Introduction to Online Learning:
Tools and Processes

Lippman on Interactivity

Lippman defines interactivity as:

Mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of both participants usually working towards some goal but not necessarily.

Source: Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. (Penguin, 1988), p. 46

Interrruptibility

Lippman contrasts the ability of any participant to interrupt the others with alternating (turn taking). He proposes a model of interaction closer to a conversation than a lecture. He refers to the granularity of the interactive system to raise the question of the human interval where participants understand they are not being ignored (e.g. word, sentence, paragraph). See phatic function in Jakobson's model of communication.

Graceful degradation

Something the system cannot handle crops up. An example: a system responds to a question without an immediate answer with a promise to come back to the point later. The interaction continues; it does not collapse. Lippman asks "in what manner does it degrade, productively or not?"

Limited look ahead

Everything is not precomputed. Related concept "on the fly."

No default

Lippman suggests avoiding default paths. He considers them boring.

Impression of infinite database

The distinction between "interactive and selective" gets looped back into that of "granularity".

You have to check the book to verify that these is indeed the order in which Lippman presents the five corollaries.

From where does Lippman's experience with default paths come? Is there a distinction to be drawn between default paths and default settings? How can different multimedia combinations be used to tackle the dialectic between expectation and surprise which seems to be at the core of the question of defaults? Consider the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard film, La Chinoise in which a voice-over describes the colours in a room, they do not appear on screen until the camera pans in 180 degree arc. Is having "no default" the equivalent of taking Godard one spin further as more colours get described they appear in the viewer's field of vision (the interactive need not be the realistic)?