Introduction:
Learning and Education
There is a simple distinction which divides the concept of
‘Learning’ from that of ‘Education’. Whilst ‘education’ manifests itself in
institutions, textbooks, classrooms, curricula and teachers – all of which we
can point at – learning itself is something that goes on in peoples’ heads:
there is, ostensibly, nothing to be pointed at beyond accounts of subjectivity.
In characterising the broader distinction between different aspects of reality,
Searle has highlighted the difference between the “ontologically objective”,
the “ontologically subjective”, the “epistemically objective” and the
epistemically subjective” (Searle, 2010, p18). Schools, classrooms and
curricula are “ontologically subjective” – they are real things that we can
point at, but whose reality is constituted through social institutions.
Learning, by contrast is “epistemically subjective” – its reality can only be
known by the person experiencing it – rather like an itch. Conversely, with
regard to “ontological objectivity”, we might say that “the earth is spherical”,
or alternatively we might say that “Beethoven died in 1827” as an example of
epistemic objectivity, since the statement about Beethoven is an objective
statement of knowledge. But it is the distinction between ontological
subjectivity and epistemic subjectivity which forms the basis of the argument
in this paper.
The discourse around a phenomena which are epistemic-subjective
is grounded in philosophical metaphysics. Modern “learning theory” can be
traced back to German idealism, particularly in what is popularly termed the
‘Copernican’ epistemological revolution of Immanuel Kant which situated the
world around the individual’s cognitive processes. With regard to Searle’s
position, Kant’s idealism is problematic: institutions of education – schools,
Universities, colleges, seem to affect us all irrespective of our perception of
them. However, there is a disconnect between the common-sense notion of the
reality of institutions and their causal powers and our learning theories which
fundamentally owe their origins to Kantian epistemology. It is this disconnect
which, in the process of designing, implementing and evaluating the Personal
Learning Environment (PLE), has revealed itself, and which this paper orients
itself towards a realist interpretation: in short, the metaphysics of learning
do not appear to have taken us anywhere. In its place is proposed a social
ontology of commitments, rights, obligations and responsibilities.
Recognition of the difficulties with the concept of
‘Learning’ was a precursor to the establishment of the PLE in the first place.
Whilst institutions of education have always constituted an “environment” for learning,
the criticism, inspired by Illich (1971) and others, concerned the ‘fit’
between the learning needs of individuals and the particular kinds of
environmental support provided by institutions (Johnson and Liber, 2008;
Attwell, 2007). The implication behind the PLE, as an intervention in learning
technology, was that a learning environment constituted by personal technology
- a learning environment where the locus of control rests with the learner
rather than with the institution - provides an alternative environment for learning
to that provided by institutions. However, if this was the case, then as the
costs of institutional education rise, we might expect an increasingly large
number of learners to flee to the technologies of the PLE as a viable
alternative. This does not appear to have happened.
In the early years of the PLE discourse, with the rapid rise
of social software, the PLE became a rallying cry for the inversion of the
institution (Wilson et al, 2007), arguing for “putting the learner in control
of their learning”, accessing and coordinating services provided by the
institution. This became a popular theme that affected not only university
education, but schools, becoming aligned with ideas of self-efficacy, together
with an argument that technology was moving too fast for institutional
curricula to keep up, necessitating rethinking of institutional services and
ushering-in ideas ranging from ‘Bring your own Device’, mobile-learning,
service integration, widgetised learning and other concepts. Among the significant
interventions in the school sector, the ITEC project funded by the European
Union, has been a major attempt to establish this way of thinking.
However, in this attempt to reposition learning, learning
itself became characterised in an increasingly concrete way: models of learning
(each of which is commensurable with the other), ranging from Laurillard’s conversation model (Laurillard, 1999), the
model of the learner as a viable system which this author contributed to
(Johnson and Liber, 2008) and connectivist learning which underpinned MOOCs
(Siemens and Downes, 2009) all served to reify learning as a process. With this reified process,
technologies were identified as being functionally
equivalent to more traditional practices in face-to-face education: conversation
online was functionally equivalent to face-to-face interaction; access to
online services was functionally equivalent to accessing the library, student
services, etc. Indeed, in the technical specification of the PLE, the aim was
to identify those services which could supplant the services of the institution
(see Wilson et al, 2007)
In practice, the PLE has not realised the predictions of its
theory. Consequently this paper asks, What might be wrong with the theory? In
addressing this, I explore the nature of the reality of institutions and contrast it to the reality of software, widgets and MOOCs
drawing on the experiences of the ITEC project and the social ontology of
Searle. I then discuss how a refined picture of the realities of education can
help us to explain some of the phenomena we see around us: not only the
increasing power of traditional institutions, but new practices online where
individuals do appear to be increasing their social status.
