to our framing (either left or right) and we shared the camera round robin. All edit-in-camera. Everyone had to pay close attention all the time and try to remember what had happened in the previous location as well as keep on top of the framing. The energy level was quite high. Our finished movie looked like a real live news show.

    First Shot, Last Shot This game is built upon the idea that each individual shot contains an action that moves a story forward. So the first thing I do is have all the individuals in the group write down on little scraps of paper single shot ideas. For example: “angrily throwing a wad of paper in a trash can” or “biting a delicious apple or a bad one”. I encourage the group to save these shot ideas on little scraps of paper that can be kept in a box or a hat. These can be used in a variety of games, but in this one, we break into two teams. Each one picks a first shot out of the hat -then a last shot. the object of the game is to create a story sequence that gets from the first shot to the last shot in twelve shots. The camera is passed from individual to individual. No one is allowed more than one shot at a time and each shot has to be no longer than thirty seconds. All members of the team must appear in front of the camera at least once. Again this is all done edit-in-camera. So everyone has to be on their toes at all times. The game can be timed or not and the sequence can have more than twelve shots or less. We’ve done this as an easy going, inclusive recreational activity on a Saturday afternoon and the movie was played after a pot luck supper.

    Power Shift This game is challenging for performers and shooters because it requires strategic freezing of the action without losing the flow of the movie. Other games do this too, but this one emphasizes the problem. This requires a group of five or more. Three or more people must be on camera at all times. The idea is to have a spontaneous feeling, dynamic group discussion or argument where individuals come and go because they have been bullied out or are pulling a power trip. The point of focus with the camera is to be aware of the axis at all times. So when a person hands the camera to the next person they can pass the information along and maintain directional continuity. This is an advanced game and again it can be done like a team sport with two groups competing within time parameters or limited numbers of shots.

    Beam Us Up This game requires a tripod. The idea is to use “lock-off” camera positions to create Star Trek like transporter special effects. The dramatic point is something is wrong with the transporter – some people disappear and new ones emerge. Again the camera is shared round robin. So this is what changes up the personnel, but the real challenge is trying to remember how people were positioned in the last location so when they re emerge, they are still in the same physical relationship with each other. Its harder than people think, but kids of all ages love this game. The way it works is the camera is rock solidly framed wide on a certain empty location and you record a few seconds. Then you bring the group in and have them freeze in transporter position. Simply roll the camera again without moving it a millimetre and the group will appear out of nowhere. Some cameras have an overlap dissolve which makes the group seem to fade in. Its fun and the dramatic possibilities are wide open. This idea can be combined with other games like “In The Moment” to create wild, Wellsian stories.

    Who Am I? This is a P.O.V. game. Again it is edit-in-camera and passed round robin from individual to individual in the group. Camera operators choose a certain P.O.V. either dynamic or static and the actors interact with the camera in such a way that the identity of the camera is implied, but not expressly given away. I usually remind the players not to hog the camera and figure out how to create connecting shots so the camera can be passed to the next player. All the visual rules remain the same. This game is played in teams. One group has to watch the other’s sequence and correctly identify the camera’s character.

    I found very interesting his approach, developed from Viola Spolin’s Theatre Games.

    All of them are designed with specific points of focus and they also accelerate the process of learning the language of motion pictures. But more importantly than all of this is the breaking down of the industrial hierarchy. My main goal is to foster inclusiveness, community pride and creativity.

    For a researcher in HCI, who designs new tools and technology to allow improvisation, collaboration and creativity, it is very exciting to hear what video makers & educators invest and develop from a day to day basis on these subjects.

  • 27JulVideo, toys and perspective taking

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to receive the latest Architectradure’s articles in your reader or via email. Thanks for visiting!

    I discovered this fabulous experimental research on perspective taking by developmental psychologist Masuo Koyasu.

    Masuo Koyasu’s web site (in Japanese only).

    In the 1980s, I was interested in studying the development of perspective-taking in young children. Piaget’s “three mountains task” had demonstrated that children find it difficult to understand how something looks to a person who is in a different position from themselves. In fact, younger children exhibit a strong tendency to choose their own view when asked to indicate how an object looks to someone in another position, a tendency that Piaget called “egocentrism.” I thought there are three dimensions of egocentrism (up and down, front and back, and left and right), and that children’s difficulty in understanding different perspectives might be because they do not receive feedback about other people’s perspectives. To test this hypothesis, I conducted a series of experiments with kindergarteners.


