Cupboard Notes

What can we really learn from virtual worlds? After all, they are not, by definition, real.

Virtual worlds are expressed only by a relatively limited set of rules and procedures expressed in the underlying code. While they may be, like the rules of chess, capable of endless expressive variation, they may not lead us to new knowledge.

That is not to say that they may not lead us to see these expressive recombinations as insights - new patterns or configurations that we had  not noticed before - and in that sense a form of 'new knowledge'. For example, a colleague recently suggested that in creating a virtual 3D map of an archaeological site new insights were gained into the location and relationship of certain key buildings to others in the ancient, buried townscape. But is that really a product of the virtual world or simply what we might expect from any representational tool, albeit a tool with a higher degree of fidelity than say an aerial photograph, or a 2D map drawn from site surveys. And to what extent is that new knowledge about reality and therefor 'new' in the fullest snese of something we really did not know before?

A representation is a method for drawing out what we already know. Its contribution to new knowledge is exactly in drawing our attention to what we do not know. But we cannot then fill tehse gaps by 'colouring in' the mssing sections. We have to stand outsiede the representation. We have to take another look at reality; reality must lead us. As in the past when the map of the world from teh European viewpoint was full of blanks - we could not fill it in without imagination and then claim we had a map of the world. No, we had to go out and find what was there before we could re-construct the representation.

Take a limiting case. We could build a simultion of the CERN Hadron Collider in Second Life (or any other 'atom smasher' come to that) but we could never discover new particles in that simulation for we do not have access to the real world that the real Colider is exploring. We might learn all sorts of things about the Hadron Collider ... how to operate it, how it works, and even up to and including some already known samples of experimental outcomes - but all this is only as it is at the time of the creation of the simulation. Reality moves on but the simulation does not (unless, as in teh case of maps, someone updates it following exploration ad measurement). We can never discover new facts about reality through a simulation. (We may discover new facts about our representations of reality, but never facts about reality.)

A variation on this is those annoying moments in CSI Miami, New York or Las Vegas where they take a CCTV image and zoom in on it to discover the mole on some suspect's face, or the small print on some business card. If the data is not there it cannot be interpolated  in a way that recreates reality - all computational interpolation is rule-based, not reality based. From CSI we implicitly learn something false about digital data - that it is somehow infinitely recorded. But if the data is not there, if it was not recorded or captured, you simply cannot zoom in on it as it it is(fractal theory notwithstanding).

We are in interesting times - great changes are possible - a widespread willingness to think differently perhaps. For someone like me who was much influenced by the radicalism of the 60s and 70s it is nice to revisit some aspects of that state of mind and talk again about the transformation of schools and education.

Currently developing an FdA in Learning Technology and very interested in how to open the gates to HE by re-thinking what entry to HE might be based on.

My assertion here is that most subject groups in the Humanities are somewhat conservative in their outlook  (and though the sciences, Arts, related disciplines, and even professional training courses might be a little different I think they assertion may still be made) and do not realise the power and influence of the changing culture we live in - e.g. Business Studies in some quarters still draws forecast graphs by hand! English Literature and Language courses still fail to see the wordprocessor as a language tool rather than a typing tool and few English graduates seem to have a view about that or about how writing are altered in a hypertextual culture (which is what we have become).

I always laugh, a little too smugly perhaps, when I see how English graduates can be so inept with a wordprocessor - I usually suggest that they sue their alma mater for this failure to educate them sufficiently well in the use of a tool that is a key to their trade! (As you may guess, I see the wordprocessor in a somewhat more extended way than most in the mainstream).

Mind you, I am the first to acknowledge that my own students – mostly trainee teachers – are equally poorly equipped when they leave me. Their outlook and understanding of how digital technology can alter or enhance the way we do things has not changed that much in spite of my best efforts. I am curious as to why that is the case – it’s the power of the past I guess (my students tend to be a little more mature than the average), and HE for its parts is particularly weighed down by its traditions.

However, the traditions we live by in HE aren’t that old – perhaps 200 years – so perhaps they aren’t that hard to shake off. More important it is this recent history that we see orality succumb to textuality as a key driver in HE. For the 21^st Century I see one way forward in a revival of orality in higher education facilitated by digital technology- orality as process and (assessment) product. This is both future looking (because it proposes a rapid and ubiquitous take-up of technology) but simultaneously a return to the classical roots of higher learning (which are predominantly oral in their primary form).

It’s a middle way – we can be both revolutionary and conservatist.

An issue identified in considering routes into education and particularly into FE/HE is the large number of people without qualifications of any kind, little in the way of relevant prior experience, and often low levels of literacy and numeracy. Any or all of these can be a barrier. (See here for a starter).

 Educational reform in Wales seeks to reduce further the proportion of working age young people and adults who lack access to educaiton or the motivation to engage in further learning. This is a problem of getting the horse to the water at all, let alone asking it to drink.

 Perhaps two strategies among others are worth considering:

 (a) abandon the literacy/numeracy entry requirement altogether and aim to build these elements later in the educational progress. New Technology can support, and ehance, a new oralism in assessment and participation through the use of lightweight, accessible, easy to use recording and presentation technologies. Those seeking to enter education should be enabled to rely on their 'native' audio-visual culture rather than the more anachronistic 'Gutenberg' culture. Illiteracy and innumeracy should not be obstacles to participation in the great culture of learning and education.

 (b) correlated with the above, we can adopt a strengths-based or talent-identification model of entry requirements to further and higher education. This affords a more flexible, person-centred, individualised foundation on which to build education and learning. Everyone has some talent, some strengths that can be husbanded. Often, the very real consequences of exclusion through more standardised views of attainment, i.e. literacy and numeracy, is that other euqlly important strengths and talents are devalued, ignored and lost. Dr Gary Pritchard at the University of Wales Newport as done work in this area. It could form part of a new approach to entry into education.

