John Connell: The Blog

Sean Con­nery, in his thought­ful mem­oir Being A Scot, tells the story of find­ing him­self on a plane seated next to a com­pa­triot, a young woman. Talk­ing to her, he found that she was a lit­er­a­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, and that she was cur­rently study­ing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

“Do you see any par­al­lels between Roskol­nikov, in the Dos­to­evsky novel, and the char­ac­ter of Robert Wing­ham, in James Hogg’s Mem­oirs and Con­fes­sions of a Jus­ti­fied Sin­ner?” he asked her.

“Oh, I haven’t read that,” said she, “I’m in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Depart­ment, not the Scot­tish.” Con­nery was bemused, but pre­sum­ably did not bother to ask why, given her odd per­spec­tive, she was study­ing a novel orig­i­nally writ­ten in Russian.

Con­nery had left school at 13 with lit­tle to show for his eight years in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion other than an abil­ity to read. But early in his act­ing career, a fellow-thespian had sug­gested a list of books that the young Con­nery ought to read, and he had sub­se­quently embarked on his own edu­ca­tion in fine lit­er­a­ture. His young trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on the other hand, had suc­cess­fully com­pleted seven years of pri­mary school­ing, five or six years of sec­ondary school­ing, and by the time Con­nery met her at least a year or two at uni­ver­sity. So what was the dif­fer­ence between the famous actor with his paucity of for­mal school­ing and the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent with a decade and a half of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion behind her?

In the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent, I believe that we can see some­thing of the schooled mind at work, in this case some­one for whom the books she read were pre­scribed by oth­ers and for whom read­ing was largely a means to an end. In Con­nery, a lover of lit­er­a­ture, we can see the inde­pen­dent mind of some­one who has taken con­trol of his own learn­ing, some­one for whom read­ing was a plea­sure in itself, and noth­ing to do with pass­ing exam­i­na­tions or gain­ing qualifications.

It is inter­est­ing to pon­der the dif­fer­ences between the truly autonomous learner and the schooled mind, to explore the nature of learn­ing in an age where, although the oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-directed learn­ing are expand­ing immensely as the ten­drils of the Inter­net extend into every facet of our lives, the endur­ing insti­tu­tions of the school and the col­lege and the uni­ver­sity (all of which I am happy to refer to col­lec­tively and con­cep­tu­ally as ‘the school’) remain stub­bornly tena­cious. This durable social con­struct, one that has been shaped and adapted con­tin­u­ously through­out his­tory to suit the needs of time and place and wealth and power, has allowed the myr­iad social, polit­i­cal and reli­gious enti­ties that have sus­tained it, and that con­tinue to sus­tain it, to retain an often insid­i­ous and reduc­tive grip on the minds of those who pass through their hands. And, despite that con­stant refrain of ‘the school is dead’ that we have heard in dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, the school is arguably stronger in some ways today than it has ever been.

Of course, the tale of Sean Con­nery and the young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent raises more ques­tions than answers: the gulf between the autonomous learner and the schooled mind is rarely iden­ti­fi­able as a sim­ple dichotomy between the free spirit and the cap­tive will. The real­ity for most of us is that we find our­selves, through­out our lives, shift­ing back and forth along a con­tin­uum some­where between the two extremes, although we night hope that, as we grow older, we become more aware of the dan­gers of the schooled mind, and there­fore develop a greater capac­ity to break free of the con­straints placed on us by the school in our early years. Connery’s self-taught love of lit­er­a­ture was per­haps not entirely free of instru­men­tal inten­tions: as an actor, he rec­og­nized that an appre­ci­a­tion of lit­er­a­ture would be use­ful to him in his career, but it was his own recog­ni­tion, not one sug­gested by oth­ers or imposed from with­out. Equally, the young woman, we hope, would have taken up her course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture because of a love of read­ing. But between those two routes into books, and most cer­tainly in the student’s response to Connery’s ques­tion, there lies a dis­cernible dif­fer­ence between the approach that each had pre­vi­ously taken to their mutual love of lit­er­a­ture. Con­nery, con­sciously or oth­er­wise, had dis­cov­ered that there is a higher and deeper and wider sig­nif­i­cance to learn­ing than can be gleaned from sub­mit­ting to the stric­tures of the class­room. The young woman had allowed her­self to be per­suaded that, like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of ‘edu­cated’ peo­ple, she had lit­tle choice but to accept those stric­tures as seem­ingly the only avail­able path to an edu­ca­tion in the dis­ci­pline that she enjoyed.

