No 3 (2023)

The study is dedicated to visualization considered as a current trend, a phenomenon of contemporary education. It is known that visualization reflects the current visual turn and a new transformation of the educational sphere. A scientific study of the contemporary stage of visualization of education is important and topical because theorists have not yet fully comprehended all the processes and results of this trend, its “mirages” as something impressive, amazing, but illusory, and its “reality” as something real, but not always joyful and in line with expectations. We need to anticipate both the positive and negative educational effects of visualization during and after the bursts of the visual turn in education that is happening before our eyes. The effects are caused mainly by technical and technological breakthroughs, the state educational policy, which can be traced, for example, in the latest Education national project. The aim of the study is to identify and generalize the obvious (objective) and non-obvious (supposed) advantages, risks, disadvantages (negative influence) of visualization in the contemporary educational process. In accordance with the aim of the study, its objectives were formulated, aimed at clarifying the key terms that constitute the core of the terminological fields “visual turn” and “visualization of the contemporary educational process”; determining the current state of education visualization; comparing arguments and counterarguments in assessing the positive impact of visualization on the contemporary educational process; identifying and generalizing obvious (objective) and supposed advantages, as well as the negative impact of visualization (its risks and disadvantages) in the contemporary educational process; studying the possibilities of visualization for the individualization of the educational process and the development of students’ initiative. Research methods included an analysis of scientific literature on the research problem, reflection of our own educational activities and experience in the pedagogical design of educational resources, a study of the scientific and pedagogical experience of teachers, the method of binary positions, generalization and concretization. As a result of the study, we summarized the most common and objective arguments and counterarguments regarding the positive impact of visualization on the modern educational process, which reflect and confirm the lack of “transparency”, evidence and persuasiveness of the advantages of visualization. The authors compared the most obvious “mirages” and “reality” of visualization at the levels of subjects of the educational process (teachers and students) and visualization aids and techniques, which is the key scientific implication of the study. As expected, “mirages” are present at all levels under consideration, but to a greater extent they are manifested at the level of visualization aids and techniques. A significant potential of visualization is predicted for the individualization of the educational process, for the development of students’ initiatives.

Soviet cinema established a specific genre of film portrait, which was supported both by the visual norms of Soviet film production and by the genre specification common to literature and cinematography, aimed at streamlining large arrays of works intended to educate Soviet people. Maxim Gorky and Dziga Vertov played a key role in establishing this genre and legitimizing it as an educational artistic program with its sometimes quite provocative features. throughout the history of Soviet cinema, this genre showed great resilience, which can be explained both by the Soviet viewer’s general conception of progress and its visual representations, and by the canonical nature of the techniques of documentary film portraits. At the same time, the general image of the representation of modernity as the performance of progress prevailed over the narrative, which therefore did not need additional narratives or effects. Acting performances in documentary films were thus either condemned or tolerated as ornamental. The article delineates two types of documentaries, ethnographic and biographical, and shows how the screen principles of Soviet cinema limited the introduction of acting inserts. The collapse of the Soviet film production system significantly changed the audience. First of all, the literature-centrism of Soviet culture, in which narratives about the past and present were generated by literature, disappeared; now the cinema began to develop them independently. Next, audiences themselves began to differentiate their expectations from cinema, projecting onto it the experience of watching television and the experience of encountering Hollywood performing films. Finally, a new generation of filmmakers began to make greater use of acting inserts along with special effects to build a narrative that complemented the national historical narrative and thereby attracted more viewers. At the same time, viewers were not fully accustomed to narratives of things, perceiving them exclusively as documentary evidence. Therefore, the use of acting inserts often undermined the credibility of the film’s historical accuracy and the credibility of new documentary filmmaking in general. Such were the underlying reactions of the audience, which, although not explicitly expressed, were noted by the most perceptive Uzbek filmmakers in interviews conducted specifically for this study. The study of Uzbek films in the last three decades has shown the search for new ways to make film portraits that take into account both the play of narratives and the variability of viewer expectations. Not all of these pursuits have been successful, but they have shown a steady desire on the part of filmmakers to avoid the emotional lethargy characteristic in post-Soviet documentaries due to the lack of a single idea of universal progress that viewers accept as credible. Nation-building requires both a renewal of the idea of progress and a new conflict of narratives with a flawless use of techniques that are not chosen by the director, but entail each other, and create the aesthetics of a documentary with acting performance inserts.