 ============================================================================

Longman, D. (in process). The New Oralism: Why Literacy and Numeracy need not be Obstacles to Level 4

Pritchard, G. (2009) Skills verses talent? Why supporting students in identifying and developing their strengths makes both pedagogic and economic sense. http://bit.ly/9gCYCi

Pritchard, G. (2009) Strengths-Based Learning. http://www.casttv.com/video/wm22761/strengths-based-learning-video

Pritchard, G (2008) All Students are Talented. http://bit.ly/bTlS3v

Today I read a little story that astounded me, and made me despair.

It's a postscript to an enjoyable book about Joseph Needham by Simon Winchester: The Man Who Loved China.

Winchester describes how when living in Washington D.C. he ordered take-way Chinese food.  After some brief conversations with the man who delivered it he discovered both that this man had heard of Joseph Needham and that he knew this delivery man from Shanghai.

Over twenty years before Winchester had made a documentary about people who worked in Hong Kong and Chinese banks. He had ended up sponsoring this man Cui Guo-hing (Gordon), who had been working very hard as a bank teller, to go to America to do a PhD because the USA was the country of the future. Winchester did sponsor him, Cui Guo-hong wnet to America and they lost touch.

Cui Guo-hing had indeed got his PhD in computer design and this led to him acquiring Canadian citizenship and a job working in the design department of General Motors in Toronto. He was then head hunted for a new great job with another company near Washington. He and his wife moved to this new life.

And then came 9/11. "All non-American citizens working for the company were summarily dismissed, no questions asked .."

That is extradordinary, n'est-ce pas?

The rest of the story goes on to talk about how Cui Guo-hing was now working hard to return to China because 9/11 made him realise that the US is in decline and that China is now the new rising star in the world economy.

I guess this shouldn't surprise me; at the time I had vaguely heard about this sort of thing, and the political panic was (and contineus to be) immense, but for some reason this story hit me hard - the injustice of it.

Googling, it is not easy to verify this particular practice - there's plenty of stuff about harrassment of arabs and muslims, but difficult to verify the practice of firing non-Americans.

Among students there is a distinct fear or defensiveness about being copied, particularly where the work in question is for assessment.

It's understandable in one way but at the same time it is often the case that a good part of undergraduate work is not wholly original. Certainly in my case where I teach web page design and development, where students are required to submit a web portfolio in which the web site itself is marked as part of the submission, students are perfectly happy to copy code snippets from web sources (and indeed they are often encouraged to do so if this improves or enhances their product).

But if it is suggested that members of the same class might offer peer review before submission of the final version there arises a protectiveness, a reluctance to engage in this kind of sharing because they do not want others to copy their work.

As I say, it's understandable but at the same time contradictory and really a little absurd. It also runs against the implicit values of the 'new pedagogy' where collaboration and sharing are supposedly the order of the day.

No, individual assessment is still a private, competitive affair.

Of course, even in collaborative settings this privatising attitude still arises. For example in another case I have experienced two students are working together on a project. They are unsure how to proceed. One of them sees his tutor and gets some helpful coaching. He is told to go ahead and apply the knowledge and skills he has just been shown.

His immediate question: “But what about X? He will benefit from my work.” When it is explained that it is up to him to share his new knowledge and skills he says “Why doesn’t  X learn it for himself?” I point out that he has just been shown by me, so shouldn’t he in turn show X?

It's all rather peculiar, though as I keep saying it's understandable. Learners don't mind getting help for themselves or copying for themselves, but don't see this as a form of sharing. They immediately appropriate the new knowledge, skill or information as if it belongs to them alone, perhaps because the act of acquiring the information or knowledge is an act of possession. Our competitive assessment methods of course don't help - all student learning is in part a non-zero sum game, a case of getting ahead of the competition. Copying from others is an OK way to to do this but to be copied from is not, even if the copying is merely a matter of passing something along. 

Here's a scary quote from a paper that was circulated via an email list I belong to.

"This perspective paper states that increasing numbers of young people are acting out 'attachment difficulties' which neither their families nor our schools know how to address and which our teachers are inadequately trained and resourced to attend to. The perspective paper explores whether our teachers are disadvantaged by inadequate and reductionist routes to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) which provide them with neither the appropriate skills and understandings, nor the theoretical framework and practical experience, to secure successful educational and personal outcomes for disaffected and disengaged young people.

"The research questions the relevance of traditional initial teacher training, given the current context in which schooling, in our inner cities and in our communities which have high indices of deprivation, is no longer just an educational project but involves children's safeguarding, child and adolescent mental health, parent support and training. The implication of this is not that teachers need to be social workers and therapists, but they do need to have a therapeutic disposition informed by a professional understanding of developmental psychology and attachment theory."

The paper for which this is an abstract is here. In fact, the paper makes for interesting reading but I am fairly convinced that the type of thinking set out here could make the situation worse, not better - it is surely part of the 'problem'?  

We most definitely do not need a 'therapeutic disposition'!  And it's no good, as the quotation clearly tries to do, dressing this up as a right-on critique of the constraints and weaknesses of teacher training. Beware (right on) Geeks bearing gifts (sorry Geeks - that's a classical allusion!). While there is a pressing need to restructure teacher training (and the same organisation that produced the paper above also has some interesting ideas about how this might be brought about) a 'therapetic disposition' is not the way to go.

What concerns me most about the ideas expressed in the quotation above and in the document from which it comes is the pathologising of learning as if learning and its difficulties have become some sort of psychological 'disease' or 'condition' that needs universal remediation, a remediation by the way that requires teachers to behave more like social workers ('social pedagogues') than the intellectuals they should really be.

Nowhere in the document is the idea expressed that perhaps our young people are disaffected with schooling because they hate it, because it is a waste of their time, that it does not fulfil needs or deliver on the (false) promises it has offered. No, instead the young are portrayed as suffering from a lack of adjustment to schooling, i.e. they 'suffer' from  "attachment deficit". It argues of course for an adjustment in the process of schooling, and in changes to the way that teachers are trained, but it also argues that teachers should become more adept at recognising the pathology of anti-schoolism, and presumably that teachers should become more adept at correcting it.

