CCK08: Reflection Week 8: Part 3

Qallunology and the Hidden Costs of Technology

Note: footnotes originally included in the following excerpts have been removed for ease of formatting and readability.

Derek Rasmussen, a former Policy Advisor to Nunavit Tunngavik, wrote the article “Qallunology: A Pedagogy for the Oppressor” in the 2002 edition of Philosophy of Education. Since its initial publication, I have not been able to find a copy of the article available online. In the essay introduction, Rasmussen states,

Inuit observations are cited in this analysis to help shed light on Euro-Americans, those whom the Inuit call “Qallunaat.” This term “Qallunology” was coined by Zebedee Nungak to denote what we might colloquially call “the study of white folks.” Given that the property-based individualistic civilization that characterizes the Qallunaat emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, the words “white,” “Western,” or “European” denote its closest parentage and its place of birth, not the skin color of its current adherents or its current geographical limits. In his book, The White Arctic, sociologist Robert Paine said that his one “message” to whites was to drop the illusion that they were “in the Arctic to teach the Inuit,” and instead focus on “learning about white behavior.” Qallunology says that if Euro-Americans really want to study something they should study themselves; if Qallunaat really want to rescue indigenous peoples they should stop pushing them overboard to start with; and if Qallunaat educators really want to study something helpful to Inuit, they should study why Education was invented, and how it is a result of the ideology of scarcity (1).

Though many are now familiar with the roots of North American education being derivative of Prussian military training (in fact, this is finally being included in introductory history of education courses in universities), we are perhaps less familiar with Aboriginal perspective on education that existed and persisted over thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americaas.

Rasmussen does not mince words when he describes European attitudes towards education indigenous peoples:

Qallunaat rush around the world proselytizing their alphanumeric fetishism, supposedly rescuing “primitive” civilizations from their richly integrated physical oral-mental cultures. Meanwhile they pat themselves on the back because they are out in the igloo or under the banyan tree teaching liberatory pedagogy to the suffering locals so that they can hang on to that twenty percent of the world’s resources that the Rescuers’ civilization has not gotten hold of yet (2).

Rasmussen contends that education is the means by which traditional community values, once uprooted, are replaced with a mentality of spiritual scarcity and depravity:

Education is the main compensatory mechanism invented to deal with uprootedness and the collapse of family and community relations, and to train converts to the new non-social economy. Education is a “designed process which is carried on in specially constructed places under various kinds of bribe and threat,” as John Holt defined it. It always denotes some kind of “treatment.” Education is an “odd, modern social phenomenon” that entrenches the belief “that competence in the world derives from being instructed about it, taught about it.” The word “education” itself does not show up in French until 1498, in English not until 1530, and in Spanish not until 1632. Europeans first began to conceptualize the “world as school” in 1759, and when, thirty-three years later, a Cambridge tutor introduced the idea of grading student papers “human thought succumbed to writing and writing had succumbed to numerical evaluation” These dates could be said to mark Europe’s surrender to the “ideology of literacy”: the beginning of the widespread belief that knowledge is a subset of writing and that “learning can be sliced up into pieces.” (4)

If this assertion is accurate, then how can a Connectivist model, within which learning ecologies are posited as the basis of a design for learning, be realized? To my reckoning, where context is as important as content, and where learning is being treated as part of a larger ecology within which the learner is embedded, how are the variable factors that influence the ecology in question parsed out?

There are limits to how much can be achieved in a classroom. Wisdom can only be gained by engaging with life, by honouring ones heritage and by mastering the skills necessary for independence. We used to have this when we lived on the land….Wisdom was essential for survival on the land, but it is not essential for survival in institutions…. What happens in most schools is that children and teachers are caught in a mechanical organization that has no interest in wisdom or independence. There is no preparation for life, just preparation for work in another controlling institution (7).

Rasmussen’s article provides examples of how citizens of the world would benefit from the Qallunaat first examining their own behaviour, before investing energy in the study and judgment of the behaviour of others. Compulsory schooling for Aboriginal peoples destroyed their traditional way of life. Meanwhile, factories continue to spew out deady chemicals, which in turn affect Inuit communities. For example,

…over sixty percent of the Inuit children under the age of fifteen and almost forty percent of Inuit women of childbearing age were found to have PCB body burdens exceeding “tolerable” guidelines.14 Mothers in Nunavut have twice the allowable levels of dioxins in their breast milk. Nunavut’s and America’s communities are tied together by America’s invisible exhalation of death. America breathes out, Inuit die (3).

Rasmussen asks, “Instead of exotic slide shows on the Arctic, why do not American schools take exotic field trips to Bethlehem Steel and US Steel’s iron sintering plants in Chesterton and Gary, Indiana (3)?”

E-Waste Dumping Ground

In turn, why is it that only last week, due to the efforts of investigative reporters in China, that the injustices being committed in China were brought to the attention of Canadians via The National in the report, “E-wast Dumping Ground“ ? Though the educational technology sector is by no means the only economic driver behind the regular upgrading of computer hardware, there is certainly a relationship to be drawn between the ability to use the most up-to-date hardware and software applications, and the drive to be at the cutting edge of technological development. Are we aware of what happens to our old computers? How many computers have you discarded in your lifetime? What can we do to turn the tide of companies that are illegally shipping old computers to China, where in turn they are dismantled in hazardous conditions?

I do not have simple answers to these questions. Nonetheless, especially in light of the discussions this week on the subject of power and authority, I believe that we are alll obligated to question our own involvement in what may very well be the hidden (or possibly overt) curriculum of educational technology: stay current. Buy now.