Constructivism and the
Realities of Software and Institutions
The PLE adopted an approach to learning which was
constructivist. This relation with constructivism played a fundamental role in
its characterisation of what was meant by the word ‘personal’. Whilst
constructivism itself was not new in e-learning (many VLEs were conceived as
constructivist interventions) the view of the PLE was that if learners could be
given the facility to coordinate the technologies of their life with the
technologies of their learning, then a meta-level of personal construction
mediated by their own personal technologies and practices could be more
powerful than the surface level constructivism which relied on technologies
provided by institutions. The vision of the PLE was a version of constructivism
where nobody said “these are the tools you should use for your learning”, but
rather, “whatever tools you wish to use for your learning, here’s how you can
connect and coordinate your actions”. The PLE’s constructivism was
fundamentally tool-oriented, as opposed to utterance-oriented constructivism
that lay behind conversational approaches to learning.
In understanding the implications of tool-oriented
constructivism, it is necessary to inquiry into the nature of tools as objects
whose utilization becomes part of the individual’s construction of the world.
One was of doing this was to characterise the coordinations of individuals with
tools as a way in which individuals maintain their viability: such arguments
about technology were put forward by McLuhan and others, and Johnson and Liber
characterised the engagement with tools as a cybernetic mechanism of an
individual. However, objects are not just ‘constructs derived from use’; they
are real things in the environment independently of anything that they might
mean to individuals: in Searle’s language, they are “ontologically subjective”.
The objects of software which were advocated with the PLE may not be
fundamentally dissimilar from physical objects like banknotes, cups, or
pencils. The deep question is, How do these objects become meaningful and
recognised as significant in our social contexts? The question concerning the
PLE is, Is there a distinction between the status of reality of personal
technologies for learning and institutional technologies for learning?
Searle’s Theory of
Status Functions and the Objects of Education
Searle’s basic idea is that objects like banknotes, computer
software, textbooks and curricula acquire their significance through a social
process of what he calls ‘status functions’. A status function is a particular
kind of speech act whereby an individual or a group of individuals make a
declaration: “We (or I) make it the case by Declaration that the Y status
function exists”. Such a declaration is supported by other declarations of
others in the society, not least the declaration that the person making the
first declaration has the power to do so. So, for example, the object of the
Virtual Learning Environment was a status declaration by a group of influential
learning technologists who made the statement that “A status function exists
such that the VLE is an important part of university education”. The impact of this status function was
supported by other status functions which related to the organisations making
it. In the UK, for example, the influential Joint Information Services
Committee (JISC) played a significant role (and the reason why only in the UK
is there talk of a “Virtual Learning Environment”, JISC’s terminology, as
opposed to “learning management system” – as it is described everywhere else!).
What emerges in the network of status function declarations between different
stakeholders are networks of rights, responsibilities, obligations and
commitments. It is through the network of these that the “ontologically
subjective” entities, not just of the education system, but of society in
general, establish their reality and their causal powers on everybody in that
society.
Computer software itself is an aggregation of a variety of
status functions. Within any computer software, there are encoded
responsibilities, roles, obligations and commitments – of both users and
developers - which once a person starts to engage with the software, they are
obliged to comply with. This aggregated nature of software produces problems:
with the VLE, there are implicit roles and responsibilities (the role of
teacher, the role of learner) which are encoded in the software, and which have
to be tacitly accepted if the status function regarding the software as a whole
is accepted. The fact that the encoded roles and responsibilities within the
software relating to those people for whom the software is intended often do
not reflect their actual practice can lead to processes of alienation and
disengagement. Technologists hope that through the intervention of software,
the agency of the users will change. Yet it rarely does of its own accord. What
is required in order for it to change (even for take-up of the VLE) are
increasingly powerful status function declarations by powerful people in the
institution which eventually mandate the use of the software.
