Managerialism and "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism"

Posted by dasfseegdse Jumat, 30 September 2011 0 komentar
Orwell knew about managerialism, giving this knowledge to the fictional author in 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein. The perpetual war manufactured by the Party between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia served the purpose of maintaining inequality. The war is:
"waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact"
Given my thinking about managerialism and Ulrich Beck, I think it is reasonable to suggest that the war is the party's way of continually generating risks, and it is the creation of risk which maintains economic inequality, and which in turn contributes to the conditions for the new creation of risks.

What then of Winston Smith? His first act of defiance is to write a diary. His crime, I think, may be to increase his capability to manage risk, to make himself immune to the risks that were produced by the party. Making communications is the way he does this, just as making communications is the way that all people seek to manage their capability to manage risks. Reading Goldstein's book and discovering his love for Julia are other aspects of this journey of forbidden self-discovery and communication-making. A party member lives a continually anxious life expecting "to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party"

All the mechanisms of the party serve to maintain this state of anxiety. The perpetual historical revisionism continually disrupts the individual's narrative. In the light of HarrĂ©'s thinking about 'storylines', and what I've argued for in terms of the need to establish some sort of 'attachment' to stories as a mechanism of maintaining identity, it's interesting to see how with manipulations like 'crimestop' and 'doublethink' the Party robs individuals of their capacity to establish identities, let alone 'opinions'. In fact, what describes is the party putting the population into complex web of double-binds.

What is presented in 1984 might be seen as two visions of 'education'. On the one hand there is Smith's covert self-discovery; on the other, there is his re-education and re-integration into the Party. What's extraordinary is how one type of education seems to feed the other: the individual struggle for self-discovery makes them more vulnerable to assimilation into the party: the betrayal of Julia, which in a sense is a betrayal of self, being the key moment when the pendulum swings the other way.

Is our education system a journey of self-discovery or propaganda for integration into the 'party' of capitalism? Funding certainly tightens the screws: the anxiety is raised.. self-discovery is shown to have its price, and once locked-in to that enticing journey, do we eventually succumb to the inevitable conformity of capitalism? The risk machine of education is certainly being powered-up. And because our economic models are increasingly failing us, we feel that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.


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Luhmann, Music and Symmetry

Posted by dasfseegdse Rabu, 28 September 2011 0 komentar
Asymmetry played a large role in the thinking of Karl Popper: not just the asymmetry between verification and falsifiability, but the deeper asymmetry between perfection and imperfection. I've been thinking about this with regard to music, particularly as I've been playing a lot of Bach recently. Whatever symmetry which gives this music its transcendent perfection is something which is at once precious, fragile and rare but also essentially fundamental. In the hands of great performer, its power is breathtaking.

Our inclination logically is to think of music as a sequence of events which produce a certain effect (or affect). This view is conditioned by a certain thinking about the causal relationship between making the sound and feeling a feeling. But is this really what's going on? Because, what is apparent in the experience of the music is an emerging sense of one-ness brought about through the revealing of a harmony between personal being and an outside environment. The one-ness is the bringing together of the inner-world and the outer world. And the feeling of balance is, I wonder, precisely to do with symmetry.

Which is odd. Because we tend to think of such phenomena as being about time. And in thinking about time, we become aware of what we expect to happen next, and what we think has just happened. This was the subject of my paper for Kybernetes here: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1949443. Memory, cognition and music are all inter-related in ways which demand new thinking about how the inner-world and outer-world relate. I want to go further now, and suggest that the key to this view is understanding the nature of anticipation. In my paper, I characterised anticipation as the natural consequence of reorganisation in response to environmental stimuli (even if those 'environmental stimuli' was the twitch of an eyeball, or an itch, or a breath). The essential question is what drives the reorganisational response to behave as it does? The answer that I am thinking through is "symmetry between internal regulation and external perturbation".