The road taken by Con­nery was one that led not only to a knowl­edge of fine lit­er­a­ture but also, I would con­tend, to a greater chance for attain­ing a degree of self-knowledge that, if not actu­ally denied by school, has rarely if ever been an explicit aim of school­ing. The school, his­tor­i­cally, has not actively encour­aged inde­pen­dence of thought, nor has it cul­ti­vated the truly spon­ta­neous or cre­ative mind. We develop such traits despite school not because of it. School is fun­da­men­tally about train­ing the mind, devel­op­ing the intel­lect (as opposed to intel­li­gence), pass­ing on the knowl­edge deemed impor­tant by a soci­ety to those whose role it will be to per­pet­u­ate and pre­serve that soci­ety at all lev­els. As such, the school con­tin­ues what already is and what has been; its func­tion, what­ever the rhetoric, is essen­tially back­wards look­ing, seek­ing to main­tain the struc­tures and rela­tion­ships from the past and present on into the future with min­i­mal change.

But given the ubiq­uity of the school, we can­not sim­ply equate the schooled mind with atten­dance at school. To do so would be ludi­crous. If the schooled mind were to be iden­ti­fied merely by dint of some­one hav­ing attended school there would no chance of escape from the con­di­tion for most of us. But school­ing does imbue the stu­dent, the scholar, with cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics that the learner has to find the means to over­come either while at school, or more likely once school­ing is complete.

I will come back to what that schooled mind is all about, why we must not be con­tent with the intel­lec­tual frame­work that school bestows on us, and how crit­i­cal it is that we are able to over­come at least the most dele­te­ri­ous and per­ni­cious aspects of the school’s legacy on our own devel­op­ment as ratio­nal, free-thinking human beings.

Evgeny Moro­zov dis­man­tles the lazy think­ing and the fun­da­men­tally anti-progressive notions out­lined in Gavin New­som’s recent book: Citizenville:How to Take the Town Square Dig­i­tal and Rein­vent Gov­ern­ment [bad book, so no link!]. California’s lieu­tenant gov­er­nor is taken apart in an arti­cle in Book­fo­rum.

[It is his] lack of any basic curios­ity about the tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions that he advocates—and espe­cially about their unin­tended consequences—that makes Newsom’s account so sus­pect. Pub­lic insti­tu­tions such as the BBC might be ter­ri­bly inef­fi­cient and scan­dal prone, but they still do a better—and more systematic—job at root­ing out cor­rup­tion than Newsom’s citizen-hackers armed with data­bases and sophis­ti­cated visu­al­iza­tion tools.

I don’t agree with every­thing Moro­zov writes (his Net Delu­sion described some crit­i­cal blind spots in our under­stand­ing of the Net today — delu­sion was too strong a word, but I sup­pose it helped to sell the book) but this piece gets it spot on with respect to Newsom’s Ayn Rand-induced, hacker-worshipping, anti-democratic nonsense.

Most of all, Moro­zov exposes the fun­da­men­tally con­ser­v­a­tive and regres­sive phi­los­o­phy that so many thought­less, slow-minded and mantra-spouting lovers of technology-for-its-own-sake mis­take for cre­ativ­ity, ‘think­ing dif­fer­ent’ and enlightenment.