    Figure 1. Experimental Situation
    A:Child,B:Experimenter,C:Sample Photos,D:Place to put toy animal(s),E:Three toy animals,F:Still camera or video camera

    The task in the first experiment was to face a camera set up across from them and then to arrange one to three toy animals in a way that would produce a photograph like the sample (Figure 1). Forty-three percent of the four-year-olds exhibited front and back egocentrism by placing the toy animals’ backs to the camera. That tendency had mostly disappeared among the five-year-olds and six-year-olds, but it became clear that hardly any of the four- to six-year-olds could position two or three toy animals in the correct left-to-right order. In a second experiment, I used a video camera instead of a still camera and provided video feedback, showing an image of the toy animals as viewed from the opposite side on a color CRT monitor. In the control group, which was shown only the CRT monitor, the children were able to correct their front-back egocentrism on their own but were not informed of their errors. Even in the experimental group, which received instruction and practice in correcting left-right egocentrism, the effect on their post-test results was clearly small (Figure 2).


    Figure 2. Mean number correct in each condition

    Until the age of about seven, most children facing a teacher who says, “Let’s raise our right hands” while raising his or her own right hand will raise their left hands.
    Incidentally, research into perspective-taking abilities has traditionally focused on investigating how children understand other people’s viewpoints, but I have noticed a serious limitation in the paradigm commonly used to study this. In the case of the “three mountains task,” even if children can’t directly guess the viewpoint of a person in another position, they can solve the problem by conducting a mental simulation in which they imagine that they have gone to the other person’s position, or by a type of mental rotation, in which they imagine that the object has been placed on a lazy Susan and rotated to the correct position. The lack of methodological distinctions in the perspective-taking paradigm was a major problem. As I was worrying about how to think about this problem, I encountered research into “theory of mind.” In particular, I spent ten months as a visiting scholar in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford from 1994 to 1995, where I had the opportunity to come into contact with the front lines of British research into cognitive development. After returning to Japan, I began studying “theory of mind,” but at that time, hardly anyone else in the country was doing so. Without intending to, I have had to carry out the role of “missionary” in the field of “theory of mind” in Japan.
    The most famous experiment in “theory of mind” is the false belief task (the so-called “Sally and Anne task”) of Josef Perner and his colleagues. “Sally puts a doll in a basket. While Sally is away, Anne takes the doll out of the basket and puts it into a box nearby. Sally then returns and the child is asked where Sally will look for her doll.” In general, three-year-olds can’t pass this task, but they become able to do so between the ages of four and six. It has also been demonstrated that even high-functioning autistic children can’t pass this task. It is odd that most young children are easily deceived by this task, which is no problem at all for adults. I have been observing the daily lives of children at a Kyoto kindergarten once a week for three years, as well as conducting developmental research, including the false belief task. As a result, I have obtained longitudinal data on “theory of mind” (Figure 3).


    Figure 3. Results of a longitudinal study of “theory of mind”

    The data presented in this figure began with 15 children, with 4 more children transferring in at the ages of four and five, for a total of 19 children at the end. Only one child regressed from being able to pass the task to failing it, but he was a boy who became extremely nervous and made mistakes in the testing situation at age five and six. The fact that I was conducting experiments on children with whom I was in contact on a daily basis made me feel that I could interpret the results more broadly.

  • 27JulWhy Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”

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    Mark D. Gross, Michael Eisenberg, “Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control,” digitel, pp. 25-32, The First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (DIGITEL’07), 2007

    abstract

    The design and engineering of children’s artifacts-like engineering in general-exhibits a recurring philosophical tension between what might be called an emphasis on “ease of use” on the one hand, and an emphasis on “user empowerment” on the other. This paper argues for a style of technological toy design that emphasizes construction, mastery, and personal expressiveness for children, and that consequently runs counter to the (arguably ascendant) tradition of toys that work “like magic”. We describe a series of working prototypes from our laboratories-examples that illustrate new technologies in the service of children’s construction and we use these examples to ground a wider-ranging discussion of toy design and potential future work.


  • 09AugRobots in therapy

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    Interesting research on the investigation of the possible use of robots in therapy and education of children with autism

    Ben Robins, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Rene te Boekhorst, Aude Billard (2004) Effects of repeated exposure to a humanoid robot on children with autism. In S. Keates, J. Clarkson, P. Langdon and P. Robinson (Eds.) Designing a More Inclusive World, Springer Verlag, London, pp. 225-236.