CCK08: Reflection for Week 8 Part 2

Unlearning Pedagogy

In  an earlier post, I made reference to George Siemens’ model of a Connectivist learning design as being based on “learning ecologies” as opposed to using a more traditionally regimented scope and sequence for course delivery. I stated,

Siemens contends that designing for Connectivism concerns creating a design for the space and ecology of learning. What is new about this idea?

Stephen responded in turn by asking about my background readings in this area, to which I replied that I do not have a strong familiarity with literature in the area of learning design. Yesterday, I realized that the greatest body of educational literature (paradoxical as this may sound) with which I am familiar concerns teaching and learning outside of the framework of compulsory schooling, teaching and learning. When I worked as a Learning Consultant for the SelfDesign Learning Community, the work that I did with individual families essentially constituted supporting unschooling or deschooling by being a liaison between families and providing assessment of learners that was aligned to the K-10 curricula of the Ministry of Education. Recall, if you have read my previous post on this subject, that the SDLC is affiliated with the Wondertree Foundation for Natural Learning.

The Master’s Thesis of Michael Maser, the current director of the SDLC, was an exploration of Virtual High. Virtual High transpired in a large house in which the originators of the Virtual High progam lived alongside their teenaged students, and which encouraged and supported those learners to pursue their passions. The thesis was called Virtual High Learning Community: Towards An Ecology of Being (Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education, April 1997).

This morning, I recalled a discussion that I had in 2002 concerning the idea of writing a book called The Ecology of Education. Beyond the many educational books concerning all varieties of unschooling, deschooling, home-based education and emancipatory pedagogy that have informed my personal educational vision, I have also been influenced by ecopsychology, a term introduced by Theodore Roszak (formerly a mover and shaker in the education field in the 1970s) and Murray Bookchin’s work on social ecology.

Doubting myself, unsure about whether I was even clear on the meaning of the term “learning design” after Stephen’s asking me about my background reading in this area, I did a Google search on the term and settled on the first issue of the Queensland University of Technology Journal of Learning Design, whereupon I took great pleasure in reading the first article in the journal, “Unlearning Pedagogy” by Erica McWilliam.

McWilliam’s article summarizes what she identifies as the “Seven Deadly Habits of Pedagogical Thinking.” Below are excerpts from the article that resonated most strongly with me:

Seven Deadly Habits of Pedagogical Thinking

Deadly Habit No. 1: The more learning the better.

Bauman [2004] elaborates:

Just as long-term commitments threaten to mortgage the future, habits too tightly embraced burden the present; learning may in the long run disempower as it empowers in the short…. ‘Your skills and know-how are as good as their last application’. (p.22)

In this liquid social setting, forgetting (or what Bauman calls “de-learning”), becomes as important as learning. For Bauman, it is “the interplay of learning and de-learning” (p.22) that is crucial here.

Many contemporary learning theorists, I would suspect, want to express concerns about the limitations of Bauman’s definition of learning. If to de-learn is to forget, then learning is, by implication, remembering. Indeed, Bauman makes this explicit when he goes on to define ‘learning and de-learning’ as synonymous with “memory and forgetting” (p22). There is much more to learning than memory, we would want to insist, and we have known that for a long time.

Bauman’s thesis remains nevertheless an interesting one – that, in a “liquid-modern” social world, the work of assembling and structuring new social relations is no more important than the work of “keeping them eminently dismantlable” (p.22). His focus moves beyond the individual and the cognitive to incorporate the moral and the aesthetic, and the interplay among these various social elements. So Bauman’s ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ have more profound significance than one individual’s mind or brain. They connote a cultural and ethical disposition to knowledge that is relational, unfinished and revocable, and an imperative to processing that serves the purpose of assembling and dissembling social relations.

Having opened up the space of pedagogy as an interplay between the cognitive, the moral-ethical and the aesthetic, Bauman is less clear about the principles for getting the right mix of learning and de-learning as interplay. For him, “…how to mix them in the right proportions is anyone’s guess” (p.22).

If we are to entertain Bauman’s thesis about the value of de-learning for the context of “liquid modernity”, we begin to de-stabilise what is the apparent Truth of our time-honoured pedagogical mantra – that learning is all that matters. Instead we have to come to grips with the idea that some learning is unhelpful, and thus that in certain circumstances ignorance might be better than knowledge.

Deadly Habit No. 2: Teachers should know more than students.

In The Weightless Society (2000), Leadbeater challenges the myth that lurks behind habitual thinking about the teacher as knower, ie, the myth that we are becoming a more and more knowledgeable society with each new generation. If knowing means being intimately familiar with the workings of the technologies we use in our daily lives, then, Leadbeater asserts, we have never been more ignorant. He reminds us that our great grandparents had an intimate knowledge of the technologies around them, and had no problem with getting the butter-churn to work or preventing the lamp from smoking. I expect that few readers of this paper would know what to do if their mobile phone stopped functioning and I certainly have no idea what is ‘underneath’ or ‘behind’ the keys on which I am typing. Nor, I confess, do I want to know. But that means that we are all very quickly reduced to the quill and the lamp if we lose our power sources or our machines break down. Thus we are much more vulnerable – as well as much more ignorant in relative terms – than our predecessors.

Deadly Habit No. 3: Teachers lead, students follow.

A corollary of the idea that teachers ought to know more than students is the idea that teachers should provide the starting point for learning activities, and that students should engage in the tasks set by the teacher – ie, that students should follow where teachers lead. There is some interesting work currently being done about the knowledge economy itself which can help us re- evaluate this potentially deadly thinking habit. I refer in particular to public policy analyst Gregory Hearn’s (2005) work on the shift to value ecology thinking [my bold and italics]. Hearn maps “an emerging fundamental shift in the way that value creation is thought about in business” (p.1), and the conceptual architecture he provides in his analysis is very helpful for re-thinking the idea of a teacher as the starting point and the student as ‘following’.

Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be consumed by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dissembling cultural products. In colloquial terms, this would frame the teacher as neither sage on the stage nor guide on the side but meddler in the middle.

I am especially fond of the phrase “meddler in the middle”, because it reminds me of the “crazy wisdom” or “holy madness” approach used in Vajryana Buddhism and in Rinzai Zen (which uses koans) , where teachers educate their students by presenting them with situations that cannot be resolved logically. In those moments where students recognize the futility of trying to come to terms with the situations in question intellectually, they come to understand the world from a new perspective, one within which logic and absurdity mutually coexist.

The teacher is in there doing and failing alongside students, rather than moving like Florence Nightingale from desk to desk or chat room to chat room, watching over her flock, encouraging and monitoring.

Second, the new value ecology raises the possibility that the teacher who does not add value to a learning network can – and will – be by-passed. The rhizomatic [my bold and italics] capacity of networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may be located in a linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded from their students’ learning networks. That would be an effect of being perceived to be delivering content but not adding value. Once again, this is not a matter of how much take-up of technology is evident in the pedagogical work, but whether or not pedagogical processes bring student and teacher together in their shared ignorance and mutual desire to make new sense of their world.

Deadly Habit No. 4: Teachers assess, students are assessed.

In the words of G.B. Shaw, “power is responsibility; that is why most men dread it”.

If the rethinking of pedagogy as co-creation of value re-positions teacher and student as project partners, as co-directors and co-editors of their social world, who then is the rightful assessor of the value of that cultural assemblage? The work is no longer clean of fingerprints, but is tainted by co-direction and co-editorship at every level. So what does it mean to make judgements to credential individuals on the basis of the quality of the co-creation? And what new dilemmas does this set up around ‘objectivity’ and assessment?

…But tension remains between the ‘democratic classroom’ as an ideological ideal, and the role formal educational institutions continue to play as credentialers and reporters to industry and the professions. Experiments that involve students deciding their ow curriculum and evaluating their own work have in general remained just that; Neill’s Summerhill was never likely to become every future employer’s dream.

But apart from the desire of external agencies to know what a particular set of credentials guarantee, there exists within pedagogical relationships a strong resistance to the idea of self or peer assessment. Students – especially high achievers – are very likely to resist any apparent move to ‘downgrade’ the quality assurance that ‘objective’ assessment purports to afford. Such students are likely to share with many in the community a belief that, in its purest form, ‘democratic assessment’ is oxymoronic

Whatever about the ideological struggles that persist in educational scholarship, the matter of assessing a co-edited and co-authored work remains an ethical challenge. While the rhetoric of team building is ubiquitous in universities as it is in other corporate organisations, assessment remains stubbornly individualistic. We assess and promote individuals and then we ask them to be effective members of teams.

Deadly Habit No. 5: Curriculum must be set in advance.

If pedagogy might be rethought as the co-creation of value, then curriculum cannot be ‘fully formed’ and set in place in advance of pedagogical activity… While this does not imply that teachers have a new licence to be unprepared for pedagogical activity, the nature and purposes of what counts as preparation must change. From fixed and immutable, curriculum needs to be conceptualised as content for meddling with. And this means a significant shift in what many teachers prioritise in their teaching. While the written text remains important, the remixable curriculum demands that the contribution of other ‘non-text’ media – visuals, animation, sound – be elevated from their currently marginal status in an overwhelmingly text-dependent curriculum. In Lawrence Lessig’s (2005) terms, we need to come to see “redaction” as central toeducation, not lesser than education.

Once the plan is written, care is usually taken not to stray too far from it or to be distracted by students with other agendas. This logic, in large measure, runs counter to the requirements of a remixable curriculum. The predictable or planned experience gives way to genuine experimentation, with outcomes neither known nor guaranteed. As a co-creator of value, the teacher shares with students experimental tasks in which failure is both likely and anticipated, where students and teachers fail without shame or disappointment. Bauman’s dictum that: “[y]our guess and know-how are as good as their last application” (p.22) applies equally to teachers and students. Put bluntly, where the stability of the plan is the hallmark of good pedagogy, then the experimental culture that is a corollary of the remixable curriculum is virtually impossible to achieve.

If our higher education institutions have a deadening effect on experimentation, the same cannot be said about the excitement of university managers around technology uptake. As Strathern (1997) points out, technology “comes with the friendliest of epithets” (p.317) in the university culture – the more of it used in ways that the university management approves, the better. Thus the self-managing academic demonstrates improved teaching performance by pointing to the use of more and newer ICTs… The problem here lies in the naïve hope that more and newer ICTs will mean a more exciting set of learning possibilities. Where curriculum remains fixed and immutable, however, these good intentions remain just that. There is no doubt that new information and communication technologies offer all sorts of new possibilities for remix – but, as Sassen reminds us, they cannot of themselves be relied on to change anything.

Deadly Habit No. 6: The more we know our students, the better.

I asked a group of Masters and Doctoral students in my faculty about the nature and purposes of education. ‘Raising self-esteem’ proved to be an almost universally agreed purpose, ranking alongside ‘helping people reach their full potential’. What flows from this logic is a heavy investment by these teachers in the development of a positive and friendly teacher-student relationship. And this is achieved in turn, by getting to know the students as individuals. Such determination is not to be thought of as prying but as seeking appropriately to teach the ‘whole person’.