What might that mean? What I think it means is that the reorganisational response is a 'harmonic' response both to inner-world states and outer-world states, and as a harmonic response its focus is on maintaining the symmetry between the two. In this way, anticipation has less to do with thinking through what's happening next (which in itself is a function of symmetrical regulation), but more to do with tuning into the balance between the outer-world and the inner-world. What's particularly interesting me (although I haven't looked at this in much depth yet) is the relationship between this harmonic response and the idea of multiplier feedback as it was presented at the ASC conference by Faisal Kadri (and its relationship to 'hysteresis' - see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/08/open-atrium-and-hysteresis-of-project.html)

My paper references Luhmann (although I struggled to get  this accepted by the ASC who don't like Luhmann very much - I suspect he's too much of a realist for them! [ironically, he's too much of a constructivist for the realists!]). Recently, I noticed an interesting paper by Wolfgang Fuhrmann on Luhmann and Music in Acta Musicologica. There needs to be more stuff like this! Luhmann's work is all about the balance between outer and inner worlds (what he's calls social and psychic systems). However, Luhmann does not go into the details of anticipation. Leydesdorff has done this, and it does seem to be the key thing to understand and where important work can be done.

What's exciting me most is the fact that anticipation is such a 'holy grail' in the social sciences. If we can produce models that provide reasonable short-term forecasting, then the institutional control that will result will be a major social shift (the economic crisis may be precisely the result of lack of anticipation and control of social institutions). In essence it is the ability to 'listen' at the social level. Music is where anticipation most clearly reveals itself as an object of study. So just for once perhaps, musicology and sociology might produce something useful (just as Hermann Hesse always thought it would - the two most important disciplines in the construction of the "Glass Bead Game" where mathematics and music!).


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Real Nature

Posted by dasfseegdse Selasa, 27 September 2011 0 komentar
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WebSockets and Convivial Learning Environments

Posted by dasfseegdse Minggu, 25 September 2011 0 komentar
About 9 years ago, my attention was drawn to a major change in the technological infrastructure of the web. Capitalising on the fact that populations of many western countries were wiring themselves up with fast broadband connections, and given the rising dominance of XML as a data transport layer, WebServices presented themselves as a means by which the web could be leveraged in new ways that allowed for the discrete functionalities of systems to be repurposed - both by institutions and by users. The resulting flexibility of this technical shift created a lot of excitement in the e-learning world, where the interoperability between systems, together with the dominance of large-scale 'monolithic' systems had long been seen as stumbling blocks to the long-term sustainability of learning technologies.

Large-scale technical initiatives were launched, most famously the JISC e-Learning Framework (later simply the E-framework) - a Service-oriented specification of how university functions could be specified as discrete functional and interoperable WebServices. Perhaps more importantly, the read-write web also hooked into the WebService movement, with RSS and ATOM standards driving emerging blogging and Wiki platforms. A little later, WebServices would drive the aggregation of web components for 'mashups' with increasing separation between the data operations of Web pages and their display operations, helped by simply JavaScript techniques for exchanging data (AJAX).

In many ways, we're still there. But there's something very new happening, which I believe will have an equally transformative effect. This is W3C WebSockets. The similarity to WebServices goes about as far as the similarity of the two names. WebServices were fundamentally about XML data files; WebSockets are fundamentally about streams. This is not new in computing... we have been here before - even from early Unix years. But this time, we are talking about streams which run through web browsers: the HTML5 specification has in-built support for WebSockets.

This might not seem that revolutionary.. after all we are all used to streams - from iPlayer to Pr0n to Spotify streaming video and audio is all around us. And yet, behind the scenes, the infrastructure to get these things to work is quite arduous and certainly not for the uninitiated (ask anyone who's tried to host their own internet radio station!). With the WebSocket standard, the ability to make socket-based connections between machines gets a lot easier. Indeed, with JavaScript libraries and powerful JavaScript compilers like http://node.js, suddenly the establishment of WebSocket servers seems potentially within the reach of everyone.

This matters for a number of reasons:

  1. WebSockets are fast: the speed of interactivity between services makes a radical break with technologies like AJAX, and that means very new things become possible (see for example https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-html5-conversational-voice-and-video-implemented-webkit-gtk).
  2. WebSockets can be used to overcome institutional hurdles which would be blocked using other techniques.
  3. WebSockets can be leveraged by teachers to create servers to host their learners as clients: this overcomes the problems of 'flatness' and control with using Web2.0 technologies.
  4. WebSockets emphasise streams over files. Potentially this has a lot of implications for the way we think about interoperability. Rather than defining XML file formats, we may need to think about other (probably API-based) ways in which streaming services can talk to each other.
The speed of WebSocket services makes levels of interactivity and rich collaboration possible that we currently only know through the provision of big corporations like Skype. WebSockets promise each of us the capacity to run our own Skype-like services. And to get a flavour of what might follow, it's worth thinking about those internet services which have already embraced streams as their model. Spotify has made the most powerful challenge to physical media in a very short space of time. This week, the 'Spotify for games', at http://onlive.com promises to do the same thing for the games industry. What would a VLE look like with this hugely rich interface using these techniques?? It's probably a sign of things to come.