The combination of different status functions relating to
power relations within the institution, the status of software objects and the rights
and obligations of individuals provides a backdrop to inspect the impact of the
PLE. The PLE was a declared status function relating not to a particular object
(because the objective was not to ‘build’ a PLE!) but instead relating to a set
of practices. In effect, these practices were deemed to support notions of
‘personalised learning’ and self-efficacy whilst challenging the status of
institutional approaches to education and the curriculum. Behind the rationale
for these new ‘practice-oriented’ status functions were concretised ideas about
learning. Learning, it was argued, was engendered through conversation and
connection, and that these connections could be facilitated in ways where
individuals could coordinate engagement with institutional structures in more
flexible ways than those which were determined by traditional courses. As
evidence for this, the uses of social software such as YouTube by artists and
musicians, where individuals found new ways of making their way through the
world independently of traditional brokers (like agents) was cited as an
example of what might be possible within the educational universe. If
individual practices could change so that individuals used personal technologies
in effective ways which manifested in practices which were ‘functionally
equivalent’ to institutional processes, then a challenge to institutional
practices could be defended.
The status function of the PLE was a challenge to existing
institutional status functions. By declaring the status of the ‘learning
process’ and the associated “functional equivalence” off online engagement to
face-to-face engagement, the PLE also sought to critique the status functions
that others within the institutional environment had determined with regard to
institutional learning technology – in particular, a challenge was mounted
against the status of the VLE. Associated with the challenge to the status of
technologies, was a challenge to the status of the individuals who upheld the
status of those objects. The PLE was ‘personal’ in terms of a power conflict,
not just in terms of its aspirations for learning!
Power, Status
functions and the PLE concept in institutional learning
Whilst the PLE is described as something of a challenge to
the institution, most experiments in engaging with PLE concepts have occurred
within the context of institutional learning. Typically this has involved uses
of technologies beyond those sanctioned directly by the institution. This
creates a complex set of power relations which can also be described in terms
of status functions. Searle describes power relations within his social
ontology in terms of what he calls “deontic powers”. He explains:
“The power of the local party bosses and the village council as well as
the power of such grander figures as presidents, prime ministers, the US
Congress and the Supreme court are all derived from the possession by these
entities of recognized status functions. And these status functions assign
deontic powers.” (p 164)
The role of status functions in assigning deontic powers to
these bodies and individuals has a simple but profound logical consequence:
“All political power, though exercised from above, comes from below.” Even dictators
typically are unsure of the status functions that gave them power, needing to
maintain these functions through “massive systems of rewards and punishments by
terror.” In more democratic situations, those in power have that power given to
them by those subjected to it.
Within status declarations about tools within an educational
institution are implicit status functions relating to power structures.
Compliance with institutional tooling entails status functions relating to
head-teachers, vice-chancellors, heads of teaching and learning, examining
boards, etc. As institutions become increasingly technological, and each
institutional technology carries its own status functions and declarations of
rights and responsibilities, so the network of status functions can become
confusing and difficult for both learners and staff.
Politicians, heads of institutions and others in power can
look at existing practices and say “This is no longer valid; these new
functions/roles/responsibilities/tools are the ones you should now comply
with.” Political interference in educational systems of this sort is common as
educational intervention has become a popular means by which political parties
can stamp their mark on a society. However, such attempts naturally lead to
reactions.
The situation for teachers is ultimately one of conflicting
status functions which somehow they have to negotiate. The rights and
commitments they must manage must balance their obligations to their
institutions with the obligations to their students. The status functions
determined by the institution as they are embodied within institutional
technology must be balanced by what the teacher might feel as opportunities for
learners to learn new skills with technology that exists outside the
institution. In managing this balance, teachers exercise their own deontic
powers in relation both to their students, taking responsibility for their
experiments with regard to how they might be viewed by their institutions.
However, a teacher that declares that Twitter or Facebook will be the
technology for a course is not promoting the principles of the PLE (although this
is sometimes confused with the PLE rhetoric); they are simply declaring a
different status function with regard to technology. On the other hand, a
teacher who allows students to choose whatever technology they wish providing
they meet some particular requirement of assessment might be closer to the
spirit of the PLE. In such a case, the declared status function relates to the
process of assessment rather than the use of a particular technology. In the
variety of practices which have been described as being allied to the PLE,
there are a large variety of distinctions that can be made with regard to the
precise nature of the status functions that are declared.