(I can hear Ivan Illich awakening from his slumbers!).

Certainly, we need a root and branch rethink about how to educate our next generation. But let's not start on the assumption that this is a crisis in the soul of the young. If we start there we will never solve the problem of engagement, and we may make it worse.

Following this email there appeared this item in the Guardian on Saturday (20/3/10) by Oliver Burkeman. It kind of backs up this viewpoint:

" 'We are surrounded by therapies and diets and self-improvement programmes, all of which promise to fix us,' notes the psychotherapist and Zen teacher Barry Magid. 'What we don't realise is the way all of them tacitly reinforce our assumption that we are broken and need fixing. What if... we really deeply challenged that assumption once and for all?' Perhaps the problem, sometimes, is the notion that there's a problem."

 Footnote: in conversation a colleague remarked, "... isn't reflection-on-practice always, by implication, a presumption of an underlying negativitity, a deficit?" Well  no, reflection on practice does not say anything one way or another about such value judgements: it could be for improvement or change (and even this might not imply a deficit - only that things could be different) or it could be for understanding - why certain things happened in certain ways. In teacher training, or any other professional practice training for that matter, reflecting on practice isn't about finding out what went wrong and fixing it, though of course it might be. No, the first goal of reflection-on-practice is asking 'what happened?. That is sometimes the hardest thing to do. To assume that there's a problem to be fixed for which reflection-on-practice is a fixing tool, rather reduces the real value of reflection. 

Over the past couple of days my thinking about the idea of a 'knowledge economy' is changing. I have long accepted tacitly the idea that we are living in a knowledge economy but I have not really thought too critically about it. It is received wisdom, a meme. But involved as I am with the connections between teacher training, HE education, learning, studying and computers it is clearly a key notion.

What are we educating new teachers for if not work in computer rich schools? What are we educating students for if not to work in a computer-rich world of work? And what are computers if not ‘knowledge machines’. And if ICT is a knowledge tool then surely technology-enhanced-learning is really knowledge-enhanced-learning?

Interestingly, the idea of a 'knowledge economy' is quite old, dating back at least to the late 1960s. I had forgotten that until I looked it up just now and was surprised to be reminded of its relative age. Many years ago I did read Daniel Bell (one source for the idea along with Drucker) but I had forgotten how old the idea is. I am beginning to suspect that ‘old’ equals knackered and worn out! What I do recall about the earlier version of the idea was that we have moved, or are still in the process of moving, from a manufacturing economy to a predominantly service economy. On this basis the idea of a 'knowledge economy' was developed to suggest that services are somehow based on a different kind of knowledge, or are knowledge oriented, and are less reliant on older type hand-eye skills. 

What triggered this train of thought is this link that came though my email: http://www.minddump.org/higher-educations-3-part-challenge. That post is a summary of this longer post: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/03/03/jobs-for-graduates-in-the-knowledge-economy.aspx.

What is written in these posts began to irritate me a little. Moreover, the notion of a knowledge economy seems to have morphed somewhat into an idea about the relevance and importance of what working with ICT means for the future employability of our students. In these posts we find the idea taken for granted, that future work will rely on sophisticated intellectual and creative aptitudes, which of course it does, but in this morphed idea we find that 'Web 2.0' becomes a symbols for a discontinuity with the past, that there is new way we need to do things and to educate people. (See my other posts about discontinuity and technology disruption).

Concerned as I am about the future of education in general, about how HE must change to meet the future and not dwell in the past, and about how technology can effectively enhance learning, I was surprised to find myself scornful of the often repeated and readily accepted ideas about the knowledge economy and 21st centuryness that are so often expressed by fellow academics. This kind of stuff is easy to say and write, an easy rhetoric that now feels to me like it rests on platitudes more than reasoning. (Batson's post for example contains a list of "skills necessary to working in the knowledge economy" but which in fact contains nothing new, only slightly tweaked versions of 'traditional' skills that any educated person should possess).

It is contradicted by history. The story of the industrial revolution in Europe is not a story about knowledge per se, nor is it a story about education per se. It is a story about engineering and about self-taught artisans, an 'experience economy' perhaps

More significantly, it is contradicted by experience. I see no evidence that our economy is based on, or is driven by, or makes money out of knowledge, any more than it has been in the past … and perhaps less so than previously because while we aspire to be working in a knowledge economy we are clearly failing! Thus what I found written in those links is typical of the genre – the web is crowded with this sort of commentary. And I have realised it may well be largely wrong.

Shouldn’t a 'knowledge economy' be a more intelligent economy? But for goodness sake that clearly isn't true. And if we have supposedly been moving in this direction since the 1960s, well, where is this knowledge economy?

It isn't here because there is no such thing! So it may well be a huge mistake for HE to work for the goal of transforming ourselves so that we become players, drivers, in a 'knowledge economy' as our American colleagues above suggest that we should. There is no such economy to drive!

And speaking locally, Welsh HE and Welsh society could lose out if it clings to a mistaken myth about key economic drivers – a myth that informs policy and strategy. A new kind of vision is required. While Universities are all about knowledge - its creation, justification, application and communication - this does not mean that they are driving the development of a 'knowledge economy'. I find that now an empty and deceptive phrase. 

Examples and notes for further development:

(i)  There is the problem of the use of words, particularly the word 'knowledge'. It is clearly being used with different meaning from the one I am used to. HE is about a different kind of 'knowledge' than that of the 'knowledge economy'. The latter reference to 'knowledge' is a poor shadow, skeleton, caricature of the idea of knowledge. A major objection to the phrase 'knowledge economy' is that it is based on a reduced idea of knowledge, one built around ideas about decontextualised cognitive aptitudes. But such knowledge is not about anything - it is a mode of operational working rather than a mode of thinking and understanding. That's why the 'knowledge economy' is deceptive - it much more about training than about education.

