wallpaper dinding

On my way to the American Cybernetics Society conference in Troy, NY, I was reading Erich Fromm's "To have or to be?" What Fromm calls the 'having mode' is so clearly visible in the US. I was struck how beautiful the natural landscape of New York city is - how it must have seemed like Eden to the European settlers. The train ride up the Hudson to Albany was simply stunning. When the settler's arrived, the 'Having mode' was already well established in them - and they wanted to have this land. The natives were in the 'being mode' - we didn't listen to them. And the consequences of the possessing we are clearly reaping now. Which way now?

My encounters with distributed cognition are proving very fruitful. Andy Clark's work is particularly interesting - he has a take on the moral side of all this. However, I'm not so keen on the emphasis David Chalmers (who Clark has worked with) puts on the singularity nonsense, or whether whole brain emulation (brain uploading) is a sensible way to look at things. Anders Sandberg's 2nd life lecture is fascinating though and inspired me to sort out our Moodle-SLOODLE installation.

What we need is good models which can help us take useful practical action. Cognition sits behind human organisation, and the emergent issues of organisational intervention (including intervention with technology). I think a cybernetic model of distributed cognition might come in handy... like the one developed through the JISC SPLICE project (above). The strategic evidence for the efficacy of this is growing... which makes the whole area very exciting!

I've been trying a few approaches to helping my daughter with her maths. One problem with maths is that the stress of finding the 'right answer' can induce a state of mind where it is harder to think. Instead of focusing on the answer, I've been trying to focus on the different possible methods. Some methods are easy, but long; others are quite hard, but very efficient. Choosing the best method is important. Much of the anxiety in my daughter seems to be based around "we weren't told to do it that way!" - as if there are ways of doing it that might get her into trouble.

I'm wondering about the extent to which a 'moral sense' is as much at the heart of knowing the right answer as it is in doing the right thing. If that is the case, what teaching approaches could be used to relate choosing (and learning) effective methods? In computer programming, there is clearly a link between the best method and doing the right thing (my predominant feeling when programming is often guilt!).

I'm finding that by emphasising the moral dimension and moral choice in finding the right answer (by contextualising the problem in a moral framework), some of the stress can be overcome. "If someone's life depended on this, which method would you choose?" To understand why, I think it's useful to see the stress as emerging from the 3-4 homeostat which gets itself into a double-bind situation. Morality sits at System 5, and so takes more of a direct control over the balancing between the two.

Graduation ceremonies are peculiar affairs playing a key structural role in University life. How does it relate to Quality or Teaching? It would seem to contain aspects of both. The video is me thinking through some of this. My conclusion (for the moment) is that Graduation serves as a 'mop' to soak up the unmanaged variety/complexity from the interactions between the teaching machine and the quality machine. In this, it serves much the same role as a religious ceremony.

The mop works in remarkable ways at many levels. On an individual level, as with a religious ceremony, the ritual uses communicative practices (order of service, procession, etc) to stimulate/increase perception. In doing so, new communications become more probable, because changes to the perception system inevitably have consequences for the communication system. People talk to each other about stuff they wouldn't have otherwise talked about... This facilitation of communication can address some of the mismatches between the Q and T machines. The mopping works because people are brought together in a common belief in education; their 'faith' holds the show together, and provides a vital balancer (positioning?) for the whole system.

I've been trying to think through the issues involved in the separation of the 'teaching machine' (T) from the 'quality machine'(Q). There's little doubt that the university maintains its capital value through the Q machine, but it's deeply entwined with the T machine, with teachers playing key roles in both mechanisms.

Globalisation and the drive for efficiency will force us to separate the two mechanisms. But this will potentially cause problems which we need to find ways of averting. There's no point in separating-off the T machine, if the Q machine rejects everything it does (and basically doesn't trust it).

The values of T are different from those of Q. Q concerns itself with normative conceptions of fairness, equality, accountability, value-for-money, etc. Quality is maintained through the Q machine producing communications which uphold these normative conventions.

T concerns itself with pedagogy, knowledge, skills, relationships, conversation, activity and assessments. T's values are not always normative; they may be highly individual and personal. Assessment is the conventional interface between teaching and quality.

Teachers can get upset if their personal values concerning teaching conflict with conceptions of quality which deem their practice deficient. If teachers are increasingly asked to play a role in the Quality machine, they will get upset if the teaching machine isn't doing what they think it should be doing.

Do we need to solve this through more pervasive quality? To make the normative values of quality part of the process of teaching? This would be a bit like TQM for education perhaps... TEACHING Quality Management!

I went to my daughter's primary school play yesterday. She was very good, as was the production. The head talked very briefly at the end of the show that its purpose was to 'make memories'. I couldn't agree more.

I attended another memory-making event today in the form of a graduation ceremony. Oleg Liber was receiving an Honorary Doctorate, along with ('Big!') Sam Allardyce.

Memory plays such an important role in learning. We often say that something has been learnt if it is 'remembered' (spellings, tables, for example). But these memories are very interesting. If the distributed cognition crowd are right (and I'm beginning to think they are), then memories are not in the head, but dependent on the context within which people live their lives. Events like graduations and school plays are special contexts, and with special contexts come significant moments of 'personal bio-psychosocial organisation'. The 'memory' is in the organisation - particularly in relation to the context it occurs in.

When it is recalled, the essence of the event is important. (The essence may be the trigger...) And the essence of the event is usually something significant, dignified, maybe joyful: the triviality of learning, teaching and assessment leads directly to something more substantial, human and eternal.

The rug seems to be getting pulled from constructivism. “Knowledge exists in the head” – Does it? Where exactly? Edwin Hutchin’s work on a Navy warship points to knowledge existing between peoples’ heads and a material world. Andrew Pickering talks of scientific knowledge as performance (a ‘mangle’) which is constantly ‘tuning’ into the material world. My work on music similarly is looking at the feedback mechanisms between individuals and their environment of communications. The bottom line here is very simple and has to do with basic morals:
1. If you treat someone badly they will ‘know’ different things to what they might have ‘known’ if you treated them well. That means they will communicate differently.
2. The way you change the world changes the ways others will treat each other.
I've been experimenting with the synth sounds for the cybernetics conference. It sounds a bit like machines having sex to me! More seriously, some will hear it and think "that’s rubbish!" or "that’s not music!"; others (one or two) might like it. What might each person ‘know’? Will their opinions change the communications they have with one another?