But I'm most interested in the way this rich real-timeness can bring people together in new forms of activity. I think that's our best chance of realising different sorts of pedagogies - particularly those which focus on the emotional impediments to learning. And I'm interested not in the big streaming services of Spotify, Skype or OnLive, but in the rich streaming services which soon will be within the grasp of teachers.

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Individuation, Conviviality and Global Warming

Posted by dasfseegdse Sabtu, 24 September 2011 0 komentar
Erich Fromm's work on individuation is very closely related to Illich's work on conviviality. The two men were friends. Yet, conviviality seems to be the opposite of the 'individualised' consumer society that we see before us. But individuation is radically different from individualisation. Indeed, for Fromm, the individualisation of  capitalism is actually an example of what he calls "automaton conformity": the subjugation of the individual to the collective as a result of personal anxiety.

Individuation, by contrast, is a psychic orientation which comes to terms with human mortality. Aniela Jaffé says
"The psychological path of individuation is ultimately a preparation for death"
Beyond this, individuation is an acknowledgement of identity and selfhood as it is constituted both from within and without. The latter's importance is the connection of identity to the relations to those around us, and the role of individual action in constituting self as well as carry the moral responsibility for the constitution of others' selves. Harre's Positioning Theory is the latest (and possibly the clearest) identification of this aspect of selfhood. Finally, I think individuation involves some awareness of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics: of the essential balance of action and the harmony and symmetry of relationships. I think the central focus of this balance lies in the nature of attachments both to others and to things.

In this way, individuation is not at all 'selfish' - its view of the self is essentially where the inner world and the collective combine. Individualisation or personalisation on the other hand, has a narrow and naive concept of self, drawn from enlightenment philosophies and effectively hijacked by consumerism. Consumerism has sought to constitute individual identity through the mass attachment to commodities. Often this comes at the cost of attachments to each other.

The economic mechanisms create risks around the attachments to commodities and people as a way of creating new needs for attachments to new commodities and increasingly services. Services have arisen because they are more easily manipulated as objects of attachment as ways of creating ever-new risks and anxieties.

Such risks are essentially global in character. The current financial crisis is a classic example of the production of 'global risk': the threat to each individual is the threat of loss of identity through loss of objects to which they are attached - the house, the car, the job, etc. To the truly individuated person, such risks are hollow: preparation for death is precisely the realisation of what matters - and it is other people that matter. In this way, individuation and conviviality can present new paradigms for living. Convivial local groups can protect against global risk.

Such global risk presents some striking anomalies. An example is presented in the "global" risk of "global warming". With global warming, the anxiety is that "we will all die". Notwithstanding the real and (in my opinion) incontestable effects of the accumulation of human-produced Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, there are some problems here. On the one hand, since humankind is seen as the cause of global warming, if "we all die", then the loss of the cause of the problem brings the necessary correction. On the other hand, whilst the fear that "we all die" is fully engaged with, the certainty that "I will die" does not enter the equation. However, global warming is probably most accurately characterised as a sort of collective moral angst - that somehow the failure of coordinated action to prevent collective death is a collective moral failure. But there is nothing collective in the anxiety. What lies behind this? I think the answer is once more about identity and attachment. The fear, similar in character to the economic crisis, is that individual identity is lost through the loss of objects and people to whom we are attached. It may be that the deepest fear is of the loss of those loved ones to whom we are most attached.  For example, although it is not natural for us to be predeceased by our children, history has shown a fluctuating statistical probability that this might happen (100 years ago, it was not unusual at all). As we live longer, we may be faced with similar statistical possibilities. In this way, the fundamental character of "global warming" is of a global political movement of anxiety creation whose motives and direction are not at all clear, but generally expressive of the existential problems of modernity.

