#EdTech as an Academic Discipline and the phenomenon of Paradigm-Switching

As a relatively new area of academic engagement, #EdTech makes interesting comparison with the rise of ‘management’ as an academic subject in the 1980s. Business schools have prospered following the establishment of management and organisation studies, providing popular (and lucrative) courses (particularly the MBA) for aspiring and practising professionals. Their success combined with the transdisciplinary nature of the subject of ‘management’ made the business school a magnet for sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, cyberneticians, historians, and many others in providing a focused ‘problem domain’ with the study of management, whilst at the same time providing a greater degree of professional security (and in some cases, enhanced salaries) for academics who were struggling in somewhat ‘dusty’ native departments. Even the critique of the business school provided by ‘Critical Management Studies’ (which in part is a critique of the academy) has been absorbed into the mainstream function of the business school: in business and management, critique is welcome (even if – and maybe because - it is somewhat powerless to transform power structures in industry!). Consequently, today in many universities, it is not unusual to find prominent sociologists and philosophers under the roof of the business school.

EdTech is different from Management in important ways. EdTech has grown up as a discourse of advocacy of technological ‘enhancement’ or even ‘transformation’ of education. Advocates of technology in education have promoted various tools and techniques. Such positions were made possible by the emergence of technologies which many found exciting and which appeared to bear significance for education as much as they did for the rest of social life. EdTech attracted those who were excited by the technology, and it supported them through various government-funded programmes which situated enthusiasts within the academy, often in project-oriented or management-oriented roles rather than teaching-oriented roles.

Whilst EdTech situates itself within the academy, creating its own academic discourse which appears (at least superficially) scholarly and critical (there are journals and conferences), the rewards of scholarship in the EdTech field – unlike any other field of inquiry in the social sciences or humanities – promise not only academic status but commercial success. EdTech presents itself as a domain of application for the work of software and hardware designers, games developers, pedagogic innovators and institutional managers. As a domain of application, EdTech has demanded of its new academics engagement with issues of educational philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, computer science, cybernetics, physics and biology. However, unlike the case of business schools, where established scholars moved to study the problems of organisation and management, the EdTech world has tended to recruit educational enthusiasts with some disciplinary knowledge and technical know-how rather than established scholars in particular disciplines.

The makeup of the EdTech domain, situating itself between scholarship, commercial opportunity and project funding has entailed particular consequences. In common with work in organization studies, EdTech has produced a number of ‘gurus’ who have established reputation and status in particular forms of technological or pedagogical advocacy. Typically, the EdTech guru seeks to make what Searle calls a “status function” of such a technology or approach, supported by arguments, political position and evidence which reinforce the status function through critique, experience and economic rationale. To make one’s name in EdTech is to attract funding and secure one’s position in the academy. The guru’s position has been reinforced in the absence of a mature critique within the field, coupled with insufficient knowledge of effective critiques already established in other disciplines (particularly within management studies). The mark of the EdTech guru is that their advocacy tends to be approached from a variety of perspectival lenses, each focused on upholding the object of their advocacy; this is in contrast to practice in management studies of developing deep critical arguments which withhold advocacy in favour of critique from a particular perspective.

In the scholarship of Organisation and Management, Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan explored fundamental critical perspectives in their seminal ‘Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis’, showing how contributions to the organisational discourse could be seen to be oriented towards one of four basic paradigms of discourse. In EdTech, whilst what is called ‘paradigm closure’ does not feature in technological advocacy (and consequently EdTech avoids the ‘paradigm wars’ which can plague organisational analysis), Burrell and Morgan’s paradigms are nevertheless useful as indicators for the ways that different kinds of arguments are made in the advocacy process and the ways those arguments are structured. What appears to distinguish EdTech is the way that technological advocacy creates the need for ‘paradigm switching’ as a case is made for a particular technological approach. In other words, the focus on a particular technology or pedagogy, around which individual reputations are established (think of the MOOC as a classic example) creates the need for multiple paradigms to be brought into play as the arguments are made to support those technologies: the implementation is rarely questioned: rather the critical support for the technology is manipulated across a variety of paradigmatic arguments.