In each case of teachers negotiating this balance of
technology, institutional policy, assessment regimes and learner needs,
teachers need to consider:
·
How not to put their jobs at risk;
·
How to ensure that they can manage the
complexities of assessment which ensue from whichever approach they take;
·
How to balance the interests of learners with
practical concerns about technology use;
·
How to avoid making technological demands on
their learners which their learners are not comfortable with (in other words,
how to avoid doing precisely what is criticised in institutional IT provision!)
There are deep mechanisms whereby the education system
manages to hold things together. Not least this is because teachers want to
continue to get paid, and students demand that they achieve qualifications. In
reality, good teachers will work through things and make the best of it. The
ITEC project presents some useful examples of where this was the case.
The Reality of
Software in the ITEC Project
ITEC is a large-scale European project which aims to
transform the technological practices of teachers in schools across Europe. It
was formulated against the background of technological transformations which were
among the driving forces behind the PLE agenda: the rise of social software,
increasing personalisation of tools and the need for flexibility in the
curriculum as well as addressing deeper societal concerns including the global movement
of populations, social mobility and inclusion.
ITEC
has sought to establish a community of practice among teachers and learners in
schools focused around specific pedagogical activities which in turn implicate engagement
with technologies. To achieve its ambitions, the project set to put in place an
infrastructure whereby pedagogical and technical innovation is community-led
and community-sustained. This is central to the iTEC philosophy: it is the
means by which individual instances of classroom practice are are connected and
contribute to a broader effort in experimenting with new pedagogies and
technologies. By doing this, the conditions for sustained innovation through
engaging in new practice is envisaged as not only a means to better practice on
the ground, but also a means whereby teachers continue their involvement in a
Europe-wide community of teachers the membership of which is something of perceived
value to them. ITEC aims to be, in effect, a PLE for teachers to develop pedagogic
practice.
The
deployment of tools to meet the pedagogical requirements has demanded flexible
ways in which toolsets can be organised and distributed. Evolving the PLE’s concept of service
interoperability and personalisation of toolsets, ITEC has used ‘widgets’ (small
web-based applications) as a key component in the technical architecture of the
project. These tools can be instantiated across a wide range of electronic
learning contexts, including a number of popular Virtual Learning Environments.
Whilst particular widgets were designed with requisite affordances for the
educational requirements, the instantiation and curation of widgets could be left
to the teacher through the use of a ‘widget store’, a technology developed from
the Apache Wookie Widget Server (Griffiths et al., 2012; Wilson et al, 2008). The Widget Store also provides additional
social network features, thus not only serving the instrumental purpose of
delivering tools, but also providing a means whereby the teacher community may
share and comment on widgets which they find meaningful and useful within their
practice.
However,
across the 4 years of the project, the widget store has only met with a modicum
of success. In general, teachers have chosen to use institutionally-provided
tools such as electronic whiteboards or other tools provided on the web (for
example, Socrative) rather than coordinate their own tooling through the widget
store. From the perspective of the present paper, the realities both of the
project’s innovation in designing the widget store, and in the actual practices
teachers can be analysed in terms of commitments, responsibilities, obligations
and the status functions which relate to them.
Any
project is itself a status function which says (broadly) “this is a project
which is of relevance to you”. The deontic power of this statement rests on the body organising the project
(in this case, the EU Commission), the amount of funding, the opportunities for
engagement and the status of the ideas underpinning the project. Basing itself
around ideas related to the PLE, the status declaration of the ITEC project had
some weight with substantial funding, a broad range of stakeholders and a
recognised need that technology in schools is an important thing. However, like
all status functions – and particularly those relating to technological
practices – there can emerge conflicts in local situations as teachers have to
balance their commitments to their learners and their obligations to their
managers, whilst at the same time seeking opportunities to raise their own
status. Whatever status declarations ITEC could make about specific technologies,
‘engagement’ meant that fundamentally teachers had to endorse the status
functions about the technologies with their learners. In doing so, they would
not want to appear to be admiring the “emporer’s new clothes”. In doing this,
many teachers ultimately decided that the emporer (at least the “emporer” of
the widget store) was in fact naked and had to manouvre between their status
relations with their learners and the status relations with the project.