With our current global risks of the economy and the manufactured risks associated with consumerism, the combination of conviviality and individuation presents a ray of hope. Technology may have something to contribute here. I think conviviality depends on the management of value pluralism through the coordination of activity. Such activities can be coordinated through technology, and the increasingly real-time technologies that are now presenting themselves may provide a powerful boost to the emergence of really innovative online engagements between people. 

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Nature Wallpaper HD

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Japan Wallpaper HD

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Managerialism and competency

Posted by dasfseegdse Kamis, 22 September 2011 0 komentar
One of the risks that is produced by managerialism is competency. For those without them, competencies are experienced as absence and anxiety. These anxieties (risks) are institutionally produced - indeed the culture of the production of the 'competency-risk' in many cases goes up to the definition of 'occupational profiles' of national governments (this is particularly the case for Italy, Germany and the Netherlands).

Within education, the competency of teachers is another point of risk-creation. Competency frameworks identifying 'good' and 'bad' teachers or academics now carry real risks for individuals who are already in their jobs, with rising anxieties as "jobs are on-the-line". Managerialism can exploit these anxieties to address issues of financial viability and directing professional practice in particular directions whilst dancing around restrictions concerning the termination of employment. Very soon sight is lost of the fact that while the risks and the associated anxieties of such competencies are real (albeit manufactured), their deeper ontological foundations in what is 'good' and 'bad' in education are much less certain, tied-up as it is in the perennial paradoxes of the nature of education and human cultivation.

But competency is still 'big' in thinking about education - particularly in Europe. The essence of 'qualification' - the institutionalised mitigation of personal risk - underpins the education system. I think this is why Illich railed against 'professionalisation' - because he saw in the 'disabling professions' risk-factories which had dehumanising consequences in their assault on conviviality. I want to look at these arguments again (partly because we may be getting into another round of projects concerning competency!!)

There is cental question here:
"In a convivial society (and a convivial education system) how are the different skills and attributes of individuals recognised, if creating risk around competency is to be ruled-out?"

The answer to this starts to appear when we ask "what happens when people come together?". This requires  some thought-experiments.

Togetherness is by its nature a diverse web of relationships, not a flat plain. Some people are good at certain things, and in a convivial environment we know who they are. We do not necessarily need to have a piece of paper that tells us who they are. But surely different people will have different opinions of who is good and who is not? I think the nature of the convivial society embraces value pluralism.

Thinking about this leads me to think of the distinction between managerialism and governance. Governance seeks to manage value pluralism and maintain conviviality: the principal mechanism for this is to coordinate activity. This is very similar to the arguments I presented in our recent special issue of Campus Wide Information Systems: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=1065-0741&volume=28&issue=4&PHPSESSID=pk05nh9ouc8mgs39jicv56jpm4.   Managerialism seeks to coerce behaviour is particular ways: the principal mechanism is to create institutionalised risk.
Competency falls into the latter category.

But then again... as I write this I think "competency isn't going to go away." But it has the character of something global: generalised ideals to which all individuals are meant to conform. And here, there is another way of looking at the issue. It becomes another example of the need to balance global concerns with local needs. Maybe think this can be achieved through the governance of convivial education within institutions, which acts as the interface between the deep human needs of individuals and collectives and the global demands of competency frameworks. But given that, governance is what institutions need, not managerialism.

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Exploring a technical architecture for a "Convivial Learning Enviromnment"

Posted by dasfseegdse Rabu, 21 September 2011 0 komentar
As I have been commenting on recently, one of the problems with current technologies in e-learning has been that they only afford a few pedagogical approaches, of which constructivist inquiry and instructional design have been most dominant. Those techniques which tend to get left behind are those techniques which genuinely exploit the fact of people 'being together'. This is probably because 'being together' online is still difficult. But convivial activity online is not impossible, as Eric Whitacre's 'virtual choir'  - albeit not a real-time example - showed (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs)

The pedagogies of conviviality are most closely associated with Paulo Freire and his associate Augusto Boal. For both these theorists, there was a fundamentally different approach to the issues of learning. This can be summed-up as:
The principal impediment to learning is emotion.