They are usually…circumspect in their response to [the] question, [So what do I need to know about you?], less willing to give permission to pry. But the point is nevertheless made. The good teacher builds and maintains a close warm relationship with students and this means knowing ‘the whole person’, whether or not we want to be ‘known’ as a psychological subject. In this rationality, ‘openness’ is a marker of the good student and ‘interest in the person’ a marker of the good teacher. My point is not that we should be looking to return to a culture defined by the lofty arrogance and elitism of academics, but that one that respects students enough to challenge them by messing things up with and for them. The role, as Geoff Garrett, Head of Australia’s CSIRO put it at a recent senior management forum, is to become ‘chief disorganiser’.

Deadly habit No.7: Our disciplines can save the world.

It is my hope that I have demonstrated the problem with Deadly Habit Number Seven in my treatment of Deadly Habits One to Six. The approach I have taken to my own unlearning has been to range across academic disciplines and outside them in search of bright and shiny objects that can be used to generate different pedagogical thinking. Unfortunately, I have for some time now found relatively few compelling ideas about pedagogy coming out of mainstream education research, or professional development or leadership and management literature broadly defined…. Finally, I intend to save myself from another deadly habit of academic authorship – the deadly habit of summarising main points at the end of a paper. This will allow the reader to dispense with the deadly habit of needing to be reminded about them. In Bauman’s terms, the invitation is both to remember and to forget.

CCK08: Reflection for Week 8 Part 1

Power and Illusion

In the Oct 31 Daily, Stephen Downes commented:

From my perspective, the power I (Stephen) wielded this week in forcing a ’subscribe’ to the Moodle forums was actually an illusion of power. One student got it: “If Stephen hadn’t turned off the function as quickly as he did, I wonder if we would have taken power into our own hands, by simply not posting to the Moodle forums?” The power to do something else, to communicate using alternate means, to simply not use the Moodle forums, was always in the hands of the students – if they cooperated with each other.

I had been thinking exactly the same thing, but did not repond to Downes’ prompts to reply regarding the auto-subscription function in Moodle for precisely the reason suggested: because as an individual, not using the Moodle forum was how I chose to “communicate using alternate means.”

 In The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Volume 1: Power and Struggle (Extending Horizon Books, 1973) by Gene Sharp, the author remarks:

•  Obedience is essentially voluntary (26).
• It is not sanctions themselves which produce obedience, but the fear of them (28).

Being auto-subscribed to a Moodle forum is hardly an injustice in conventional terms. However, to the extent that Stephen was wielding his authority in a manner contrary to what students in CCK08 would expect, it begs the question: did an abuse of power occur? If we were to organize amongst ourselves as students to protest Stephen’s actions, first we would need to agree that a wrongdoing was committed. If it was agreed that an injustice had in fact occurred, then we would need to decide how we, individually and collectively, would choose to respond. Would we have agreed that collective mobilization was the course of action that ought to be taken? How would we have reached consensus about what was the best decision for us as a group? How would we implement our individual and collective responses? And finally, how would we move forward with the rest of CCK08 in a positive and constructive manner, shedding the abuses that have been conducted against us, if we chose to move forward with the course at all? Would we demand that Stephen resign from his role in the course? Would we demand an online apology?

The issues within which we find ourselves embroiled in the education system are so systemic that oftentimes it is impossible to identify how we ought to conduct ourselves when we know that injustices are being conducted against ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.

 John Taylor Gatto, voted both the New York City and the New York State teacher of the year, eventually chose to leave the teaching profession and is now a strong advocate of home-based education. He has reached the conclusion that working within the education system in order to try and transform students and/or the system itself cannot be realized. I believe that coercion plays a tremendous role in how we as teachers typically conduct ourselves in the classroom.

Especially if we are working with adolescents, for instance, classroom management is a reality that can require that students understand through no uncertain terms that unacceptable behaviours will have consequences. However, the affective and the cognitive domains must remain distinct in education, and therefore formal graded assessment is conducted not on the basis of a student’s behaviour or even engagement (for the most part) in class, but on a student’s ability to communicate knowledge and understanding back to a teacher through a variety of negotiated (some more forcefully negotiated than others) means. But the bottom line is that marks are the currency of the classroom. Even if students are promoted to the next grade whether on the books they have failed classes or not, formal assessment remains mandated by education authorities. Sure, we can be subversive about how we allocate marks; but we must allocate them all the same.

What options do students have? The vast majority realize that if they do not “play the game” at a minimum level their only option is to drop out of school, which their parents will not typically encourage.

But as educators, we all know this. Though I am no longer a teacher, I am still at a loss. 

CCK08: Reflection on Week 6: Part 2

1. Notes on “Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control” by Francis Heylighen

The basic premiss of Heylighen’s paper concerns identifying the impact of ephemeralization on global systems.

Ephemeralization, the ongoing increase in efficiency or productivity of all processes involving matter, energy and information, is the most basic manifestation of technological and organizational advance (17).

Both of Heylighen’s papers are predisposed to an optimistic view of the future. It would appear that the author is a strong proponent of globalization, without, however, rigorously defending its criticisms.

People find it ever more difficult to cope with all the new information they receive, constant changes in the organizations and technologies they use, and increasingly complex and unpredictable side-effects of their actions. This leads to growing stress and anxiety, fuels various gloom and doom scenarios about the future of our planet, and may help explain the increasingly radical movements against globalization [my italics] (1).

Perhaps in theory, the reduction of international tariffs in the interests of encouraging trade makes sense; however, the legalities of these agreements are often ratified at the expense of the natural world, local sustainable economies, and indigenous cultures, none of which Heylighen has acknowledged.