(ii) Then there is the problem of the reification of human knowledge. The argument goes something like this: computers make us more ignorant because they mechanise knowledge. I suspect that we almost all of us at some point have encountered this problem when dealing with product help lines where the advisor on the company help line works not from knowledge about the product and its history but from a script. Or the standard cliché about the way in which wordprocessing subverts knowledge about syntax and grammar, or how calculators and spreadsheets subvert knowledge about numbers and arithmetic. Etc. These all express our anxieties about the way that human knowledge is reified, reduced, and separated from its human context.

In other words the phrase ‘knowledge economy’ hides a terrible truth – that the workers in that economy are in fact dumber than they should be – for the vast majority of economically valuable work, employers and corporations do not want their workers to be knowledgeable at all; all they need to know is how to follow a script, how to let the machine walk the talk. A ‘knowledge economy’ in fact relies on making people more stupid by replacing ordinary intelligence with database-driven models enacted by machines – and asserting the authority of the machine and its outputs over human judgement.

There’s nothing new in this observation (it’s pretty much what Marx said). But we must not forget it. For could it be that in preparing students for work in the 'knowledge economy' Universities deceive everyone, ourselves and our students? We tell ourselves we are aiming higher, but in fact we are simply helping our students adapt and adjust to a world where, in the pursuit of economic well-being, we need to be just a little more stupid than we were.

(iii) ESDGC may be an interesting case study for how the idea of a 'knowledge economy' is failing us. If we really had a knowledge economy then knowledge would have driven the debate about planetary degradation to some necessary conclusions, based on fact and truth. Yet we still, even now as the oceans swell and threaten to engulf costal cities, argue in the realm of belief, principle and politics. That's why I like the main thesis of Stewart Brand's Ecopragmatist Manifesto - according to that we can only address these issues by using knowledge not by arguing about or sticking to principles.

(iv) If only it were that simple - if knowledge really was a driver, then presumably we'd be OK. But of course knowledge is always contested, it is never static and it has varying degrees of reliability. Therein lays a deep and fundamental absurdity about the idea of a 'knowledge economy' if by that it has come to mean and economy built on the use of knowledge a process and a commodity.

An example of this aspect of the issue came up in a recent radio discussion about the relationship between social and pedagogical behaviour and the architectural spaces in which it takes place. Universities in the UK are and have been spending millions (billions) of pounds on new buildings. Fair enough. But often the designs of these new buildings are built around notions of pedagogy and particularly the 'new pedagogy' outlined by academics such as Charles Crook: constructivist, collaborative, personalised, independent, lifelong, client driven and facilitated not taught. (It may be this new pedagogy that Batson is struggling to define).

(By the way I note the irony here in using apostrophes to enclose 'knowledge economy' in such a way as to imply criticism, but the apostrophes used to enclose 'new pedagogy' has a positive tone, in this case they are intended to imply not criticism but a useful though informal or provisional label. What power that little dash has!)

As I write hundreds of millions (billions?) are being spent on building new University estate, frequently new buildings designed for education, or learning as the current paradigm puts it. A great deal of architectural conceptualisation that has gone into creating learning spaces, hubs, centres, studios, hothouses and 'serendipity spaces' (which of course have to be booked!). All this design has been informed by the percolation of knowledge about the new pedagogy. These buildings are designed to promote or enable it.

Two problems: what happens if it turns out that the 'new pedagogy' is wrong, or at least a passing fashion? That means we are stuck with buildings designed not on functional principles but on ideological principles. What happens if it turns out that the physical architectural spaces we create bear little or no relation to the pedagogical activity that goes on within them?

This may be happening. For example we know that the fashion for open plan offices, designed into new academic buildings in order to promote collaboration and serendipitous exchanges, is at best contested and occasionally rejected outright. No doubt academic workers will and probably must adapt themselves to these new spaces, but to suggest that they are pedagogically better may certainly be doubted (See: Leader: Open plan risk to collegiality, Open plan or open warfare?, Open to error: letter responding to previous articles, Say goodbye to the office, Open Plan Needs Good Planning, Laurie Taylor's satire 1, Laurie Taylor's satire 2, ... and more recently Shared space: good for collaboration or too noisy?. To track this issue search THE with "open plan").

Interestingly, some sociologists are rethinking this issue. Where once the justification for re-designing academic spaces rested on notions about how authoritarian and hierarchical relationships between staff are reflected in the more 'traditional' academic spaces built around corridors linking individualised offices ('cells') reflect, this view may be subtly changing. For as we move into these new buildings, while there is bound to be some gains and some losses, it is the organisational culture that may turn out to be a more important determinant of pedagogical practice. Re-configured spaces alone will not render an academy non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian. (Note: there's an irony here too in that frequently the adoption of such new spaces is driven more by coercion than by voluntary response - like Lenin's old conundrum about the withering away of the State we can only hope that this coercion is benign, a necessary step in the path to enlightenment and that once open-plan academic spaces are in operation, coercion will give way to a more relaxed, non-hierarchical style of organisational culture. If coercive cultures persist then presumably the power of collaborative working will not be fully realised).

So where once sociology critiqued corridors as literally 'corridors of power' studies that have revisited these spaces have developed a more sophisticated view. Indeed corridors are now recognised as powerful and important serendipity spaces! Where once corridors were deemed bad and have been designed out of new academic buildings, a revisionism is taking place where we realise that such spaces may have great benefits ... provided the organisational is conducive. (See here for a related observation about the way in which email can seemingly reduce such important, serendipitous interactions, particularly from managerial point of view; so these new kinds of spaces may not only be unsatisfactory from a pedagogical point of view they may also be unsatisfactory from a managerial point of view - the hidden variable is of course the use of technology, including email and hot-desking, which may contradict and undermine the collaborative aspirations of new architectural spaces. Of course we will all get used to it ... but ... ).

