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Learning Theorists

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Donald Clark’s collected critical introductions to a wide range of theorists that have some connection with learning. They are not all learning theorists as such, despite the title, though all relate to things that matter in learning and/or teaching and/or education. It’s an eclectic mix that covers far more than those we normally consider to be learning theorists: the likes of Jesus and Marx are not normally grouped with the likes of Dewey and Gagne, for example.

Donald positively relishes the demolition of holy cows and many of his critiques – e.g. of social constructivistm or learning styles or Sugata Mitra  – challenge orthodoxy and commonly-held-but-mistaken beliefs in a very refreshing way. He’s not always right, but he is always well-informed, thought-provoking and interesting. And, if you do disagree with anything he says, he’s normally willing to engage in a reasoned debate about it on his blog – this is a million miles away from a static textbook.

For anyone wanting to get a quick, informative introduction to learning/teaching/education theories and some incisive commentary on them, as well as some excellent references to further reading, this is a brilliant learning resource.

Address of the bookmark: http://planblearning.com/articles/learning-theorists/

From Representation to Emergence: Complexity's challenge to the epistemology of schooling – Osberg – 2008 – Educational Philosophy and Theory – Wiley Online Library

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This is my second post for today on the subject of boundaries and complex systems (yes, I am writing a paper!), this time pointing to a paper by Osberg, Biesta and Cilliers from 2008 that applies the concepts to knowledge and education. It’s a fascinating paper, drawing a theory of knowledge out of complex systems that the authors rather deftly fit with Dewey’s transactional realism and (far less compellingly) a bit of deconstructionism.

I think this sits very firmly within the connectivist family of theories (Stephen Downes may disagree!) albeit from a slightly different perspective. The context is the realm of complex (mostly complex adaptive) systems but the notion of knowledge as an emergent and shifting phenomenon born of engagement – a process, not a product – and the significance of the connected whole in both enabling and embodying it all is firmly in the connectivist tradition. It’s a slightly different perspective but one that is well-grounded in theory and comes to quite a similar conclusion, aptly put:

“education (becoming educated) is no longer about understanding a finished  universe, or even about participating in a finished and stable universe. It is the result, rather, of participating in the creation of an unfinished universe.“

The authors begin by defining what they describe as a ‘representational’ or ‘spatial’ epistemology that underpins most education. This is not quite as simplistic as it sounds – they include models and theories in this, at least. Their point is that education takes people out of ‘real life’ and therefore must rely on a means to represent ‘real life’ to do its job properly. I think this is pushing it a bit: yes, that is true of a fair amount of intentional teaching but there is a lot that goes on in education systems that is unintentional, or emerges as a by-product of interaction, or that happens in playgrounds, cafes, or common rooms, that is very different and is not just an incidental to the process but quite critical to it. To pretend that educational systems are nothing but the explicit things we intentionally do to people is, I think deliberately, creating a bit of a straw man. They make much the same point: I guess it is done to distinguish this from their solution, which is an ’emergentist’ epistemology.

The really interesting stuff for me comes from Cillier’s contribution (I’m guessing) on boundaries, which makes the simple and obvious point that complex systems (as opposed to complicated ones) are inherently incompressible, so any model we make of them is inaccurate: in leaving out the tiniest thing we make it impossible to make deterministic predictions, save in that we can create boundaries to focus on particular aspects we might care about and come up with probabalistic inferences (e.g. predicting the weather). Those boundaries are thus, of necessity, created (or, more accurately, negotiated), not discovered. They are value-laden. Thus:

“…models and theories that reduce the world to a system of rules or laws cannot be understood as pure representations of a universe that exists independently, but should rather be understood as valuable but provisional and temporary tools by means of which we constantly re-negotiate our understanding of and being in the world“

They go on…

“We need boundaries around our regularities before we can model or theorise them, before we can find their rules of operation, because rules make sense only in terms of boundaries. The point is that the setting of the boundary creates the condition of possibility for a rule or a law to exist. When a boundary is not naturally given, as is the case with natural complex systems, the rules that we ‘discover’ also cannot be understood as naturally given. Rules and ‘laws’ are not ‘real’ features of the systems we theorise about. Theories that attempt to reduce complexity to a system of rules or laws, like our models which do precisely this, therefore cannot be understood as pictures of reality.“

So, the rules that we find are pragmatic ones – they are tools, rather than pictures of reality, that help us to renegotiate our world and the meaning we make in and of it:

“From this perspective, knowledge is not about ‘the world’ as such, it is not about truth; rather, it is about what we can do in the world, how we can change it.…One could say ‘acquiring’ knowledge does not ‘solve’ problems for us: it creates problems for us to solve.”