In the 1980s, Ger­man philoso­pher and provo­ca­teur, Peter Slo­ter­dijk, pro­claimed ‘the end of the belief in edu­ca­tion’. Despite society’s dec­la­ra­tion that Knowl­edge Is Power, young peo­ple, he said, live…

…with the risk of learn­ing with­out prospects. Those who do not seek power will…not want its knowledge…and those who reject both are secretly no longer cit­i­zens of this civilisation.

How much more do Sloterdijk’s words res­onate today than they did three decades ago? Today knowl­edge is power, still, of course, but we can also say that knowl­edge is cur­rency, knowl­edge is eco­nomic lifeblood, knowl­edge is cul­ture, and so much more.

Edu­ca­tion for education’s sake is fine as a mantra, but in the real world, we need to be able to offer our young peo­ple hope. How many young, and not so young, peo­ple see lit­tle if any hope today? Too many!

Too many will there­fore ques­tion the point of edu­ca­tion in the for­mal sense. And who can blame them?

There is a con­spic­u­ous and abid­ing fal­lacy resid­ing at the heart of for­mal edu­ca­tion, namely that what is taught is what is learned, that what the teacher teaches is what the stu­dent learns. Edu­ca­tion sys­tems, schools, col­lege and uni­ver­si­ties around the world today rest, as they have done for much of their exis­tences, on an illu­sory foun­da­tion, and I believe that much of what is wrong with for­mal edu­ca­tion today arises from this endur­ing and mis­taken belief.

When we come to the full real­i­sa­tion of the actual rela­tion­ship between teach­ing and learn­ing, we begin to dis­cern the sheer point­less­ness of so much of what passes for edu­ca­tional pol­icy and strat­egy in today’s world. We know that human beings learn through inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, with ideas, with infor­ma­tion, with the world at large, but that ulti­mately they cre­ate and shape their own learn­ing. The inter­ven­tion of the teacher in this process is impor­tant and valu­able, but at no point in the inter­ac­tion of teacher and stu­dent, other than by occa­sional happy acci­dent, does the learner ‘learn’ what the teacher ‘teaches’.

An appre­ci­a­tion of this, the true nature of learn­ing, means that the com­plex edi­fices of cur­ric­ula, ped­a­gogy, assess­ment, accred­i­ta­tion, teacher edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, as well as the over­bear­ing struc­tures of insti­tu­tional man­age­ment and edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tion, start to crum­ble to dust before our eyes.

Howard Gard­ner, speak­ing in a video on the DML Cen­tral site:

I don’t believe for a moment in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. I believe any tech­nol­ogy can be used benignly and malig­nantly. You can use a pen to write beau­ti­ful poetry. You can also use a pen to poke peo­ples’ eyes out.

Gard­ner doesn’t ‘believe’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, in the same way that some­one might choose not to believe in a deity or the exis­tence of Santa Claus. Fair enough. How­ever, the exam­ple he gives to sup­port his unbe­lief is not only mis­lead­ingly sim­plis­tic but also spe­cious. A pen used to poke an eye out is not being used as a pen and is there­fore not a pen at that moment in time. It is merely a pointy stick. If he had said that the same pen can be used to write beau­ti­ful poetry and also to sign the death war­rant of an inno­cent per­son, his argu­ment would have been a lit­tle more cogent, but still only within the some­what nar­row lim­its to which he chooses to restrict his notion of tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. We expect bet­ter from a Har­vard professor.

This much we can agree on: tech­nol­ogy is only tech­nol­ogy when it is being put to use. Oth­er­wise, it is merely pas­sive arte­fact. At the level of the instru­ment (such as the pen), tech­nol­ogy can be used for good or ill. But that is not a con­di­tion unique to tech­nol­ogy; it can be posited for vir­tu­ally every prod­uct of the human hand or mind. Richard Feyn­man put it suc­cinctly when he quoted a bud­dhist proverb:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

I made that point in a post back in 2006 when I com­pared cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics shared by edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy: they are both instru­ments that can be put to good and bad uses; they are both instru­ments that can be truly trans­for­ma­tive or deeply destruc­tive. Given those shared attrib­utes, I used that post to appeal for care in how we choose to bring about their con­junc­tion. But these are attrib­utes that bear no rela­tion to whether or not tech­nol­ogy is deter­min­is­tic; hence the prob­lem with Gardner’s position.