    Introduction In this paper we discuss lessons learnt from our previous study, and introduce a new approach, heavily inspired by therapeutic issues. A longitudinal study with four children with autism is presented. The children were repeatedly exposed to the humanoid robot over a period of several months. Our aim was to encourage imitation and social interaction skills. Different behavioural criteria (including Eye Gaze, Touch, and Imitation) were evaluated based on the video data of the interactions. The paper exemplifies the results that clearly demonstrate the crucial need for long-term studies in order to reveal the full potential of robots in therapy and education of children with autism.

    Video of this research by BBC

    Paper


  • 16JunA century of evolution between La Guerre des Boutons and Harry Potter

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to receive the latest Architectradure’s articles in your reader or via email. Thanks for visiting!

    I’d like to share the notes I wrote about a fascinating French book:

    De la Guerre des Boutons à Harry Pottter by Jean-Marie Gauthier and Roger Moukakou.

    In this book, two psychiatrists connect the novel of Louis Pergaud, La Guerre des boutons (English: “War of the Buttons”) written in 1906 with the best seller of Joanne K Rowling (1997-), Harry Potter. The authors present a century of evolution in the teenagers’ life: their space/time structure, their relationship to a group of peers, and their appropriation of the land. The authors analyze the progression from developing concrete skills (close to the ones of adults) to an imaginary virtual world. Based on these two influential novels, a repository for this evolution, they illustrate their clinical analysis with real life scenarios of teenagers.

    La Guerre des Boutons VS Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix movie

    You can read on La Guerre des Boutons flyer: “Il y a des guerres qui durent des années, celle-ci doit se terminer avant le diner” which stands for “There are wars that last for years, this one needs to be over before diner”. For the ones who do not know this French novel, I am posting some screenshots from a movie interpretation of La Guerre des boutons made in 1962 by Yves Robert.

    An excerpt from the movie can be found ->here<-

    La Guerre des Boutons

    Notes from: De la Guerre des Boutons à Harry Pottter by Jean-Marie Gauthier and Roger Moukakou.

    Essais anthropologiques

    The authors observed that the ones who usually have difficulties to talk and show some reserve towards socialization, tends to spend a long period of time on internet for remote communication. With the computer, the relationship between distance and proximity, direct communication, corporeal and indirect, mediated is transformed. It is as if these teenagers privilege a communication in which the body is absent. The authors propose that this transformation induces difficulties in sharing and exchanging across generations and difficulties in the position that parents take place in the growth of their children.

    The relationship to the body

    – Rhythm of lives is different. We neglect the sun’s motion in our lives! Before the industrial revolution, a rhythmic life was imposed due to the constraints of working in the field, outside! Now we eat at unstable hours, find abnormal quantity of food anytime of the day, forgetting that meals can have a social function. The social function of meals is replaced by their nutritional function.

    – The physical constraints related to transportation have been transformed. We walk less, thus transforming our relationship to time and space as well as our relationship to the body: feelings, feeling tired, cold/heat or being well.

    At the time of “la guerre des boutons”, children were progressively learning how to build toys, hunting equipment, using the wheelbarrow under the grand father’s supervision! Now we can be a champion in Karate without moving a finger! The measure of each gesture (cause and effect) goes through an iterative process usually explored by gathering in locations & spaces.

    La Guerre des Boutons

    The Land

    Play is key for social & individual development, a way to measure personal skills in comparison to others at the same time than measuring one’s body, a necessary step imposed by the life as an adult.

    guerre3.png

    Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix movie

    Urban concentration has reduced the children’s possibility to gather outside. The space for play and collective experience is disappearing. Not only that but the parents themselves lost their everyday corporeal connection, their craftsmanship and their personal space. These transformations impact our ability to measure the consequences of our actions; this can explain a come back of the magical thought in a world where the relationship between causes and effects is more and more uncertain. Not only the quantity of available land has changed but also its quality has decreased. Before one could close his house with doors and windows, now it is completely impossible. The house walls not only did become porous, but the family remains in communication with the entire world through telecommunication, TV, internet, mobile phone… thus interrupting the paternal order of things!

    Distinguishing between the inside and the outside world is harder (this relationship becomes more and more ambiguous). Distinguishing between private, individual, internal and external realities becomes very hard.