Listen to the discussion about this on Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed, 24/2/2010. And here is the paper by Rachel Hurdley: The Power of Corridors: connecting doors, mobilising materials, plotting openness and the Loughborough Academic Workspaces research here. Openness of space does not equate to openness of social interaction.

The point of this slightly extended discussion about architecture and pedagogy is that it exemplifies the problem of using knowledge as the basis for some kinds of economic decisions. If the knowledge base turns out to be wrong, or in need of revision and correction, you may be stuck with some outcomes (in this case buildings) that are hard to change. Stewart Brand by contrast advocates an adaptive engineering approach (I think that's what he calls it) that should apply here - they key idea is to make sure that when you try something it can be unengineered or reengineered, that we should approach all solutions based on theories and ideas with the idea in mind that "Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is absurd". (Voltaire).

An economy based on this principle might save education, and through that it might save the planet. But to me this is not a knowledge economy but an intelligent economy (or intelligence economy).

The growth of a Hive Mind (see also Borg) which is at least in part the product of certain ideologies of technology. (A Hive Mind by the way, equals Cloud Computing, often promoted the successor to Web 2.0). These ideologies are subverting individual creativity and favour the growth of monopolies while claiming to be promoting culture and creativity (that's what makes them ideologies after all; they are a form of deceit). They also have the (unexpected) consequence that advertising is one of the few ways to make a living out of it, the Hive. But advertising, especially in its online form, is a destructive cultural force (discuss!). That these ideologies are so negative is a little odd by the way because they were spawned by the 'counter culture', the playground of the baby boomers and Generation X, all of whom regarded themselves as radical, progressive, and libertarian.

The crisis in creativity. Lanier is a musician as much as a technologist so this part of his polemic is close to his creative heart. I don't know enough to evaluate the details of this argument about whether or not there is any new music coming through the generations (I admit to not having kept up with music very greatly in the past twenty years). Lanier says no, there is nothing new, and he lays the blame squarely on the rise of the Hive Mind. There are several aspects to this. One is that the ideology of ’information needs to be free' (particularly the Stallman version of it) is killing creativity because it is so hard to make a living being creative. We are in danger, he argues, of being forced back to a time when artists relied on patronage to survive. One of the great benefits of recent economic development is precisely that it has been more possible than ever to earn a living doing creative work. But that is disappearing in a world of 'free information' and music is its first victim. Books and writing will be the next. This is a great danger that we need to avoid.

Today (19 Feb 2010) a fascinating story in the Independent, 'Publish and be Damned, about a first novel written by a young author which has been a best seller, film rights sold already and the same author working on the film adaptation. Turns out that the novel is seriously plagiarised from several sources, particularly a blog, Strobo.

(More on this story here, here, here, and loads here.)

And the response to this charge from the author and her publisher? The intertextuality defence:

“...she is a member of a different generation of writers which is used to adapting and using the abundance of information available online for its own creative purposes”

[quote from publisher] "This novel follows the aesthetic principle of intertextuality and may contain further excerpts,"

[quote from author] "There is no such thing as originality anyway, there is just authenticity."

What do I make of that?

Not quite a story about the death of the author since of course in this case there is an author making a good living out of using other people's words and ideas. Now I know that this is historically a fact – intertextuality has long been with us (see this article from the Observer) and it can be genuinely difficult to avoid it (e.g. Ian McEwan ran into an issue like this with Atonement and similar defences were put forward then.)

I know that if I were writing stuff of my own and someone lifted whole passages, enough perhaps to make several pages in a well paid novel, I would certainly like some of the income from that.

In other words it's kind of deceitful to put forward a philosophical argument that intertextuality is art but 'interfinanciality' is resisted. I know that could be complicated but intertextuality if OK, paying for it is not OK. (I am reminded here of the discussion in Virtual Revolution about the tension between open-source and free, and corporate and paid for).

Is intertextuality a reality: generally yes, it's difficult to deny the fact that more than ever we live in an ocean of 'texts' and let's face it most academic publishing in the humanities and literary fields is highly intertextual but in that domain there are rules and conventions about recognition and citation.

When does it become ripping off rather than just intertextuality (the textual equivalent of sampling)?

Well , the classic definition of plagiarism is of course 'passing off and so this example may well turn out to be an old-fashioned case of converting the public and common intellectual property of the open-source publisher (bloggers etc) into private property. That's the difference. And that may be the offence. Especially if someone earns a living from it - feed me first then let's talk ethics.

Of course the reverse also happens: the discussion in Virtual Revolution touches referred to above covers Bill Gates' response to the Home Brew Computer Club about their use of his BASIC interpreter (see this Wikipedia article) - and Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture (page 53ff) descibes how Hollywood got started at least partially as a response to the controls over film making equipment exercised by Edison patents - Edison was East Coast, but at the time federal law had relatively limited reach - by the time the law caught up with the early Hollywood film makers on the distant West Coast Edison's patent were expired or expiring!

 Note: TurnItIn, widely used in Universities as a "plagiarism prevention tool" is, I guess, really just an 'intertextuality reduction tool'. Presumably intertextuality can be more quickly and more easily discovered on the Net? But prevented?

Note added 28/2/08: Intertextuality is happening all the time. Look at this story about Avatar and whether or not James Cameron 'borrowed' from the Strugastky brothers. Interestingly, in the way of the Web I stumbled on this story by accident as follows: just borrowed a Sony e-Reader from work. Looking for a book or text to upload from my PC and I  found a TXT version of Roadside Picnic  which I got from the Web a few years ago. I thought it came from Project Gutenberg. I visited that site but couldn't locate it so while googling for the source again, instead I came across the Avatar story.

Serendipity.

But it gets a bit more focussed in that while searching I evautally came across this PDF version of the same text from this site http://www.cca.org/  where the site author tells us that he got the original text from Project Gutenberg.

