The ITEC project, the ITEC Widget Store and Togetherness in the Classroom of the Future

This is my presentation from the Eisenstadt E-learning conference where I discussed the theme of 'togetherness' in the context of emerging technologies including the ITEC WidgetStore, real-time technology and the classroom of the future.  My talk began by getting all the delegates to sing, using one of the techniques which I learnt from Pauline Oliveros's 'Deep Listening'. (I'm grateful to my experiences at the American Society for Cybernetics for this). The point in doing this was to underline the particular and special situation of doing activities together: this is not Facebook, Twitter or a VLE - it has a different and more profound quality.

I divided the challenge of thinking about the classroom of the future into three categories: SPACES, ACTIVITIES and ORGANISATION.

Technology, and in particular ITEC Technologies, seek to mediate between these three aspects, providing new kinds of SPACES for learning, different kinds of ACTIVITIES, and providing new ways ORGANISING those activities. 

Real-Time technologies are, I believe, fundamental to this transformation of spaces for learning. With the advent of real-time interactive systems like Steam and OnLive, the richness of real-time collaborative experiences is deepening. At the same time, such technologies afford richer kinds of interactive activities in physical spaces: for example, cinemas might exploit real-time interactivity for audience participation (equally lectures, although cinema and theatre might in the end prove far more attractive). 

But what of the kinds of activities that are done? Here again, I think real-time technologies play an important role. However, rich activities online don't just have to be real-time. Eric Whittaker's Virtual Choir still stands out for me to be the best online activity I have seen. But there has been an explosion on the web of simple activities embodied as 'widgets' or webpages, which if used creatively by teachers can be really innovative and enrich lessons. Making these activities easily accessible for teachers to organise is one of the goals of ITEC. The ITEC Widget Store does just this, by providing the facilities not just to browse a range of different kinds of widget-based activity, but to personally curate collections of favourite tools. 

But then, given a range of tools, how can learning activities be coordinated? Here too, recent technological development are addressing the ease with which activities can be presented to a class, and coordinated. The Open-Sankore open-source Interactive Whiteboard platform can seamlessly integrate with ITEC's widgets because it uses the same W3C standard. There is one way of coordinating activity. But I also demonstrated the ability to present tools to users, and to dynamically change the tools that are presented on each user's screen using the ITEC Presenter Widget. This also uses the technology of the Real-time web, and provides a facility to ensure that learners have a shared experience, even when they are looking at personal devices. 

Finally, I invited people to participate in a performance of Haydn's Surprise Symphony. This was done by using the interactive features of the real-time web to power 'controller widgets' which served to deliver real-time signals to a sound generator on my machine which was hooked to the sound system in the class. At the crucial moment, participants hit a button to ensure that Haydn's surprise was more surprising than even he intended!

Togetherness in Eisenstadt

Tomorrow I'm speaking at an e-learning conference in Eisenstadt, Austria (see http://homepage.bildungsserver.com/scms/content/index.php?kat_id=310&schul_id=1033&k_name=Conference+2012&aktuelles_seite=) Eisenstadt is etched in my musical knowledge as the home of Joseph Haydn, where he served at the Esterhazy court and struggled with a difficult domestic situation. Haydn's music is the epitome of joy, lightness and humour whilst also bearing witness to the most profound humanity and musical wisdom. I'm tempted to ask "what's the equivalent in education?". It seems so often the epitome of misery, boredom, heaviness and consistently favouring the superficial over the profound! Maybe I'm being unfair. I would have love to have met Haydn (one of the few composers I think I would have enjoyed talking to), but I have had some rare experiences through education to meet individuals who have possessed humour, lightness and profundity. Everything else was nonsense. Computers, I fear, have made the situation worse.

What I want to say at the conference is that computers need not make it worse. But in order to ensure that they do not become the tools of the harbingers of misery, we need to understand our truly joyful experiences of learning. I will begin with music - not just because it is my passion (and the best advice I was given when I trained to be a teacher was "teach your passion!") - but because it is unique in bringing people together. Joy comes from togetherness.

When we make sounds together we become aware of each other. We listen to each other. We sense the universality of our individual experiences; we look at each other. This is the root of learning and the path to wisdom. There is no wisdom without listening and that which we learn we learn about each other. Even physics and maths.

Technologies as we have them - our so-called "social technologies" - offer us little opportunity to listen. Who really listens to someone's Facebook post? If you really listened you would hear something different from what was written. Maybe...

"I'm posting this because I need to tell the world I exist and having a good time even though I'm not because I am having an existential crisis!". 