If we want to see how truly deter­min­is­tic tech­nol­ogy can be, and is, we must ele­vate our point of view so that we can see beyond the indi­vid­ual instru­ment and allow our­selves to com­pre­hend the broad vista of the tech­nol­ogy land­scape within which that sin­gle instru­ment is utilised. Whether a pen can write beau­ti­ful poetry or con­sign a per­son to their death really tells us noth­ing about how, at a much broader level, sys­temic shifts in the under­ly­ing nature of tech­nol­ogy undoubt­edly do influ­ence soci­etal inter­ac­tions and, quite sim­ply, how we do cer­tain things, amongst them, edu­ca­tion. To try to pre­tend, for instance, as Gard­ner must inevitably do with his ‘unbe­lief’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, that the way we learn — or for that mat­ter, the way we teach — can remain the same in the dig­i­tal era as it has been for cen­turies of print is just naive.

Karl Marx, writ­ing in The Poverty of Phi­los­o­phy in 1847, under­stood that bet­ter than the good pro­fes­sor obvi­ously does today.

The hand-mill gives you soci­ety with the feu­dal lord; the steam-mill, soci­ety with the indus­trial capitalist.

The dig­i­tal era — the com­puter, the net­work, the Inter­net, the Web, social tech­nol­ogy, uni­ver­sal search, and so much more — changes rad­i­cally all of the rela­tion­ships that are crit­i­cal to how we learn and how we teach: the rela­tion­ship between teacher and learner; the rela­tion­ship between the learner and infor­ma­tion; the rela­tion­ship we all have with the con­cept of learned author­ity; and the social rela­tion­ships between our­selves and the rest of the human race. It is of course a hugely com­plex process of deter­mi­na­tion, with nuance lay­ered on nuance, but it is undoubt­edly true that broad global shifts in tech­nol­ogy, such as that between print and dig­i­tal, deter­mine how learn­ing can hap­pen and there­fore should (and inevitably will) deter­mine what it means to teach.

This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

On my trav­els around the world I have often found myself work­ing with some truly inspir­ing organ­i­sa­tions. One of these is SAIDE, the South African Insti­tute for Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion, who I met with more than one occa­sion in Johan­nes­burg. This is an orga­ni­za­tion that is truly com­mit­ted to trans­form­ing edu­ca­tion and train­ing through a focus on the adop­tion of open learn­ing prin­ci­ples and dis­tance edu­ca­tion methods.

SAIDE do not think small! One of their key aims is to:

Sup­port pro­grammes in sound and inno­v­a­tive course design, mate­ri­als devel­op­ment, learner sup­port, man­age­ment, and the use of tech­nol­ogy, par­tic­u­larly for large scale pro­vi­sion.

They given pow­er­ful sub­stance to their prin­ci­ples with the launch of a site ded­i­cated to the pro­vi­sion of OER resources for edu­ca­tion across the con­ti­nent of Africa — OER Africa. With spe­cial areas of focus — teacher edu­ca­tion, health, agri­cul­ture and skills devel­op­ment — this is a great resource built on the assump­tions of openness.

A quick search for ‘pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment’ threw up some 237 ref­er­ences, and I could see a rich har­vest of ideas and mate­ri­als even in the first two of three pages of results.

Def­i­nitely worth a look!

.…the same three-person team of a pro­fes­sor plus assis­tants that used to teach ana­log cir­cuit design to 400 stu­dents at MIT now han­dles 10,000 online and could take a hun­dred times more.…

So said Anant Agar­wal, the com­puter sci­en­tist appointed by MIT and Har­vard this year to head edX, a $60 mil­lion joint effort (cur­rently includ­ing UC Berke­ley and the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, as well as MIT and Har­vard) to stream a col­lege edu­ca­tion over the Web, free to any­one who wants it. Their aim, in time, they say is to reach 1 bil­lion stu­dents by this means.

