Distinctions about teaching and knowledge - analysing OERs

Whilst all the stuff around inter-disciplinarity is interesting, we tend to study subjects: maths, physics, chemistry, music, geography, drama, etc. It's always struck me that different types of people are attracted to different types of subjects, and that the 'feel' of the study of different subjects is different too. The choice of subject may be biologically, psychologically or socially determined.

Is this to say that the knowledge within them is similarly differentiated? Is the nature of mathematical knowledge related to the 'feel' of studying mathematics - and to the preference of those who study it? Can we relate the feeling of studying something to a classification of the type of knowledge it contains? Can we relate the ways in which things are taught to the type of knowledge it contains?

With my 4 quadrant model, I may have a way of classifying the type of knowledge something contains. With so much open content, there's an opportunity to study this through looking at videos of lectures. For example, it might be interesting to compare this to Richard Feynman's lectures or Gordon Pask on Cybernetics.
In both these cases, there is a strong element of the purpose-form of knowledge: both these individuals exude the importance of what they talk about through their character and presentation. It's interesting that the content-form of knowledge is in the background, but only alluded to by the speakers, who also exhibit a strong aspect of the person-form of knowledge. There is little tool-form.

Pask and Feynman were great individuals and great teachers with high authenticity. I would suggest that the following is more normal for this sort of content:

Here there is a lot of content-form and person-form. Tool-form might be considered in the mathematical tools which are introduced. But the purpose-form is less strong: the teacher, whilst they might well be deeply grounded and authentic in what they do, fails to reveal it in the way Feynman does.

What about this video interview with a life coach? I think this is person-form and purpose-form but little content-form. I think there may be tool-form in the sense of the techniques which are presented ("use positive language.." etc.). There's also tool-form as well as a lot of content-form in this computer-science lecture:


I think these distinctions are important because confusion about different types of educational performance can lead to category mistakes. For example, the curriculum cannot be replaced with something like life-coaching - to wish to do so is to misunderstand the nature of knowledge. In the same way, boring lectures are just boring lectures, but may well do their job in allowing for different representations of the knowledge to be made. Some topics in the curriculum may naturally lend themselves to content-form or tool-form. But it's the language games that count - the different forms of knowledge are different ways of coordinating it.

What is bad teaching?

Let's assume that the 'goodness' or 'badness' of teaching is objective (the opposing argument that it's relative gets lots of attention - and may be a bit pernicious!)

The objection to bad teaching fundamentally must be ethical: there are good and bad ways of treating people - waterboarding is bad for example (whatever George Bush thinks). Indeed the 'simulated drowning' induced by waterboarding has an analogue in bad teaching. As forms of suffering, how different is boredom or exam stress to drowning? (I blogged about the nature of boredom as suffering a while ago, see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2009/10/tiredness.html)

But I don't want to exclude suffering from education completely: as an aspect of authentic human experience, it has a fundamental role to play. You can't learn to swim unless you have some concept of drowning. But there is a difference between the teacher who warns their students that "this stuff is really boring, but you have to work through it... it's worth it!" and one who continues on regardless and without acknowledging the element of suffering involved. What's the difference? It's between the teacher who reveals their own awareness of the knowledge, and of the learning process, and of their own experiences of learning and one who simply reveals a shallow aspect of the subject without any authentic engagement.

I wonder if authenticity is very important for good teaching: knowing something (the content) is linked to that thing which you know being 'real' to you. It ultimately is related to the 'purpose-form' of knowledge; it's ethical dimension; of being able to say honestly "I have experienced this to be good". It is to reveal your joy in something.

Inauthentic teaching, without the purpose, may be like the teacher saying "I'm telling you this because it's my job. I don't quite know how my job came to be doing something so meaningless, but there's nothing I can do about it, other than just do what I've been told to do"

What's interesting me now is that different aspects (subjects) of the curriculum lend themselves to different forms of knowledge, and the purpose-form may be more present with (say) inquiry-based learning, or life-coaching - where ethics and authenticity is high on the agenda, than (say) teaching chemistry - when content-form may play a bigger role (than in life-coaching), or computer programming where there's more scope for both the content-form of knowledge and the tool-form.

Maybe we can map the curriculum in this way??? Would that be useful?

Knowledge and Cause

Talking about different forms (or maybe dimensions?) of knowledge as 'person-form', 'content-form', 'tool-form' seems rather like Aristotelian causality, where cause has a material-aspect, a formal-aspect, an agency-aspect and a purpose-aspect. Do these relate? If they do, then there's a line of thinking we can go down...

maybe:

1. agency-aspect of causation   <==> person-form of knowledge
2. material-aspect of causation  <==> tool-form of knowledge
3. formal-aspect of causation    <==> content-form of knowledge
4. purpose-aspect of causation  <==> ??? purpose-form of knowledge ??? (what is knowledge for?)

I'm not sure about this. Maybe too abstract.

"To know something is to know what causes it" - Aristotle (in the Posteria Analytics)

I think if I'm pursuing a theory of 'double-description' of knowledge, then Aristotle basically says that to know a cause is to become aware of a number of descriptions of different aspects of cause. That seems similar to what I'm saying.

I would say "To know anything is to have a number of different descriptions of that knowledge."

Are the descriptions of knowledge the causes of knowledge?

Maybe. This is very hard stuff and my brain hurts slightly! (how do I know..?)

It's interesting to think about the 'purpose' of knowledge. Let's say, for example, that the purpose of knowledge is to 'do good'. How does that relate to the surgeon almost accidentally killing a patient? What we would say is that the language game the surgeon plays has an ethical dimension related to the purpose of what he or she does. This ethical dimension helps to coordinate the language game along with the other knowledge-forms.

Going back to the classroom where the surgeon might have learnt his skills (or rather the language game), the safer language games that the students play will be coordinated by the teacher of the surgeon who reveals a person-form of knowledge, uses a tool-form, and a content-form... against the background of a purpose-form? or an ethical-form? I wonder if this isn't to do with the authenticity of the teacher.

This is interesting because it means that we need to consider 'bad' teaching, 'bad' ethics and 'bad' knowledge...

The tool-form of knowledge

I'm thinking about the ways knowledge exists in people and the material forms it takes: Educational resources (open or not) are examples of that material form. But we might say that technologies also carry knowledge as well. For example, a Greek vase carries knowledge - explicitly in this case because is contains images of people making music.

What's the difference between the knowledge contained in a vase and the knowledge contained in an online learning tool (like ReCourse below)

Can we say then that knowledge has a 'tool-form' as well as a 'content-form'? (or maybe a tool-form is a type of content-form...

What's clear to me however is that the person with knowledge - possessing the person-form of knowledge (the knowledge embodied in the knower) - uses the tool-form and the content-form to regulate a language-game with with learners. It may not be that knowledge is 'transferred', but that the game is played. How the game is played may well be passed on to those who 'learn it' (by learning how to use the content and tools to regulate their own games). They may well play the game with others in the future. 

Often such language games are used to teach skills (for example surgery). What is the difference between playing the surgery game with a teacher, and using those skilled game-performances in real life? There are clearly differences in risk! 

If a surgeon acts alone in operating on a patient, is he playing the language game with himself? What happens if the patient nearly dies, or the surgeon recognises that they have made a mistake? What is a mistake in this circumstance? A mistake might be a 'move' which threatens the viability of the language game and any future language games: the patient dying would be a catastrophic upsetting of the game. The knowledge in the surgeon is likely to contain the person-forms of their teachers, the content-forms of their textbooks, and the tool-form of their instruments.

There's something about concernful action here, and the way that agency reproduces and transforms structure. The accidental killing of a patient may also have implications for knowledge - the inquiry would identify the cause of the accident: education might come under scrutiny, the teachers, or the tools, or the textbooks. Obviously, the inquiry itself would be another language game!

Institutions and Knowledge: the gatekeeper fallacy

Is there something that institutions do which directly relates to the nature of knowledge? Would we talk about physics, chemistry, philosophy, etc if it weren’t for the continued existence of institutions? Do institutions merely produce knowledge or are they tied up in the mechanisms of its existence? If institutions disappeared, would knowledge disappear?

Grounds that might give us reason to think that institutions are not knowledge factories may rest on ideas that knowledge requires a ‘double-description’: a ‘content-form’ and a ‘person-form’. Institutions implement processes and regulate those processes through teachers, content and learning activities. ‘Knowledge’ can be seen to be in the people and in the content.
Talk about the institution no longer being the gatekeeper to knowledge is to see knowledge merely in its ‘content’ form. This is a category mistake. The person-form of knowledge (the knowledge as it is known and lived by a person) does not necessitate an institution, but institutions tend to do this well: it is how they are made. To do it in other ways requires strong local support where open content might be used to regulate processes with others who might reveal the ‘person form’ (family members, friends, etc) – but those who support would likely be the products of institutions in the past. If institutions were to disappear and we were only left with the content-form I think we would lose the forms of knowledge we have now; we may generate new forms of knowledge – but that process would accompany a ‘re-institutionalisation’.

What the institution must do is to extend the person-form of knowledge to the world just as it is extending the content-form. For weaker students, the person form is more important: learning must be more ‘fleshly’. The question is “how can technology help the institution do this? And how can they do it cheaply so that the weakest can afford it?”

Want to be bowled over by insight? or steamrollered by dogma?

I remember by predominant desire and expectation of going to university was that I would be thrilled by insight and intelligence. I was lucky - I studied music (the most important discipline on the curriculum!) and I had a wonderful professor, Ian Kemp, whose biography of Michael Tippett I had read prior to going. "The only thing we expect of you is that you like music" he said in his welcome to us. That was a good start.

Music for me was wonderful because on the whole I was encouraged to ask any question of it I wished. And all the questions of life are there - and I asked many of them. Indeed, my professor would often write down the questions (and answers) we came up with. Occasionally, less open teachers would try to 'close things down', but I was largely able to avoid them.

My experience of Higher Education following this was increasingly disappointing. I found that in place of openness and questioning, increasingly I found dogmatic attachment to methodologies, rigid thinking tied to insecure personalities, and increasingly the sense that the University was not somewhere where any question (the sort of questions a child might ask) could be asked. Indeed,as Alasdair MacIntyre has recently commented, in the modern university there were some questions which seem to be impossible to ask.

I was lucky because my first experience was wonderful (also free!). Only in my current role at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics have I found anything as open in University education (a role for which my first degree prepared me better than I could possibly have imagined). But for many students, their first experience of Higher Education is their only experience of higher education. They might arrive at University hoping to be bowled over by insight, but immediately find themselves steamrollered, not just by theoretical dogma and the insecurity of teachers, but by bureaucratic mechanisms - which often work hand-in-hand with dogmatic teaching. And they're paying for it! They may indeed get their degrees through jumping through the hoops - but what else do they get?

The most worrying bi-product of this experience is a cynicism about knowledge and questioning which continues the attack on curiosity and authentic being begun by schooling. I find the emergent social consequences of this frightening.

Personhood, Learning and Activities: The double-description of knowledge

Engaging in a Learning Activity is a special type of concernful action. Rather in the way we might play a game, we submit to rules and constraints. In fact the game metaphor is useful with regard to learning activities. They demand the somewhat restricted exercise of particular skilled performances (linguistic, maybe technical) in a language game. At its most basic, a teacher asks a question and the learner wonders "There's something I am required to do/say.. I must think what it is!". The teacher determines the rules of the game. The learner might not choose to play the teacher's game (and maybe try to establish their own game) - such behaviour might be construed as indiscipline.

Even with Pask's teach-back, I think it is still the teacher who determines the rules of the game. Teach-back is simply a more elaborate skilled performance that is required by the learner. Teachers and learners are obviously asymmetric.

What is the purpose of restricting the skilled performances in a learning activity? I think it can facilitate 'personal revealing'. With a restricted set of communicative acts within the activity context, the speech acts can expose more of the person of the teacher and that of the learner than might be revealed in everyday life. This might be because in everyday discourse, skilled performances relate to personal viability: threats to viability might be perceived with certain communications, and as a consequence they won't be made. Within the constrained context of a learning activity, there is less perception of threat because all parties understand the relatively simple rules of the game.

Where does the learning happen?

There are two things that go on in a learning activity:
1. There is the use of subject 'content' as a way of framing the rules of a language game;
2. and then there is the recognition of the person of the teacher.

The teacher's knowledge is part of their personhood. In this way, there is effectively a 'double description' as Bateson might explain it. We come to know best when both the aspect of the language games of the subject and the person of the subject are there. If we only get the language game - maybe from reading about it - our knowing tends to require playing that game with others (talking about the knowledge).

What does this tell us about the role of content - and particularly open content? I suspect learners need both descriptions. I think without the person of the teacher, learning with just content online is likely to be deficient unless the learner uses the content to play language games with others around them. Alternatively, it is possible that the author is also available for inspection online (biography, etc) - in which case both descriptions (the person and the knowledge) could be gleaned from online engagement. Teachers might use open content as a way of defining language games which they may want to play with their learners. But this can only work if the teacher uses the content in a way which helps to coordinate the language games they play with their learners.