If we listened to that, we'd understand more about what technology isn't doing for us at the moment.

7 billion of us are inhabiting spaces together increasingly unaware of each others existence, their humanity, or their needs. This may be because appreciation of others means we have to consider our own existence, our humanity, our needs. And who wants to do that?? Technology is deafening us because we want to be deafened.

What is possible? How might it be different?

Imagine a shared space with lots of atomised individuals all staring into their own online worlds. Suddenly something grabs their attention and points them to the same resource. They become curious. They engage. As they do things with the resource, things happen around them which affect everyone else. Their attention shifts from their own screens to their environment and to each other. It's as if suddenly, everyone's been given a musical instrument and has been invited to participation in a performance. Technology has drawn people together and created a shared experience. Everyone remembers it. It is a meaningful moment.

I will argue in future posts that such moments are moments when technology is used to create a shared absence, and that this absence is the driver for learning. Absence is not content. It is simply the surprise revealing of the thing everybody was avoiding. That's what I believe we should be aiming for with learning technology. It is also the art that Haydn excelled at.

Towards A Negative Theory of Learning

If the best we can do with constructivist learning theory is the MOOC, and if theory predicts that MOOCs will work, then it's time for a new theory! As I have been arguing recently, constructivist theory is essentially positivist: it reduces reality to actual posited mechanisms of the learning process, and that learning and knowledge is a process which can be accounted for by the action of these mechanisms. To adopt a constructivist approach in this way means trying to account for the most mysterious aspects of human experience through a mechanistic metaphor. Computers, in being the epitome of mechanism, are ideally suited to this approach. And yet all we have managed to do appears deficient in comparison to established and ancient practices of learning.

As a cybernetician I perhaps ought to be sympathetic to the mechanicists. But equally, as a cybernetician, I am more familiar with the deficiencies of this kind of mechanistic thinking. It leads here: http://www.talkcarswell.com/ (more about that later). And I want to suggest an alternative approach.

My experience of learning is visceral. Music knocked me sideways, philosophy thrilled me, science intrigued me, technology fascinated me and religion allowed me to step back into a space where everything was one. I fell in love with subjects, sometimes teachers or fellow students, and all the time being battered by a continual drive for something... I think (now)... meaning. I might well have constructed my world, but the extent to which it could whack me in the solar plexus was the richest reality I knew, and (through music) I knew that it was real for others too.

It's the whacking and the reality of it that matters! Not everyone feels it like this (I was odd!). But my first task is to compare my experience with what I imagine the experience of those who are unmoved by these things. Often, I wonder, they were being whacked by other things - by family, relationships, worries, etc. I believed getting whacked by science or music would help me establish the connections to others that I wished for; those uninterested in science didn't wish for those connections. My antennae were tuned in a particular way; others had different antennae. In essence, we had different strategic priorities. It's much like the differences that emerge in relationships when two people have moved past the stage of physically exciting each other to realise they are wanting entirely different things.

It is not what is thought, it is not what thinking itself is that matters. It is what is not thought. What is not thought bears on what is thought, what is decided, in powerful ways. My strategic priorities, like those of others around me, were the product of what each of us could not think. The reasons why things are unthinkable are, I believe, emotional: unthinkability relates to family, love, attachments. That means that unthinkability is social.

Constructivism is wrong in characterising a coordination of understanding - a coordination of thinking. What I think happens - what amounts to a negative theory - is the idea that coordinations occur around what is not thinkable. Shared absence is at the heart of this: those experiences which in a group of people produce the same physical reaction, the same turning of the stomach, the same 'knocking sideways'. Learning stems from this as a process of directly engaging with that shared absence and progressively determining it.

This is the process of human intimate relationships. The sexual absence which is felt is a shared question for each. It's gradual determination, exploration, identification leads to new absences which will either bring people closer together or drive them apart. Learning is the same. The astonishment of seeing sodium explode in water is shared amongst those who witness it. What happens then is a kind of critique. Different things are determined depending on the backgrounds of the individuals who experience this, depending on the thinkability or unthinkability of things, which in turn will depend on deeper emotional predispositions. The absence of the explosion is determined in different ways. One might say "rubbish! it's a con!", the other says "I can join a community of scientists!". Of course, they might both be right!

