wallpaper dinding

The value of e-learning to me has been in the opportunity to look at the mysterious process of human development afresh through the lens of technology. We had such optimism, and had so much support (and money) from government sponsors. But where's it got us?

Whilst technology cannot bear the full blame for the current crisis in HE, it lurks in the background as a causal factor - even if its just the whiff of 'inefficiency' when we see a lecturer performing the same lecture they always have done to a small group of students. The steamroller of technology says "why not video it?", put it on a social network, etc. Of course, this question is never taken as a challenge... "Why NOT video it?"

The problem is one of perceived "functional equivalence". Or rather, the mismatch between perceived functional equivalence and ontological and phenomenological difference. In short, we've been good in spotting (and defending with 'evidence') functional equivalence. We've been less good in investigating ontological distinctions. Those are the things which come to bite us when we look at miserable MOOCs.

This is not to defend the status quo, or to argue for the maintenance of inefficient practice. It is to attack shallow, lazy and expedient thinking. It is to critique the traps that 'functional equivalence' have led us to. These, I think, are 3 significant assumptions that lurk behind our current problems:

1. Communication is the exchange of information between individuals;
2. Community is a network of individuals bound by communications (as defined above);
3. Learning is adaptation.

For each assumption, I think we need to insert "more than" so that "Communication is more than the exchange of information", etc. But the obvious thing to then to say "in what way 'more'? How can we investigate it?" The dynamics of communication have been modelled in various ways, and in e-learning, one of the principal models is Pask's Conversation theory as it was adapted by Laurillard.

The problem with conversation theory that it posits the existence of a mechanism whereby individuals coordinate themselves with the communications of each other. The coordinations are based on the communications (the result of other coordinations) of the teacher, or other learners. It must be said that this is not an unsophisticated model; indeed, Pask developed a theory which accounted for 'concepts' themselves in a remarkable (but rather impenetrable) way.

But the bottom line is, if Pask was right, then the experience of MOOCs would be fantastic. They offer the epitome of the constructivist theory in action, where adaptation, concept formation and communication work together in an environment which is geared towards supporting it. (The connectionist metaphor is, of course, where the MOOC started in the first place, and this is entirely consistent with Pask's more sophisticated theory).

Pask is wrong for an important reason: thinking itself, not just communicating, is a social and environmental process. The world in its entirety, including what is and what isn't there, is constitutive of individual humanness; it is not a 'constraint' within which concrete processes of cognition operate. Merleau-Ponty's talk of "the flesh of the world" is perhaps the most visceral expression of this. Pask thinks that individual humanness is merely constituted by the coordination of communications. He ends up positing ideal humans. We have developed our technologies (not just learning technologies) based on this misapprehension too.

This brings me on to the second problem: community. If the individual is constituted by their environment, then it is a mistake to conceive an individual as a dot in a network. It is worse to misrepresent communities as clusters of dots. Each dot represents acts which are recognised to be there, recognised to be individual. And whilst each act may relate to other acts of other people (for example, I give you a present and you say "thank you!"), the act is not the person, and the sequence of acts is only a sign of something deeper that might be going on. Each act (the act of joining a forum, for example) is the result of deliberation of the individual which, as I have just indicated - is itself social at a deep level. Community lies in the deep bonds of trust, care, understanding and love that develop between people as they grow together. Community does not lie in patterns of acts between people per se. Teaching at its best, is about community. But isn't teaching at its very best face-to-face (at least with someone, although not necessarily with the teacher themselves...)? or even one-to-one?

Finally, we come to learning. The Piagetian idea of learning as adaptation needs challenging. Rather like Pask's conversation model, Piaget envisaged entities reacting to concrete perturbations in the environment. In a way, his is a biological model with a physical characterisation of causality. For Piaget, what we learn is an epiphenomenon of our adaptational processes. This model is wrong I believe, because it conflates biological adaptation processes with complex psychological and social performances. The problem lies in the conflation of biological reductionism - the flattening-out of structure.

Learning and Teaching are like music. At any moment we may determine 'elements' to which we might attribute an experience, or even reduce the gamut of our experiences to that element: it's all about the harmony, or all about the melody, or the rhythm, etc. In reality, however much we might want to bracket-out things which we don't want to consider in order to understand our experience, those things are still there. They have not been reduced, just overlooked. Indeed, the challenge of notation of music has been to codify the uncodifyable: to establish a normative representation that connects intuitive practice with intentions.