…Both the area of land and amount of human effort needed to produce a given amount of food has been reduced to a mere fraction of what it was. As a result, the price of food in real terms has declined with 75% over the last half century (World Resources Institute, 1998). In the same period, the fuel consumption of cars has decreased just as spectacularly, while their speed, power and comfort have increased (3).

Ironically, Heylighen cites both advances in agriculture (leading to a decrease in food prices) and fuel consumption in the same breath. We know now that fuel consumption has increased in North America with an increase in the purchase of SUVs, and that the implementation of government policies that support increased production of biofuel has led to a decrease in the growth of grain products for food worldwide, especially rice. This had led to an increase in the price of those food staples, which in some countries, such as Haiti, has led to riots among the populace, which was suffering from high rates of poverty even prior to the spike in the price of grain.

There is also an unsettling irony that accompanies the increase in the GDP of developing countries, in particular China and India:

…In the developed countries, the problem with food is no longer scarcity but overabundance, as people need to limit their consumption of calories in order to avoid overweight. Even in the poorest countries, the percentage of people that are undernourished is constantly decreasing (Goklany, 2000; Simon, 1995). More generally, the trend is clearly visible in the spectacular growth in wealth, usually measured as GDP per capita, since the beginning of the 19th century (Goklany, 2000). The ever increasing productivity not only results in people earning more, but in them working less hours to achieve this wealth. Moreover, this economic development is typically accompanied by a general increase in the factors that underly overall quality of life: health, safety, education, democracy and freedom (Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000a; Simon, 1995; Goklany, 2000) (6).

Wage increases occurring in developing countries as a result of outsourcing by the West are in part what has contributed to the food crisis. For example, with the increase of the middle class in China, meat consumption has increased, which is also placing tremendous stress on grain production; grain is required to feed the livestock that are now in higher demand for human consumption. In India, the growing middle class is contributing to tremendous growth in the purchase of affordable automobiles. Granted, Heylighen is not making unsustainability a central focus of his paper, and he communicates as much:

Many things are still much less abundant than we would like them to be, and although increasing productivity leads to an ever more efficient use of natural resources (Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000a), ecologists have rightly pointed out that our present usage of many resources is unsustainable. The focus of this paper, though, is not on the remaining scarcities and wastages, which ephemeralization hopefully will sooner or later eradicate, but on a wholly new category of problems created by the emergence of “hyperefficient” processes. To get there, we first need to understand more fundamentally how ephemeralization affects the dynamics of society (6-7).

It remains nonetheless striking how much the world has changed, even since this paper was originally written. Heylighen’s own observations are applicable to the events that have transpired, including the recent downturn in the global economy:

The effect on society of this extension of causal networks is a greater interdependence of various subsystems and processes. Any action will have an increasing number of unanticipated or unintended consequences: side-effects. This entails a greater difficulty to predict, and therefore control, the overall effects of any particular event or process. The reduction of friction in causal chains merely increases the speed of the process, the number of subsequent effects in the chain, and the risk of snowballing. This reduces controllability but not necessarily predictability: as long as the cause-effect relationships are known, it is relatively easy to determine when and in how far a particular process will affect another one. The reduction of friction in causal networks, however, makes prediction ever more difficult, since the number of factors that need to be taken into account to determine any one outcome explodes, while the myriad interactions between those factors are likely to make the overall process ever more chaotic, i.e. sensitive to the smallest changes in initial conditions (11).

2. Notes on “Tackling Complexity and Information Overload: intelligence amplification, attention economy and the global brain” by Francis Heylighen

Heylighen’s description of what is required of 21st century education is entirely consistent with the treatment of subject matter in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course. The gravitation towards a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to education may necessarily require that the term is largely deconstructed, unless Connectivism serves as the vehicle and the container within which the new paradigm emerges. In this regard, where Connectivism informs education and where education wishes to borrow from a Connectivist framework, it may, without the threat of the education domain being dismantled entirely:

An education for the 21st century will in particular need to teach us to better understand complex systems, and to avoid the typical errors of judgment that result from their counter-intuive behavior (e.g. Casti, 1994). This requires an in-depth reflection on the observations, concepts and principles developed in disciplines such as systems theory, cybernetics, self-organization, chaos, evolution and complex adaptive systems (Heylighen et al., 1999) (22).

Heylighen’s explanation of “economy” is similarly consistent with Downes’ characterization of the Seven Habits of Highly Connected People:

At the most basic level, “economy” means simply the careful management of resources, so that as little as possible is wasted. From this point of view, individuals should learn to optimally spend the limited amount of attention they have, by investing it only in the most worthwhile items (24).

The author proposes that “the only true solution…” that will allow humans to manage the phenomenon of ephemeralization “…must involve the synergetic use…of…three components, in the form of an emergent collective intelligence, or “global brain”.

First, practical intelligence requires extensive knowledge; yet it is extremely difficult to elicit this knowledge from human experts in a form sufficiently detailed and explicit to be programmed into a computer. This is the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Second, true intelligence cannot be completely preprogrammed: it must be able to develop autonomously, to self-organize. Third, for an autonomously developing system to acquire knowledge about a realistically complex environment, it must be able to interact extensively with that environment, so that it can learn from its experiences (this requirement of interaction with a true environment is sometimes called “embodiment” or “situatedness”). (28).