But it isn't there! Honest.

I wrote Gutenberg an email just asking the questio: it if it withdrawn could you tell me why - copyright? Will update this post with the response if/when I get one.

Been at the SRHE conference this week. Held at the Celtic Manor (what a strange building that is: Xanadu on the inside, Stasi HQ on the outside).

Very interesting time and I listened a lot, and concentrated too, thinking through many of the things that were being said or reported.

After 2.5 days of this I am very, very weary.

A valuable lesson: learning is actually hard work - students get tired!

I seem to recall that someone like John Holt discussed this issue of how to balance the work of learning with the rest from learning. We rarely talk about how important it is to take a break. But taking a break from learning is pretty crucial. (Some theologies make use of this: the greatest insights are achieved when doing absolutely nothing!).

Anyway - this experience reminded me that learning takes effort.

Here's some notes I wrote at the about some of the ideas and events that I picked up:

======================================================================

Here’s a a few comments that are left over in my mind from the SRHE conference last week. As with all large conferences as I sit and skim the proceedings I realise that I missed far, far more than I listened to, and some of it looks far more interesting to me now!

Sessions I joined (couldn’t do Thu PM - clashed with teaching).

Denzin’s Elephant.

Symposium A1: I didn’t understand too much of this session but it was all papers by past colleagues from Sussex. Nice to catch up.

One paper was very clear - a depressing tale about the trading of sex for grades in the National University of Ghana (i.e. female students exploited by male faculty; ironically some quite deep resentment from male students who see this as an unfair advantage!).

Picked up some nice words: quotidian (means everyday, basic, common); doxa (means common belief, opinion); metonymy (means using the name of one thing for that of another with which it is closely associated – e.g. I read Shakespeare, or London has decreed).

Denzin’s elephant came from a paper by John Pryor about being a peer reviewer. Quite interesting, though quite a personal story. Methodology: autoethnography (is that just ‘writing about myself’?).

‘Linear’ and ‘non-linear’; Chains and Networks.

Here I went to Session F5 “Using Knowledge Structures as a lens to consider the development of university teaching”. Ian Kinchin et al King’s College.

This was v interesting and a clear exposition about concept maps and it explored aspects of how lecturers model teaching.

However.

“The method highlights the negative influence of linearity in promoting an environment where non-learning is the norm ... [where] ... dialogue between teachers and students is not seen to have a purpose”.

This is the sort of thing I want to argue with.

The situation described in that quote is not backed up by any serious data. There’s a whole lot of unprovable assumptions before we start. (You could argue instead that this is simply a description of bad teaching and that linearity has little or nothing to do with it.)

There is some evidence to suggest that when asked to describe how they teach lecturers will often describe a ‘chain’ or ‘linear’ model of the teaching and learning process. But again, what does this really tell us about the issue of non-learning?

Thus linear thinking is represented by linear chains of logic; non-linear thinking is the network of knowledge (though chains are embedded in the network). Linear is bad! It implies certainty and closure. Non-linearity is good. It is how experts think. It is open. Experts can move between these representations freely and rapidly (this thus offers part of a model of problem-solving) but the novice cannot. We need to encourage non-linear thinking in our students.

Yes but … while enjoying the framework for this paper, I am not convinced by the polarisation between (so-called) linear and non-linear representations of knowledge, and I am particularly not convinced by the value system that gets laid on top of it – i.e. linearity is the dark side! It leads to non-learning …

Which is better? To learn by being told (in chains) or by learning through exploring networks (or concept maps)? Answer: there is no real choice here.

So I find myself speaking up for linearity and the out-of-favour lecture. Being told is not a bad thing, and may often be a necessary thing. (Here though we need a discussion about the situated nature of ‘learning by being told’ – it is more complex than some of these straw dogs suggest).

Nicola made a related point in her’s and Rachel’s paper about the academic writing experiences of students. There, ‘memorisation’ is repositioned as a fundamental part of learning. I have always seen memorisation, repetition and, importantly, imitation  as basic components of learning. However, as pedagogical concepts they seem to have acquired such bad connotations; perhaps because of their implications of power? But why so squeamish?

I think this is bad news for any discussion about pedagogy because it skews everything before we start, and rules out, uncritically, some key concepts. Maybe I am imagining it but there seemed to be a subtle kind of orthodoxy running through parts of this conference – a received wisdom (doxa) that linearity, lecturing (a chain mode of delivery supposedly), learning by recall etc, are all ‘bad’ things and that we are striving for something higher and better, more student-centred.

But this received wisdom is uncritically absorbed and becomes a subtle but powerful orthodoxy in its own right. I wonder if a paper about the effectiveness of rote learning in Eng Lit classes would be accepted for the SRHE?

Similarly I heard several references to poor old PowerPoint as being nothing more than a linear presentation tool and thus not fit for purpose in our aspiration to achieve non-linearity in learning.

NO, POWERPOINT IS NOT MERELY A LINEAR TOOL!

It's non-linearity however is all too rarely exploited, even by those who argue that HE is too linear! Have they not noticed? If not, why not?

Footnote: I am also reminded that in the VLL symposium there was a brief reference to the notion that the lecturer is often seen as a ‘perfect narrator’. This is an interesting perspective. It connects, among other things, to the books I am reading about plagiarism currently one by Rebecca Moore Howard where she describes how lecturers rely entirely on plagiarism as a basis for their lectures; they tend to convey the impression that it’s all their thinking and ideas that are being presents. We rarely, if ever in the context of a lecture, display our sources. Lecturer as perfect narrator. (And then, says Rebecca, we go on to punish students for doing the self-same thing!).

The crisis in academic capitalism; the failure of the neo-liberal mission to democratise education.