Whilst I write this, I am aware of a recent document about 'learning design': http://www.larnacadeclaration.org/. I should talk more about this later, but the document contains an analogy to music notation and 'educational notation' which I found a bit superficial. The document states that  regarding notation of music:

As a result, a musician living hundreds of years later, in a very different context, can still understand the musical ideas of a composer long ago, and with appropriate skills, can reproduce those musical ideas.

This is an inappropriate causal attribution. The notation does not do this. Music lives through practice, interpretation and study. Indeed, early notations appear really focused on coordinations of group practice. These things took place in monasteries, universities and (much later) orchestras and opera houses. (It is only relatively recently that some medieval notations have been interpreted so that they can be performed). It may however be true that notation created a common language whereby the study of this rich and mysterious art may be conducted and coordinated amongst practitioners. The processes of study (like the hermeneutic study of ancient texts) have to consider what is not there as well as what is. Performance takes place in this context, and always against the context of its own time, not some ossified recreation of the past. Literacy is not just about reading and writing; it is about the organisational, institutional, political, educational, technological and legal structures that facilitate the passing-on of the understanding of texts from one brain to another.

Efforts to establish notation of (and technologies for) learning have assumed a conflated reductionist model of learning and teaching, and consequently produced deficient experiences as the ignored levels of educational ontology assert themselves (in ways never anticipated by the learning designers). This can be organisationally disastrous for the Icarus-like attempts to promote new technologies (like the University of California blowing $4.9m on online courses and recruiting one student! http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-online-courses-fail-to-lure-outsiders-4173639.php) Just as music's normative practice is always social (even if it's merely a dead composer's score and a solo performer), but where the magic is in the communion which results, so too with learning. Learning exists in an ontological context which includes society, politics, care, attachment and love. A functionalist notation (and functionalist technology) brackets these things out, or simply flattens them.

Our challenge now is in coming to terms with the stratified and irreducible levels of learning, communities and communication and finding ways in which our technologies can address and support these levels, rather than reduce and conflate them. 

Nigel Howard's "drama theory" is highly relevant to data analytics. Any piece of data is the result of deliberation and decision. Behind each item of data, there is (at least) psychological drama, if not real drama of events. Behind each item of data are the characters who form the context within which an act is taken. Each decision is taken in the light of a set of expectations that certain events will follow. If it is a good decision, the events will be in accord with expectations.

In Howard's methodology, things begin with a kind of 'agon' where each character articulates their position relative to the others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_theory); what they want; what their fall-back position is. When everyone is aware of everyone else, the characters work through their positions. This usually results in 'dilemmas' (in his theory of meta-rationality, Howard called these 'paradoxes') as the positions taken aren't tenable, threats aren't believable, etc. This causes emotional and psychological change, with characters developing their position as the drama unfolds. The wikipedia article describes that:

a character with an incredible threat makes it credible by becoming angry and finding reasons why it should prefer to carry out the threat; likewise, a character with an incredible promise feels positive emotion toward the other as it looks for reasons why it should prefer to carry its promise. Emotional tension leads to the climax, where characters re-define the moment of truth by finding rationalizations for changing positions, stated intentions, preferences, options or the set of characters.

There are specific 'dilemmas' or paradoxes, which Howard articulates (see the wikipedia article). His argument is that resolution in the drama cannot be reached until all the paradoxes or dilemmas are dissolved.

It is important to note that the dilemmas arise through particular strategic and meta-strategic priorities of the actors. What informs the strategy-making (and meta-strategy-making) are pieces of information or data which the actors either willingly release, or unwittingly reveal. The willing release of data will be a strategic act whose consequences will have been considered. The unwitting release of data will be a bi-product of some other kind of act.

A strategic act will depend on anticipation of the reaction of others. It will depend on guessing of the strategies and meta-strategies (the anticipations) of others.

A strategic release of information (the kind of data that gets analysed in data analytics) will be based on a calculation of how others will respond. However, it may be so calculated as to mislead others into thinking that the intentions behind the act (and so the strategy) are something other than it really is. An information leak can easily hide true intentions.

Misinformation will lead to certain paradoxes. One piece of information with an assumed strategy behind it will contradict another piece of information. Those on the receiving end of this kind of information will wonder how the originator of the information can be thinking, how they can be consistent.