I think that paradigm switching is a particular characteristic of EdTech as a discipline. More broadly, any technological advocacy for the purposes of social change (which is what EdTech is) exhibits this feature of paradigm-switching. In analysing this phenomenon, I think that understanding the markers of paradigm switching is of fundamental importance in our understanding of the ways in which technological change, technological advocacy, educational transformation and social change are interlinked. This is important because “educational technology” encompasses two aspects of social change: those aspects of social organisation which each citizen votes for, and those aspects of social organisation which unfold through technological emergence and a narrative of ‘progress’ which tends not to be politically mandated or critically inspected.

The Limit of Music and "Steel Education"

Silently and slowly walking along the gallery of the Royal Albert Hall the other night during a performance of Elgar's 2nd Symphony last week (what a fantastic way to listen to music - we really should get rid of seats in concert halls!), I was thinking that when we play or listen to music together we become aware of a limit of expression and feeling which, when things are right, we feel with each other. Alfred Schutz, in his paper "Making Music Together" is right on this, I'm sure.

But this is a also a matter of taste and habit. Sharing music is not always 'right' in this way. Imagine that a Dylan-loving musician and a Debussy-loving musician come together - each tries to enthuse the other about their passion. Somehow it doesn't really click...

A: "Wow, Dylan is amazing, man."
B: "its completely tuneless and charmless music!"
A: "You must be joking! This is poetry!"
B: "Peleas et Melisande is poetry! It breathes passion, longing... those most basic of human emotions..."
A: "Bourgeois pretentiousness, if you ask me. Dylan's a man of the people..."

I wonder if there is an element of fear in both positions A and B; there are clearly divergent passions. We read the passion because, when spoken (rather than just written), people use their whole bodies to express what they mean. For example, A's use of the word 'amazing' will be accompanied by vocal tension (raising pitch and volume), probably arm tensing and gesturing, and so on.  B's response appears to be something like "you are caught in some sort of trance which I believe is morally perilous!"- B's reaction is one of fear, as if the emotional content of A's enthusiasm represents an affront to B's pleasure in Debussy. This is a communication which is going nowhere. Yet A and B may yet agree on a more rational level: for example, they both might have sympathies with social justice which they might both believe their respective artistic passions are deeply concerned with - and there may be a rational level at which they speak with one voice. But it is unlikely that it is going to be a musical or aesthetic level. A and B might choose to overlook aesthetics to find agreement at a different level.

Similarly, we might consider B and C, who both love Debussy. C however, has no time for social justice, thinks Michael Gove was poorly served in the recent reshuffle, and believes that Nigel Farage makes excellent sense. C would of course agree with B about Dylan! Yet whilst they understand one another at an aesthetic level, their fundamental values could not be more out of tune.

C: "only the educated can understand this music"
B: "what do you mean by 'understand'?"
C: "This is music of the highest refinement. To appreciate it is to appreciate an order which puts this at the top."
B: "the social order of Eton?"
C: "Well, not just Eton, but perhaps Eton stands for something. It stands for refinement and order... Oxford too..."
B: "But what about everyone else?"
C: "They are part of the social order - but it is not this!"

B's battle between these two extremes interests me - partly because it is where I have found myself: sharing my passion for music with some who I would never wish to be associated with, whilst at the same time having common political cause with those who I struggle to have a meaningful discussion about music. It is at this point that I find the distinction between the "two limits": the limit between the true and the false, and the limit between absence and presence (of which the beautiful and the ugly may be an aspect) most immediate for me.

The distinction between the true and the false is, I think, easier to think about. It is certainly easier to talk about because it is fundamentally borne in discourse. The limit of aesthetics is much more difficult. At a recent conference I attended on music and philosophy, I found much discussion about analytical techniques which were basically aimed at exposing aesthetic questions. Typically, these techniques look at the notes only. Repeatedly, I found myself asking, "How can it be about the notes alone? - how can we ignore the person? How does music communicate?"

The notation of music and the sound of music are material epiphenomena of the aesthetic limits between people. We can study the epiphenomena: internally they display an order between notes, motifs, harmonies, themes, etc. These are the 'figures' that are made apparent through conventional musical analysis. Additionally, the epiphenomena also reveal redundancies - the background: these are present in all music (everything repeats), although they are more apparent in Dylan than Debussy (the beat is the principle repetition which little rock and pop varies, but also there is more melodic and harmonic redundancy).

