Community and the Impossible PLE

There has been much talk of "communities" in e-learning circles over the past few years. But little attention has been payed to the fact that this is a fraught and problematic concept in sociology and philosophy. As I argue in this short article, the problems of community are central to education, and the reason why the idea of the "Personal Learning Environment" is impossible as a general educational solution. After a short summary, the argument begins with a quote from Stephen Downes:

"It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre and where your teachers - if there are any - are your peers. It is, I believe, the future…" (2006).

But this is where a problem enters in. Specifically, it appears in the first few words of this quote: "It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre…" It is important to consider carefully the implications of talking about "your community;" or to extrapolate from the PLE designation itself, "your personal community." It is important also to stop and think of what it means to combine reference to the communal with the second person singular ("you"), and to mix that together with the idea of "an environment where you are the centre."

What is a community? Is it an environment in which you are "at the center?" If I were in "your" community, would it be "my" community also? Who would then be at the centre? In what contexts does it make sense to talk of "my community" or "your community?" And what are the implications of community generally for education or for "personal learning?"

Internet Research Methods: A Canadian Perspective

Earlier in June and July, I had the pleasure of teaching a course with Maria Bakardjieva (right) at the Leopold Franzens Universität in Innsbruck, Austria.

It was an excellent experience to work with the issues (appropriate methodologies, timely research questions, research epistemologies) involved in studying the Internet in general. These aren't necessarily that different from the methods, theories and issues that come up in e-learning, but they tend to be a bit less positivistic and more explicitly or methodologically descriptive. Ethnography, for example, is everywhere in internet studies. Critical (political) and historical research, as a further example, abounds in the Canadian Journal of Communication which was used in the course as a source of articles for student review.

Check out the course website, which has our presentations and other materials.

Education as mediating Social Reproduction

"The mediation of social reproduction" may initially seem like an uncommon way of thinking of the significance of education, but it's exactly how I'll be treating it in the context of a course that I'm preparing to co-teach. It means that education occurs through processes through which adults (unconsciously) present or (deliberately) re-present ways of life to children, often simply by living with them. Education involves ways of reflecting on and practicing deliberate re-presentation.

I'm co-teaching this course with Diane Purvey (from Thompson Rivers University) and Tone Saevi (visiting Kamloops for the fall semester from the Norwegian Teacher Academy; pictured here).

Understanding education as a very general process of representation has significant implications for media and technology: These play a very important role in both providing children or learners with representations of the adult world that can be either problematic or pedagogically valuable. Neil Postman and others have made much of the media's role in showing representations that are problematic. This course focuses on ways that media are used in a more positive sense. It uses movies, novels and images to demonstrate some of this positive potential.

To collect together some of these positive examples (pictures and fictional passages), and to summarize some of the main ideas behind the course, I've been developing a small Website (using mediawiki -a great system). These ideas come from the book "Forgotten Connections" by Klaus Mollenhauer, a book which, unfortunately, is not yet available in English.

For another example of this very general way of understanding education, see Hannah Arendt's Crisis in Education(PDF).

Math Education and Technologies of Attention

This paper looks at the "Tower of Hanoi" puzzle, using it as a basis for exploring how technologies can structure our experience and attention in ways that are pedagogically significant. The "Tower of Hanoi" game, as it turns out, was developed at the heart of what art theorist Jonathan Crary has identified as a generalized "crisis of attention:" In the 1880's, in a Paris of panoramas, phonographs and pointillism.

The Tower of Hanoi represents paper as an early but powerful "technology of attention." The pedagogical significance of this puzzle is explored using phenomenology, and the puzzle is understood in this context in terms of what phenomenologists Gaston Bachelard and Bernhard Waldenfels refer to as the "phenomenotechnical:" A phenomenon that is "not simply found, but invented, that is, thoroughly constructed."

Even though some of the methodological and historical context invoked in the paper may be somewhat complicated, its ultimate findings are not difficult to summarize: The structuring of attention provided by the Tower of Hanoi is at least as much emotional and affective as it is cognitive and intellectual. And the emotionally charged experience that this puzzle generally provides is essential to understanding its value for mathematics education.

I wrote this paper with Krista Francis-Poscente as a part of the learningspaces.org project, and we presented together at the International Human Sciences Research Conference in Rovereto, Italy.