In education, we aspire to get everyone to the view of "I want to join a community of scientists" (or some other academic community). We measure individuals as to the extent to which they succeed in this, and determine their life chances based on this. A negative theory of learning highlights how dangerous this is. For the reaching of that position is determined by what is not thinkable. It is determined by a set of attachment situations and emotional predispositions which are codified in class structures which succeed only in delimiting thought. The anti-education critique is however a different set of unthinkable propositions which are no less worth exploring and critiquing than those which fit the system. Yet the system struggles support their exploration - particularly in school.

Most serious are the growing noises from government circles about particular 'idealised' educational experiences. I was horrified to see Geoff Mulgan saying that 'bad' universities should close (see http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=421875&c=1). I'm horrified because I've been a fan of Mulgan in the past, and he shares an enthusiasm for the work of Stafford Beer. But this is terrible. The ideals of 'good education' are essentially what is thinkable by the likes of Mulgan, Gove, Cameron and others. They believe, like the constructivists, that learning results from a 'coordination of understanding'. They believe that the community within 'good universities' might be expandable to learners at bad universities (i.e. takeovers). The opportunity to coordinate your understanding with the understanding of the great and the good can be sold as a product. Because of this, "Bad Universities" represent an absence for them which is different to what they represent to those who study and work there. But the absences of the great and the good (in good Universities) will never be the same as the absences of those in 'bad' universities: this cannot work. In essence, there is a shared absence relating to 'badness' of an institution amongst a class-oriented group, and a contrasting absence amongst the immediate stakeholders within that institution.

Ultimately, this results is the opposite of learning: oppression. The danger lies in the unthinkability of that proposition for Mulgan and co., and its visceral reality for those who will be their victims.

Learning, Society and Absence

If we believed that the social aspects of learning demanded some sort of physical proximity between individuals, then we would never have thought that e-learning was a good idea. Given that the experience of e-learning is generally still terrible - solitary individuals hunched over computers, knots in the stomach as they try to work out "what am I meant to do?", "where do I click?", "why am I doing this?", etc... dealing with the mantra to "engage socially" (which generally means exposing yourself through text messages that everyone else can see - more knots in the stomach), what do these experiences tell us about the deficiencies in the way we think about learning?

First of all, it is important to say that given sufficient determination and effort by learners, these terrible experiences can work. However, little is known about the conditions within which it works, and the conditions within which it doesn't. Given that the e-learning brigade is generally self-serving and has a vested interest in 'talking-up' the experience, it is very difficult to get a handle of the differences between actual experience and success.

I think physical proximity really matters in this process. And so I'm going to have a guess: things work online when learners are supported by those who are physically close to them. It works when the learners engagement online, at a distance, becomes part of the 'family project', or the 'work project'. Progress in the online course becomes an important factor in maintaining local conversations which people who matter in day-to-day life, rather than individuals represented as pixels on the screen. These attachments counter-balance (even compliment) the crappiness  of the online experience. Some research needs to be done here.

Conversely, when this is not the case, when the learner is really on their own, then I think it may not work. Although, there may be exceptions: the very lonely individual for whom online communities offer their only social outlet, for example. But I'd be willing to bet that such an individual would crave proximal (probably intimate) communications instead and the online vehicle might become a way of achieving that (or maybe a surrogate).

Thinking, attachment, emotional management and strategic engagement with technology are deeply entwined. What I may be saying is that attachments are a key factor in success in e-learning. The fact that attachment seems to be significant raises a number of questions. Simply comparing attachments to internet use, or to success in e-learning or participation on forums may be to over-reduce complex causal relationships. If we think with others, and our thinking relates to the management of attachments, then the strategies we pursue (whether face-to-face or online) are related to those relationships. But if this is the case, what does it tell us about thinking itself and physical relationships? What is the involvement of the body in intellectual life?

I've been making some suggestions here recently (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/body-society-and-learning-from.html) Our understanding of learning as "mental process", or learning as "connected mental processes", or learning as "practice and reflection in the light of models" all appear suspect. None of them acknowledge that for each individual there  are other individuals who are deeply important to personal viability: parents, partners, children, colleagues, etc. This oversight is largely responsible for some big mistakes in e-learning, including MOOCs, Learning Design, Instructional Design, etc. Maintaining attachments with those we love is essential for establishing sufficient emotional management to engage in challenging processes of learning. Ironically, many thinkers in e-learning themselves seem to plateau-out, no longer wishing to challenge themselves or their current knowledge, but preferring instead to believe that they are right and to become evangelists. But then, that's why e-learning is dead.