There may well be a correlation between particular balances between ordering and redundancy and social listening. Music preference algorithms basically work on this basis, with some success at identifying the kinds of musics which individuals prefer. But there is a difference between determining the properties of music to identify preference and actually understanding how music communicates. The problem with preference algorithms is that they abstractly codify the status-quo and fail to establish the conditions for anything new.

Yet the most exciting thing in any new music, in any new art, is when something surprising happens; indeed, not just when something surprising happens, but when something surprising happens and everyone gets it. That's when we look at each other and know that the other person is thinking the same as us: "wow!"

There are indeed limits which restrict our aesthetic sense. We read these in our shared experiences, and adjust our engagements accordingly. But the real point of art and the limit of aesthetics is when we travel across it together. It is what Bataille referred to as the point of eroticism: an "assenting to life, even in death". It is a supreme act of giving: the giving of the artist, the giving up of boundaries by the audience - collectively giving of oneself to something new. Artists are occasionally able to do this because they understand something of the interaction between the aesthetic limit, and the limits between the true and the false. In taking people across an aesthetic limit, they can also cause them to reconfigure their limit of truth. Art really can change the world. Beethoven and Shakespeare teach us how to act.

Education too is all about crossing limits. It is fundamentally about giving and assenting (unlike business, which is all about taking! - God forbid that we should confuse them!). With increasing marketisation, education has become too rational; it has become businesslike; it has forsaken giving for taking. Most seriously, it has lost its aesthetic sense - evidenced by its obsession with 'science, technology, engineering and maths' - which (if politicians ever talked to proper scientists, mathematicians, etc) has just as much to do with art and aesthetics as it does to reason. We have 'steel' education which only people with steel stomachs can negotiate.

The problem is that most of us don't have steel stomachs. Anything but.

The Ordering of Institutional Fear

There is a limit between the true and false. In many aspects of everyday life, we fear traversing this limit: fear is the emotion we associate with encountering the limit between the true and the false. There are other limits which we experience emotionally: for example, the limit between absence and unity (between 0 and 1) is, I suspect, the experience of climax: music and sex are where this is most apparent. This is where the real power of category theory lies: it provides a unified way of talking about rational experience (between truth and fasehood) and those experiences which are nuanced, flowing, emotional - what we might otherwise call irrational. In education, both matter. Badiou presents this as the difference between classical logic (excluded middle logic) and non-classical, dialectical logic.

In category theory, truth and falsehood are defined with relation to a 'sub-object classifier' (typically in the literature, this is written as Ω, although Badiou prefers to call it 'C'). In determining truth functions, the sub-object classifier is fundamentally the object which helps us determine order among the objects and transformations in a category. Ordering means some things are more important than others. It means that the experience of limits between truth and falsehood, ie. fear, which are everywhere present (because limits are everywhere present) have a hierarchy. Some fears are more constraining than others; some people are more frightened than others; the fear of one person depending on their ordering in the social scheme can impact on the fears of everyone else. Category theory gives us a way of ordering fear within an institution. This is both fascinating and important, given the amount of fear within our institutions (universities in particular), and the managerial belief that fear can be ramped up and oppression increased without consequences (many vice-chancellors apparently believe that fear within the institution has no effect on teaching and learning.)

What are the consequences of ramping-up institutional fear? There are two sides to it. On the one hand, there is the limit of fear within the person implementing a ramping-up of fear (say, a VC). VCs are among the most constrained actors in a University - 'clear' in their vision about what must be done, yet only clear because of what they do not admit into their picture of the world: clarity exists against the force of a limit. Here both the limits of fear and the limits associated with emotion (climaxes, excitement, enthusiasms) can be in play: a VC's enthusiasm for a particular 'pet-project' is as much the exposure of limit as their fear relating to pursuing a particular policy or not. The VC's limits determine differences throughout the structure of the institution. It is these differences which bear upon everyone else, to which everyone else's limits are subordinated. The question is, How do everyone else's fears (awareness of limits) become subordinated to the leader's fear? And what are the effects on the organisation?

The interplay between emotional limits concerning enthusiasms, climaxes, achievements, and (fundamentally) meaning, and the limits of fear between the true and the false can create conflicts and split within individuals. These conflicts can distort the limits of fear to the point that what is feared at one level presents emotional limits of a different and opposing kind at another. Here we may find the classic signs of Bateson's 'double-bind': for example, the alcoholic's calculation that  'alcohol is bad for you' which is between the true and the false, whilst the pleasure that alcohol brings (and the converse misery of acknowledgement of true/false distinction) serves to maintain individuals in a cycle of oscillating dependency. This is how people can be manipulated. Most of the logic concerning money is of this sort: on the one hand, money exists on a true-false distinction concerning the limits of financial viability, whilst on the other hand, money brings degrees of security and compensatory pleasure which leads to the a kind of economic slavery.