Wow! My take on this is to apply elements of this thesis to our own situation, as came up in the follow-up discussion group: after 1979 The Tories began the long process of commandeering education through a paradoxical combination of privatization and extreme centralisation. They and their neo-liberal (?) descendants (new labour?) justified all this on the grounds of improving equality (aka, widening access etc.). Now we realise that inequality is worse than ever and that HE has made little difference. The ideology of market forces, of student as consumer, the supposed power of choice, does not work.

Question: what is the replacement? how do we change direction?

The lecture as a failed educational form (traditional) vs. new learning spaces (progressive).

(See also notes on non-linearity above).

Under this theme I put Symposium L5, “Creating and Developing visual learning spaces for tomorrow’s universities”  presented by a team from The University of Nottingham’s Visual Learning Lab. Some interesting stuff – e.g. that art history and design lecturers like dimly lit, low-ceilinged rooms to teach in; or the use of multi-screen displays for teaching design and art history.

A couple of nice details about the history of art history pedagogy– see Heinrich Wolfflin (introduced double projection using lantern slides); also Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory) and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Picture Wall etc.

But all rather strongly technology focussed, and admitting that a fair degree of technical support is required. Thus not scalable.

No strong evidence is forthcoming about the effectiveness of these hi-tech learning spaces, apart from fairly anecdotal data about preferences, ambience, classroom organisation etc. All these are good of course – students and teachers need to like and enjoy their physical spaces – but technology-rich learning spaces like these can only form part of a repertoire. Question is: how big a part?

Incidentally, one of the talks used the ‘linearity’ critique of PowerPoint as a small part of the rationale for multi-screen displays. I also found the presentation about interactive whiteboards surprisingly limited particularly in that there was know focus on the value of the ‘interactivity’ that these tools provide. I sensed that this was partly due to slightly undeveloped or unsophisticated conceptions of digital information flows and re-use. I don’t mean to sound snotty – I am always making mistakes about these more technical aspects of the tools we use, why only the other day I found myself arguing that a physical computer is more likely to be stable than a virtual one … I was promptly corrected by those in the know. But too often our conceptions of what IT will do for us in our teaching and learning rest on weak or woolly understanding and skill of what IT can actually do.

We teach what we know. If we believe that PowerPoint is linear then so will our students, and of course everyone is denied the opportunity to realise the great potential of the non-linearity that PowerPoint (and all similar tools) affords. If we believe that PPT is linear then that’s how we will use to to support out teaching.

Similarly, if we don’t believe, or have no conceptions of the importance of managing and using data files as a foundational skill underpinning the effective use of IT in learning and teaching then of course our file management will be crap and everything that depends on file management will be crap. This at least partially explains the relatively slow take-up of VLEs – they depend on a decent level of skill in handling data files.

A related talk was given in Session G12.1 “New Spaces for New learning in HE”, by Paul Martin et al Brighton University, a report on the work of the Brighton Creativity Centre. (Here’s some links to related work at Brighton: InQbate; SPACES FOR LEARNING in ART and DESIGN; CETLD etc.

The talk was strongly from the viewpoint of design and fine art teaching. Here we were presented with a digitally facilitated studio space rather than a conventional teaching room. It’s a completely flexible space etc.

The speaker was a little critical – the technology is quite complicated to use, and there is a limit to how messy you can be in the learning space (speaker is a fine artist, hence presumably likes to make a lot of splashes!).

Again, no real evaluation of the effectiveness of this sort of space was offered and as with all presentations of this type, the question of scalability and replication is barely touched on.

Besides, this speaker made a strong assertion to the effect that outcomes are determined by the teacher’s attitudes, knowledge and motivation as well as those of the students. The use of ‘determines’ is rather strong and if this is true, as I suspect it is, then we are left with only a marginal contribution from the physical learning space – so why invest all this time and money in experimental spaces?

This talk also left me wondering what their real value is apart from the obvious (fun, fresh, funky) but we don’t know anything much about things that might have lasting value. Particularly of course as the history of education is full of attempts to reform and remodel the physical environment around pedagogical principles but we see little real change from the basic models laid down in the 18/19 Centuries.

‘Creativity’ as an icon of learning.

I only mention this in passing, as an example of some sort of social rhetoric. The concept of ‘creativity’ seemed to be in frequent use in many of the talks and conversations I heard. But it’s one of those odd ideas that is used more like a kind of ‘placeholder’ for a set of values that are intrinsically positive, but at the same time vague and difficult to define. Without realising it your interlocutor has invited you to fill in the blank which you obligingly do.

“Our aim is to make our students more creative” is code for bright, lovely, environmentally aware, non-racist, happy, bouncy students whose potential has been more fully realised. ‘Creative’ is also contrasted with ‘lectures’ (and hence linearity) as the negative force in teaching and learning. ‘Creative’ is good.

How can you not fill in the blank this way?

But in fact ‘creative’ has a far more mechanistic aspect which makes it less attractive. This aspect is rarely addressed. Learning one’s first language is ‘creative’ only in a technical sense; thinking itself is ‘creative’ but as a process it cares nothing for values.

Creativity is a Janus. We like to use it to signify the beautiful, the desirable, the good. But evil too is generated out of creativity.

Sort that one out!

ESDGC as a new ideology.

I am worrried that there is potentially a great threat to liberty and to democracy (such as it is) which may come from an authoritarian and orthodoxical repetition of received wisdom (doxa?) about the state of the planet. ESDGC may be a key policy to unlock the future (I hope it is), or it may turn out to be a key power-tool for reaction and repression. (See this THE op ed piece for a related discussion).

The stakes are that high.

Thus, while I found Brendan’s Session H9 illuminating and relevant I am worried about the suggestion that ‘developing sustainable behaviour’ is an aim of HE. This feels closer to indoctrination whereas a more proper orientation for HE must be towards the critical evaluation of behavioural choices, without prescription.

After all, we have a relatively poor understanding as to what genuinely sustainable behaviour is, if only because all solutions turn out to generate their own problems that require solutions. So the notion of ‘developing’  sustainable behaviour is fraught with moral and political dangers as well as, more obviously, environmental dangers.

