The network and the message

In looking at phenomenology, one of the very distinct perceptions of the tradition is that in transforming it from its origins with Husserl into a French context with Merleau-Ponty, the movement was transformed not only by by reflection into the French philosophical culture, but also  by translation into the French language.  I find myself again looking at it after a double translation, as I see it through the lens of commentators in English on both aspects of the movement.

What is interesting is that the process of translation seemed to strengthen and clarify the core values of the movement.  Thus an extension and amplification of a system of thought has appeared as an emergent property of its transmision through the network.

In education we take our understanding of the subject and translate it into terms which we expect our students to understand.  There must be a translation, because if there was no translation then there would be no learning involved.

At times this translation is merely a communication, but at other times the translation is much more involved, involving paraphrase, analogy and simplification.

The question here is what new and more powerful concepts are going to emerge from this translation, and how can we maximize the potential of their engendering?

All links are to the current version of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Principal Editor: Edward N. Zalta  URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/,The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University, Stanford Ca.

Pre verbal thinking and the web

Growing out of a discussion on critical thinking which has been taking place on #PLENK2010 I found my self considering preverbal thinking at a GradCAM seminar on Maurice Merleau-Ponty this afternoon.

Pre-verbal thinking is the first layer through which perception travels before it receives our attention, but it may also be involved in an artists interaction with their medium and it is also a way of thinking about an audiences interaction with a performance, when it has gone beyond just watching and is totally engaged.

Communicating over the web lends itself to verbal modalities and logical analysis, but the web has the potential to be a much richer medium. Academic analysis is historically biased towards the text and the spoken word.  As the medium gets richer, are we moving beyond the affordances of our conventional academic analysis?

In this richer medium what do we do with the precept that you have not mastered a medium unless you can create in it?

Assessment and models of learning

This is really more a thought experiment than a practical suggestion but please walk with me for a bit on this. What if we use the student at the end of their course as the input for an expert system? i.e. we queried their knowledge over an extended period until we felt it was captured within a rule set and a data store.
Now imagine we have evaluated the students, and we now have a set of expert systems, all encoded from separate students impressions and connections built while taking part in the course.
Now how do we compare these expert systems to verify that they are close enough to a canonical system to qualify as being fair copies?
Would such a comparison, if it were possible, be a valid assessment?
Would it preclude the possibility that the student had gone beyond the teacher and built a more valid learning network?

What’s interesting here is, as ever, the implied spaces.

Matters arising: The first issue is can an expert system, given sufficient time and resources, successfully capture the sum of the knowledge acquired by the student. If it can’t, what is it going to miss and how can that be assessed?

The second question is assuming such a thing is possible, should all such systems resemble each other? If the topic is flying a plane, we would appreciate it if they were similar, and bore some passing resemblance to the Airbus peoples model of the actions of an ideal pilot, but if the subject is creative writing, its less clear that this method will work. Here I would claim that the implied space, the part of the learning which cannot be captured in a set of rules, is the real learning on the course. #PLENK2010

What Does a theory do?

This is coming from a discusion of "Theory" in week four of PLENK2010

A theory is a simplified model of some real world phenomena which tries to encode previous experience with a view to guiding future action.
A really good theory will make wild improbable predictions which turn out to be true. Think things which glow in the dark and the photoelectric effect leading to H bombs here.
A fun theory starts with minute observations of some trivial inconsistency in conventional explanation and replaces it with a much grander structure.
Many theories will cover the facts, few give you a totaly new vision of the existing landscape.

I would sugest
Conectivism
The school of Barbianna
Foucault's analysis of power in the classroom

as examples of theories which do.

Bereiter's Learning Paradox

Existing theories of learning fail to account for the expansion and creation of knowledge (what Bereiter calls the learning paradox: “If learners construct their own knowledge, how is it possible for them to create a cognitive structure more complex than the own they already possess (cited in Cambridge Handbook of Learning Sciences, p. 103). Connectivism and networked learning, on the other hand, suggest a continual expansion of knowledge. New and novel connections open new worlds and create new knowledge. Source George Siemens, September 12, 2009 “what is conectivism” on Google Docs at
https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=anw8wkk6fjc_14gpbqc2dt
Bereiters Learning paradox as described above ignores two things.
1) The first is a fundamental principle of computer science, which is that once a computer language contains a few simple constructs it is possible to perform arbitrarily complex computations with it, given sufficient memory to store intermediate results,
2) The phenomena of emergent behavior whereby as systems get larger unexpected behaviors emerge (Conways game of life is an early example, as are many systems beloved of investigators in the field of Chaos theory.)
The word used to name conecitivism implies a vast preexisting web of potential knowledge onto which we sling our hammock of knowing. I think there is more to learning than that, and I like to think that there are processes at work which generate, in addition to a plethora of connections to existing knowledge sources and systems, new substrate in knowledge space through which we can “boldly go where no man has gone before”.

Are we doctors, artists or actors?

Roger Neilson blogging at http://didactylos.posterous.com/ has a nice post where he draws an analogy between a doctor using 150 year old tools and a teacher using 150 year old methods and by analogy asks why we don’t throw such teachers out on their ears. However I think the analogy is an unfair one.

In medicine there is a clear goal: cure the patient, and very solid evidence that technology helps.

In education the goal is misty (what’s an educated student?) and there is less evidence that technology is an essential tool.

First I'd like to draw an analogy not to medicine but to art, considering the proposition that as educators we are artists. Some artists use technology to very good effect, some don’t. Its not clear that the low tech artists are “ipso facto” doing a worse job. This analogy works at a lot of levels, but it still doesn’t quite capture what educators do. This brings me to my final analogy which is with actors.

Here in some sense the core performance remains the same, but the role of technology although subservient, is stronger. A theatre performance without stage lighting and other technology would be an arcane thing which would require extra artistic justification to validate it. Maybe that’s how we should view teachers who haven’t moved on.

Social Media An extended response:

To what appears to be a guest blog by Muireann O’Keeffe on socialbits

The ability to examine digital sources in terms of voice, agenda and authority are skills we have to give our students, and much of education in digital literacy allows students to read the meta language surrounding a webpage or site, however education is now as much about the pipes as the repositories. Social media is a pipe skill. In addition to the critical abilities above we need to make our students effective digital plumbers by giving them skills for improving the signal to noise ratio in their online data streams.

Most secondary teachers know that Youtube is a great educational resource, few would claim that unlimited access to it in the classroom would benefit their students educational goals.

Twitter is a great source for educational information (I came here from there) but unless tamed by an aggregator such as paper.li, it becomes an asynchronous source of distraction.

Social media present great opportunities for education within and beyond the classroom. We can crowd source information, participation and engagement; but unless focused and scaffolded there is a high risk that student classroom interaction with social media will be in a non educational social space which the new media have transported there.

Its easy to be critical and to gainsay, but we mustn’t forget that just as social media can bring the external world into the classroom as a distraction, it can equally well bring the classroom out and allow students to study any time, any where as the impulse strikes them.