Technology and Thinking (Part 5 of a Short Introduction to Thinking about Education and Technology)

If there is a central theme to this introductory course in thinking about education and technology, it is 'constraint': the idea that our questioning about the worlds of education and technology are constrained by institutions, discourses, technologies and (frankly) other people.

In the first week, I asked you to think of a question, and then to think of all the questions around that question which give rise to you asking the question in the first place. This is not only a good exercise for thinking deeply and searchingly - it is also an exercise in the identification of constraints.

In week 2, I suggested an approach to reading which was similarly about identifying the constraints bearing upon other authors as they try articulate their ideas on paper. Writing is hard, and the PhD is fundamentally about writing. Writing is also shaped by constraints, and reading is very often about finding those authors (many of them dead) whose constraints relate to your own.

In week 3, the issue of writing itself was dealt with. The exercise here was to examine the process and experience of writing as something where ideas from the mind find externalised expression. Externalising things allows us to play with the things we create, and in doing this, we can improve our writing (moving sentences around, for example). It's in this process of rejigging of things that we become more aware of the constraints bearing upon us, and become more capable of thinking them through (I think as I write this; I write to think).

Last week, I focused on methodology and value. Methodologies are often represented as 'research recipes', but actually they are different world-views. World views themselves are dependent on the ways that the world constrains the way we look at it. If academics were deeply critical, they would never simply adopt a methodological recipe and call it 'research' (although so many do!). Instead, they would deeply examine their problem, using the different world-views of methodologies as ways of asking more penetrating questions until they find their own methodological synthesis.

Now it is time to examine one of the major constraints that bear upon us, shapes our world-views, blinds us to aspects of reality, and even changes the way we write and think - this is technology.

In this week's exercise, I want you to make a short (2 minutes) video of a space where you spend a lot of time.

1. Identify those things around you that you consider to be technologies
2. How are they important to you?
3. What would your life be without them?
4. What do you have around you which you don't consider to be technology?

The point in doing this is to highlight the extent to which lives are lived immersed in technologies. This presents lots of questions, which I discuss in my video. Technologies excite us, and as they do so, so we change the way we think. Our expectations of the world change when we see something really cool (like, for example, the Oculus Rift which I discuss in the video). There are challenges to understanding how this happens, and what its effects are.

We see dramatic social changes resulting from technological change: think about how everyone's head is stuck in a smartphone in waiting rooms or on public transport. Or how we all now use email. How did that happen? Do you remember people thinking "this will never catch on" a few years ago? Will it always be like this from now? What will be next?

The problem with social change produced by technology is that, unlike social change produced through politics, nobody votes for it. It just happens, and it changes our lives.

Some of the social changes produced by technology can be challenging for individuals and society. For example, think how many jobs now don't exist because they have been replaced with technologies. How many public services are cut-back for online services take their place? Is an online service the same as something face-to-face? Is the village store the same as Amazon.com? How can the village store compete? Technologies encourage a kind of rationalising way of thinking where people appear to become more like cogs in the machine. Human beings become 'instrumentalised' in some grand design of a 'system'. In whose interests is this done?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger worried about this aspect of technology. He argued that living with technology was the dominant way of being in the modern world. He called it "enframing". He worried that technological thinking was a way of thinking whereby the real world was only viewed through a frame which showed the resources that could be exploited by technology. The Cybernetician Heinz von Foerster expressed this concern quite neatly when he said: "we have allowed existent technology to create problems it can solve."

Heidegger believed that the only people who do not think in this way are artists, and poets in particular. Is he right? As a musician I think about this a lot: musical instruments are among the earliest of human technologies. Do they enframe?

But what we have today seems new. The fact that all the data from the use of online tools gets fed back to global corporations to be aggregated and analysed is a new development in society. What does that mean for democracy and politics? Whose interests are served by these technologies? Who wins? Who loses? These are hard questions, and perhaps our greatest current challenge is that we lack the intellectual means to be able to probe them effectively. Our technologies are so complex that whilst we know we are constrained and manipulated by them, we struggle to articulate exactly how this happens, which leaves us powerless in the face of technology's inexorable "progress".