What can happen here is that the apparent meaning of the data can be questioned in the light of what might be in the mind of the originator. "Maybe they said this to put us off the scent... Maybe they don't really care what happens, but want us to believe that they do!" and so on. Those on the receiving end of this stuff will construct a storyline which most closely fits.

What really is going on here is the business of identifying the kinds of constraints which might produce the assorted items of information. Is it madness? Is it self-interest? Is it a genuine mistake? and so on.

Analytically, this produces some interesting possibilities. Imagine we are presented with some data. Email messages sent, policy decisions made, reports of discussions, etc. Can we reconstruct the kind of psycho-drama that produced these events? This is a bit like psychological profiling. What this should reveal is the extent to which the overt meaning of speech acts, email messages, etc matches the intentional meaning behind those acts and their intended purpose. Where there is a mismatch between the intentionality behind messages and the expressed meaning of those messages (the meaning that might be initially constructed by recipients), then a refined view towards the interpretation of future messages is necessary. This would take into account the reasons why there is a mismatch. The 'refined' view  is actually a shift in the modelling of the originator of those messages - a more accurate identification of their absences.

Resolving the paradoxes means finding a "storyline which fits". But if we do arrive at something which fits, is there further analysis that might be done? Can the process be re-applied to an emergent narrative? Doing this might, I think, shed new light on new items of data to be searched for. It is rather like exploring a new theory of physics. The theory is an invention, but the invention suggests the existence of new physical phenomena - so we go looking for them.

Our tendency when analysing 'big data' is for the high-level global viewpoint. A drama-theory inspired perspective would:

• start from particular items of data
• suggest a psycho-drama that might produce the data
• identify the conflicts between the suggested psycho-drama and the overt meaning of the messages (identify where the anticipations of the utterer of the messages is different from the anticipations of the audience)
• redefine the psycho-drama
• with a refined psychodrama, identify new possible items of data to support the theory
• go and find them, together with randomly chosen new items of data which might challenge the theory.

Some people find TINA incredibly attractive: the promise of the single door opening before you with a big red flashing neon sign saying "There Is No Alternative". All the deliberation, complexity, confusion and debate peels away in a moment of clear-sighted, hard-nosed decision-taking.

Of course, other people find TINA hideous and dangerous. Unfortunately, lust for TINA is most common amongst those in power.

Part of TINA's appeal lies in the way that the path to her single doorway can be manipulated by those in power. It takes the form of:

1. a engineered crisis, or the exploitation of an existing crisis;
2. the suppression of debate, opposition, humour and creativity;
3. the cumulation of small, apparently insignificant moves, which gradually transform the situation to one where TINA becomes more likely (but too slowly for anyone to see it coming);
4. the manipulation of decision-making bodies and regulatory mechanisms to ensure we stay on the path to TINA;

Email discussions are often hopeless because they reveal little of the person behind the messages. This is particularly noticeable on forums - which are the dominant mode of communication in e-learning platforms, including MOOCs.

I believe that what we learn, we learn about each other. Because of this, text messages in a forum are a deficient means of learning anything because they reduce the 'whole person' to their textual utterances. There is an opposing position to mine that says "what we learn we learn about ourselves." This position too has its merits, but it seems rather too solipsistic to me, and potentially dangerous since the fundamental human acts of promising and of forgiving cannot involve just one person. Arendt argues:

“The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility──of being unable to undo what one has done──is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.” 

So to believe we only learn about ourselves is to say we forgive ourselves, and we validate our own promises. In the hands of a psychopath, this clearly is dangerous, and my biggest fear of this position is that it either directly leads to a self-validating fascism, or an idealism which becomes blinded to the potential for evil in the world - which similarly lets in the bad people.

I've been thinking more deeply about this need for other people in cognitive process. I think there is a determination of absence that takes place. Each utterance we make is a decision which is reached not just by what we can think, but by what we cannot think. Each utterance is a calculation based on our ability to coordinate and anticipate the direction of the communication, and consequently, our ability to anticipate the responses of those we converse with.  That means we have to determine the thinkable and the unthinkable of other people too. Indeed, I suspect that it is what we cannot think that has the greatest bearing on the decisions we take.