The boss as paymaster is the figure who is in control of determining the rational bargain with employees. For employees, the bargain carries an element of security providing the rational true/false distinction is appropriately met. The boss's assertion of this bargain is also subject to their own emotional limits: whims, enthusiasms, etc. It is not beyond possibility that some whims and enthusiasms are in some way sadistic or victimising. The enthusiasm may not be shared with the employees, who nevertheless have to comply to satisfy the pay (truth) bargain. At some point, the boss might demand compliance and enthusiasm as part of the pay bargain. At this point, the employees, who will have their own emotional limits, will find themselves split in an emotional tangle where the rational (or cynical) compliance and real emotional needs cannot be reconciled. Here we find (I think) the difference between Habermas's "communicative action" and "strategic action". It begins to mark out the logical structure of the double-bind situation. The double-bind situation bearing upon employees becomes more marked the more the whims of the boss are reinforced in the institutional structure: 'cronies' are appointed whose rational bargain reinforces the boss's whims (because there is rational gain in the form of higher status or pay). The example of such people is illustrative of the fact that the boss relies on employees for their status: the status functions concerning the boss ultimately come from the employees; this status declaration can be reinforced through the double-bind people are placed in - so in a University, as Senate and Governors are stuffed with yes-people, whims are reinforced, alienation increased and the double-bind exacerbated. Greater alienation may equal greater reinforcement for the boss's position: those VC's who believe fear is good appear to have justification at first glance! But it only works to a point.

The principal issue is the way that redundancies can become codified discourse.When redundancies of expectations are shared between people then communication arises and redundancies effectively become foreground and not background (in fact they are no longer redundancies). With an asserted policy which clearly doesn't work it will not be long before the individual disjunction between rational limits and emotional limits results in the emergence of codifications of emotional expectations which will become part of the fabric of rational limits: at this point there is a risk that rational challenge in the form of reorganising status functions - particularly those status functions which relate to the boss - might result in criticism and direct challenge. Such are the dialectics of the institution, and managers have to react appropriately in the light of this.

Empirically, we can measure status declarations between individuals. Every declaration of change to practice, every new professional mandate, every new technology, every new procedure is a status declaration. Some of these come from the top and filters to the bottom; others relate to experience on the ground (engagements with learners). There can sometimes be a strong conflict either between the commitments and other status declarations that staff are involved in, and therefore not all mandated changes to practice will actually occur (however much the boss might wish it). Conflicts in status declarations can be measured simply by ascertaining the status declarations surrounding existing practices, technologies and so on. Emotional factors have a bearing on this, but the emotional factors are establishable not through status declarations, but through redundancies of practice. Redundancies reflect the absences bearing upon individuals in their practice. What do they think about? What do they worry about most? What do they do most often?

Of course, the empirical investigation of redundancies may itself be a catalyst to change. But perhaps this wouldn't be a bad thing!!

Mathematical Quantification and the Order of Education

We have grown accustomed to almost all empirical investigations in either the physical or the social sciences as involving some level of quantification: x% this, y% that, and so on. The foundation for the fiduciary qualities of this kind of work sits on an ontology of numbers where the truth becomes associated with the higher number (100%!). Behind this lies the view that numbers exist on a continuous scale. Yet mathematical work in analysis and number theory questions this. From Dedekind to Cantor, the fundamental issue with number is not continuity and quantity, but ordering and the way that numbers exist within limits. Indeed, quality is something that may lie within the mathematical ontology, rather than something to be deduced through processes of quantification. There's so much that's troubling with qualitative research: not least that almost always, qualities apparently only make themselves amenable for analysis through quantification; indeed, technologies have become instrumental in the industry of the transformation of qualities into quantities. Work done in this way - for the benefit of evidence-based policy (which as Hugh Willmott pointed out today is really 'policy-based evidence') - has real and often negative impacts on the lives of real people. Mathematics is beautiful, and its distortion which produces these effects demands that for all these reasons, it may be important to look again at number and mathematical ontology.