I'll return to this, but to illustrate my point, just imagine someone you deeply love standing alone on the precipice of a cliff. Most typically this might be your child. Think how you feel. The terrified anxiety which turns the stomach; the frantic search for ways of reaching them and dragging them back; the desperate instinct to protect; the fear that something might happen which threatens not only them, but you too. The bodily sensation here is fundamental and, I believe, ontological. The intellectual challenge brought about by the situation drives us to new thinking, new ideas. And this, I submit, is a better way of thinking about learning than the coordination of mental models, or whatever other mechanism might be suggested.

The difference between this scenario and the descriptions of learning that have be proposed to us by e-learning aficionados is simple: My scenario focuses on the negative, on what isn't there - all that we know is the churning of the stomach. All other descriptions attempt to assert a positive mechanism - what is proposed to be there (interestingly, positive descriptions often turn my stomach - I think of what isn't described!)

If there is a priority in the theoretical development in education, it lies in understanding the logic of the negative and the absent. That this theoretical development is urgent is underlined by the terrible things we are currently doing to education.

An Idea for a University

Amidst the attempts to fathom the "direction of Higher Education" in an environment of cuts, privatisation (see http://union-news.co.uk/2012/11/uclan-set-to-become-first-mainstream-privatised-university/), managerial hubris, ministerial expediency, redundancies and parodies (see http://uniserfs.wordpress.com/), the more obvious question is "what do we want university to be?" It rarely gets asked because it's difficult. Attempts in the past to ask it (first and foremost by Newman, then by various thinkers ranging from the Frankfurt school to F.R. Leavis) were from an age very different to ours, from an education system deeply different. None of them believed mass higher education was a good idea.

The environment of widening participation universities (like my own) would have been completely alien to most of those thinkers, who were themselves very comfortably ensconced in the system they described. They would have remarked that it "wasn't really a university" meaning that it wasn't at all like Oxford. I'd like to think that Newman might have had a bit more of an insight into Bolton than the likes of Leavis - after all, his ministry in inner-city Birmingham brought him into contact with something completely unlike Oxford. Newman wanted to make something special in Birmingham - he passionately believed in his Oratorian Movement and its spiritual and social mission. I'm thinking of this not just because I think a similar social mission needs to accompany the development of our new kinds of "university for everyone", but also because Manchester is about to acquire its own Oratorian Movement (see http://offerimustibidomine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/new-oratory-for-manchester.html) in a particularly run-down part of town. I believe this matters.

Students often turn up at Universities not being quite sure about why they are there. In fact this applies to students at many red-brick universities, but it especially applies to widening participation institutions. The chance to get a degree is of course important, but the means of getting a degree (boring lectures, assignments, exams) often comes as something of a disappointment, and for many widening participation students an uncomfortable reminder of where they have failed in their education up to this point. Too often Universities repeat the circumstances which give rise to habits of failure. Too often, now scandalously, they are still happy to take the students money when this happens (even penalising the students for the privilege). What bastards!

The world might be a better place if students didn't feel they all needed degrees. But I suspect the reasons why our society inculcates this need are deeply entwined with where our economy is in a post-industrial world. So all students feel they need degrees. But here is where I think Universities, and particularly widening participation universities can help.

My idea for a University is a place which helps students deal with the problem they are faced with: believing they need a degree; not knowing which institution/course to choose; not having equal freedoms to choose institutions or courses; sometimes not knowing where they are going; struggling with assessments; struggling with the cost of it all. It isn't just about trying to do things cheap, although that's important. It's about waking up to the barriers that we put in the student's way almost without thinking because we've grown accustomed to saying "but this is how we do it in education".

Education, I believe, is an important step in an individual's search for meaning in life. Education fails if it makes life more confusing and unmanageable. Sadly it often does this.

The search for meaning begins with trying to assess the chances of success of an educational journey (which the student is paying for) before that journey is embarked upon. The experience of education is so unreliable. Lectures are so hit-and-miss. I think students deserve more reliability in their educational experience, and they should be able to sample the educational experience before signing up to the course. Universities should be able to say to students "this is the experience we can guarantee" and this will be accurate. With the remarkable technologies we have, there is no reason why this cannot be done. Being able to sample the experience is an important step in being able to make the choice as to which course/institution and to assess their chances of success. By this path, my idea for a university is one of 'open education': where the experience is reliable and open to all; where the business model is geared around the provision of certificates, and the risks in submitting oneself for certification can be inspected by the student prior to committing themselves and paying their fees. This, I feel, is only fair.

However, meaningful experience is not just the performance of a lecturer. It is the social environment. But there too, the organisation and effectiveness of activities that students engage in is also hit-and-miss. As I have argued, thinking is a social activity. But the social activity of thinking and doing needs to be coordinated and people engaged. Being with others is special. Universities should aspire to create activities and experiences which can be tried, tested and reproduced.