Methodology and Thinking (Part 4 of a Short Introduction to Thinking about Education and Technology)

'Methodology' is one of the first words budding researchers are confronted with. Like an aspiring artist who approaches a master and says "I want to paint", the master says "first you must acquire technique", so the budding researcher says "I want to research", the (not very good!) supervisor says "you must acquire a methodology". But technique doesn't make an artist; and methodology certainly doesn't make a researcher. Artists have to find their voice - and they do this by discovering their technique in the heart of what it is they want to express: it can be a slow and tortuous process of trial and error. Researchers in the social sciences must too find their voice, and off-the-shelf methodologies will rarely deliver this (they represent, after all, the voices of the inventors of the methodology!); only profound critical engagement with the researcher's problem will lead to a methodological approach that is representative of the researcher's voice.

The issue of the discovery of "voice" is closely related to the issue of personal "values", and it may be surprising at first to see "values" connected with "methodology". But every methodology comes with its own assumptions about how the world is, and how it ought to be. The crude experimental paradigm of before-and-after tests assumes a world of regular and uniform human behaviour where the results of an experiment in a sample can be extrapolated to the larger population. Is that how the world is? ... many will ask. Equally, the phenomenological reduction of Grounded Theory carries its own presuppositions - particularly in the possibility of 'bracketing out' experience, and in the neutrality of processes of coding and development of theory. (Grounded theory often doesn't seem very grounded!)

Whatever method we choose, in education research there is a tendency to want to say "intervention x is good", "conditions y are bad", and so on. Such statements may be supported with methodological practices like Grounded Theory, Action Research, interview analysis, etc, etc. But in the end, the research is evaluative, declaring something good or bad. Accepting this means that our own values must be inspected. Indeed, this is a good starting point for really being able to grapple with the (often unwelcome) monster that is 'methodology'.

So this week, I want you to take a piece of work you have done in the past (it can be a paper, an essay, a blog post), and write a short passage of text answering the following questions:

1. What is your conclusion in your work?
2. By what method do you reach your conclusion?
3. If you think your method is sound, describe how the world must be for your conclusions to be true...
4. If you're unsure about your method, why did your choose it?
5. What does your choice of method tell you about what YOU are like?

This is a challenging exercise. But the real value in exploring methodology is that it challenges us to think about our values through examining the values of those who promote different methodologies.

These are the most challenging questions any researcher has to ask themselves because they strike at the heart of our own identity. Unfortunately, too often methodology is treated as a kind of recipe, and this self-inspection doesn't happen. The result is bad work!
 

Writing and Thinking (Part 3 of A Short Introduction to Thinking in Education and Technology)

One of the purposes of last week's exercise on "reading" is to understand texts as something produced by other people (writers), and that in reading texts we are trying to understand those people. In an ideal world, we could take them for coffee and have a long discussion with them: their manner, inflections of speech, body language and the look in their eyes would tell us much about them that we would feel we could get to know them (we still might be mistaken though!). Unfortunately, most of the people we read are dead, or live far away, or haven't got time, and so on. Writing is the best we can do: like most technologies, it is an imperfect substitute for supposedly ideal human relations. Writing is a constraint on writers' self-expression, and in understanding that constraint, and how individual writers deal with it can sometimes be as revealing about a writer as a face-to-face meeting.

 

This week I want to focus on the experience of writing: the way that thoughts and actions bounce between another as actions gradually manipulate words on a screen, or scribbles on a piece of paper. This is everyone's experience of writing, and yet we rarely inspect it despite the fact that the fundamental task of any PhD is a producing an lot of text!

 

In this week's exercise, I want you to document the process of writing a short (300 word) passage of text. You are going to take multiple snapshots of your text at regular short intervals during its composition: from the first sentence all the way through to the completed passage. The text should be based around the question you asked in Exercise 1, and the different critical, experiential and analytical ideas you explored there can feature as a framework for you text.