At this point they come round to Dewey, whose transactional model is not about finding out about the world but leads to a constantly emerging and ever renegotiated state of being.

“…in acting, we create knowledge, and in creating knowledge, we learn to act in different ways and in acting in different ways we bring about new knowledge which changes our world, which causes us to act differently, and so on, unendingly. There is no final truth of the matter, only increasingly diverse ways of interacting in a world that is becoming increasingly complex.“

One of the more significant aspects of this, that is not dwelt on anything like enough in this paper but that forms a consistent subtext, is that this is a fundamentally social pursuit. This is a complex system not just of individuals negotiating an active relationship with the world, but of people doing it together, as part of a complex system that drives its own adaptation, at every scale and within every (overlapping, interpenetrating) boundary.

They continue with an, I think, unsuccessful attempt to align this perspective with postmodernist/poststructuralist/deconstructionist theory, claiming that Dillon’s differentiation between the radical relationality of complexity and poststructuralist theorists is illusory, because a complex system is always in a state of becoming without being, so it is much the same kind of thing. Whether or not this is true, I don’t think it adds anything significant to the arguments.

The paper rushes to a rather unsatisfactory conclusion – at last hitting the promised topic of the title – about the role of this emergentist epistemology in schooling:

“Acquisition is no longer the name of the game …. This means questions about what to present in the curriculum and whether these things should be directly presented or should be represented (such that children may acquire knowledge of these things most efficiently or effectively) are no longer relevant as curricular questions. While content is important, the curriculum is less concerned with what content is presented and how, and more with the idea that content is engaged with and responded to …. Here the content that is engaged is not pre-given, but emerges from the educative situation itself. With this conception of knowledge and the world, the curriculum becomes a tool for the emergence of new worlds rather than a tool for stabilisation and replication

This follows quite naturally and makes sense, but it diminishes the significance of a pretty obvious elephant in the room, which is that the educational institution itself is one of those boundaried systems that plays a huge role in and of itself, not to mention with other boundaried systems, regardless of the processes enacted within its boundaries. I think this is symptomatic of a big gap that the paper very much implies but barely attempts to address, which is that all of these complex systems involved processes, structures, rules, tools, objects, content (whatever that is!), media, and a host of other things are part of those complex systems. Knowledge is indeed a dynamic process, a state of becoming or of being, but it incorporates really a lot of things, only a limited number of which are in the minds of individuals. It’s not about people learning – it’s about that whole, massive, complex adaptive system itself.

Address of the bookmark: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00407.x/abstract;jsessionid=901674561113DC6F72BDE8756B165030.f04t03?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+11th+July+2015+at+10%3A00-16%3A00+BST+%2F+05%3A00-11%3A00+EDT+%2F+17%3A00-23%3A00++SGT++for+essential+maintenance.++Apologies+for+the+inconvenience&userIsAuthenticated=false&deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=

Boundaries and Hierarchies in Complex Systems

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This rather elderly paper by Paul Cilliers peters off to an unsatisfyingly vague and obvious conclusion, but it does have some quite useful clarifications and observations about the nature of boundaries as they relate to hierarchies, networks and complex systems in general. I particularly like:

“We often fall into the trap of thinking of a boundary as something that separates one thing from another. We should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. “

This simple observation leads to further thoughts on how we choose those boundaries and the (necessary) ways we create models that make use of them. The thing is, we are the creators of those boundaries, at least in any complex system – Cilliers mentions neural networks as a good example – so what we choose to model is always determined by us and, like any model, it is and must be a partial representation, not an analogue, of the impossible complexities of the world it models. In a very real sense, we shape our understanding of the world through the boundaries that we choose to (or are hard-wired to) consider significant and there are always other places to draw those boundaries that change the meaning of what we are observing. It makes the analysis of complex systems quite hard, because we can seldom see beyond the boundaries we create that simplify the complexity in them and we have a tendency to over-simplify: as he points out, even apparently clear hierarchies shift and interpenetrate one another. This is more than, though related to, categories and metaphors of the sort examined by the likes of Hofstadter or Lakoff.

Since this paper was written, John Holland has done some mind-bending and deeply thought-provoking work on signals and boundaries in complex systems that delves far deeper and that begins to address the problem head-on, but which I have been struggling to understand properly for many months: I’m pretty certain that Holland is onto something of staggering importance, if I could only grasp precisely what that might be! He is not the clearest of writers and he tends to leave a lot unsaid and assumed, that the reader has to fill in. It’s also complicated stuff – suffice to say, stochastic urns play a significant role. This paper by Cilliers is a good stab at the issue from a high altitude philosophical perspective that makes a few of the wicked and profound issues quite clear.

Address of the bookmark: http://blogs.cim.warwick.ac.uk/complexity/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2014/02/Cilliers-2001-Boundaries-Hierarchies-and-Networks.pdf

Everything Science Knows About Reading On Screens

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Well, maybe not everything!

This article contains some interesting and useful information about the current state of the research comparing e-reading vs p-reading. In brief, there are no simple, unequivocal findings. The biggest issues with e-texts apparently relate to the propensity of screen-users to skim and/or be distracted, though there are also issues with knowing where you are in an e-text, which makes it both harder to get the bigger picture of how it all hangs together and more difficult to remember some aspects of what your are reading. On the other hand, there’s good evidence that screens are better for people with some disabilities like age-related sight impairment and dyslexia and the advantages of things like easy search, instant word lookup, shared annotations, variable fonts and, of course, cost and information density, are pretty compelling. In the past I’ve shared some thoughts on some potential solutions to the known problems with e-readers as well as on the relative merits and demerits of each technology. Like all technologies, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Research like this is useful because it helps to identify design problems that we need to solve, not because it provides definitive answers. I don’t think we are going to see much improvement in paper books in the near future, but there’s plenty to work on in e-reading!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048297/evidence/everything-science-knows-about-reading-on-screens

Over two dozen people with ties to India’s $1-billion exam scam have died mysteriously in recent months

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“… the scale of the scam in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is mind-boggling. Police say that since 2007, tens of thousands of students and job aspirants have paid hefty bribes to middlemen, bureaucrats and politicians to rig test results for medical schools and government jobs.

So far, 1,930 people have been arrested and more than 500 are on the run. Hundreds of medical students are in prison — along with several bureaucrats and the state’s education minister. Even the governor has been implicated.“

A billion-dollar fraud scheme, perhaps dozens murdered, nearly 2000 in jail and hundreds more on the run. How can we defend a system that does this to people? Though opportunities for corruption may be higher in India, it is not peculiar to the culture. It is worth remembering that more than two-thirds of high school Canadian students cheat (I have seen some estimates that are notably higher – this was just the first in the search results and illustrates the point well enough):

According to a survey of Canadian university & college students:

  • Cheated on written work in high school 73%
  • Cheated on tests in high school 58%
  • Cheated on a test as undergrads 18%
  • Helped someone else cheat on a test 8%

According to a survey of 43,000 U.S. high school students:

  • Used the internet to plagiarize 33%
  • Cheated on a test last year 59%
  • Did it more than twice 34%
  • Think you need to cheat to get ahead 39%

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/universities/

When it is a majority phenomenon, this is the moral norm, not an aberration. The problem is a system that makes this a plausible and, for many, a preferable solution, despite knowing it is wrong. This means the system is flawed, far more than the people in it. The problems emerge primarily because, in the cause of teaching, we make people do things they do not want to do, and threaten them/reward them to enforce compliance. It’s not a problem with human nature, it’s a rational reaction to extrinsic motivation, especially when the threat is as great as we make it. Even my dog cheats under those conditions if she can get away with it.  When the point of learning is the reward, then there is no point to learning apart from the reward and, when it’s to avoid punishment, it’s even worse. The quality of learning is always orders of magnitude lower than when we learn something because we want to learn it, or as a side-effect of doing something that interests us, but the direct consequence of extrinsic motivation is to sap away intrinsic motivation, so even those with an interest mostly have at least some of it kicked or cajolled out of them. That’s a failure on a majestic scale. If tests given in schools and universities had some discriminatory value it might still be justifiable but perhaps the dumbest thing of all about the whole crazy mess is that a GPA has no predictive value at all when it comes to assessing competence.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theprovince.com/health/Over+dozen+people+with+ties+India+billion+exam+scam+have+died/11191722/story.html

Exam focus damaging pupils' mental health, says NUT – BBC News

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A report on a survey of 8,000 teachers and a review of the research.

The report sponsors observe…

“Many of the young people Young Minds works with say that they feel completely defined by their grades and that this is very detrimental to their wellbeing and self-esteem.”

It seems that at least some of their teachers do indeed (reluctantly) define them that way…

One junior school teacher said: “I am in danger of seeing them more in terms of what colour they are in my pupils’ list eg are they red (below expectation), green (above expectation) or purples (Pupil Premium) – rather than as individuals.”

Indeed, it appears to be endemic…

Kevin Courtney, deputy general-secretary of the NUT, said: “Teachers at the sharp end are saying this loud and clear, ‘If it isn’t relevant to a test then it is not seen as a priority.’

“The whole culture of a school has become geared towards meeting government targets and Ofsted expectations. As this report shows, schools are on the verge of becoming ‘exam factories’.”

He argued the accountability agenda was “damaging children’s experience of education”, which should be joyful and leave them with “a thirst for knowledge for the rest of their lives”.

This is terrible and tragic. So surely the British government is trying to do something about it? Not so much…

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Part of our commitment to social justice is the determination to ensure every child is given an education that allows them realise their potential.

“That’s why we are raising standards with a rigorous new curriculum, world class exams and new accountability system that rewards those schools which help every child to achieve their best.”

Helping people to realise their potential is a noble aim. A “rigorous new curriculum, world class exams and new accountability system” is a guaranteed way to prevent that from happening. Duh. Didn’t those that run the UK government learn anything in their expensive private schools? Oh…

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-33380155

The death of the exam: Canada is at the leading edge of killing the dreaded annual ‘final’ for good | National Post

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Good news!

There’s not much to disagree with in this article, that reports on some successful efforts to erode the monstrously ugly blight of exams in Canada and beyond, and some of the more obvious reasoning behind the initiatives to kill them. They don’t work, they’re unfair, they’re antagonistic to learning, they cause pain, etc. All true.

Address of the bookmark: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-death-of-the-exam-canada-is-at-the-leading-edge-of-killing-the-final-for-good

The LMS as a paywall

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I was writing about openness in education in a chapter I am struggling with today, and had just read Tony Bates’s comments on iQualify, an awful cloud rental service offering a monolithic locked-in throwback that just makes me exclaim, in horror, ‘Oh good grief! Seriously?’ And it got me thinking.

Learning management systems, as implemented in academia, are basically paywalls. You don’t get in unless you pay your fees. So why not pick up on what publishers infamously already do and allow people to pay per use? In a self-paced model like that used at Athabasca it makes perfect sense and most of the infrastructure – role-based time-based access etc – and of course the content already exists. Not every student needs 6 months of access or the trimmings of a whole course but, especially for those taking a challenge route (just the assessment), it would often be useful to have access to a course for a little while in order to get a sense of what the expectations might be, the scope of the content, and the norms and standards employed. On occasion, it might even be a good idea to interact with others. Perhaps we could sell daily, weekly or monthly passes. Or we could maybe do it at a finer level of granularity too/instead: a different pass for different topics, or different components like forums, quizzes or assignment marking. Together, following from the publishers’ lead, such passes might cost 10 or 20 times the total cost of simply subscribing to a whole course if every option were purchased, but students could strategically pick the parts they actually need, so reducing their own overall costs.