I've found myself studying the Category Theory of Mac Lane, Goldblatt, Badiou (who's taken much from Goldblatt) and Lawvere (who writes particularly beautifully for the uninitiated). Category theory is a development of set theory which works on the principle of describing processes of transformation between different states of constitution (my term - basically it's a set), where a "state of constitution" might be called an 'object', and a transformation might be called a 'mapping'. Most importantly, Category Theory gives us a way of describing ordering without numbers.

My educational empiricism is a concerted effort to study the ordering of education. That means looking at the logical structure of the relations between people, objects, institutional structures and so on. The relations between people, objects structures are (as John Searle and Tony Lawson independently insist upon) networks of rights, responsibilities, obligations, commitments, and duties. We can empirically discover some aspects of the structure simply by asking people questions like "who tells you to do x?", "who are you doing it for?", "what happens if you don't do it?", and so on. At the same time, a structure ought to make the distinction between what a 'right' is, what a 'responsibility' is, what an 'obligation' is, and so on. In each case we see a different form or geometry of the ordering, but where for each form, there is a central idea of a 'limit' with which a particular obligation or commitment might be identified.

Category theory has a number of basic forms which might map onto different kinds of relations.

The picture above is the Category Theoretical 'epi-morphism' which is characterised by the two arrows from B to C. I look at this and think of those situations where people seem to acknowledge that 'C is the case', although they might do so for different reasons (hence the separate arrows). In each case, the two arrows stem from an initial single arrow f which is the beginning for each of h and i. But you can also stand outside the whole situation with arrow g from a position that 'sees' A, B and C (although I haven't drawn the arrow to C in this case). An obligation, in this sense, appears to me to be a limit where the arrows h and i are acknowledged to be the same and that the declaration of equality between them is a statement of compliance with each others norms. This limit, a unique position of balance, is indicated by arrow k. This might be the politician's stance: the obligation to coordinate education that conforms to the norms of stakeholders in society.

Turning this diagram around, we get the category theoretical 'monomorphism' which starts from a diverse position to become a single point. The starting point of arrow g  indicates the viewpoint of being able to 'see everything (B, C and A). The limit line here, k, might be seen to be the point at which an identification of the difference between h  and i must be made. Is this a moment of 'responsibility taking' - the moment at which someone has to make a judgement the things that matter bearing in mind the different perspectives feeding into it?

There are also structures where two lines focus on a particular object (like the lines from D and C lead to E), where there is a point B that can see these relationships, but where is a point A that sees the whole situation including the observer B, and where A determines a limit on B. Category theory allows us to move up hierarchies like this (the diagram above is called a 'pull-back'), at each point challenging us to think about the limits imposed. Maybe 'rights' are limits imposed by the super-structure on the sub-structure? But then again, there is a difference between 'you have a right..." and "we demand our rights!". But to demand rights is to demand that A changes its limits. 

Perhaps that will do for now. The point here is that behind each of these diagrams is an inherent logic and ordering. The strength of category theory is that within this inherent logic are particular orientations towards truth, falsity and absence where in each case, the structural relationship between absence (say) and limits may be explored.

The absence bit really interests me because in addition to asking people about their rights, obligations, commitments, and so on, we can also observe their redundancies. I only have a hunch that absence is the same as redundancy (I gather Lacan - Badiou's teacher - held a similar view), or that Hume's regularity theory is really a redundancy theory (Tony Lawson rightly challenged me on this today), but I am also mindful of the work on pattern, figure and ground which people like Ernst Gombrich conducted in his "A Sense of Order": we are so 'figure oriented' in our approach to empiricism across all the sciences.

There is a discoverable order to education. There are practical steps we can take to unpicking it. This is not learning analytics! That (analytics), along with all our technologies, must now be considered as part of the contemporary "order of education".

Empiricism and Education

What happens between understanding the logical structure of something and the usage of techniques for measuring reality? In Hume’s theory of causation, he deployed an implicit ontology of event regularity together with a constructivist (he wouldn’t have used the term, but that’s what it was), communication-oriented logic of understanding and theory-building about causes. Critical Realists and others argue that this can’t be right because many of the theories which are constructed (e.g. gravity, relativity, etc) predict regularities where none have been investigated, implying that there must be something ‘real’ that is discovered in a theory rather than simply something constructed through the communications of scientists. But maybe there is a question about how logic and measurement relate to one another? After all, Hume’s idea of scientists’ conversation carries an implicit logic of communication which has successively been shown to be more and more complex in its relations to reality (Kuhn’s paradigms, Popper’s falsification, etc, etc).

What appears to emerge from the work of those philosophers of science who have explored the discourse of science is a kind of ‘ordering’ of that discourse – the way that paradigms shift and interact, the way that institutional structures and other social forces come into play, the way that technologies change the picture. In effect, what seems to occur is the negotiation of a lot of ‘status functions’ as Searle would call them – “x says ‘this is the way the world is’ producing evidence z to support it; x is backed up by institution a and academic community u; x is opposed by counter-examples from scientist y in institution b and academic community v” … and so on. The logic of the ordering of a discourse relates in some way to the measurements that might actually be made of the phenomena in question.

Absence is the most fundamental feature in the ordering of anything: whatever position we take, it will always include (as a background) the possibility of “no position”; positivists might wish to deny absence as an element of their thought, but the denial of absence is itself an absence and ultimately this weakens the status of any positivist argument. Positions are subsets of other positions; positions vary in the network of status functions that operate around them. The logical structure of a theoretical position relates to the deontic powers it deploys and to those deontic powers which bear upon it. It may be that this logical structure is similar to the logical structure of number as we find in Badiou’s mathematical theory and Conway’s concept of “surreal” numbers. To argue this is to start to expose the “logic” of Hume’s scientific discourse.

What then of measurement? It seems to me that the most important thing we must grasp in our measurement is what is “not there”; this is much more significant that what “is there”. Of course, most measurement concentrates on the ‘present’, so there is a question about how we might measure the absent. Really it is about measuring the ground rather than the figure, or at least inferring the ground from the figure. I could be wrong about this, but I think that Shannon’s information theory is important in allowing us to think about the ‘message’ (the present) but also the ‘redundancy’ (the absent).

My reinterpretation of Hume suggests that science proceeds through the coming together of logic and measurement (isn’t Euclidian geometry like this?) Indeed, looked at this way, ‘regularity’ (which plays such an important role for Hume) is reinterpreted as ‘redundancy’. So what we see is a mapping of measured redundancies (which are absences) with the logical structures of status functions declared by scientists.

Am I stretching things too far to suggest that this holds out a possibility of educational empiricism? Our educational theories have a logical ordering determined by the networks of status functions that they declare. Institutional structures and patterns of usage also have a logical structure. These seem mappable to me as networks of commitments and obligations. But in addition to this logical structure, there is an empirical structure of measurable redundancies. Can we bring them together? Can we move forwards if we do? Maybe we should have a go…

Some Reflections on the #pleconf and 'cool technology' : What Software or Hardware isn't Social?

I very much enjoyed the #pleconf in Tallinn. I wish I had attended these conferences in the past, but I sense that this year’s conference has brought a kind of sobriety around the educational idealism (which I gather typified earlier conferences) and which has surrounded the PLE more generally up to this point. Sobriety contains elements of disappointment, realism and a kind of ‘growing up’: I think e-learning in general is having to ’grow up’ – which means thinking harder. I suspect for some participants, the conversations this year have been too philosophical (although we were treated to a demonstration of a superb inquiry-based learning tool called “wespot” – http://inquiry.wespot.net – great to see new cool tools!), the questions “what do we mean by ‘learning’? ‘environment’? ‘personal’?” are inescapable and demanding: it is not difficult to point to the deficiency of any attempt to answer them.

My personal realisation at the conference is the sense in which the PLE has become so closely associated to social software tools: the birth of the PLE was roughly synchronous with the birth of Facebook, Twitter, etc. We may need to rethink this. At the PLE’s inception, social software was cool, innovative, exciting and generally unknown in the wider population. Now social software is rather old, everyone knows about (even if they don’t use it), and not particularly exciting. The question is whether the PLE became associated with social software because social software was cool and exciting when the PLE was born, or whether there was something intrinsically important about “social” software irrespective of its one-time “coolness”. Up to this point, the PLE (and the MOOC) has seized upon something intrinsic in social software, identifying in the analytics and connections of online discussion some deeper psychological import. I think this was a mistake, and has resulted in the PLE becoming associated with an ‘idea of learning’ which is constrained, reified and fundamentally indefensible in the light of real human experience.