There
were some curious side-effects of this. Not least was the fact that despite the
actual evidence of web activity on the widget store was low, teachers would often
say that they had used the technology more than the statistics indicated, with
many saying that the widget store was a ‘good idea’. Moreover, teachers found that they could
negotiate between the different status functions of the project, trading off
one for the other. ITEC made two fundamental status declarations: on the one
hand, there was a declaration about the use of technology; on the other, there
was a declaration about engagement with “pedagogical scenarios”. The latter
function provided flexibility in the acknowledgement of the former. Thus, the
status of “being engaged in the ITEC project” could be achieved through
engaging with the pedagogical scenarios, irrespective of the specific technological
solution deployed.
But
given this rather complex web of status functions, and the apparent failure of
the attempt to get teachers to use ITEC widgets, it is also worth considering the
winners and losers in the whole enterprise. In particular, we might ask, to what
extent did teachers or learners increase their social status? To what extent
were they able to define new rights and responsibilities? The answer here is,
for learners – hardly at all; for teachers, not a lot. What about the core
project team? These, in the final analysis, were the people who clearly did
gain new networks of responsibility and obligations: they determined the nature
of the technology provision, they determined the organisation of the project,
they identified the goals and
challenges. Despite its intentions, ITEC appears fundamentally top-down, with
an “elite” management which could only gain status from the project (even
despite its failures), and teachers who were provided with few opportunities for
increasing their own status. Given that the project team had few ambitions for despotism,
how could this come about?
The
root cause for this lies in the fact that ITEC’s status function concerned not
a particular technology or a particular pedagogy, but an idea about learning.
The concepts of online connection, conversation and cognitive development –
whether in teachers or learners – lay behind not only its technological
developments, but many of its pedagogical developments. Yet over-focus on
ideals led focus away from the concrete realities of institutional life – not just
in schools, but within the universities participating in the project, and
within the governmental institutions that commissioned it in the first place. There
are some fundamental questions which emerge from the ITEC experience:
1.
What if ITEC had been more aware of the network of status
functions which it was going to become a part right from the beginning?
2.
What if the concrete requirement for status enhancement of
both learners and teachers had been in-built from the start?
3.
What if the requirement to balance the deontic power of the
project board with the deontic power between individual teachers and learners
had been recognised?
4.
What kind of preliminary research would have been necessary to establish the realities of
institutional relations?
5.
What kind of interventions might have resulted in the light
of a realistic grounding of the nature of the schools who were subject to the
intervention?
The Personal Status
of Learners: The role of Institutions and the Role of Technology
Situations such as those in ITEC are examples of
institutionally-oriented approaches to personal learning with technology.
However, the PLE articulated a vision of technologically-empowered learning
which could theoretically bypass institutions altogether, or at least stich
episodes of learning from different institutions together in individual ways.
Despite a few isolated examples of where individuals found ways of carving out
careers through engaging with online platforms, for the vast majority of
learners, the bypassing the institution has seemed unrealistic. Learners often
testify to fear and lack of confidence with online practices like blogging or
posting videos on YouTube. Even when learners can be persuaded to engage with
tools like Twitter, engagement does not always become habit, and habit does not
always entail increased self-confidence or personal learning. In particular,
online discussion forums – whilst promoted as being communities of support for
all where issues can be discussed – tend to attract the few with the
disposition to express themselves online, whilst everyone else either ‘lurks’
or fails to engage at all.
The exhortation to engage online through forums and other
means has grounded itself in ideas about learning. It is through these ideas
about learning that particular status functions are declared with regard to
particular tools and practices. However, the rationale for these status
functions is seen to be inconsistent with the experience of complying with
them: it is not only that there are sometimes perceived to be no ‘learning
experiences’ gained through engaging with the technology. It is more than
confidence is often not increased or that fears about online engagement are not
addressed. In effect, it is the fact that individuals exhorted to engage in
personal technologies for learning too often fail to acquire new deontic powers
themselves in order to declare new status functions.