The specificity of the task — diagnostics — makes it justified to resort to medical terminology. At the same time, the semiotic nature of this diagnostics justifies an appeal to the etymology of some medical terms, which goes back to ancient myths. Astigmatism is a diagnosis of such a deviation from the norm of vision, one of the symptoms of which is the perception of a circle as an oval. The reason for this deviation from the norm is the syndrome of the defective crystalline lens of the eye, leading to focusing features. Here, a chain of associations may arise, caused by the plots of the myth. In the ancient Greek version, Hestia was the keeper of the hearth, and the hearth was the pivot of the fire which, in the Roman version, was called “focus”. Hestia is present by her name and purpose in yet another medical term: the gestational period. This term denotes (formerly more often, now rarer) the state of pregnancy. This chain of associations serves to set the problem: to find a way to diagnose the consequences of the forced digitalization of teacher education during the pandemic. In other words, the search for an answer to the question: does the stay of a future teacher in the “belly” of a pedagogical university during the gestational period, passing with “complications”, require measures to replenish the norm of a specialist “born” by the university? Or, does digitalization burden the anamnesis of a future teacher? The procedures of the diagnostics themselves are based on the symptom/semantics, syndrome/syntactics, anamnesis/pragmatics correspondence. The listed correspondence is included in the operationalization of the basic concepts of the questionnaires. Two groups are selected for the pilot survey of students. The first group (I) includes the students for whom the period of total digitalization included the entire last year at high school and the first semester at the university. The second group of students (II) consists of those for whom total digitalization occurred during the third and fourth years of the university program. This selection fixes the extreme positions (I and II) in the distribution of digitalization by significant stages in the curriculum. In full-time mode, a survey of lecturers and teachers working with contingents of student groups (I and II) has been conducted on specially formulated points to find out the pros and cons of the digitalization of education; confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis of the authors of the article about the norm deformation. The pilot survey involves 60 students and 12 of their teachers. The article gives a general description of the survey tools. The questionnaire for surveying students combines verbal and visual methods of diagnostics. Teachers record the transformation of the norm, associated with only two aspects: a decrease in the quality of education and student-teacher communication. The relevance of the procedures of the semiotic diagnostics to the search for answers to the research question posed is confirmed by the revealed circumstance which was eluding under the use of different optics when the effects of education digitalization were discussed in the scientific literature. For the first time, the identified defect in the digitalization of education is the gap in student-student communication. This defect has consequences also established on the basis of the application of semiotic diagnostics procedures.Among these consequences, there is the lack of understanding of the essence of teamwork, leadership, professional competition and ethical principles of subject-subject communication. Such an effect of “educating Robinson Crusoe” does not correspond well to the competencies of a teacher. In whose “eye” is there the lens with a distorting defect? Students? Teachers? Operators of digitalization in education? We have found that digitalization in education implemented during the pandemic is subject to astigmatism. The fact that this situation belongs to the past requires two measures. First, the correction of “vision” among graduates. Secondly, the introduction of precise compensatory actions in the environment of distance education.