In the back-streets of Rio Freire dealt with the emotions, teaching illiterate kids to read and do maths. The highly unusual way he did it has been an inspiration to teachers ever since. Boal took on these ideas, developing theatrical activities which could be used in different locations to loosen up channels of communication - particularly within those who were usually too timid to speak out. But by creating safe situations for people to explore their feelings and express themselves, both Boal and Freire sought to teach through 'unblocking'.

But importantly, these techniques depended on people being together, sharing in an experience, caring for each other.

How could such situations be engineered online in ways which can be ready-to-hand for teachers in classrooms now? Can technology provide new ways of encouraging the sort of pedagogical approaches pioneered by Freire? Can technology, which until now has at best been a rather cold experience, be a vehicle for something profoundly human, warm and convivial?

There are a number of challenges:

  1. There needs to be a gradation of power-relationships in the control and organisation of technology which enable meaningful coordination by activity leaders (i.e. teachers and learners)
  2. The technologies for participants needs to be easy to use and ready-to-hand. It should be easily graspable, with zero administrative overhead for teachers
  3. The technologies for activity leaders needs to be almost as easy, although teachers/leaders can manage the complexity of their own machines in a preparing an activity, providing they know that the control of that activity is ready-to-hand for learners.
  4. Whatever is done by a teacher must be easily reproducible by other teachers.
I've long thought that the principle advantage of the Wookie Widget Server is its ability to bring technologies to-hand easily in a variety of different environments (VLEs, blogs, mobile (nearly)). So I had conceived of 'controllers' which were Wookie Widgets that could collectively control things that happened on a teacher's machine.

Inspired by Pauline Oliveros's 'deep listening' exercises (which are very like Boal's dramatic activities), I decided that I would like to create a convivial musical environment, where sounds could be contributed to the environment by individuals engaging with controllers.

The architecture for this set-up involved establishing a web-socket based chat server on the web. The purpose of this server was simply to forward messages from those clients that connected to it via a WebSocket connection. I then wrote two 'clients' for this service. One of them was a Java applet designed to be a Wookie Widget (which is just a matter of wrapping the Applet in a W3C Widget zip file). 

The other client was a Java Application, which similarly connected to the same WebSocket, but which was designed to interact directly with other applications on the local machine through sending UDP messages. In essence, this Java Application was the teacher's 'server'. But for it to do anything interesting, the teacher needed to think what would respond to those messages.

In my case, I decided that I would like to make sound, so I used PureData (a real-time Digital Signal Processing engine) to create sounds on the teachers machine in direct response to the messages being sent from the server.


I hacked around with an existing PD-patch (that's a type of program in PD) which would respond to the UDP messages sent by each controller clicking buttons...
And then I invited people to try clicking on my widget buttons. The response times were very quick, even when people were clicking in other parts of the world, so the immediacy of engaging with the control and something happening to a 'global' environment was quite striking.Each individual could see the difference they made to the environment that affected everyone else.

This, I think, is the essence of the convivial pedagogies that Freire and Boal (and Oliveros) have experimented with. The only limits to thinking in this way are thinking about the different sorts of things that can actually change in the environment, and how that environment is presented to participants. 

Since I'm working on the iTEC project, my focus is on the classroom. Indeed, with this technique I think I can address my principal concern about widgets in iTEC, because the teacher clearly gets something out of using widgets in their lessons.

However, there's no reason which environment which individuals contribute to cannot exist online: as an internet TV stream or radio. The key to such developments lie in the real-time web and WebSocket technology. In this way, my principle interest is in seeing if genuine convivial situations may be created where distributed individuals participate and experience rich shared experiences, and where different sorts of convivial pedagogy might be explored for the first time in online environments.

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Desktop Backgrounds HD

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Managerialism, Technology and Conviviality

Posted by dasfseegdse Selasa, 20 September 2011 0 komentar

Managerialism is the institutionalised creation of risks.  It is the enemy of conviviality. Managerialism is concerned with individuals – indeed, what it sees as rather selfish individuals who are manipulated through the risks that managerialism creates to behave in certain ways: wanting certain things, avoiding other things, all for personal fear of falling victim to one risk or another. The anxieties which are the natural human response to managerialism’s risks are felt personally. And managerialism at its worst manipulates individual insecurities in cruel ways which only through the guile and cunning of clever higher-level risk management avoids the accusation of ‘victimisation’.