What software (or indeed, hardware) isn’t social? There’s no question in my mind that the Oculus Rift causes powerful social interactions – it’s just that not all of them are amenable to data analysis (which probably makes them more powerful!). What about Flappy Bird? What about 360-degree video cameras like http://bublcam.com? What about amazing Ableton Live? What about R? One way or another there are networks of practice evolving around new cool things that manifest in various ways in online social networks (Facebook, Twitter), developer networks (GitHub, SourceForge), academic networks (journals), blogs, etc, etc. If there is (as @srmpbi argued for at the conference) a socio-material entanglement going on, to draw the boundary of the PLE simply around social software and text exchanges and to ignore the new ‘cool stuff’ as somehow not ‘personal’ seems short-sighted.

Looking back, I don’t think the PLE was really about "social" software as we have come to understand it; it was about “cool technology”. What made social software appear important was the fact that it was cool and exciting; what gives the PLE a problem now is that social software is no longer exciting nor particularly cool. But what makes something ‘cool’? Here is where I think the real essence of the PLE lies. When people discover or make something cool and exciting, their instinct is to ‘give’ it to other people. The euphoria of the early PLE was the euphoria of ‘giving’. As Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roger Caillois, George Bataille and others have studied, ‘giving’ is of fundamental human significance - it unites economics, love, war, art, religion, sex and play: those things we repeatedly see throughout human history in all cultures. So much of technological activity has the form of the ‘potlatch’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch) and there is a curious logic to it. What seems to emerge, through a complex variety of social mechanisms, are enhancements to social status: I do something cool and ‘give’ it on YouTube; an audience finds it, likes it, expects more; the social relation between myself and my audience – which incorporates both rights and commitments begins to become a formal recognition of status (which I can put on a CV); by continuing to uphold the commitments and obligations, status can be enhanced further, and so on.

The question for the PLE concerns how the ‘giving with regard to technology’ relates to the acts of giving within educational institutions (the best professors always ‘give’), and the giving of everyday life. In particular, the question concerns the nature of the ‘new’ and the ‘cool’ and the ways that individuals make their way through the world through the giving of novelty. The priority is to embrace and understand emerging technology, and to avoid getting trapped in what was once new and cool, but now isn’t. 

Stephen Downes on the Personal Learning Environment at the LSE

There's an irony in Stephen Downes giving a talk on the "Personal Learning Environment" - that discourse about shifting the locus of control of learning and technology from institutions to the individual - at one of the great institutions of the social sciences (from whom control might be wrested) - see http://www.downes.ca/presentation/343. But the LSE is prestigious, and association with it (particularly a keynote) tends to impress most people. Perhaps we all crave this kind of opportunity - but it's a curious symptom of the tug-of-war between technology and institutions that the advocates of technology find a platform to spread their message and enhance their personal reputations from the institution! Somehow, YouTube and Twitter isn't enough; but the LSE will do nicely (although the  Oxford Union would be better!) Something in me really finds the whole thing a bit distasteful...

I should say that Downes was quite supportive of our PLE work in Bolton. He even came to a special 'experts day' which we organised as part of the JISC PLE project in 2006 (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningframework/cetisple.aspx and http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/ple/). At that time (which is 8 years ago now!!), the PLE was the next "big thing" in e-learning. Social software was only just beginning to happen, driven by the technologies of XML webservices (consequently, the interoperability issue was also very important). But it's interesting that it's still around: I'm currently in Tallinn about to give a paper (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-personal-learning-environment-and.html) at the PLE conference (http://pleconf.org/2014/). My paper frames the questions I would now ask Downes about the PLE (since he too hasn't given up on it - perhaps because his thinking about MOOCs owes a lot to it).

At a fundamental educational level, the PLE didn't work. We thought that technology would challenge institutional hegemony. It hasn't. We thought that learners would prefer to use their own tools for learning. Mostly, they didn't. Institutions seem more powerful than ever- even the weaker ones are getting stronger. Which is OK if you work for one (actually it might not be because of the way they are managed and the technologies available to managers for making bad decisions) In another way, I think many of the arguments about personal technological organisation that we put forward in the JISC PLE project have proved to be correct. Our proof-of-concept environment, PLEX, bears strong similarities to the App-store driven approaches of Apple and Google: a simple set of 'technical dispositions' to connect and integrate a vast range of services (perhaps the integration isn't what it could be, although most mobile providers aggregate messaging from different service providers, for example).

