I’ve been reading George Siemens blog for a year or so and it’s often one of the most interesting in the educational blogosphere.
I missed the Connectivism online conference, I see.
But it looks like he’s got a book together, not coming out, but congealed and connected. It’s online; it’s got a Wiki, and a photoset on Flickr.
Cool…
What makes Foucault a challenging read? The complaints I’ve heard most often are his long and winding, illustrative sentences. That’s exactly it. He fills his sentences with illustrations and explications that intellectually ornate. He’s utterly French, even in English. The trick, I’ve found, is to know that’s what he’s doing, to fast-forward ahead, then circle back, summarizing along the way.
What a workout.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Ali Jafari yesterday; he’s the CEO of Epsilen. It’s a next generation learning management systems/personal learning environments.
In the course of our conversation I realized again one of the many tensions I experience between what could be and what is, what I notice and what makes sense.
When I talk with innovators, for that matter when I read them, I’m in a completely other world than, say in my multiculturalism class. It’s not just what it’s about, but who we are, where we work and what makes sense to us.
What lens we use.
Technology innovators are looking ahead, not at who’s straggling behind or why. On the other hand, I got into this field thinking it had the potential to equalize, to make education more available.
I need a new metaphor. The bridge metaphor doesn’t do it. It’s too static, material and separatist.
A daunting part of the PhD process is finding one’s niche, in our case four areas of expertise we demonstrate through our qualifying exams. I’ve been spending some time thinking on it, mapping it out, brainstorming, listening. I like the word niche as compared with focus or expertise. In one sense, niche implies expertise. In another, it’s about having a function within a larger whole.
It seems that you’d need a sense of the larger whole to find and live your niche. Perhaps that’s a prerequisite of expertise or perhaps that constitutes a kind of expertise.
I still can’t get these ants out of my pants: I can’t completely explain it, but here’s a thought on why I think computers are a long way off from being able to think and interact via language except in very simple and controlled contexts. Metaphors. Below are some from this site.
Metaphors embody contextual and sociocultural knowledge.
Computational linguistics, specifically word sense disambiguation and machine translation also explain a few of those ants.
Metaphors for Learning
Using the above clean questions, we elicited a metaphor for learning from ten adult students:
1. Planting flowers — A seed is planted in my mind which I nurture with water and sun in the faith that it will sprout and grow.
2. Playing cards — I divide things into four categories and look for patterns across the suits until the logic and meaning emerges and I know which card to play.
3. Savings account — I invest the time to accumulate data and information until there is enough interest that I can roll it over into the next idea.
4. Switching on a light bulb — It’s not until the light switches on that I have an insight or an ‘ah ha’.
5. Eating — You need to take in the basic meat and potatoes before you get to the mouth-watering dessert.
6. Being a detective — It’s all about uncovering the facts, looking for clues and asking the right questions until the whole mystery makes sense.
7. Peeling an onion — I peel off a layer which reveals the next layer to be peeled off. Each time something teIls me I’m get closer to the core of the matter.
8. A quest — I’m searching for that illusive something and every step I take brings me closer to what I need to know, but I never get there … it’s a continuous journey.
9. Sculpting — You start with the raw material and shape it into a form that’s pleasing to the eye.
10. Wrestling — I struggle with the ideas until they’re pinned down and I’ve captured them.
I was recently at a webinar about a next generation learning environment, epsilen.com. I’m always excited about the potential of next generation ideas, the built-stuff that follows them is usually disappointing.
Learning objects sounded like it had potential in 2002 when I first started looking into it. When SCORM hit the pavement running, I became uninterested, not only because the US Department of Defense created the standard, but that no one seemed to mind. I still like the idea of learning objects; I don’t think they’ll be used by most instructors in higher ed, at least not in the near future. The term is too hyper-modern, the notion too abstract for most faculty.
The same is true of the term and notion of an intelligent agent.
By and large, I ignore the intellience in Amazon. And I recently noticed the intelligence in emusic; I’ve already started ignoring it too. I may actually see if I can disable it; I spend enough time there to justify the effort.
Intelligent agents are one of those cool ideas. The ones I’m aware of, like the Paperclip in Word, Amazon and eMusic-like vendors who remember what you’ve done, are more annoying than not. They get in the way of my experience. They structure; they categorize; they further dehumanize by acting as if they “personalize” an already impersonal experience.
Vendors are about commerce and there are rules of commerce. Since I don’t follow them for the most part, the agents don’t work.
I use help menus extensively now and have acquired a certain intelligence about them. If I’m stuck, it’s often because I don’t have the language to find the answer. The paperclip can’t give it to me either.