Individual biology is always prone to this sort of manipulation because fundamentally, it is a manipulation of identity through altering attachment relationships (I have speculated on this before here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/07/listening-to-economy-brief-paper-for.html). Indeed, managers themselves are prone to managerial manipulation higher up the ‘food-chain’, and there the anxieties produced by one set of risks can have particularly pathological consequences further down the system. Anxiety produces rather bad policy!

Attachments are fundamental in the establishment of identity and the strengthening of capacity to manage anxiety. Where attachments are strongest, society is at its most convivial. For Illich, such situations are the epitome of dignified humanity.

But managerialism seeks to disrupt and sometimes sever individual attachments to one another. It has found ways of leveraging technology to help it to do this. It has found in the internet radical ways of rationalising and organising individualised risk, asserting ‘realities’ which are not ontologically grounded. It has exploited the resulting alienation to further its risk-produced manipulations.

Because the whole economy is organised in this way, individuals appear helpless in the face of these forces. They are deprived of ways of being together because their attachments are subject to managerialism's interference. Not least the individuals who work or study in modern higher education - particularly in a risk-laden environment of rising fees and economic uncertainty.

But technology has a surprising knack of upsetting the applecart. Whilst managerialism has leveraged most of the radical technologies of the last 10 years, its technological foresight is less effective. The technological and human need is to fly beneath the radar of institutional systems. The first attempt to do this was Web Services about 10 years ago. Web Services enabled the connecting of the functionalities of different systems together in ways which would work in most institutional environments. Unfortunately, corporate managerialism consumed most of these ideas, using them to find new ways of producing risk for individuals in the form of the big global social network enterprises.

Now we have Web Sockets: the ability to create direct communication protocols between web pages, again without interfering with any of the high-level institutional security problems that usually plague socket-based communication. This is really new because it affords much richer real-time communications. Moreover, it enables those communications to be served and managed not by central services, but by ordinary individuals: setting-up a real-time communications server will become as easy as writing a blog.

I find this interesting because it may provide a way in which individuals can re-find ways of being together, and engage in convivial activity. That’s important, because if the technology can genuinely support environments for rich attachments, then the risk culture of managerialism is undermined: the collective that looks after each other is more immune to individual risk manipulation than the fragmented social wastelands we are currently producing.

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Japan Beautiful

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After E-Learning

Posted by dasfseegdse Sabtu, 17 September 2011 0 komentar
E-learning is dead.

Where has it taken us? What does education look like now? What's next?

The "campaign to get teachers to use the internet" which started about 15 years ago has succeeded: teachers use the internet. Whilst the utopian hopes for transformation of the education system have not been realised, education in the world of the internet is a different place from education before it. And whilst many of those utopian hopes might not have been realistic, they gave the campaign for the use of the internet drive, political support and money.

In terms of understanding where we are now, I think it is useful to think of the stages of the evolution of educational technology. As with most technology initiatives (as Illich tells us!), the early days are the most interesting and possibly the most beneficial (particularly for the innovators). In the early days, a few teachers discovered technology and saw the educational potential in it. Nobody else knew what they were doing: it was a kind of 'black magic' which tended to capture the imagination of others, even if they had little understanding of where it might lead.

So a teacher would bring into class their newly-acquired personal computer, or they would set up a discussion forum on the University's mainframe (which had up till then only been used for running Fortran programs of physicists and mathematicians). It was new, it felt revolutionary. No wonder people were inspired to think that the world of education could be transformed!

The next phase however was characterised by a growing realisation of institutional threats from the technology as well as opportunities. Managers started to take note of what their innovative teachers were doing - particularly as teacher-driven websites started popping-up served from desktop machines running in classrooms. Whilst recognising that much of this was very exciting and important, the emerging concerns were:
a. how can technological practices be made accessible so everyone can do it?
b. how can technological practices be organised and coordinated?
c. how can technological practices be managed so as to reduce the risk to the institution?

Firewalls, Virtual Learning Environments, massive PC roll-out programmes, Access policy management and an emerging ICT curriculum were the result.