    The Group

    Children have a predisposition to form groups in which learning by imitation is very important. This helps children leave the exclusive parental relationship to enter a more complex form of socialization: creating an identity and functional skills. In La Guerre des Boutons one practices his skills by crating weapons for hunting while in Harry Potter to compete with one another the children use magical formulas.

    In psychoanalysis, authors such as Leroi-Gourhan, Winnicott, Mendal, Montagner, Gibbs show the importance of a psychic construction that needs to connect to the outside world, necessarily going through gesture and object manipulation. Playing without using the body, without manipulating objects is very different.

    La Guerre des Boutons

    Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix movie

    Creating relationships between children is a considerable advantage as it allows children to realize early on the human’s fundamental destiny: a social being (De Waal, F. 2005). It also allows kids to find modes of learning outside of the parental relationship. The authors remark that we need to think of this child’s pleasure to group and learn in a group and reevaluate the quality of learning that can happen within the group. It is not impossible that behind this pleasure of the group, kids can rediscover values of solidarity probably essential to our humanity and that were still very present at the beginning of industrialization but that are disappearing.

    With La Guerre des Boutons one would constitute a group that opposes itself to another one, but today individuals are pushed towards being identical. Solidarity as a value is the most compromised, while individuation is assimilated to the general identical. Consumer society can only live if it destroys values of sharing and solidarity benefiting individualization …

    Time and space

    Important for rational thinking, time and space are constituted and function via intuition. These intuitive forms of representation are constructed progressively while the child uses his corporeal skills. Corporeal exercise has a direct influence on the essential cognitive functions (Gibs, Gauthier, Montagner).

    With a computer, one can be in contact with the entire world without having moved from the parent’s house. The computer is the perfect compromise between the teenager’s necessity to go outside to become independent and the necessity to keep the protection and security of the parent’s house.

    La Guerre des Boutons

    Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix movie

    While in the 20th century, kids were riskily gathering outside, creating groups, risking their identity confronting others, now kids can just stay home while contacting the external world, protected by their parents. According to the Oedipian complex, teenagers have to develop their personal lives outside of the family environment [Winnicott & Mendel], the computer seem to be the perfect compromise as children avoid the risks of the foreign while being closely connected to this outside world. The teenagers can also escape their fears related to their own body in comparison to the severe criticisms induced by co-located peers! The narcissistic image remains idealized. The teenagers will not quit their bedrooms and will remain dependent on their parents, because this context does not offer a way to move physically away from the family house.

    Speech

    Communication technologies modified our relationship to space and time and this cannot be left without consequences on the development of thoughts. Instead of confronting peers using a verbal exchange, communication is now guided with icons that one needs to only “clic” in order to be projected in the other side of the globe. The relationship to speech in which the exchange is contrary to the magical icon formula, is a relationship of time.

    This modification of the general relationship to space/time can explain the modification of our potential to take time to share thoughts. Language is more and more stereotypical and univocal (close to the marketing discourse) which appears in the political speech today (Chomsky, 1986, 1998).

    The dialog with the computer is a series of keywords and reveal the transformation of the structure and use of language in our occidental society. Harry Potter is truly a hero of our time!

    Transmission

    To separate themselves from their parents, children need to be a minimum aggressive to distant themselves. At the same time, children need to identify to their parents.

    However, parents are questioning their role models and hesitate to propose them as references to their children. So the entire reproduction of behavior and models is questioned. Speed, technological progress and the fact that children possess higher skills in tech fields such as IT, all contributed to this change in the parental role. Harry Potter and his adventures confront us to tendencies and forces, that are modified both in the parental and social space.

    The hunting land and the exploration space are restricted. It is now rather difficult to find resources outside of the parental home, parental home from which one of the two parent is usually absent. Grand parents are usually distant geographically. Living conditions have changed so much that there is an unbalanced between our human potentials and the environment in which we evolve. This can explain largely the developmental difficulties of the children. The authors question how socially we can address the educational needs of children considering that we cannot go back in time!

    The conditions for education have changed because parents have changed. It happened before, but this time it happened extremely rapidly and the educational methods have not evolved as much. Harry Potter raises interesting questions on how the individual maturation of a teenager is a complex and uncertain process, because of the uncertainties that rest on the transmission mechanism across generations.

    Most probably the teenagers need to rediscover the joy of living in a group, the values of solidarity and the belonging to a group of peers. Wouldn’t that be what these novels of youth are demanding from adults?

    La Guerre des Boutons

    Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

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