(Re)Inventing the Internet: Surveillance and Experience

I had the pleasure of participating in a one-day colloquium called "(Re)Inventing the Internet" in Vancouver in February. This presentation was sponsored by the ACT (Applied Communication Technology) Lab at SFU's school of communication. MP3s of the presentations have just been posted, and this means that there are a number of great "academic" podcasts to be had now on the colloquium website.

There are a number of links that are related to my presentation that I'd like to provide:

• The MP3 of the presentation (13.5 Mb; 23 min)
  
• The Powerpoint of the Presentation
  
• The original paper presented (MSWord Doc)
  

One more item to link to is a really interesting paper that applies some of the notions of surveillance to e-learning platforms (to the detriment of the WebCTs of this world). This is Screen or Monitor? Surveillance and disciplinary power in online learning environments by Bayne and Land. It is an excellent paper that (indirectly ) points out the merits of using "open" Web 2.0 technologies in education.

HIT CRTL+F1 FOR COMPREHENSION: James Paul Gee at the American Educational Research Association Conference

Here's a podcast of a presentation, "Video Games and Embodiment" made by James Paul Gee on April 12. The presentation was made in the context of a panel entitled "Embodied Cognition: A More Meaningful Ontological Unit," together with Sasha Barab and James Greeno (PDFs of panel papers also available).

In the 1980's and 1990's, when the PC was a conspicuous technology, human learning was generally understood in terms of computational functions and operation. Now, with computer games grabbing the attention, new articulations of learning and cognition are emerging. "In the same way that we used to use computers as metaphors for the digital mind, we can use videogames as metaphors for the experiential mind." Gee bases his argument on Barsalou's (1999) conception of situated, embodied cognition: "comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for situated action." Gee goes on to explain how this understanding can be used to understand the educational value of video games: "Humans…think through embodied experience in the world. They store those experiences; then they can run simulations in their heads to prepare for problem solving. But it is not just any old experiences, humans think best when they are having experiences [in which they are] preparing themselves as agents for action." In the same way that computer operation mirrored the "digital mind," videogames, according to Gee, mirror this process of "simulation" of activity. Leaving aside the relevance of such simulations to non-kinesthetic experience, Gee's argument represents a new and interesting variation on the "tools to theories heuristic" and "the mirror effect" that I've discussed here earlier.

Listen/Download (3.5 Mb; 29 minutes)

P.S. I pasted on a couple of questions from the end of the session that I thought might be of interest (including one by yours truly, in which I reference [directly or indirectly] texts by Dourish, 2001, Nardi & Kaptelinin, 2003 (with Bødker, Carroll, Hollan, Hutchins, & Winograd) and, Nardi and Kaptelinin, 2006).

Myth # 5: The Mind ≈ Computer Myth

In their day, new technologies --from the camera obscura through moving pictures to the Web itself-- provided compelling metaphors for the human mind. Memory, experience and learning have, for example, been likened to the exposure of a photographic plate (Draaisma, 2000), the "cinematographic" capturing of motion (Bergson, 1998), and the construction of associative "links" between nodes of information (e.g., Chen & McGrath, 2003). Each metaphor seems to have been equally compelling and convincing in its time. E-learning research is currently in the thrall of at least two of these explanatory metaphors: One is the information theory model, which has served as a kind of "Rosetta stone" in theories of communication (Yacci, 2000; p. 2), especially those in distance education. The second is the complimentary "mind as computer" metaphor, which stands as "the fundamental tenet of cognitive science" (Bruer, 2003; p. 160). The first of these metaphors finds expression in discussions of the roles of sender and receiver in distance educational "transactions" (e.g. Garrison and Shale, 1990) and "interactions" between content, student and teacher (Moore, 1989; Anderson, Annand & Wark, 2005). The second is encapsulated, for example, in descriptions of ICTs as "cognitive technologies" (Pea, 1985; Greening, 1998), "cognitive tools" (Lajoie, 2000) or "mindtools" (Jonassen, et al, 1999) --as instruments that form a "partnership" with the learner to "share" "extend" and "amplify" her cognition (Jonassen, 2000).

The problem is that these metaphors are not neutral.

Read the entire post.