The universalising of internet-based practices were the principal legacy of the VLE - albeit, the main practice being the use of the technology as a 'giant photocopier'! PC rollouts created huge and largely new management problems for institutions. These problems were dealt with by leveraging the technologies to manage technological innovation (often, this effort was led by those early-adopting innovators who, having benefited from the freedom of experimentation without interference, now found themselves organising ways to restrict the freedom of others!). The result was a curtailment of technological freedom within the institution.

Institutional curtailment went hand-in-hand with the rise in power of personal technology. Increasingly, there was an emerging disparity between institutional technology and personal technology. Individuals could do far more with their own technology than they could within the institution. Along with this process, and helped by the development of XML-based 'services' on the web, global services (run initially as start-ups, but often ending-up as global corporations) appealed to individuals by offering functionality which mirrored the provision of educational institutions, but which seemed to work better and be more effective, whilst not curtailing freedoms in the ways that institutions had.

This process gave rise to debates about the 'locus of control' of technology in learning, otherwise known as the 'Personal Learning Environment'. Shift the provision of technology outside the institution, so learners could organise themselves with their own technology for their own learning journeys. This was not a new idea: similar pedagogical exhortations had been made in the 1960s before the internet, but the internet gave it new impetus, and finding resonance in the work of Illich who advocated the 'learning web' as an alternative to the educational institution.

But the PLE muddied an already confusing picture. Teachers found themselves in the position of being curtailed by their institutions in the use of technology, but at the same time facing big organisational problems if they tried to use personal technologies with their learners because of the difficulties in being able to coordinate learning, and the fact that not all their learners were confident or happy subscribing to global services whose corporate agendas were somewhat opaque. Global services were aimed at individuals: they did not meet the needs of local groups or communities.

More importantly, the types of activities that teachers could organise for their learners tended to become focused on text-based discussions. Each learner could now be relied on to have a device for text-based discussion, and so learning activities involved individuals with their personal technology participating in discussions. Or at least, some of them. Indeed, because discussion of this sort could be done online, there was a decreasing need to meet together. This trend suggested that those saying "the campus is dead" had a point.

But online chat was simply the most available of the modes of engagement. It was the mode of engagement that could be accommodated most easily by the VLE or PLE. All that had to happen was agreement about which environment was to be used (e.g. VLE of Facebook?).

The relationship between message and medium is interesting here. The message has always been shaped by the medium. Before the internet, the classroom was the principal frame. Early computers expanded the medium and created new possibilities. After e-learning, the frame of what is possible is what is most readily available in the technologies provided: typically this is online chat (either asynchronous or synchronous).

After e-learning, technology can actually do much more than that. WebSockets and new developments in HTML make possible real-time engagements in ways which have not been possible before. Online gaming can bring together people in shared activities from across the world. Remote control can allow mass participation in experiments and artistic events. Haptic interaction can provide opportunities for physical engagement without physical co-presence. Video provides ways of personal revealing which go beyond textual communication. Hardware hacking allows individuals ways of interacting with their own physical devices. Biological hacking may be the next and (possibly more interesting) development in this sort of trend.

But we're stuck with chat because of what technology has done to our institutions. We're stuck with chat because global services don't meet the needs of local communities, only individuals to whom they wish to sell their services. We're stuck with chat because we've now conditioned ourselves to expect chat from e-learning, just as we expected a lecture in the classroom.

So we're ready for the new guerilla campaign. We're ready for the equivalent of the teacher who brings their PC into the class in 1982. It is the teacher who finds new ways of bringing their learners together and breaking the spell of 'me-first' chat technology. It is the teacher who creates the cool biological robot and invites their students to participate in controlling it. It is the teacher who conceives of online musical or dramatic performance with improvised participation from their learners. It is the teacher who does something remarkable and finds a way of sharing it to create a collective experience for their students.

Currently, e-learning gets in the way of this sort of thing. But my wish is that the real-time web (WebSockets, etc) might provide a way of cutting through the technological red-tape and create a new moment in time when everything seems possible again.


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Japan Nature

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Japan Nature

Japan Nature

Japan Nature

Japan Nature

Japan Nature


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Japan Cities

Posted by dasfseegdse Kamis, 15 September 2011 0 komentar
Japan Cities

Japan Cities

Japan Cities

Japan Cities

Japan Cities


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