 

In the video below, I explain this a bit more. One of the biggest problems is managing how you feel as you produce text. It is extremely common to write a few lines, read them back, get tired, and then to think after a bit of reflection they are no good and give up! How do you get over the emotional block? I talk about some of the things I do to avoid this.

 

Some things to think about after you've done this:

• To what extent does your written passage reveal your own constraints?
• To what extent is the technology of writing (the words, the computer, the pen and paper, etc) a constraint on how you express yourself?
• To what extent does your writing reflect a particular world-view?
• To what extent do you consider other world-views to be possible?

Next week's activity is about world views and their relationship with methodologies. The week after, we consider the constraints of technology.

Reading and Thinking (Part 2 of A Short Introduction to Thinking in Education and Technology)

Last week I introduced an exercise to stimulate deep thinking about education and technology. You had to think of a question which interested you. The exercise didn't lead you to answer the question. Instead, the exercise aimed to highlight the CONSTRAINTS around the question you asked in the form of analytical constraints, critical constraints, and experiential constraints. This week I want to further explore this issue of constraint on thinking with regard to the process of reading in academic study.

 

When we get to University, people tend to assume we can read. Of course most of us can perform the mechanics of reading - we can read a passage of text out loud, we can gain a sense of meaning of a text, and so on - just like we were taught to do in primary school. But beyond acquiring the mechanics of reading in primary school, we tend not to re-examine what it is to read. Unfortunately, there are many side effects of our early reading education which can cause problems when reading at a higher level. The worst side effects are:

• The expectation that things should be read from the beginning to the end:
• Samuel Johnson famously said "who reads books through?" Academics tend not to read things from cover to cover. Usually the process is one of constructing an understanding of a book (or a paper) by frequently 'dipping in' and working backwards and forwards.
• The expectation that Reading is a separate activity to thinking:
• Reading and thinking are entwined. A page of a book is some kind of environmental stimulation of thought. We don't understand how this works!
• The expectation that the words of a text indicate the meaning of a text:
• There is an assumption that the meaning of a text can be revealed through laborious study of the words and their meaning. The words of a text in a book are signs of the constraints operating on the author. Your job is to get to know the author. C.S. Lewis reminds us that "We read to know we are not alone". You will rarely get to know an author through a single book.
• The expectation that the study of texts is hard work:
• This is the most damaging of all. My advice is that you should never read anything unless you do so feeling excited, curious and passionate about what you are doing. If you don't feel like that, do something else that will make you feel like that - and then read!

The texts I'm asking you to examine as part of the exercise are:

• T.S.Eliot - Notes towards the definition of culture - The introduction (available in the Amazon Preview): http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Towards-Definition-Culture-Eliot/dp/0571063136#reader_B004EPXXB0

• Gilly Salmon - E-moderating - "What is e-moderating?" and "Jane's diary" (available in Amazon Preview) http://www.amazon.com/E-Moderating-Gilly-Salmon/dp/0415335442/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390247723&sr=8-1&keywords=gilly+salmon+e-moderating#reader_0415335442

For each one, the question is "How are they thinking?" - experientially, analytically or critically?

 

A Short Introduction to Thinking in Educational Technology: Part 1 of 6

This is a short "course" in thinking about education. I've put "course" in "" because I'm not really sure what a "course" is. Except that I can see that education is full of them, and if you want to do anything in education, you have a create a "course".

But you can change someone's life in 5 minutes!

There's something peculiar about a course in stretching the 5 minutes to 6 weeks! (Ezra Pound first made this point in his "ABC of Reading"). Maybe (Pound suggests) we do it just to try and justify sufficient payment for the employment of teachers for longer than 5 minutes.