[Sidenote. Take for example our council which has recently introduced a recyclable waste collection. Very good. But the other day I realised that now we have two collection vehicles visiting our house – one for the regular rubbish (now a smaller load of course) followed by another (admittedly smaller) vehicle to collect the recyclables.]

Why? Is that  sustainable behaviour?

So, the role of HE is not to change behaviour. The role of HE is to enable reasoning about choices so that the choices that people do make are based on reasons and principles rather than hearsay of propaganda.

The People’s choices may not be the right ones … but we certainly cannot design a curriculum that can know in advance what are the right behavioural choices for students. All society can ask of HE is that we empower students to think about things. We have to leave their behaviour, their actions, to them.

Is that an old-fashioned view of HE?

One obvious and major problem with this view is that nevertheless HE does in fact create prescriptions on behaviour, academic, moral and political. But (a) not all these prescriptions are assessed or measurable outcomes of the curriculum; and (b) many are contested.

Indigenous knowledge

Nicola reminded us that indigenous knowledge should be valued. This is a vital aspiration. It is conceptually connected to the notion that we need to understand much more about where all our students start (their prior learning as it were). And of course, in some sense all knowledge is indigenous.

But we still have to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the trash from the recyclables. Not all indigenous knowledge is worth keeping as knowledge. Some is interesting only as a museum piece …

The same goes for indigenous values, customs and practices. All are open to question.

Isn’t that what HE is for? Not merely to validate beliefs and practices on the grounds that because they are held by some one or some group they should be respected for their intrinsic value, but to dissect, analyse, critique and reassemble indigenous knowledge into a relevant and appropriate way of life.

Finally

Listened to an interesting PhD project about how and why students engage with academic reading. This paper used the idea of threshold concepts quite a lot (these came up in other papers too). Must look this up. Ensuing discussion also addressed the issue of to what extent lecturers model reading for their students.

This topic resonates with my own recent interest in plagiarism which grew out of some measure of hostility towards the adoption of tools like Turnitin.

Authorship, writing, reading, ‘relationship with text’, deja-lu, copying, replicating, sharing. The whole screaming paraphernalia of textuality is up for grabs it seems to me. One of the many prescriptions about that HE tries to enforce and which is increasingly contested.

... while waiting to get some coffee, I got into conversation with a chap. Somehow we got onto the good and the bad about email. He told me about his son, a senior civil servant who hates email because it keeps him in his office all day. "My son remembers a time", he says, "until even quite recently when he was in much better touch with what was going in in his department because he spent so much more time speaking directly to people, popping in an dout of offices. He says that it's the nuances that matter if you want to know how well your department is working ..."

Moral of this: the over-use of email can become a hindrance, a source of inefficiency. Which of course is ironic because unitil quite recently email was tacitly if not explicitly adopted and accepted as more efficient and a more effectiev way to handle organisational communication.

Now we are less sure. There is more and more data smog. Just like the motor car which at first brought great beneifts but now pollutes the planet, so email brought great benefits - but we are beginning to notice that it brings with it its own kind of  pollution.

It's the nuances that make for effective communication - but ICT filters them or blanks them out. And where do nuances come from? From the context. And context of course is what gets lost in email.

In my MA group we have been discussing the educational issues about how to teach young people and adults about managing their online identity. We came across this website http://www.123people.co.uk/.

It's quite surprising what is out there and can be trawled. Search for your name and see what you can find.

Is this the kind of tool that might be used by HR when vetting job applications?

In one search we did in class the student was surprised to find her Amazon Wish List alongisde her LinkedIn information. The latter is a site used for professoianl networking - the students uses it to attach business for her unit in the MoD (so this student could be involved in some highly sensitive defence work). The Amazon Wish List of course is a personal list of entertaining items that one might like to buy. The wish list in question at the time of the search stored items which I will describe here as items of deliciously salacious literature.

But would you want your private and personal interests in reading matter to be publicly conjoined with your professional profile as a MoD contractor?

That's what 123people does.

So - we need to learn and to teach something about identity management.

There is more and more emphasis in the press and TV at the moment about the managemen tof Facebook or Bebo profiles (e.g. an item on the TV news today), so awareness is growing. But I did not realise that there are privacy settings on my Amazon wish list - should I be more careful?

Perhaps - as a well informed and hopefully reasonable adult I do occasionally read politically radical material, sexually dramatic material, and obscure nerdy stuff about certain toys. Could such data be misinterpreted if presented in the rather pot-pourri style of 123people?

After all, as far as I can tell, 123people is only accessing publicly available material, but presents it all, no matter how disparate, in a single context

(The author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age starts the book with a documented case study of a US teacher who lost her job because of one easily misunderstood photograph on the individual's Facebook account).

Independent 31/10/09

In the early days of the WWW we used to believe that being online was anonymous, that "no-one need ever know if you had been looking at pornography". (Naughton, p35)

There was an early cartoon, now fairly famous: "On the Internet no-one knows you're a dog". Followed a small few years later by another showing a dog looking at his online profile - in other words, everyone knows you're a dog! (Berners-Lee, p157)

Then there came the WayBack Machine - the first attempt to plug the void in the cultural archive of a transient web - an attempt to stop the web forgetting itself through simple erasure; (it's a little disconcerting to find web pages archived there that I produced in 1999). For a contextiualised discussion see Lessig, Ch 9.

And now, we are perhaps more sophisticated about all this. The Internet never forgets, and perhaps this damages us as human beings. Now we have to learn to be in control of our digital footrpint (also see this US report from 2007, and this report too about how employers may well search for you on Facebook etc. - sorry for the US example, will find similar UK story).

So while you may forget - the Web does not. Though you make remake yourself, through atonement or reconstruction, the Web sits there like some supra-conscience, biding its time, setting its snares ...