MIT’s Tech­nol­ogy Review has pub­lished a busi­ness report on Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion that includes a piece that asks, is the MOOC the great­est edtech devel­op­ment in 200 years?, and another piece that takes a strangely myopic look at the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­ogy of the MOOC (myopic because it gives not the slight­est men­tion to those who actu­ally syn­thetized the con­cept and who coined the term itself). Given that this is in the con­text of a busi­ness report, per­haps the some­what pro­gres­sive, left-leaning, anti-corporatist incli­na­tions of many of those involved in the ori­gins of the MOOC sim­ply keeps them below the radar of those writ­ing for the Tech­nol­ogy Review. I gen­uinely hope that is not the case.

How­ever, while my ped­a­gog­i­cal sym­pa­thies are some­what closer to the MOOC’s prime movers, I also have a lot of admi­ra­tion for what the big play­ers are doing too. Cours­era and Udac­ity, as well as the likes of edX, are all non-profit social enter­prise ven­tures, and while their ped­a­gogy is pri­mar­ily a ‘knowledge-delivery’ model (as opposed to social-constructivist or con­nec­tivist model), they are very much part of a broad-based set of devel­op­ments in edu­ca­tion that, I believe, are coa­lesc­ing into a major storm that will sweep through the struc­tures and assump­tions of for­mal insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion in the next few years. Of course, there are many other MOOCs out there too: Stephen Downes offers a recent list of inter­na­tional providers.

Agarwal’s quote at the top of this piece itself con­firms that these big MOOC providers are basi­cally tak­ing the model of deliv­ery straight out of the lec­ture halls and class­rooms of higher edu­ca­tion and onto the Web. That’s fine, so far as it goes, but it means that much (most?) of the real power of the MOOC as orig­i­nally defined, namely that knowl­edge is dis­trib­uted across a net­work of con­nec­tions, and that learn­ing there­fore con­sists of the abil­ity to con­struct and tra­verse those net­works is dissipated.

That foun­da­tion in the ped­a­gogy of the lec­ture the­atre also means, of course, that the big providers are also hop­ing to find the com­mer­cial holy grail of trusted, authen­ti­cated and secure accred­i­ta­tion via the MOOC.

Nonethe­less, it will be inter­est­ing to watch what the effect will be on all those uni­ver­si­ties across the world cur­rently licens­ing courses from the big providers. I doubt that they are licens­ing their own anni­hi­la­tion, as some of the more lurid com­men­ta­tors might sug­gest; but i do think they are has­ten­ing a mas­sive and wel­come shift in the cen­tre of grav­ity in higher edu­ca­tion globally.

The MOOC is a devel­op­ment that, like all great inno­va­tions, is a cul­mi­na­tion of inven­tions, for­ma­tions, think­ing, exper­i­men­ta­tions, mis­takes and tri­umphs that came before it; it is also like all great inno­va­tions in that it is a game-changer. The game is chang­ing in higher edu­ca­tion, and in edu­ca­tion gen­er­ally — of that there is no doubt — and while the MOOC can only be a part of that change, it is a crit­i­cal part. The MOOC will never be able to cope with all the require­ments of learn­ing and of study: there will also be a need, in some dis­ci­plines for lab work, ground work, work in the field, what­ever. But there should be lit­tle doubt that the MOOC is a major devel­op­ment in education.

So, the great­est edtech devel­op­ment in 200 years? I cer­tainly hope so!

Typog­ra­phy from Ron­nie Bruce on Vimeo.

“.…you’ve got to speak with it too.”

Tay­lor Mali, poet.

Won­der­ful, and of course true!