In this process of the acquisition of deontic powers that
some key distinctions can be made between what happens within institutions and
what often happens online. Institutions – particularly universities – establish
themselves on the basis of a rich set of status functions which relate them to
society. For the most prestigious institutions, these status functions are almost
universally upheld in a rich network of political, historical and societal
status functions. Association with such an institution immediately connects an
individual to this network of social declarations and grants them privileged
social status. University education at all levels upholds its status functions
through various processes of exclusion and selection. However, more than this,
within an institution – even an institution which is not in the upper echelons
of the University system – opportunities are provided for individuals to
establish new commitments and obligations: it might be writing for the student
newspaper, or managing the sports club, or taking a political role in the
students union. In each case, such opportunities also accord to an individual
learner the opportunity to gain new deontic powers within a limited context:
students can find themselves in a position to take the initiative with new projects
and so on – all things which they can declare on their CVs when they graduate
and look to impress employers. Student confidence follows increases in deontic
power.
Whilst Universities portray themselves as “institutions of
learning”, analysis of the opportunities it affords for increasing deontic
powers, giving access to new rights, obligations and commitments may provide a
richer and more realistic picture of the causal power of engagement with such
institutions. Having said this, we can turn to the PLE and ask to what extent
‘learning’ might be a mistaken focus for looking at the engagement with
personal technology. In the celebrated instances of individuals making careers
through engaging with personal tools, it is possible to determine processes of
increasing social status through acquiring new rights, responsibilities,
obligations and commitments through online action. For example, the YouTube
video artist acquires an audience who harbour expectations about the kind of
thing that the artist might produce next. The artist acquires new
responsibilities to satisfy and maintain their audience. In open-source
software development environments like GitHub, a software developer might
through developing software, acquire a body of users whose expectations create
the need for the developer to honour obligations and commitments in terms of
fixing bugs, developing new functionality and new initiatives. In each case,
what we see may be better described as networks of commitments and obligations
rather than processes of learning which remain essentially unobservable.
Veblen’s Critique of
Education as Archaic and Status-serving
The account given so far of the role and efficacy of
institutional learning in providing opportunities for status enhancement goes
some way to explain why it is that the PLE has not challenged the institution
in ways that theorists thought that it might (including the present author).
Despite rising costs of institutional education, there seems to be no decline
in the demand for institutional learning, and there is certainly no abandonment
of institutional learning in favour of technological engagement. How can we
explain this? What is required is a more general theory of education as a
status-oriented activity, where the nature of the relationship between status
enhancement and economic activity is made explicit. Such a position was put
forwards over 100 years ago by the American economist Thorstien Veblen. Veblen
wrote twice about education – first in the last chapter of his “Theory of the
Leisure Class” (1899) and later in “Higher Learning in America”. Here I will
concentrate on the arguments put forwards in the former text, since they relate
directly to a more general economic theory.
Veblen sees "education"
as having not shaken-off archaic sacramental roots, presenting itself to the
"leisure classes" (Veblen’s name for the Bourgeoisie) as a means of
becoming 'priests' or shamans. Veblen argues that:
"The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all
ages, a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing, or
even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in the mind
of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy
with the occult forces"
In the relationships between those who consider themselves
'lettered' and those who don't, there is perhaps still an element of
'impressing' and 'imposing upon' that goes on. Veblen characterises the
behaviour as:
"The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
external world [...] stand in the position of a mediator between these powers
and the common run of unrestricted
humanity; for he was possessed of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette
which would admit him into the presence."
Veblen's point is not so much to drive home a point about
education. It is to drive home a point about economics. His theory of the
‘leisure class’ provides the foundation for his critique of American
capitalism. He argues that the acquisition of priestly status among the leisure
classes had become not only desirable, but mandated by 20th century
society. In mandating this pretence, the engines of the education industry
could be fired on the social aspirations of students. With this, so the engines
of social difference and inequality drive value conflicts and networks of wants
and desires which ultimately serve to keep the rich getting richer. Veblen
points to evidence for his association with priestliness and learning in the
obsession with rituals in the
University:
"the learned class in all primitive communities are great
sticklers for form, precedent, graduations of rank, ritual, ceremonial
vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally."
Later he says "Even today there are such things in the
usage of the learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation,
and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees, dignities,
and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic
succession." Furthermore, he argues that:
"These usages and the conceptions on which they rest belong to a
stage in cultural development no later than that of the angekok [shaman] and
the rain-maker."
To what extent does Veblen’s critique measure up to what we
see in the education system now? He presents a powerful description of what we might
term the 'marketisation' of education:
"it is also no doubt true that such a ritualistic reversion could
not have been effected in the college scheme of life until the accumulation of
wealth in the hands of the propertied class had gone far enough to afford the
requisite pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the colleges of
the country up to the leisure-class requirements in the higher learning. The
adoption of the cap and gown is one of the striking atavistic features of
modern college life, and at the same time it marks the fact that these colleges
have definitively become leisure class establishments, either in actual
achievement or in aspiration."
Finally, Veblen turns his focus on the leadership of
institutions. Even in America in the 1920s, the pre-echoes of 21st
century managerialism were present:
"it may be remarked that there is some tendency latterly to
substitute the captain of industry in
place of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning. The
substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of
institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with a high
degree of pecuniary efficiency."
He goes on to say that there is a tendency for educational
institutions to be run by the ‘money men’ rather than people of learning:
"There is a similar but less pronounced tendency to intrust the
work of instruction in the higher learning
to men of some pecuniary qualification."
"Administrative ability and skill in advertising the
enterprise count for rather more than they once did, as qualifications for the work
of teaching. This applies especially in those sciences that have most to do
with the everyday facts of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the
economically single-minded communities."
Institutions and
Technologies
Veblen’s analysis appears powerfully prescient, but what
does it mean for the PLE? When Veblen talks about the power of institutions he
is referring to what Searle describes as the network of status functions which
determine the position of those institutions in an economy. In particular,
Veblen’s analysis which relates the status functions of the institution with
the societal drive towards status acquisition and broader economic processes
helps to explain why it is that even despite the rising costs of institutional
education, learners are still drawn to it, being prepared to take out larger
and larger loans as a consequence. Indeed, Veblen points out that his principal
of “conspicuous consumption” by the leisure classes may make more expensive
offerings of education more attractive – social status can be achieved through
explicit and extravagant wastefulness. This gives rise to what has become
termed the ‘Veblen good’: a good whose demand is proportional to its price.
Veblen, in describing this phenomenon, is close to Bataille’s economic theory (Bataille,
1991) which related economic behaviour to exuberant wastefulness as an
expression of individual sovereignty.
When we come to ask “What is exuberant or wasteful about the
PLE?” we see by contrast a picture of economic rationalism. Indeed, this is not
just economic rationalism but also a kind of ‘learning rationalism’. However,
with regard to technological engagement, and particularly those engagements
which have been effective in raising social status, there are particular
special cases and exceptions. The principal one is the production of art. For
Bataille, artistic endeavour was a fundamental expression of exuberance: it is
an act of ‘giving’ or what Bataille termed, following Mauss (1922), a
‘potlatch’. What is particularly curious is that the potlatch of artistic
engagement produces in turn a network of new responsibilities, obligations and
rights – from which new deontic powers emerge for individuals, from where they
learn. A similar pattern of potlatch can be seen in the behaviour of
individuals who create software in GitHub. Again, this appears, at least
initially, to be a wasteful act.
From this perspective, we can see how deep differences and
similarities between technological practices and practices within the
institution relate to economic forces which will tend to manifest in the
increasing dominance of educational institutions in social life irrespective
(and maybe because of) their cost. Whilst educational certificates carry particular
declarations of status from the institutional bodies, the real value of
institutional learning relates to its provision of other opportunities for
status enhancement. Online, there are opportunities for status enhancement, but
to realise them requires a more direct engagement with fundamental processes of
exuberant and wasteful self-expression. Typically, those with the dispositions
to do this will themselves be those privileged through upbringing to have the
confidence to grab opportunities: online engagement does not represent a
solution to the problem of social inequality.
Conclusion: A
Personal Status Environment?