Certainly the creation of common ontologies that allow databases to “talk” to one another has evolved significantly with the advent of the semantic web (28). I remain nonetheless skeptical of any uber-initiative, since it smacks of utopianism. That having been said, the formally rendered “collective mental map” is perhaps already being implemented in a beta format, to the extent that Open Source communities, the W3C, or research-based cohorts from around the globe are contributing to the resolution of complex problems (for example, the Genome Project):

The idea is that different individuals, agents or computer programs would contribute their specific knowledge, solve those partial problems or make those decisions for which they are most competent. The results of this cognitive effort would be shared with all other components in a coherent system that I have called a “collective mental map” (CMM). A CMM consists of cognitive resources (typically documents or database records, but this may also include computer programs, agents, and human experts), that are linked by a network of associations. This network would be organized in such a way as to minimize the effort in getting any resource to the place where it is is needed (30).

To what extent do such projects unfold using a centralized model for information dissemination, versus a more distributed model? I do not know enough about these initiatives to say. Heylighen’s observation that the success of a CMM depends on the extent to which it is self-organized and distributed seems accurate:

No system, human or technological, would be able to exert any form of centralized control over such a map so as to coordinate or allocate contributions. Any mechanism of coordination must be distributed over all contributing components. In other words, a CMM for global society must be self-organizing. Hints on how such a self-organizing mental map could function can be found both in the collective foraging behavior of ants, and in the organization of the brain (30).

There is a name for the synergetic use of individually intelligent components: collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997). The most famous examples are insect societies, such as ant nests, bee hives or termite colonies (Bonabeau et al., 1999), that consist of individually dumb components, but are capable of surprisingly smart behavior when working together (30).

One of the most accessible articles that I have encountered on swarm theory, and to which I have linked in a past blog, can be found here on the National Geographic website.

 

 

 

CCK08: Reflection for Week 5: Part 4

The Virtual Self: Further notes from Franciso Varela’s Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition

In George Siemens’ Articulate presentation “Groups and Networks,” multiple references to “the self” are made without any formal definition of the term to which Siemens is referring. Below are excerpts from the presentation with transcriptions of some of the commentary accompanying each slide included in italics.

Basis of collective intelligence is “the self” (slide 7)

As we begin to integrate our ideas and concepts with others and we extend themselves into some sort of a group activity, there is an important protection of self that needs to occur where we retain our identity or where we retain our contributions.

The self is not created through socialization. (slide 12)

It is shaped and expressed through socialization (slide 13)

The self is not something that is created through socialization. Instead, it is something that is shaped and expressed through the act of socialization, through the act of negotiation, through dialoguing with, and sharing in conversations with other people.

Connectives: autonomy of self (mosaic) (slide 14)

Individuals then, in some type of a connective relationship to each other retain a high autonomy of self. Rather than blending, they exist in a mosaic. Namely, they retain their identity, even though they contribute to the larger whole.

Collectives: subsumption of self (melting pot) (slide 15)

In contrast, a collective is a subsumption of self. An example that is often used is the notion of a melting pot, where our individuality is absorbed as we contribute or become part of the larger whole.

 The previously listed tenets adhere to a notion of selfhood in which\ the autonomy of the self is highly valued. Selfhood may also be understood, however, in terms of assuming a position of groundlessness, or homelessness, out of which spontaneous action arises in terms of one’s moment to moment co-creation of the world. From within this constantly changing frame of reference, uncertainty guides action and response, and one’s decisions are made in relation to the specific contexts in which one finds oneself.

 The core proposition of Franciso Varela’s Ethical Know-How is:

Ethical know-how is the progressive, firsthand acquaintance with the virtuality of the self…If we do not practice transformation, we will never attain the highest degree of ethical expertise (63)…The analytic stance of ethics…proposes that we suspend the temptation to be identified with the other and, instead, undertake a journey of learning to see ourselves and others as inescapably transitory and fragmented (65).

 The nature of the identity of the cognitive self…is one of emergence through a distributed process. The emergent properties of an interneural network are enormously rich and merit further discussion at this point. What I wish to underscore here is the relatively recent (and stunning!) conclusion that lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought toether, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to be an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole, without the need for central supervision…. A selfless (or virtual) self [is] a coherent global pattern that emerges from the activity of simple local components, which seems to be centrally located, but is nowhere to be found, and yet is essential as a level of interaction for the behavior of the whole (52-53)

 Applied to the brain, this new model explains why we find networks and subnetworks interacting promiscuously without any real hierarchy of the sort typical of computer algorithms. To put this differently, in the brain there is no principled distinction between software and hardware or, more precisely, between symbols and nonsymbols… The cognitive self it its own implementation: its history and its action are of one piece (54).

 This continual redefinition of what to do is not at all like a plan selected from a repertoire of potential alternatives; it is enormously dependent on contingency and improvisation, and is more flexible that any plan can be (55).

 Distinction between “environment” and “world”

Here we must sharply differentiate between “environment” and “world,” for the cognitive subject is “in” both, but not in the same way. On the one hand, a body interacts with its environment in a straightforward way. These interactions are of the nature of macrophysical encounters—sensory transduction, mechanical performance, and so on—nothing surprising about them. However, this coupling is possible only if the encounters are embraced from the perspective of the system itself. This embrace requires the elaboration of a surplus signification based on this perspective; it is the origin of the cognitive agent’s world. Whatever is encountered in the environment must be valued or not and interacted with or not. This basic assessment of surplus signification cannot be divorced from the way in which the coupling event encounters give rise to intentions (I am tempted to say “desires”), and intentions are unique to living cognition (55-56).