Why am I doing this? In the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton, we continually receive requests from students to study for a PhD. The number of these requests has grown in recent years (the PhD "market" - more inverted commas! - is likely to become very excited in the next few years as students try to differentiate themselves in a world where everyone has a degree). The problem is that a PhD is a very high risk strategy for a student. It is unlike any other academic award because, in the end, the award is a kind of declaration of trust between the student, the supervisor and the external and internal examiners. If either of the examiners are not comfortable with the award, it tends not to be made. After 3 or more years work, that can be a bitter blow. As with most failures in life, the root causes are usually deeply buried in the origins of the study. By the time it comes to the PhD examination, there's often little that can be done to remedy these kind of problems. The biggest problem, particularly in educational PhDs lies in assuming education to be simpler than it is. It may be that Vice-Chancellors and education Ministers can get away with this (although they shouldn't), but PhD students usually can't.

Some causes of simplistic thinking have their roots in the academy. Particularly at fault are the off-the-peg methodologies that are sometimes (unfortunately) presented to students as "ways of studying phenomenon x". At the extreme end are the kind of naive empirical studies involving pre and post-tests which see education as a branch of pharmacology. But naive thinking extends to methodologies whose supposed intentions are more realistic, but in their application, a gaping void of unexplored questions opens up between the real problems of education and those problems exposed by the methodology. Action research is a good example - great for hands-on trying-things-out, but generally poor at deeper explanatory frameworks which would ground critical analysis and build a foundation for the advancement of knowledge (which is what the PhD is meant to be about). Grounded theory is another popular technique but now too often uncritically applied as a kind of crank-turning process whose underpinning phenomenological foundations are rarely explored (and many of which are rather suspect!). This is to say nothing of the increasing use of text analytic software and the automated statisticisation of real experience which only serves to mask that experience in a fog of measurements. I'm not in principle against any of these techniques - they can all be useful. But I am against not thinking. And not thinking is the surest route to failure in the PhD.

So I want to provide students with a way of assessing the risk they face when embarking on a PhD before they pay the money to sign up for one. It also helps us assess the risk we might face in supporting them. In doing this, the purpose of this course is to get students to "challenge everything". This is how we think in IEC, and my hope is that having pursued this, students might be better prepared to make the decision whether to come and study with us or not.

The course is structured around activities, not content. Although we use some texts, the real purpose is to get students to produce artefacts which allow an inspection of how they think, and a framework for creating a strategy for deepening their thinking. The activities are:

Week 1: A 'way of thinking' mind-map. This activity focuses on the difference between analytical thinking, critique and experiential testimony. It's purpose is to highlight the difficulties of thinking straight about education.

Week 2: Reading critically. This activity focuses on two texts considering them from the point of view of analysis, critique and experience. The texts couldn't be more different: T.S. Eliot's "Notes towards the definition of Culture" and Gilly Salmon's "E-moderating". Students are asked to write a short analysis of the comparison between passages from each.

Week 3: The critical experience of writing. We look at  the experience of writing. How to deal with the creative process of trying to write about education and organise your thinking? How to deal with critically re-reading your own work and reorganising it. The exercise this week will use the mind map you produced in week 1.

Week 4: Method and Ideas in education. Using the mind map from week 1, we will explore the relationship between methods and knowledge about the reality of education. What is a research method and how does it relate to the way we think about education? This week's exercise involves you critiquing your own work.

Week 5: Technology and Experience. How does technology change the way we think? How do different media of communication change the way we think? What is the experience of using technology? Students will be asked to produce a short video on this topic and publish it online.

Week 6: Thinking and Modelling. What is a model? Why are they useful? Why can they be problematic? In this week's assignment you will be asked to draw a simple model of an educational problem that interests you. You will be challenged to identify the communication dynamics between the different actors in your model, together with the critical areas of doubt that you might have about your model.

So here's the video from Week 1: A "Way of thinking" mind-map
My example, which build's on my question "Why is education usually rubbish" can be seen by following the link to the Prezi presentation below.
Obviously, students will need to think of their own question.

Have fun!


A link to the Prezi presentation used: http://prezi.com/gpfp-hvofnzr/education-ppt1/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy