Money, Education and Tokens of Absence

Money does amazing things to us. It can reach into the darkest recesses of any personality (however much they might wish to deny its power over them) and, at the very least, cause an emotional response. A £20 note lying on the road is likely to cause most of us to pick it up (whether or not we choose or intend to keep it; the possibility of keeping it is always there). There are few interventions in the environment which can have such a strong effect on agency.

As I argued here (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/educational-technology-and.html) the materiality of money is important. It is a thing which everyone can see. Whilst its usage and meaning is constructed, our economy depends on our capacity to ascribe causal significance on a physical token.

What is it a token for? As I argued here (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/capability-and-cultivation.html) money increases capability: the flexibility with which we can act in response to the challenges life throws at us. Having money and not having money make a difference when we are faced with risks. The impact of unemployment is far less if one has the liquid assets or other private means that would ensure one didn't lose one's house. With reduced risk comes greater confidence and courage - themselves attributes that build greater capability. Without money and social risks become smothering.

But I don't think money is a token for capability, although it increases capability. In economic exchange, something to which one is attached through having the relation that we call 'ownership' is given up. Money compensates for what is lost. If there is no compensation, then we would say that the thing in question has been 'stolen', although money is not the only compensation for loss (altruistic or potlatch-style "giving" brings its own compensation, for example). But I think this compensatory aspect of money suggests that money might  be a token for anything which might be lost; it is a token of absence.

So there is a token of absence, whose use in exchange creates increased capability.

So what of education? It too, as I argued before, much like money, also increases capability. At first glance though, education doesn't appear to have a material 'token' - certainly not a universally recognised one. If it was someone's degree certificate lying on the road, I'm not sure that many people would pick it up. But a degree certificate is a token for the individual it is assigned to. But an educational certificate compensates for the loss of money by an employer. It does this by making a fiduciary statement: "this person will be able to do...". Most employers will not hand over their cash on the basis of certificates alone, but they will hand over their time in interviewing a person. The interview itself is a process of identifying whether the concerns of the employee and the concerns of the employer are compatible. The educational certificate is the first step in that process.

Understanding the processes of agreement, consensus and this kind of meeting of minds is important to understanding the relationship between the tokens of education and the process of employment. I do not think that consensus is achieved by a coordination of specific communications in agreement. I think a better explanation would look at the coordination of absences between people. It is a negative process. Communicating reveals the person by revealing their absences (the things which bear upon their being and shape their thoughts, but are not directly articulated). When two people fall in love (for example) it may be precisely around the impossible-to-articulate voids that both of them recognise that they are drawn together. To a lesser degree, the same may be true in processes of consensus.

This is important because it then allows us to consider the certificate as a 'token of personal absence'. It is the material, negative image of a person's identity which has the power (as a negative image) to draw the attention of others (including employers) into discussion. It's power lies both in what it says and in who says it (which institution). The latter matters because some certificates have a more universal recognition than others. But just as money serves as a compensator of absence in economic exchange, so might the 'token of personal absence' compensate for the effort that is expended in interview.

The processes of producing a 'token of personal absence' are opaque. Education might be a journey of self-discovery, but certifying personal absences is a game that can only be played by a few institutions. Those institutions maintain themselves on the desirability of certification, and the monopoly they hold in it. Informal learning is of course important, and some of the evidence of actions taken in informal learning can too have the property of a 'certification of personal absence'. But a degree certificate from Oxford will have more power because the absences will tend to be richer and more universally recognised.

All though our lives we go on creating certificates of 'personal absence'. These continue to operate in a way which draws others into engaged conversation with us: employers give up their time to interview us; or new acquaintances give up their current concerns to refocus some of their attention on us. Our certificates, the negative signs we bear, compensate for these decisions.

But at all levels, decision is the thing to understand. We decide to enter into education. Employers decide to employ people. The reasons for decision, however, are not (I think) causally deterministic in the linear manner of homo economicus. Decisions are made against a background of absences. If we can speak of causal determinism at all, it is that what is decided in all cases, is determined by what cannot be thought. The creating of symbols for what cannot be thought then can be seen as the most powerful mechanism for social behaviour. 

Teleodynamics and the Forms of Knowledge

It slightly amazes me that there is still such interest in Paul Hirst's Forms of Knowledge (my post on Hirst here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/hirsts-forms-of-knowledge.html attracts more hits than anything else on my blog!). Not that there's anything deeply wrong with the work - it's very good - but it dates from 1971! Has nothing changed regarding our thinking about subjects in the intervening 40 years? Yet, we see wave after wave of reform on the curriculum, assessment and school organisation. Reactionary moves like Free schools (which are rather costly!) seek organisational and institutional responses to autonomy over problems of the curriculum.

It's remarkable how some of these schools seem to be going after the 'Hogwarts' market - offering the kind of education that Michael Gove believes is good for us. This is a free school near me: http://www.kingsleadershipacademy.com/ I'm sure that the teachers are great and the kids and parents keen, but I find that everything about this, from the name of this establishment to the curriculum it offers speaks of deep confusion about education, curriculum, class, family and society. And that's not to mention the controversy about the incursion into the existing school and playing fields (see http://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/news/9743569.Woolston_free_school_decision__called_in_/). But there's some heavyweight backing behind this...

Perhaps that answers my question: Hirst's work was at least a serious and thoughtful attempt to address the question "exactly what do we think we are doing with education?" What happened afterwards was generally characterised by a lack of thought: Thatcher, New Labour (education, education, education) and now Gove. How the years fly by!! Education has become a political football, like a child in a broken marriage, torn apart by political rhetoric when it just wanted to be left alone - and maybe loved a little.

I wonder if the problem we face is that Hirst's work wasn't good enough. It wasn't good enough to convincingly set the groundwork for a coherent alternative to the expedient likes of Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker, Blair or Gove. The problems of education are caused by bad theory.

Can we do better? I think we need "critical holism" in educational thinking. What goes on the classroom is related to the question of how institutions are organised, how resources are allocated by government, how families cope with the pressures of raising children, how teachers cope with the pressures of bureaucracy, right up to the question of "what sort of a society do we want to live in?" Government supporters would say "Free schools precisely aim to increase flexibility and autonomy in the classroom by giving the administration independence". But a critical holist would say "Nonsense! What you've done is redirect resources from an established system to something untried for political short-term gain (and for the selfish gain of the sponsors of the free school institutions), with scant regard to the institutions that will suffer!". There's no critical holistic thinking there.

The greatest challenge for a holistic approach, however, is where to begin. Everything is connected to everything else; every layer of  the system, from the cognitive demands on learners to the financial strictures bearing on institutions is related to every other layer. Indeed, government thinking since the 1970s has tended to be a see-saw process of focusing on one level to the exclusion of the others: boxed-in thinking has dominated education (I see this not least in my own institution, where - as in others - 'retention' is discussed in a way completely unrelated to pedagogy or assessment, because certain issues are outside the remit of the committee concerned).

I think the best place to start is the most difficult. It's "teaching and learning". We are not at all clear what learning or teaching is. But uninspected assumptions here snowball into other layers of thinking. Is learning the acquisition of content and teaching its presentation? Surely not! Is it axons and dendrites making stronger connections with reinforcement? perhaps... Is learning adaptation? Maybe... but adaptation to what? Is the teacher the regulator monitoring communications of learners as in Pask's 'teach-back'? Maybe... But... there's something missing. We can't prove any of this. They're all just metaphysical assertions (even the axons and dendrites!). But they hide their metaphysical essence behind an image of scientific respectability (thanks, Piaget)

Teaching and learning is the most difficult question because it is the most metaphysical. But metaphysics is unavoidable. I think a scientific starting point should acknowledge the metaphysics explicitly from the start: begin with what we can't know and see the effect it has on what we do know. That means beginning with the void - beginning with absence. Then things can get interesting...

Hirst's forms of knowledge are stratified entities of 'discourse'. His distinctions highlight some essential qualities and irreducible natures to particular aspects of the curriculum: Maths is different from Art which is different from French. He may be right here, but he offers no account of how this irreducibility of the curriculum arises: he just asserts it.

But taking absence into account might do this. Deacon's work on 'Teleodynamics' suggests a way in which irreducible structures emerge from an interplay between internal 'present' mechanisms and absences which form the context within which those structure emerge.

 If something like the forms of knowledge can be shown to emerge from this kind of absence-driven process, then there are some important issues that can be addressed in the explanatory power of Hirst's work. The issue of reified knowledge is addressed because the 'reification' is seen as a consequence of an emergent mechanism. At the same time, that emergent mechanism is the learning process itself.

In other words, a critical holistic perspective becomes possible with the help of absences all the way through the educational system. The absences in the learning process shape the dynamics between teacher and learner. Whilst there is teach-back and coordination, there is also the emergence of irreducible structures (habits, concepts, etc) which carry their own absences. Irreducible structures at this level interact with larger-scale irreducible structures which are similarly emergent: the curriculum, timetable, institutional forms, etc.

The education system from this perspective is an emergent entity which is stratified and irreducible. Holism allows us to see the patterns of its emergence, deeper knowledge about which can give us an indication of the kinds of intervention we might make with it. But the ever-presence of absences means that the critical/negative aspect of continuous critique allows the never-ending probing of what's missing, the determination of shared absences, and the gradual unpicking of pathologies in the system.

The ultimate aim of a critical holist approach to education is the progressive determination of shared absence, achieved through deep systemic explanation and grounded critique. 

"Homo Sovietus" and an Imagined Educational Dystopia

I've been reading Andreï Makine's "A life's Music" which draws on Alexander Zinoviev's concept of "homo sovieticus" - the particular species of human being bent by the Soviet system. Zinoviev's concept was characterised by (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus)

• Indifference to the results of his labour 
• Indifference to common property and petty theft from the workplace, both for personal use and for profit. 
• Isolation from world culture, created by the Soviet Union's restrictions on travel abroad and strict censorship of information in the media (as well as the abundance of propaganda).
• Obedience or passive acceptance of everything that government imposes on them. 
• Avoidance of taking any individual responsibility on anything. 
• a tendency to drink heavily

As Makine points out, Zinoviev's characterisation resonated with everyone. It was the concept everybody in the system could relate to. When everyone has a shared experience like that, a powerful concept can take root and be transformative in beginning to overturn the system.

But we all have a shared experience of education too. In the future, we might all have a shared experience of online education. If Homo Sovieticus was the result of an educational rather than a political system, what would we see? Perhaps Zinoviev's features can be transposed to education like this:

• Indifference to knowledge and wisdom
• Indifference to social responsibility and politics
• Isolation from each other
• Obedience to institutional rules and regulations
• Avoidance of taking personal responsibility or risk
• and a tendency to drink heavily!

We can probably recognise a few 'strategic learners' in there! But the point about Zinoviev is that everyone was like that. Could everyone become like that in our education system? What kind of education system might produce this kind of alienation? 

I find this an interesting question. Most of the time we try to design educational utopias. We tend to spend less time designing dystopias. But it's quite good fun, so let's have a go...

To produce this kind of alienation, an education system would have to be oppressive, and individuals would be unable to escape it. No professional advancement would be possible without succumbing to the education system and gaining the certification it produced. So there would need to be high level legislation which restricted the actions of employers in ensuring only those with the appropriate paperwork could be employed. Further legislation could be produced which controlled the promotion of employees to particular roles depending on the gaining of further certificates. Competencies, dictated by institutions and professional bodies, and only capable of  being signed-off by accredited institutions, would determine complete dependency on engagement with those institutions. Technology means that the scale of tracking and categorising competencies and certificates for each individual is easily managed with the help of a DNA fingerprint. There is no way of slipping through the net.

One would think that working for educational institutions would then be a safe place to be in such a system. But this is not the case. In this dystopian world, education is the biggest employer. (The jobs in sectors that education produces certificates for are largely automated and so provide few jobs, although each individual gaining certification hopes they will be lucky!) As an employer, education is a trap. Whilst each individual aims for the heights of educational virtue, the institutional system - struggling as it does to keep everyone busy - puts barriers in the way to prevent anything happening. But what does this do to the spirit of the people?

Like every human being, individuals in this dystopian education system search for meaning in their lives. They used to search for food - and at least that is plentiful thanks to the automation of the farms. But now they search for meaning in a world which is befuddling. In the complexity of this world of education, there is no way of connecting the dots. Each person hopes one day to have worked it out. But it is futile. The system preaches meaningfulness, but produces bureaucracy and petty rules. Each individual might plan their actions as 'the next step' towards a meaningful existence. But each step is thwarted by some official blockage or other "ah - but you need certified competency 2.3.5 to do that... go to this website... and there's a fee..." And then at every step of the way is an invitation to consume a bewildering and unpalatable array of financial products and services (in order to pay for education) which will further bear on the restrictions to act meaningfully for many years in the future.

So what emerges? The only meaning available is to play the system; become part of the bureaucracy. And from there the human indifference and isolation which is the hallmark of Zinoviev's Homo Sovieticus starts to reveal itself.

Interactive Documentary, Shared Experience and Better Theory in Education

I've recently been playing with the Wookie Widget Server for the iTEC project in producing a kind of interactive video. Basically, I have a movie (an instructional thing made with CrazyTalk) which (because it uses the HTML5 video component) can fire events at particular instances. Those events trigger changes in the Wookie widgets. As a result, the audience of the movie (eg. kids in a classroom) can be invited at particular points to engage in activities with the movie, and be automatically provided with tools (widgets) to do this. It doesn't matter what platform they view it on, providing the technology within particular widgets is compatible (so no Flash!).

Video

Participant widget screen (in Moodle in this case)

It doesn't look like much as a screen shot, but in reality, it creates a very interesting dynamic in the classroom.

I'm fascinated by the shared experience, by the sequencing of activities in this way simultaneously, and by the way the teaching can do other things whilst the activities are running through and the participants engage in the video.

There's a lot happening at the moment in terms of real-time collaboration in this way. Smart Technologies (the Interactive Whiteboard people) have just launched something called Extreme Collaborate which appears to use a web-socket style connection system for direct interaction with any kind of web-enabled device and the whiteboard. Then, Microsoft are doing some remarkable things with their 'SmartGlass':

I think there is something in this. My wish is that it opens the door to a contrasting approach to open education than the one currently being explored by MOOCs. I think convivial experience matters, and that there is no reason why Universities shouldn't create rich convivial experiences that can be engaged with by groups of people all over the world - but something which is more like an interactive cinema presentation that a website that people look at on their own: with this technology, the lecture is an 'interactive documentary'. Currently, we are seeing arts organisations broaden their reach (the National Theatre and Royal Opera in London, and the Metropolitan opera in New York are two examples), with the use of live broadcast to global venues. These are powerful events. Why shouldn't Universities do the same?

It would require Universities to really think about the "theatre of the classroom" in ways that they perhaps haven't done before. It would offer the opportunities for Universities to continually improve the experience of the lecture, or the classroom theatre, by monitoring participant engagement, and getting live feedback on the learner experience. It would set a standard that they would then have to live up to. And why shouldn't anyone be able to attend?

But I'm interested in the research opportunities presented by this technology. It provides a way of exploring 'conviviality' in learning. The fascinating thing in my experiments has been the extent of discussion amongst participants - particularly when they are all engaged in the same activity. "What do you think?" they ask each other. What if their activities were all different, rather than all the same? What if the coordination was different? There are parameters of investigation here which can be easily explored and data collected. Indeed, it may be that the face-to-face classroom provides a richer opportunity for data collection and the examination of experience than the online world, where it can be so difficult and time-consuming to encourage engagement.

What am I after? There are a number of questions:

1. What is the relationship between the 'content' of learning and the communication dynamics in classroom?
2. What is meaningful in the experiences?
3. What is the relationship between the manner of coordination of activities and the meaningfulness of the experiences?
4. Is meaning related to anticipation?
5. Is anticipation related to shared experience and knowledge of one another?
6. Is what we learn that which we learn about each other?
7. Do patterns of communication stimulated by shared experience reveal what we learn about each other?
8. Is shared experience related to shared absence?
9. Is the mechanism whereby shared experience affects patterns of communication essentially one of focusing on what's there, or is it drawing attention to what isn't there?
10. How might the differences in communication dynamics in relation to the manner of coordination be modelled?

Probably enough questions for now. But the point is that there is a technological way of investigating them which can be reproduced in different contexts. I find that most exciting.

After all, any scientific investigation requires a degree of reproducibility in the experimental conditions. Despite the fact that education is clearly not physics  (it's mechanisms are transitive, as Bhaskar would say), we do identify 'demi-regs' (as Tony Lawson would call them) of 'things that tend to work'. Explaining the 'things that tend to work' in ways where new kinds of coordinations can be produced and tendencies predicted is a very important step to understanding educational processes a bit more.

But at the bottom of it all is the fact that I think one of the reasons why education is in such a mess at the moment is because our theories of education and learning need critiquing and investigating. This is certainly the case with e-learning. We need a better ontology.

Maybe technology can provide a means to working towards a better description.

I - thou and educational technology

When we say "learners prefer x to y" there is always some kind of reduction of the person, the extent of which depends on the intentions of the individual making the statement. I've just done it... just now! But my intention is to be acutely aware of the kind of reductions that are performed, and the kind of reductions that I might perform in trying to talk about them.

First, let me say that reducing the person is a problem. If it becomes a reduction which gains official acceptance, then it will find its way into policy. Because the reduction is always the product of some kind of idealism, and that the real world and real individuals don't conform to any particular ideal, what we end up with inevitably are degrees of oppression. I've worried particularly about cybernetic reductions in this regard, but in fact most of the dominant learning theories (many of which are essentially cybernetic or mechanistic in nature) also fall into the category of reduction of the person. Essentially, every mechanicised description of learning amounts to a "mechanical metaphysics": the assertion of a mechanistic process to account for what we cannot possibly know. Indeed, the weakness of most of these theories is that, in the main, most of them stop short of trying to account for God (Bateson and Beer are notable exceptions).

I've been thinking about Martin Buber's I-thou-it distinction as a reminder of the dimensions of personhood which are distinct and irreducible to each other. The concept of the irreducible structuring of personhood is not something that has been widely represented in the educational discourse, and certainly not the educational technology discourse. The reason for this is the dominance of a mechanistic constructivism whose totalisations have washed over the rich complexity of the inner lives of learners, teachers and everyone else. And because the desire for learning technology has been tied to vested interests, personal agendas, economic forces, etc, the desire for a digestible explanatory totalisation has been great, as individuals working in the field of e-learning have sought to validate their activities and claims and their technologies. The extent to which they have been successful is an interesting phenomenon, possibly arising from the contested and confused nature of thinking both about education and technology in our post-industrialised world.

But what do I mean by the irreducible dimensions of the personhood? Buber describes 'I' as a focused aspect of being directed towards concrete experience of things ('it') which are distinct and separate from ourselves. "Thou" is an aspect of being which is a boundless awareness of relationships. In mapping this territory, Buber makes no claim for assimilating the "I-it" mode of being with the "I-Thou" mode, although he does claim that the human search for meaning ultimately leads to the spiritual awareness of "I-Thou" and God. But the essential point is in identifying the different kinds of experience.

Comparing this to cybernetic theories of learning, for 'perturbation-response' theories (like Piaget for example), "I-it" is the dominant experience (where 'it' is a perturbation - an experience of disequilibrium which causes adaptation, assimilation and accommodation). The locus of the cause of disequilibrium and its resolution is open to debate. But Piaget clearly is interested in the individual 'experience' of and focus on something that doesn't 'fit': this is "I-it". For radical constructivists like Von Glasersfeld, there is denial about a concrete external 'it', but his account is still "I-it" focused, emphasising the internal construction of external reality; indeed due to his scepticism about any external reality, Von Glasersfeld and other 2nd-order cyberneticians perform a profound "I-it" reduction of experience. Luhmann (and maybe Bateson), whilst coming from the same camp, I think provides a different focus. This is one with more emphasis on the construction of the ego through apprehending the relations of communications. Luhmann comes close to a characterisation of "I-thou" as the dominant mode of experience; 'it' is merely an epiphenomenon of the communication dynamics. With Piaget and Von Glasersfeld, scepticism about the existence of 'it' leads to "I-it" reductionism; with Luhman, scepticism about "I" lead to "I-thou" reductionism. Each loses the richness of the other.

Buber's point is that both are there and concrete. In social life, experience simultaneously hovers or oscillates between them. Spiritual awareness and thing-directedness coexist. (It's also interesting to reflect on this in the light of Freud's Ego-Id-Superego distinction, which are also co-existant and concrete). The scientific problem with this is that the explanatory tendency is to reject the experience of concrete distinctiveness between modes of experience in favour of explanatory totalising mechanisms which account for a reduced range of experience. There is a methodological aspect to this problem: where to begin? With concrete experience, or with an ideal abstraction? In learning technology, it tends to be the latter which the experience is then bent to fit. Then there is a practical explanatory problem which is to find a way of explaining rationally the existence of concrete and distinct aspects of experience.

I have some discomfort in suggesting the following because it is a mechanism, and as such it is ideal. But maybe mechanistic rationality is the best we can do... Terry Deacon has recently explained how concrete form arises through the interaction of presence and absence (see http://www.evolutioncreationsemiotics.org/autocell_modelling.htm), between the internal mechanisms of an organic form and the substrate within which that form arises. Floridi has similarly described possible ways in which 'levels of abstraction' which are irreducible to each other might arise. Might it be like this with personhood? The absences between people are causal in the emergent distinctiveness of concrete aspects of experience which whilst emergent from a mechanism become irreducible to each other. Accepting this emergence of irreducibility and structuredness in reality may be an important step in thinking about how best to approach the study of those different levels of experience. Moreover, it suggests that the attempt to reduce the concrete layers to a totalising mechanism is futile. What happens is more subtle.

The major development in this approach for educational technology is the focus on absence as a category for investigation. The absences involved in the use of technology are always palpable - when it works, when it doesn't work, what is lost in the medium, what might be gained, etc. The comparison between the individual with a computer talking to others remotely can be compared to the convivial classroom situation. In each case, absences are distinct. There are simple things we can do to begin to get a handle on this. What happens when people are together? What happens when they are remote? There is concrete data (communications, activities, etc) that might be a starting point for differentiation. A mechanism involving absence may then be explored for its capacity to generate differences which relate to the differences that are demonstrable from the data. That would give us a way of getting a handle on the causal role of inferred absences through an analysis of data. This means using data of communication, etc as examples of distinct aspects on experience, and then asking about the emergent mechanisms which might give rise to that distinctness. We can then do a comparison between the differences in the emergent mechanisms and the social and material situation of learning.

Such an approach, in focusing on distinctions and differences between experiences, is distinct from idealised attempts to 'explain learning'. Instead, the focus is on 'explaining difference in experience'. The assertion is that by studying difference, we start to investigate the causes of difference, where absence is a fundamental category in a mechanism that leads to the emergence of irreducible differences both within individuals and between individuals. Determining and articulating the absences becomes the research objective.

In this way, concreteness not idealism is the starting point for investigation; mechanism is the starting point for explanation.

Why Openness Matters: From MOOCs to FlashMobs and Shared Spaces

Whilst I've been quite critical of them, MOOCs are clearly 'happening'. If the learning technologists from 10 years ago could see where we have got to with learning technology (some of them can, but they've got short memories!), they'd probably be quite impressed by the emergence of large-scale open courses - particularly the institutional buy-in they have gained. Where my worries begin is that we lose perspective in the MOOC debate: not just from the anti-MOOC crowd, but from the pro-MOOC crowd. There is a need for us to say "What is this really about?"

In a word (or 5) it is about "access to the education system". Where the anti-MOOC people and the pro-MOOC people disagree is precisely what 'access' and 'education system' really mean. In many ways it feels like a rehash of the many "don't forget the pedagogy!" arguments that surrounded VLEs, Learning Objects, e-Portfolio and Personal Learning Environments. But I don't think we ever sorted out what we meant by pedagogy in that debate - and there are similar fundemental issues surrounding MOOCs which risk getting ignored. In reality there was a tendency to take sides without fully exploring the positions adopted. One way of addressing that is to turn each positive assertion into a question:

1. access?
2. education system?
3. pedagogy?

Regarding access, the education system has been and continues to be a closed system. That is not to say that learning has not been possible outside it (learning cannot be closed). But the education system, with its capability to certify individuals, has been closed through entry requirements, and more recently, fees. MOOCs address this.

The fact that the education system has embraced technology as a way of addressing its own closure is interesting. I have argued previously that Universities are experimenting with ways of leveraging technology to increase their market share through apparent 'openness' (of course that raises another question: apparent openness vs real openness..  but let's park that for now!). In other words, the new 'openness' may be another form of closedness. But if MOOCs are ultimately ineffective, then frankly its just another experiment - and probably one that has more positives than negatives as outcomes. If MOOCs, have massive take-up, lead to slashing the costs of education - if they are hugely successful in doing precisely what they claim to do - then we will have justification for worrying about Universities in the same way we worry about Google. It's important to be careful what we wish for!

But perhaps we should forget the education system and institutions for a moment. Learning is the active thing that goes on, after all; education itself doesn't do anything! The arguments against MOOCs tend to be based on poor learning experiences (I've jumped on this bandwaggon myself - and I'm now awkwardly readjusting my position!). Yes - the learning experiences are mostly poor, and this is reflected by the  few conversions to certification. But what are the alternatives? The traditional university with small group seminars, face-to-face (huge) lectures, out-of-date curricula, etc? Isn't that merely upholding the old-fashioned closedness of the system?

The basic question of education, not only educational technology, need to be asked:

1. What is learning and teaching that some experiences are better than others?
2. What can technology do to amplify better experiences? (can they be amplified? How does their quality change when they are?)

In other words, openness is not just about widening access. It is not just about putting stuff on a website. It is about widening access to great learning experiences.

One institutional business model for some (not all) MOOCs conceives of a 'loss leader' tempting students to purchase the deluxe product. Of course, it could have the opposite effect - MOOCs are reputational risks for institutions. Another is simply a super-scale effective education model with slashed costs. I tend to favour the latter because costs are the big concern of learners. But the systemic ecological implications on the 'institution of knowledge and learning' needs to be examined in a way which is not happening at the moment. And we need new theories and tools to do it.

Universities should aim to amplify their best learning experiences as a way of broadening access and participation: they have huge amounts to offer society. This doesn't have to be online. It can be on TV, in cinemas, huge public lectures (this is hardly an innovation - Bergson's lectures in Paris in the early 20th century were sell-out affairs). Flashmobs are a recent and incredibly creative invention: technology can do remarkable things there, I think! Universities should create the most exciting events which bring people together and give them the experience of having their minds opened. Perhaps Universities should examine their role as media companies - or even take a more direct role in political activism. Open education = Open Minds.

Such an effort would entail a honing of the "theatre of the classroom". Convivial spaces that allow them to say with confidence to students "this is the experience you get if you study with us - and it's really great!". The most important element of this experience is, however, social. Why does this openness matter? Because students need to make decisions about what to study, where to study, etc. They need to be able to see the experience they will get to assess the risks of submitting themselves for assessment.

At the moment, the University is largely opaque to students before they choose to go. Yet those students are on the point of making one of the most expensive financial risk transactions of their lives - Without the ability to see the product? to assess the risk? It's the kind of nonsense that we'd hoped went out of fashion with the pre-reformation Catholic Church! MOOCs might be a useful experiment in the right direction. But we should remember this is not the only possible technological world we might live in. Others are possible. And Universities might well expend some effort in exploring them - for the sake of all of us!

Educational Technology and Sociomateriality: An Aristotelian perspective

A friend of mine argued recently that “there’s no such thing as technology; there are only artefacts” I find this position very interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, we should consider what it is we talk about in e-learning if there is “no such thing as technology”. In fact, it challenges us to accept that there are many dimensions of things that interest us: changes in agency of learners and teachers  being one of the fundamental ones. Then we are interested in the technical dimensions of our ability to manipulate the material environment: much like an artist will look for new techniques to manipulate paint, wood or stone (new interoperability standards, new programming languages provide this kind of thing in e-learning). Taking the  position that “there’s no such thing as technology” means that the causal connection between what we do and what we observe happening is re-situated. We cannot say “it’s the technology that does this” because the 'technology' as an entity isn’t there; there's just an artefact. We might then ask ourselves why we would want to say that “the technology does this…” The answer, I’ve often encountered, is because we want to believe that the technology as a 'saleable commodity' has causal power. After all,  many other technological artefacts appear to have causal power.

Much educational technology discourse centres on the impact on agency from the creation of artefacts in the environment. New websites, textbooks, systems for recording attendance, giving feedback, coordinating activities, and other systemic interventions allowing for the seamless joining-up of existing system have material properties - the physicality of the computer, the light from the screen, etc. Their social properties, which may or may not emerge from their materiality include the power relationships which demand interaction with a new system, normative practices, expectations of others or social roles.

But surely, saying “there’s no such thing as technology” is ridiculous?! There are things like cars and telephones and wheels and houses. McLuhan would tell us about the 'extending' power of technologies: cars extend the feet, telephones extend the voice, etc. But is 'extension' merely a particular property of particular technologies? 

I think Aristotelian causal distinctions are useful here. If we are to distinguish between different kinds of technologies as artefacts, our distinctions take the form of examining formal, material and final causes. [See here for a quick guide to Aristotelian causality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Aristotelian)] McLuhan's idea of 'extension' is an articulation of a final cause - the purpose of something. McLuhan tends to see technology as teleological - i.e. for a purpose. Not all artefacts are purposeful in this way (for example, a painting). But teleological thinking can cause us problems - after all, purpose for whom?!

Artistotle's distinctions can help us make a deeper analysis of artefacts that we think of as technologies. A car is an artefact with a formal cause (being car-shaped with wheels, an engine and seats), a material cause (paper cars never really caught on!), an efficient cause (you need a car industry, and industrialists to make a car) and a final cause (it extends my feet). But something interesting happens here: the final cause is linked to the efficient cause (the economy); the material cause of the car is dependent on other efficient causes (mining industries, for example); the formal cause is connected to the final cause which influences the efficient cause... and so on. Aristotle's distinctions appear to create dynamic feedback patterns when we look at different artefacts.

If we see a £20 note lying on the road, it will have a particular effect on us. The urge to pick it up will be strong. Is this urge is the result of the presence and proximity of the artefact? Is it the result of the 'affordances' of the £20 note? I wonder if we can do better than "affordance". Picking it up is a transformation of agency in response to a material intervention. Something happens in us which drives us. We can first of all think about the questions which we might ask: “who dropped it? What can I do with it? Could I take it? Will someone else take it?” and so on. In essence, picking it up is a decision. The question is “how is the decision reached?”. These are questions about causality. Can we then make a connection between the dynamics between the causes of an artefact and the decision-making process of people encountering it?

I have recently argued that decisions are reached through what is not thinkable, rather than through what is thinkable. An artefact may create unthinkabilities. It may be that the unthinkabilities are related to the causal properties of the artefact. The artefact of money is interesting because the final cause is normative and related to the efficient cause. That everyone understands this means that everyone has a similar experience in the presence of the artefact of money. Because everyone has a similar experience, so everyone may be drawn to a similar way of acting, and similar decisions will be made. In turn this creates the efficient conditions for the reproduction of money. This would not be the case if we saw an abandoned car, for example. There would be far more differentiation in peoples' reactions.

I wonder if many technological artefacts aspire to the condition of money. And I wonder if the dynamics of self-perpetuation (autopoiesis?) are fundamental in our distinguishing 'technologies' from other artefacts.