Cognitive intelligence…resides only in its embodiment. It is as if one could separate cognitive problems into two types: those wihch can be solved through abstraction and those which cannot. Those of the second type typically involve perceptual and motor skills of agents in unspecified environments. When cognitive intelligence is approached from this self-situated perspective, it quickly becomes obvious that there is no place where perception could deliver a representation of the world in the traditional sense. The world shows up through the enactment of the perceptuo-motor regularities. As Brooks puts it:

Just as there is no central representation there is no central system. Each activity layer connects perception to action directly. It is only the observer of the creature who imputes a central representation or central control. The creature itself has none: it is a collection of competing behaviors. Out of  the local chaos of their interactions there emerges, in the eye of the observer, a coherent pattern of behavior (60).

What we call “I” can be analyzed as arising out of our recursive linguistic abilities and their unique capacity for self-description and narration. As long-standing evidence from neuropsychology shows, language is another modular capacity cohabiting with everything else we are cognitively. Our sense of a personal “I” can be construed as an ongoing interpretive narrative of some aspects of the parallel activities in our daily life, whence the constant shifts in forms of attention typical of our microidentities. Whence also is the relative fragility of its narrative construction (61).

Varela remarks that ethical conduct arises and deepens through the cultivation of a “more open-ended and nonegocentric compassion (71). Similarly,

 It should not be surprising at this point that one of the main characteristics of spontaneous compassion, which is not a characteristic of volitional action based on habitual patterns, is that it follows no rules [my italics]. It is not derived from an axiomatic ethical system or even from pragmatic moral injunctions. Its highest aspiration is to be responsive to the needs of the particular situation [my italics]…Urealized practitioners, or course, cannot dispense with rules and moral injunctions (71).

 How can such an attitude of all-encompassing, decentered, responsive, compassionate concern be fostered and embodied in our culture? It obviously cannot be created merely through norms and rationalistic injunctions. It must be developed and embodied through disciplines that facilitate the letting-go of ego-centred habits and enable compassion to become spontaneous and self-sustaining. It is not that there is no need for normative rules in the relative world—clearly such rules are a necessity in any society. It is that unless such rules are informed by the wisdom that enables them to be dissolved in the demands of responsivity to the particularity and immediacy of lived situations, the rules will become sterile, scholastic hindrances to compassionate action rather than conduits for manifestation (73-74).

Varela’s comments regarding responsivity align themselves very nicely with Siemens’ characterization of decision-making as central to Connectivism: 

Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate impacting the decision (bullet #12).

 

CCK08: Reflection for Week 5: Part 2

Notes on Taking down the walls: communities and educational research in Canada’s 21st Century by Celia Haig-Brown, Ph.D

Yesterday I stumbled upon a working paper called “Taking down the walls: Communities and educational research in Canada’s 21st Century” by Celia Haig-Brown (2000). In it, Haig-Brown cites the work of Eleanor Godway and Geraldine Finn in which the authors

…claim that community is catechresis, calling on Gayatri Spivak’s definition whereby “catechresis means that there is no literal referent for a particular word; that its definition comes apart, as it were, as soon as we begin to articulate it” (2).

Wittgenstein revisited, perhaps. Haig-Brown continues:

…In looking historically at the effects of community building, Godway and Finn question the possibility of event trying to construct such a place:

It is up to us to make community: to find it, build it, or encourage it to grow in our fragmented world. But can we? Or should we even try, when in spite of good intentions, the effects of community are often more divisive, more exclusive, and more oppressive, than the absence of community it originally intended to remedy or remove? (1994:1)

In an endnote, Haig-Brown explains her attraction to the word:

I realised that it is its refusal of “thingness” or reification of that which is in motion that appeals to me. Catechresis, even as it is a noun, works to address the transience of notions such as community. As as we name it and define it — or even try to do so — it becomes something else (10).

This reflection lends itself well to the group-network distinction:

Despite such warnings or perhaps because of them, I am committed to trying. If we keep in mind the dangers of past efforts, perhaps we can do a better job of creating spaces which allow difference to be a constant, unpredictable part of who we are together. Striving to work respectfullly with difference may broaden our work in ways that serve to enrich what I am coming to see as the limitations of centralized theorizing whether it is within disciplinary walls or university walls. Confining ourselves to particular and familiar theoretical or material contexts leads to impoverished and/or obscure theory based too often in work we do primarily with and for people just like us. Outside the university, taking community seriously addresses the other kinds of walls, the ones which we cannot wish away, the borders of our physical plant: it may mean getting out of our offices and into the schools and into the streets. Sometimes, it even means getting in a boat or onto a snowmobile. Ultimately, it means learning to listen [my italics] just when we thought our positions in academe, whether as graduate students or faculty, gave us the credibility to speak and be listened to [my italics] (6).

Haig-Brown’s work has stong ties to design-based research, and in her own context pertains to the development of A Pedagogy of the Land. In this capacity, Haig-Brown is committed to bringing researchers into Anishinaape communities in Northern Ontario to structure a curriculum and research based on that curriculum:

The Pedagogy of the Land is a pilot project which involves traditional indigenous knowledge keepers who have some fluency in their language and whose knowledge arises from traditional Anishinaape world view in a programme that allows them to build on one another’s knowledgee and to prepare to pass it on to others who know less than they do (6-7).

In terms of curriculum development, the Pedagogy of the Land project contains elements that are also found in a Connectivist pedagogy:

The curriculum which must have endless flexibility is based on what people do as they live together in a place. So much for minute by minute lesson plans and predetermined performance indicators: one does not set a net if the wind is blowing too hard (7).

Siemens’ reflections on contextuality in terms of the Connectivist framework are worthy of consideration here, as they relate to local knowledge, culture and custom, and their places in a connected world.

Okay, I think we’ve got the confusion part…

Notes and Reflections on Selected Self-Organization and the Semiotics of Evolutionary Systems

by Luis Mateus Rocha

“You have to be confused before you can reach a new level of understanding anything” – Dudley Herschbach – Nobel Prize winner (Chemisty).