When I was a student I wanted, more than anything else, to know what my professor thought of my work. More than anything else I wanted feedback from him. The rich and personal feedback is a fundamental component of what the university offers to students. I believe that here too, there are important incursions for technology in the support of deep and meaningful feedback.

But why is it that meaningful feedback about individual student's development rarely happens? Why is it that the work students engage in on their course is so often mundane and irrelevant to their lives? These questions boil down to the ways students are assessed. Yet, since the advent of modules and outcome-based education, all assessments are conducted against a set of learning outcomes. There is no reason why individual learners shouldn't produce work which is personal and meaningful to them, whilst also meeting the specific learning outcomes for each module. This is the route of "personal inquiry" and innovative assessment methods like Patchwork Text (see http://www.richardwinter.net/node/13). It doesn't require a radical shake-up of curricula. It just requires greater flexibility and imagination on the part of teachers.

The way students are assessed is so fundamental, and I doubt that it was an issue that registered at all with Newman or anyone else in the past. Assessment is part of a conversation with the learner. If it is rigid, if it is inauthentic, if it is exactly the same task for all the learners, then the conversation with the individual learner will quickly dry-up and learners will become disillusioned (and probably do the sensible thing and game the system!). But if the assessment is personal to the learner, whilst sticking to the set assessment criteria for modules, then there is room for a richer conversation, not just with the teacher, but between peers. And because it's individual and personal, plagiarism is minimised and feedback can be continually constructive. This way the conversation about the pursuit of meaning can support learners throughout their studies.

But what of research? Surely that's important in Universities? I think the development and adaptation of human beings to a complex and technological world is one of the most serious challenges we face in our world today. If we could only crack this problem many of our other crises and research priorities in health, technology, world peace and global flourishing would at the very least become much more manageable. It would open science to everyone, to make the march of progress a participatory affair. It is in institutions like my own (and not Oxford) where these developmental and adaptational problems are dealt with head-on. Studying and developing ways of addressing them best through education is probably the most important research that any institution could be engaged in today.

Nice noises

Amongst my fondest memories of my music professor Ian Kemp was his disarming way of poking fun at musicological seriousness. On receiving well-intentioned but jargon-filled explanations for musical moments, he would sometimes say, "yes, that's interesting.. but maybe it's just a nice noise". It stopped people in their tracks because the niceness of the noise was somehow absent in its technical descriptions. He could, of course, be deeply serious and technical too, but he knew the importance of popping his own bubble.

Music is good at bubble-popping. I've found it invaluable in my current work simply because however carried-away I get with hubristic and idealistic explanations for learning, technology or society, they rarely go anywhere in explaining the extraordinary experience of music. Music will always ask questions which show up the holes in any explanation. That keeps me moving on, never settling on any uber-formula for education. But in moving me on, I am driven to search for some new formula.

That's where I am at the moment. I am thinking about  'nice noises'. I wonder if a nice noise is like being poked in the stomach. What do I feel? Wow! I'm arrested (as I was listening to Beethoven in the car this morning). My whole body feels a sensation quite unlike any other kind of sensation. It's most like sex or eroticism (another of Kemp's interjections was "music's all about sex, you know"), but it is more cerebral than that, more controlled. But the most remarkable thing about it is that in experiencing it, I know something of the experience of others hearing it too. I think now (after musing about parody http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/parody-and-truth.html and the body, http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/body-society-and-learning-from.html) this is the most important thing: the social awareness that arises from visceral experience.

It is shared absence. Academic explanation is a way of trying to determine the absence. But equally (and perhaps more authentically) so is just to say "wow!" or to smile, or to inhale. And indeed, all those bodily responses themselves carry their own 'social awareness' (we know what it feels like for others to inhale; when others smile, we know what it means, etc). Something deeply recursive goes on here. It's interesting me to think that much of the power of orgasm can be thought of in the same way - but that's another post!

But the moments of 'nice noise' do not come out of nothing. There is structure, melody, rhythm, harmony all of which contrive to create extraordinary moments. There is a definite ebb-and-flow of physical sensation, a development of anticipation. Again, in analytical discourse about music, this ebb-and-flow is poorly accounted for (often meaning that music which doesn't fit analytical models is disparaged).