The missing links of intelligent agency are linguistically and contextually bound, utterances and contexts are infinitely unique and profoundly human.
Freedom and the Control of Men first appeared in American Scholar, in 1955/56.
In it he wrote, “It should be possible to produce behavior according to plan simply by arranging the proper conditions.”
If this is true, and I believe it is, why does Skinner get a bad wrap in educational cirlces and in the community at large?
Is it residual notions of our lives being taken over by machines? Foucault also pointed out how social and environmental conditions control our lives, the decisions we make. Prisons keep everyone in order; in Skinner’s terms it is the threat of punishment that determines our behavior.
For Skinner, democracy is jeopardized to the extent that we refuse to acknowledge that our behaviors are controlled by the world around us; our preoccupation with choice and free-will as consumers of goods and knowledge is just one example. Why don’t we get down to business, fess up to the facts and really take control, he tells us?
He’s got a point. When he asks us to agree that health is better than sickness, wisdom is better than ignorance, love is better than hate and productive energy is better than laziness he’s also asking us to be scientific in our approach. He’s asking us to agree with one notion of health, wisdom, love and productive energy. I’m not sure if it’s the scientific approach or the objectivist approach which works the least for me and countless other people.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (A. M. Sheridan-Smith trans). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
“Pay as your throw”, that is, charging households for disposing of non-recyclable waste is what the Brits are currently discussing.
Julie Hill of the Green Alliance was quoted “… I think that’s a much more rewarding way of going about it than say, for instance, compulsory recycling and the threat of penalties.”
But is it? The chain of production, consumption and waste is complex and can’t be successfully addressed in its last links, so to say.
In Rubbish 101, we learn about the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Changing habits of reducing and reusing results in overall less rubbish, recyclable and not, and from a behavorist perspective that might be all that’s needed to improve the situation. Is that enough?
How deep into the subject does the average household need to go to be informed enough? How much do we need to know and who decides? Seatbelt wearing became compulsory; cigarette smoking will eventually be outlawed in most public places. Most of us know relatively little about either, but we know enough to decide what we’ll do and for the most part, why.
Interestingly, many people still smoke, knowing what we do about it, suggesting perhaps that simply knowing or being informed isn’t enough to learn. There must be other ways of knowing–socially, emotionally, intellectually conjoined knowing, to effect some change in behavior. There’s also evidence suggesting that one’s beliefs play a significant role in one’s understanding.
For example, many people, including me, incorrectly think that as we back away from a mirror in which we can only see our upper torso, we see more and more of ourselves. Even after the fallacy was illustrated in an experiment, I still went back to my office, to prove it to myself with my little mirror. I did not want to or could not believe it. Why?
Reading dense texts like Boje’s work on critical postmodern narrative research methods is like getting lost inside your mind. If you’re not vigilant about staying focus, you fall into that “What did I just read?” place. It’s a bit like eating rich food when you’re not used to it. If you don’t pace yourself in time and quantity, you’re liable to end up with indigestion/not digested. So I’m taking a break; I’ve been taking them on and off all day and yesterday too, while I’m writing a capstone paper for a course on narrative research tools.
And I’ve been wondering too, how long it should take to do these kinds of papers. Last weekend it felt too long. The 10 page paper I was writing took close to an hour a page. How can that be?
Smack dap in the middle of 2 compact graduate course, a conference paper and a busy work schedule. I can’t help but take a few minutes to reflect on my own learning process. My brain is usually at it’s sharpest in the morning. But I often have this disconnected feeling when I’m writing. Disconnected from what? I sit there with these readings, my notes and push out my rendition. It’s not a synthesis; I don’t have the feeling like the readings have marinated long enough. I don’t feel like I’ve consciously connected them. Is it the learning, the teaching, the process, my brain?
When I zoom out to my bigger picture–work, preparation for an upcoming symposium in Turkey, and then I tell people about all these things I’m doing, it’s clear how they’re connected. It’s clear to me. It’s intellectually clear that is. But when I have to zoom in on the minuitiae, it feels strained, the concentration that is. It might be too that I don’t live in a culture that values depth, really. We give it lip service and then move on. And perhaps that’s part of my fragmentation, a desire to go deep, savour and marinate and the desire to excel at plate spinning. All around me are plate spinners; my neighbors, 2 single women are up and about, ready to running this morning, at 7am. I’m sitting here, writing this, procrastinating or maybe warming up to getting back to the papers I’m writing. I’m not going to church, or brunch or my parents for Sunday dinner.