Hajera Blagg points up a log­i­cal link between the gath­er­ing momen­tum behind the MOOC and the notion of rad­i­cal social entre­pre­neur­ship. In a post enti­tled: ‘A class­room of thou­sands’: Dis­rupt­ing entre­pre­neur­ial edu­ca­tion with Mas­sive Open Online Courses she writes:

If MOOCs become a more com­mon way of learn­ing, then MOOC stu­dents who have under­stood the learn­ing process to be dynamic and col­lab­o­ra­tive will bring this mind­set to their own projects. Learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties (and sub-communities) emerge nat­u­rally from the MOOC process. These endeav­ors are likely to be more inclu­sive and socially-oriented, with the goal being advance­ment in the name of the com­mon good.

By treat­ing edu­ca­tion as a mas­sively open, col­lab­o­ra­tive process, MOOCs have the poten­tial to spread a dis­rup­tive entre­pre­neur­ial phi­los­o­phy through their class­rooms of thousands.

There are MOOCs and MOOCs (see, for instance, Tony Bates on Coursera-type MOOCs, or Stephen Downes’ dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between what he terms xMOOCs and cMOOCs) but Hajera clearly under­stands that it is the learn­ers them­selves who will deter­mine what they are able to take away from their par­tic­i­pa­tion in a MOOC.

There’s a risk of a cir­cu­lar argu­ment here: those who go into a MOOC with an open and col­lab­o­ra­tive approach will be more likely to appre­ci­ate the ‘dis­rup­tive entre­pre­neur­ial phi­los­o­phy’ that can come out of the expe­ri­ence. But I would hope that some peo­ple who go into MOOCs car­ry­ing tra­di­tional bag­gage, expect­ing a top-down model, or look­ing for tra­di­tional cre­den­tial­ing, for exam­ple, might come to realise that their bag­gage is redun­dant, at which point they could well begin to under­stand the full power of the MOOC.

There’s an info­graphic on the MOOC appended to the post too.

Sim­pli­fi­ca­tions are legion, and emo­tions are a factor

“Schools kill cre­ativ­ity”, “Does Google make us stu­pid?” are press-worthy attention-grabbers, but the real­i­ties are more nuanced, for a world that refuses to deal with its nuanced self.…Everyone brings in their own biases to an edu­ca­tion con­ver­sa­tion (this author included), but most often fail to be aware of them as the biases they are.

My good friend, Charles Fadel, has offered his per­sonal list on www.thefivethings.org

They are all inter­est­ing points, but two in par­tic­u­lar caught my atten­tion because, to me, they are two sides of one coin. His point above is so true when we look at most edu­ca­tion ‘debates’ being con­ducted today, espe­cially, but by no means only, in the tra­di­tional media. Nuanced edu­ca­tional debate is a rare thing indeed in the press, and that includes the so-called qual­ity press. But too often, even in debates between peo­ple who ought to know bet­ter, the crude attention-grabber is king and the impor­tance of fine dis­tinc­tions, sub­tleties, shades of grey are thrown by the wayside.

Charles’ next point is equally valid, where he crit­i­cises the pre­pon­der­ance of ‘or’ debates over ‘and’ debates:

Con­ver­sa­tions about edu­ca­tion abound with false dichotomies, and abso­lutist views, that must be transcended.

The lack of a balanced-conversation mind­set leads to many OR debates; for instance:

- Knowl­edge vs skills
– Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) vs Humanities/Arts
– Didac­tic vs con­struc­tivist learn­ing
– For­mal vs infor­mal learn­ing
– All tech­nol­ogy or no tech­nol­ogy
– Char­ac­ter devel­oped at school vs at home

The bal­anced real­ity is that these are all AND propo­si­tions, work­ing in con­cert with each other, and rein­forc­ing each other, in a judi­cious, impact­ful feed­back loop.

It is just eas­ier, I sup­pose, to take a stand at one extreme or the other in an argu­ment. It is far harder to con­clude that both sides have merit, and then to set out your argu­ments for lean­ing more in one direc­tion than another, or set­ting out the par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances in which one side might have more merit than the other.

Scep­ti­cism is healthy; cyn­i­cism and bad faith are not.