I will explore this in a later post, but at this stage, it is interesting to think that moments of motivic repetition can become dull if over-mechanical. Dull-ness too is a physical sensation. But what causes it? If there is a game that is played between listeners and the music, then that game probably involves a continual coordination of  anticipations with what is heard. An expectation is a choice out of possibilities. In game-theoretical terms, the choice would arise from identifying an equilibrium point.

I'm going to speculate that when we are engaged in music, we can identify our anticipations because we can identify our equilibrium points. The mechanism whereby this happens has something to do with what's not there rather than what is (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/release-concepts-and-understanding-more.html). Ambiguity and suggestion is the food of engagement.

But if patterns are asserted over and over again, the positive choices (the things that are there) can be felt over the things that are not. That means that it becomes harder to identify equilibrium points; it becomes harder to choose an anticipation (this sounds awkward and probably needs unpacking, but bear with me!). This produces what I'm thinking of as an 'equilibrium crisis' where distinctions between anticipations break down. That too has a physical component. From the absence of the crisis comes something new: a new idea, a new motif. This is the moment of disruption, either through rhythm, harmony, melody, etc.

There's more to say here regarding music. But at the same time there's something to say about the experience of learning, which (along with sex!) has remarkable similarities to the experience of music.

On Knots and Universities

Imagining a world without universities is difficult. Even for those who've never been, they're there, the places that their mates might have gone, but where they personally chose not to go. Certainly, everyone has an opinion about universities, as they do about education in general, from "waste of space!" to "fundamental to civilisation!".

The first thing to say is that a world without universities is not a world without learning. Learning is intrinsic to life. Anthropological studies have highlighted the societal structures by which children are cultivated into the norms of their society, by which rites of passage lead to transformations of social function, and through which belief systems, ethical codes, justice, play and art take their place within the complex shared experiences of belonging to a society.

Universities have simply become part of the belief system of our own society. They have their myths, their history, their rites of passage and have assumed their role within the social order. Universities and churches have more than their historical origins in common. Despite the crudely functionalist rhetoric of ministers and  vice-chancellors, the University is still metaphysical in nature: imagining a world without universities is like imagining a world without religion.

It is to imagine what might happen if the great knot that our society has tied between the minds of individuals, old buildings, books and practices and which keeps many individuals in a certain place and engaging in particular kinds of activity (often without knowing why) has been untied. What is gone is the reason to engage in those practices, to be in that space. What then?

To answer that, we may need to understand something about the nature of the knots in the first place. The double-binds of education are everywhere: the curriculum that must be followed irrespective of an individual's interests; the exams that must be sat irrespective of their ability to measure learning; the texts that must be followed irrespective of their relevance; and so on. Tying a knot in anything turns it from 'anything' into a 'knot'. The knot is there because it's a knot.

Human life is full of knots. Family therapists spend their time trying to untangle the knots between siblings, parents and children, men and women. Economists spend their time trying to fathom out the ways in which individuals wrestle with their own personal and social knots (spending money - another knot - whilst they do it). It may not to too far-fetched to say that the only thing that creates the conditions for concernful agency in anything is being caught in a knot. Luhmann calls this the central paradox that sits at the heart of his various communications systems - a 'contingency formula'.

What becomes of research if we untie the knot of universities? Or rather, what becomes of the knot of research? Well, it probably gets tied somewhere else. What becomes of art history or music? Some other knot will probably be tied. What becomes of wisdom??

Wisdom may be something different. That's the thing that tells you you're in a knot. Would we lose wisdom if we lost Universities?

Universities don't teach wisdom; they award degrees. Wisdom certainly happens through learning and personal growth. It may happen in Universities (and Universities have covered themselves in glory for those instances where it has). But often it doesn't, or it happens elsewhere.

To ask of the nature of wisdom is to inquire into the nature of the human intellect. Newman writes:

The intellect of man [...] energizes as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights and sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It discerns in lines and colours, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. It gathers up a succession of notes into the expression of a whole, and calls it a melody; it has a keen sensibility towards angles and curves, lights and shadows, tints and contours. It distinguishes between rule and exception, between accident and design. It assigns phenomena to a general law, qualities to a subject, acts to a principle, and effects to a cause.

You don't need a University to do that. What is needed are the conditions for love. That may be to be caught in a knot; to know that you are caught in a knot; and to accept it with grace.

That our knotty universities are currently tying themselves into such a bundle they neither know they are in a knot, nor can accept it, is a curious indictment on the effectiveness of universities for producing wisdom.

If I accept that 'knowing that we are in a knot' and 'accepting it with grace' are important, then the challenge reveals itself: describe the deeply complex knotty web of universities, technology and economy.