The article considers the meaning and content of the concept of ecological landscape. The author shows that the ecological landscapes of plant and animal organisms, fungi and microorganisms are built and modified through the processes of semiosis, signification of environmental elements and mutual recognition of signs. Landscapes are complex networks of interactions between organisms and with different types of environmental factors. The author argues that, for understanding the network interactions and communications of living organisms, the approaches from the network science and systems science are useful. Consideration of ecological landscapes from the perspective of complex systems opens up additional aspects of a possible analysis: spatial and temporal configurations of landscapes, elements of symmetry and asymmetry, order and chaos in them, their possible scale invariance, and the fractality of their structural organization. The concept of ecological landscape is correlated with the concept of ecological niche, a place occupied by a species in specific environmental conditions. When describing the coexistence of various organisms in a biocenosis in terms of niches, the author uses the concept of a fitness landscape or an adaptive landscape. She also analyzes the subtle nuances of meanings of the concepts “ecological landscape”, “ecological niche”, “habitat, “umwelt” and “eco-field, and “ecosemiosphere”, and the question of what determines the structure and diversity of the umwelts of living beings. Umwelt is the subjective world of perception and action of living beings belonging to the same species. Particular features of each individual are superimposed on the species-specific features of umwelts. Umwelt is built thanks to the active connection of a living organism and its environment, which it masters and turns into its own environment. Since environmental conditions are constantly changing, the umwelt of a living organism is partly rebuilt under the changing environmental conditions. A diachronically living organism lives in a plurality, a historical chain of states of its umwelt. There are several meanings in understanding the spatio-temporal properties of ecological landscapes and the interconnection of umwelts, the construction of landscape designs of nature. Curious features of the configuration of landscapes are short-range and long-range orders, the imposition of large and small scales, the division of ecological niches, cooperation and mutual assistance, and the synergy of living organisms. In the light of evolutionary holism, all types of umwelts (umwelts of plants, animals, human beings as social and cultural creatures) can be united and combined into a hierarchical ladder. An integral view entails an understanding of the need to promote global environmental ethics as a concern for the preservation of biological, social and cultural diversity, life and health of all parts and the whole of ecological landscape. By taking care of the whole, we take care of ourselves. By paying attention to and preserving the small in biological diversity, we support the sustainable development of large and global ecological entities and structures.

The ecological conception of a new dialogue between man and nature is ripening. This concept is biosemiotics. According to the concept, nature is perceived as an equal actor of the coevolution of humankind and the living creatures on our planet. The idea of the research is to use biosemiotics – a pre-linguistic level of semiotics, semantic processes which happened in the living sphere – as a tool or conceptual framework for describing biological phenomena at all levels of life organization. The relevance of the concept can be driven by the unstable relationship between culture and nature, and can be used to initiate safe cultural forms and practices between the different worlds of living. Biosemiotics understands life as the existence and interaction of living communities, where signs are created, interpreted in different ways and have meaning. Basic semiotics covers almost all living forms on the tree of life. Meaningful behavior has been documented even in unicellular organisms. We cannot but view plants from the same perspective, as there have been a lot of discoveries in plant biology. The author takes plants interaction and communication as of individual organisms, as they construct their own ontological worlds. New data of plant signaling and behavior have revealed that plants have their own sensory-motor apparatus: higher plants with a vascular system have the functional cycle, i.e. a sensory-motor loop mediated by electrical impulses; and plant studies of their cognitive skills and behavior have found that plants not only passively adapt to the environment, but also actively transform and construct it, i.e. create an umwelt. Thus, the author sets a question of the existence of semiosis between plants. Through the lens of a biosemiotic approach, she describes an example of a symbiotic interaction of American polyculture: maze, pumpkin, and beans. This approach is supplemented by the concept of 4E (embedded, extended, enactive, and embodied) cognition, with the addition of the fifth E – ecological, which reveals plants’ affordances, namely, entanglement of affordances of the environment with the morphological affordances of any plant and the possibility to use these affordances for their own needs. The author made an attempt to integrate the concept of enlogue (by Segei Chebanov) into the phytosemiotic approach. Enlogue is a tool for communication with another. It is a link between living organisms, as well as between a living organism and a non-living thing. This link or connection is always reversed. Enlogues (two or more) are involved in the formation of a sign. Mutual links, or enlogues, create an umwelt. The research highlights the importance of a further development of the biosemiotic approach as well as the need for the development of a new descriptional language. As an additional issue for further examinations is a question: How can we properly describe non-human phenomena in human language? And what is “properly” in that case?