What was wrong? My paper lays the blame on our approach to "learning". The PLE, in our conception, was a technological reification of an idea of learning. Our reification saw learning linked to personal organisation of technology, which was articulated through the cybernetic modelling of the Viable System Model. Downes continues to pursue his own reification of learning: connectivism, about which I have written here (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2014/05/stephen-downes-defends-connectivism.html). In each case, the thing that goes on in each of our heads is presented as a diagram with boxes and lines - in other words, an object. Having made the diagram, someone goes off and makes some technology where the boxes and lines become processes, roles and communications. Of course, stuff still goes on in our heads. And it goes on in our heads in response to the diagrams with lines and boxes, and in response to the software with people and roles. And always the stuff going on in our heads is disjointed from the abstract representations of what somebody thinks is going on.

Technological reifications of "idealised learning" are quite common, and becoming increasingly common in education: we should be worried about this. Constructivism has been the principal culprit, as has the cybernetic modelling techniques which are associated with it. Yet, for all the cleverness of the Pasks, Von Glasersfelds, Piagets, Deweys, etc, the truth is, WE CAN'T SEE LEARNING. Yet, this metaphysical idea has implanted itself deep within the education system: what happens in education is that 'students learn'. Moreover, learning can be measured: most perniciously by meeting (?) 'learning outcomes' (what are they, exactly?). The whole thing is tied together with the institutional need to demonstrate 'quality', such that the place of 'measurable learning' in the institutional edifice is reinforced. But this is not unassailable: educational attitudes will change significantly in the coming years.

Downes is stuck because he's obsessed with learning. Yet, all around him he's confronted by evidence that his learning theories cannot be right (MOOCs). Indeed, lurking at the back of his mind might be the thought "can any learning theory be right?" That's a scary thought - because the answer is no, and the reason is to do with "theory" in the first place.

Bateson argued that science progresses in a pincer-movement. On the one hand, there is abstraction, and on the other, there is experiment. Another way of putting it is that on the one hand there is logic, and on the other experience: analytic and synthetic judgements, a prioi and a posteriori (given that a posteriori analytic judgement is a contradiction). Educational research tends to be a half-arsed pincer: the theory part stays put, and only the practical part moves (do it again, but this time try harder!). The deep problem we have is that we are not able to inspect the logic of our theories and to compare the logic of theory with the results of practice. There is no connection between theory and practice, and no way identifying how a theory might need to be adapted. The only way this can happen is through identifying regularities in practice and then seeking to explain them through theory. Since it appears there are limited regularities in education research (and even those are artificially created by statistics), opportunities for concrete explanation-building are rare. Downes and Siemens at least recognise the problem: they put their faith in 'learning analytics' as their empirical exercise. But learning analytics is no more an empirical exercise than theorising about learning (it's a different level of reification of learning): analytics provides fewer regularities to be explained than good old-fashioned statistics!

But there are regularities in education (not learning). There are textbooks, and classrooms, and teachers, and learners, and timetables, and institutions, and quality regimes, and Vice Chancellors (God Bless 'em!). And among the structures and communications produced by all of these people, there are regularities of role, commitment, obligations, positions, rights, responsibilities, etc. These regularities have a logical structure as well as empirical content. For example, the logic of a commitment from A to B infers that there is a C that can see the relationship (and make a statement about it)

What about C? Who's looking at them? And on it goes. A logical structure emerges quite easily with regard to the relations between people. What about the empirical side of things? To start with, there are the actual declarations between individual stakeholders; there are the objects that each individual engages with (textbooks, VLEs, etc), there are the relations between objects and people; there are the outcomes of peoples' engagement with objects and people (i.e. walking away from a MOOC, or using a PLE).

What's interesting is when the relation between A and B is where A awards B a grade in exchange for B honouring their commitments and responsibilities within the institutional assessment framework. Is that learning? Is it saying something about what's gone on in B's head? I don't think so. It's simply describing the systemic thing that institutions and teachers do to students, and the things that students have to do in order to win them.

Now we could draw a diagram of the commitments and obligations met between Stephen Downes and the LSE. What would that diagram represent?