This quotation can be found at the end of George Siemens’ article, Connectivism: Learning as Network Creation. I came across it last week, right about the time that Siemens also mentioned, I think in the first UStream weekly discussion for the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, that he would be concerned if participants in the course were not experiencing confusion.

Looking through the bibliography for the article mentioned above, I noted an article by L.M Rocha called Selected Self-Organization and the Semiotics of Evolutionary Systems. The following quotation is especially relevant to my interests, and I think that it also intersects with suggestions that are being brought forward by Stephen Downes in Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge, namely, that knowledge is subsymbolic, and that knowledge is distributed:

…Varela, Thompson, and Rosch [1991] have proposed an embodied, inclusive, approach to cognition which acknowledges the different levels of description necessary to effectively deal with emergent representation…

In this case I believe that the different levels of description to which the author is referring are namely the biological and the conceptual. To continue:

Cognitive science used to be traditionally concerned solely with those aspects of cognitive representation which can be described as symbolic. In other words, it was concerned with semantic relation between cognitive categories and their environmental counterparts through some direct representational relation (intentionality), without taking into account any sort of material or internal organizational constraints: real-world categories directly represented by discrete symbols which could be freely manipulated. The connectionist, emergent, or self-organizing paradigm has changed this focus to the lower level of attractor behavior. That is, cognitive systems are defined as those systems capable of self-organizing their components into discrete basins of attraction used to discriminate the environment they are able to construct. Classifications become subsymbolic and reside in some stable pattern of activation of the dynamic system’s components, instead of based on some higher level symbols (emergent representation) (3). 

Here is Rocha’s definition of self-organization:

…the spontaneous formation of well organized structures, patterns, or behaviors, from random initial conditions. The systems used to study this phenomenon are referred to as dynamical systems: state-determined systems. They possess a large number of elements or variables, and thus very large state spaces. However, when started with some initial conditions they tend to converge to small areas of this space (attractor basins) which can be interpreted as a form of self-organization (3).

What I find interesting in terms of this formulation is that when we discuss self-organization, we are talking about its emerging from an initially chaotic state. When “some initial conditions” are present, there is a movement towards self-organization. From what I can ascertain, “very large state spaces” according to this model may be suggestive of a pre-network “container,” and “attractor basins” may be understood as the starting point for early nodes in a network.

Consider the following: 

This process of self-organization is also often interpreted as the evolution of order from a disordered start. Self-organizing approaches to life (biological or cognitive), in particular second-order cybernetics [see Pask, 1992], take chaotic attractors as the mechanism which will be able to increase the variety (physiological or conceptual) of organizationally closed systems. External random perturbations will lead to internal chaotic state changes; the richness of strange attractors is converted to a wide variety of discriminative power (3).

Let’s try to apply this description back to the framework being used to realize this course. There are “some initial conditions,” i.e. there is a syllabus, there are readings, there are daily updates and weekly discussions, there are individual blogs being maintained by course participants, there is a course blog and there are Moodle fora for discussions. There is certainly chaos. And there are certainly also “random perturbations” impacting individual learners, inducing “internal chaotic state changes”, each in (presumably) very different ways. 

Learning is described by Rocha in terms of its relation to memory:

The dynamical approach of von Foerster [1965] to cognition emphasized the concept of memory without a record…Today, we name this kind of memory distributed, and the kind of models of memory so attained as connectionist. As previously discussed, for a self-organizing system to be informationally open, that is, for it to be able to classify its own interaction with an environment, it must be able to change its structure, and subsequently its attractor basins, explicitly or implicitly. Explicit control of its structure would amount to a choice of a particular dynamics for a certain task (the functional would be under direct control of the self-organizing system) and can be referred to as learning (4).

Creativity is described in terms of the ability of a dynamical system to experience structural perturbation:

…Self-organization alone cannot escape its own attractor behavior. A given dynamic system is always bound to the complexity its attractor landscape allows. For a dynamic system to observe genuine emergence of variety can only be attained by structural perturbation of a dynamical system. One way or another, this structural change leading to efficient classification (not just random change), has only been achieved through some external influence on the self-organizing system (4).

In other words, chaos is a predecessor for introducing learning and adaptation into an organism. 

Kauffman [1993, page 232] further hypothesizes that “living systems exist in the [ordered] regime near the edge of chaos, and natural selection achieves and sustains such a poised state”. This hypothesis is based on Packard’s [1988] work showing that when natural selection algorithms are applied to dynamic systems, with the goal of achieving higher discriminative power, the parameters are changed generally to lead these systems into this transitional area between order and chaos. This idea is very intuitive, since chaotic dynamical systems are too sensitive to parameter changes, that is, a singlemutation leads the system into another completely different behavior (sensitive to damage). By contrast, ordered systems are more resilient to damage, and a small parameter change will usually result in a small behavior change which is ideal for smooth adaptation (hill-climbing) in correlated fitness landscapes (4). 

The Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course could be characterized as a system precariously balanced on the edge of chaos, teetering on the edge of coherence.

It is here that systems at the edge of chaos enter the scene, they are not as sensitive to damage as chaotic systems, and thus, some mutations will accumulate (by causing minor changes) and some others will cause major changes in the dynamics allowing more distant searches in fitness spaces. These characteristics of simultaneous mutation buffering (to small changes) and dramatic alteration of behavior (in response to larger changes) is ideal for evolvability [Conrad, 1983, 1990]. 

Is the course intentionally being framed in these terms towards the end of fostering the greatest evolvability of its participants? The answer is entirely possibly in the affirmative.