Friday 30 September 2016

E-learning and Scientific Communication

With the technologies that we have today, it is possible to communicate on a large scale in a much richer way than has ever been available to us before. Fundamentally, the power of our new media has to do with its potential variety of expression, or (more technically) its maximum entropy (the maximum possible surprisingness which can manifest itself though the medium). Text - particularly the text of academic papers - has a much lower maximum entropy.

I mention academic papers because I find it strange that academics remain transfixed by the academic paper as the 'gold standard' of intellectual communication. There are important reasons why it ought not to be. Not least among them is the fact that today's science is not the science of certainty and objectivity for which the academic paper was originally conceived as a means of communicating science by the academic societies in the 1660s. Today's science is a science of contingency, complexity and uncertainty. Communicating uncertainty through a medium designed to communicate certainty is surely going to lead to problems. And indeed it does... the 'marketisation' of education may be the most devastating manifestation of this epistemological misalignment.

With video, one can express one's uncertainty - which, in a science of uncertainty, is a very important thing to communicate: in the end, the point of communicating science is the coordination of understanding and action. As part of the FIS discussion (http://fis.sciforum.net/fis-discussion-sessions/)about academic publishing, I produced this:

The point of making a video is trying to convey honestly the uncertainties of knowledge and understanding. It is important to use a communication medium which affords this. The academic paper encourages people to hide, posture, and so on. Our educational market encourages people not even to care about 'communicating' but merely to posture, and acquire the status markers of publication. In the FIS discussion, a number of people have expressed pessimism about "human nature" in the sciences - that the ego-driven posturing will always win out. But I can't help wondering if this ego behaviour wasn't the product of the means of communication (the paper) as well as the epistemological model. If scientists used a more revealing technology to communicate, we would see, I think, different kinds of scientific behaviour.

Another important reason for thinking about scientific communication is that it is scientific communication which Universities are fundamentally about. In recent years, this has been forgotten - even in the most elite institutions. The market-driven focus is now on teaching students, with endless speculation about the 'best' pedagogy (whatever that means - it is all speculation, because nobody can see learning). So, we end up in a very confused place. "Teaching" in universities involves preparing people for the labours of scientific communication - which still means academic papers, conference presentations, etc... even when the science and the epistemology now concerns uncertainty and complexity. Educational technologists are enlisted to attempt to produce resources that encourage learners to develop themselves in ways which turn them into copies of the 17th century enlightenment scientist. This is a bit crazy.

The universities of the 1700s changed fundamentally within the space of 100 years or so (Bacon's "Advancement of Learning" of 1605 castigated Cambridge's curriculum, and by the 1700s, its Aristotelian ways had pretty much disappeared). What changed them? It was the transformed practices in experiment and communication among scientists, from the invisible college to the Royal Society.

Our universities today are in a mess - this is a very bad time in education. University managers think they can determine the future of Universities. But in the end, the future of Universities is always led by scientific communities. When those communities change the way they communicate then everything else in the education system changes alongside. I believe much of what we consider typical of a University today will have disappeared in 100 years, just as the once-unquestionable supremacy of Aristotelian doctrine in the scholastic university was swept away. The abandonment of the academic paper (certainly in its current form) and the adoption of new ways of communicating uncertainty will lead the way in this.

The reason why I think this will happen is because our epistemology of uncertainty cannot successfully communicate itself through a low-variety medium. It demands richness, aesthetic power, and emotional connection. The Newtonian, Lockean doctrine of the scientist as dispassionate observer cannot be right; complexity science will eventually disarm it.

There are some simple questions to ask: Do scientists really communicate with one another today? Is citation an adequate indicator of how well we understand each other? Are conferences any better for scientific communication? (I'm sorry, your time is up - you have to stop). If papers and conferences are no good for scientific communication, what actually works? What can we do better?

Probably as a first step, we have to realise that science isn't possible without communicating. 

3 comments:

Paul Hollins said...

Mark, as ever a well considered argument in a considered post. I believe the nature of our universities is fundamentally changing or at leat those outside the elite club . With funding and by association access to university now arguably "controlled" by government and its objectives, educational institutions have changed, It is not only the managerialist approach that has resulted in this change academics have been complicit .The domain/ discipline/ field (and I note the argument de jour seems to be about the distinctions) Educational technology/ pedagogy is a perfect example whatever "they" are I can't recall the last time I read a scientific paper or attended a presentation where an intellectual ,as opposed to academic i.e. schooled in the game of academia, argument was made we are complicit in this process. Scientific Paper usually reads Everything's wrong, here is my methodology to support my "everything's wrong" hypothesis , here are the (manipulated )) empirical results of my everything wrong hypothesis . My" this will make it right" chapter including the obligatory new paradigm and my book comes in the autumn ! and this is perpetual or "pathalogicallyautopoetic"(B.T.W There is a great paper in that).

Lenandlar said...

""Teaching" in universities involves preparing people for the labours of scientific communication - which still means academic papers, conference presentations, etc" --- not everyone will go on to this sort of thing i suppose

Lenandlar said...

"Educational technologists are enlisted to attempt to produce resources that encourage learners to develop themselves in ways which turn them into copies of the 17th century enlightenment scientist. This is a bit crazy."

Not sure what you mean by "a bit crazy" but one of the very things Educational Technologists can help do to execute your alternative communication proposal is provide a space to develop the skills to do alternative forms of communication.