A discussion is a shared experience. Moves in the discussion depend on calculating the success of communications which entails anticipating what others will say (what Luhmann calls the double-contingencies of communication). Where the capacity to predict communications is hampered, and where one feels forced to utter something but unable to predict what will happen, confusion creates stress. This is the situation of a classic double-bind. Nothing is clearly demarcated, the absences of the other person (the unthinkables) cannot be determined, and consequently, their utterances cannot be anticipated, and we therefore have no grounds for making a decision ourselves.

For good conversation to take place, where each party learns something about the other, there needs to be the acknowledgement of some sort of "shared absence"; something that we both recognise we lack; something which demarcates the thinkable from the unthinkable in each of us. A conversation may then proceed to determine an aspect of that shared absence and establish a new concept. The learning about the other person is the acknowledgement and determination of what we both lack. A new concept transforms the world views of both participants. But this is an ideal situation.

Online it is hard to assess the absences of the other person. I can only judge their absences by taking decisions to make utterances which might elicit information about their absences. One way of doing this is to make assertions and see how the other person reacts to the assertion. Often in forums, however, the stakes of a communication are not high, and so assertions will tend to be ignored (which will of course tell us something about what's missing!)

If the stakes in online discussion are higher (e.g. if there is a threat to personal reputation in some way) then conversation may become unpleasant to the point that both parties seek a "way out". They cannot just stop communicating because they are caught in the double bind of the communication situation (needing to determine common absence but being deprived of the means to effectively do this). The stress and confusion of this situation will create complexities and difficulties in making communicative decisions - a situation that at the very least needs addressing in some way. One way out is to recognise that the absence which is shared is a "dislike of the present discussion". An agreement to differ is an identification of a "question" as the determination of an absence: we will in the final analysis agree that this absence is "is it x or is it y?". Such a new concept-question can offer some respite and an escape because the complex decision-trees can be reorganised with the new concept so as to lead to a mutual restructuring of expectations.

Face-to-face contact gives much more information about absences that online media. The eyes reveal far more about an absence than words. In fact technology presents its own absences. This may be what can make it seductive, since what is missing in the technology can only be substituted by the user. In this way, an attenuated communications medium does indeed lead us to reflect on ourselves, on our own absences. We might think we identify the absences of others, but these may in fact be detected in ourselves. But it can makes technologically-mediated communication narcissistic.

This makes me think about my argument that an online community is not a real community (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/myth-of-online-community.html). Is online communication real communication? How do we distinguish our understanding of communication from our understanding of media?

Maybe thinking about absences can help us grasp the varieties of non-neutrality of media in communication.

and all this has set me thinking about some of the new possibilities for articulating ideas which technology is making available to us.

I've always felt that communication technologies are a bit like 'masks': the real 'me' hides not just behind my language, but behind the word-processor, the blog, the email, etc. There's masking in my  video not just in the digital puppets, but in the sound too.

In the online environment you have to wear a mask. But even in the real world, letters have always masked the individual (although hand-written letters reveal more than word-processed ones); CVs still mask us as part of the process of gaining employment. Sometimes we see real people behaving robotically behind other kinds of mask - like cars, for example - or even sunglasses.

Another word for 'mask' is 'persona'.

One thing that has happened as technologies have developed is that the sophistication of the masks that are available to ordinary people has increased. Skills that were once only the domain of the typesetter become available to anyone with a word-processor; online publishing which was once the domain of geeks is now available to anyone who sets up a blog. But as ubiquity replaces novelty, so the drive for new novelty continues. Technological progress appears driven by continual critique and the determination of deficiency.

So my latest obsession with deficiency has led me to consider the potential of 'virtual theatres' and the presentation of information as dialogue rather than monologue. Crazy Talk enables me to do things only professional animators were able to do a few years ago. Actually, I want to go further, because I want to have my virtual theatre as 'interactive' - that would enable me to virtually produce some of the drama games that Augusto Boal (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal) developed and which I've found to be so powerful in face-to-face interactions. I wouldn't be surprised to see this kind of stuff becoming ubiquitous soon.

Will I ever be satisfied?

No.

There is always deficiency - not just because the world changes, but because there were deficiencies in us to begin with. That's why we have technology in the first place. It's sticking-plaster over deep absences which are in us, not in our tools. But if playing with technology is a way of accepting that, then maybe it needn't be as pathological as I sometimes fear!