Technological interventions in education give us permission
to ask deeper questions about education in general: the benefit of
intervention, whether PLE, VLE, MOOC or anything else often lies not in
successful implementation (which is rare), but in illumination. The PLE
discourse asserted technology as a challenge to the institution’s hegemony on
the basis of theories of learning. The outcomes from the interventions from
projects like iTEC suggest that the theories cannot be right. The problem,
fundamentally, appears to be the intangible nature of learning itself, and the
impossibility of being able to impute concrete processes to things which go on
in peoples’ heads. The PLE (not least through the present author’s work) not
only attempted this but to design a technological infrastructure and set of
practices whereby imputed learning processes could be supported: metaphysics
drove technological development!
Technological development however does not need metaphysics
to advance its cause. There is plenty of evidence of individuals making careers
and advancing themselves through society with online activity. What is required
is a theory to explain this which does not rely on metaphysics, but practical
and concrete description. Searle’s social ontology helps with this task.
Networks of rights, responsibilities, obligations and commitments can be
revealed both by looking at the data-oriented connections between people, and
by simply asking people about their relations with one another. Who has to do
what? Who says who has to do what? What do people gain? Who has the right to
change things? Basic transformations in rights and responsibilities bring with
them the paraphernalia that typically are associated with learning: increases
in self-efficacy, confidence, skilled-performances, and so on.
Institutions have always done this. However, they have
presented what they do not as a ‘status game’ (which is what Veblen identified
was actually going on) but rather as a metaphysical process of learning. We
might ask whether for institutions to maintain their economic advantage, a
certain degree of obfuscation about what they are really about is necessary.
The appeal to the metaphysics of learning works by pretending that mysterious
processes are going on in peoples’ heads whilst in reality social climbing and
grappling for responsibility and power presents the real opportunities of the
institution (opportunities which all-too-often are most accessible to those who
already come from positions of privilege) and the currency beyond the degree
certificate which carries graduates into high-flying employment beyond
education.
Something happens to individual confidence, and status
within the learning process – and particularly in the face-to-face
interactions: it may be validation of personal viewpoints, or the ability to
enhance self-expression. If the PLE is framed around the
same metaphysical foundations that support institutions in their increasingly
expensive offerings, it is unlikely that any institution will fear personalised
learning. However, if the PLE operates as an illumination on institutional
processes and socio-economic structures, then there may be ways in which the
example of successful YouTube artists, software developers and bloggers might
be codified and amplified in ways that provide individuals with genuine ways of
using technology for social advancement. But his requires a deeper research
project. Among the factors that would need to be investigated are:
1.
The socioeconomic status of individuals engaging
in institutional study or online activity;
2.
The costs of study to learners in institutions;
3.
The motivations for online activity;
4.
The family backgrounds of individuals engaged in
online activity;
5.
The financial rewards of study to institutions;
6.
The financial rewards of online engagement to
technology corporations;
7.
The financial rewards of online activity to
individuals;
8.
The net contribution to national economy of
institutional performance;
9.
The potential benefits of student loans to the
government and industry;
10.
The extent to which individuals engage in
‘potlatch’ style behaviours online or within institutions;
11.
The power of networks of rights and
responsibilities gained through online activity;
12.
The causal efficacy of educational interventions
in making a difference (or not) to social status;
13.
The economics of course provision and the means
by which institutions maintain their viability;
14.
The utilization of free course offerings through
MOOCs and the marketing strategy of institutions;
15.
The consequences of the financialisation of
knowledge and the consolidation of enterprise operations in universities
Such a list is only a beginning, but it is an indication
that the research project of the PLE is a large-scale, transdisciplinary
affair. It must bridge the gap between a discourse around educational
processes, technological affordance, and economic analysis if it is to have any
power. Ivan Illich, whose work provided one of the polemical foundations of the
PLE argued that:
“Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no
more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built
on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their
pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom
or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility
until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education.”
In ruling out many of the popular initiatives in educational
thought (including the PLE as it was initially presented!) Illich’s argument
concerned the nature of the relationship between education and society. He goes
on to say:
“The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into
the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the
opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of
learning, sharing, and caring.”
In order to do this, the task is an understanding of the
nature of society, institutions, economy, technology and educational activity.
The PLE’s apparent failure might yet be the root of its eventual success as a
way of situating modern social life with educational processes.
References
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no. 1
Bataille, G (1991) The
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Griffiths, D; Johnson, M; Popat, K; Sharples, P; Wilson, S
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Illich, I (1971) Deschooling
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no. 1
Laurillard, D (1999) Rethinking
University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of
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