This idea is, of course, stupid. This is not because it doesn’t make economic and practical sense: it totally does, notwithstanding the management, technical and administrative complexity it entails. It is stupid because it flips education on its head. It makes chunks of learning into profit centres rather than the stuff of life. It makes education into a product rather than celebrating its role as an agent of personal and societal growth. It reduces the rich, intricately interwoven fabric of the educational experience to a set of instrumentally-driven isolated events and activities. It draws attention to accreditation as the be-all and end-all of the process. It is aggressively antisocial, purpose-built to reduce the chances of forming a vibrant learning community. This is beginning to sound eerily familiar. Is that not exactly what, in too high a percentage of our courses, we are doing already?

If we and other universities are to survive and thrive, the solution is not to treat courses and accreditation as products or services. The ongoing value of a university is to catalyze the production and preservation of knowledge: that is what we are here for, that is what makes us worthwhile having. Courses are just tools that support that process, though they are far from the only ones, while accreditation is not even that: it’s just a byproduct, effluent from the educational process that happens to have some practical societal value (albeit at enormous cost to learning). In physical universities there are vast numbers of alternatives that support the richer purpose of creating and sustaining knowledge: cafes, quads, hallways, common rooms, societies, clubs, open lectures, libraries, smoking areas, student accommodation, sports centres, theatres, workshops, studios, research labs and so on. Everywhere you go you are confronted with learning opportunities and people to learn with and from, and the taught courses are just part of the mix, often only a small part. At least, that is true in a slightly idealized world – sadly, the vast majority of physical universities are as stupidly focused on the tools as we are, so those benefits are an afterthought rather than the main thing to celebrate, and are often the first things to suffer when cuts come along. Online, such beyond-the-course opportunities are few and far between: the Landing is (of course) built with exactly that concern in mind, but there’s precious little sign of it anywhere else at AU, one of the most advanced online universities in the world.  The nearest thing most students get to it is the odd Facebook group or Twitter interaction, which seems an awful waste to me, though a fascinating phenomenon that blurs the lines between the institution and the broader community.

It is already possible to take a high quality course for free in almost any subject that interests you and, more damagingly, any time now there will soon be sources of accreditation that are as prestigious as those awarded by universities but orders of magnitude cheaper, not to mention compellingly cut-price  options from universities that can leverage their size and economies of scale (and, perhaps, cheap labour) to out-price the rest of us. Competing on these grounds makes no sense for a publicly funded institution the role of which is not to be an accreditation mill but to preserve, critique, observe, transform and support society as a whole. We need to celebrate and cultivate the iceberg, not just its visible tip. Our true value is not in our courses but in our people (staff and students) and the learning community that they create.

What is a BOOC?

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This acronym is very ripe for satire. My local public library is full of BOOCs, quite a few of which might be thought of as big, open, offline courses.

Dan Hickey explains: a BOOC is in fact a big open online course with up to about 500 members. This size limit is to enable more interactive, participitatory and socially-driven, though still teacher-managed, pedagogies in a large-ish setting without breaking the bank. It’s an open and pedagogically enlightened version of the recently hyped SPOC or, as we normally refer to it, ‘online course’. 

Dan’s model is most interesting as a testbed for OpenBadges and the use of WikiFolios, allowing participatory, learner-driven and on-demand assessment in some very admirable and interesting ways. So, though the acronym is a little painful, the ideas behind the implementation itself are most cool. One to follow.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.indiana.edu/~booc/what-is-a-booc/

The EDUCAUSE NGDLE and an API of One's Own (Michael Feldstein)

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Michael Feldstein responds on NGDLEs with a brilliant in-depth piece on the complex issues involved in building standards for online learning tool interoperability and more. I wish I’d read this before posting my own most recent response because it addresses several of the same issues with similar conclusions, but in greater depth and with more eloquence, as well as bringing up some other important points such as the very complex differences in needs between different contexts of application. My post does add things that Michael’s overlooks and the perspective is a little different (so do read it anyway!), but the overlapping parts are far better and more thoroughly expressed by Michael.

This is an idea that has been in the air and ripe for exploitation for a very long time but, as Michael says in his post and as I also claim in mine, there are some very big barriers when it comes down to implementing such a thing and a bunch of wicked problems that are very hard to resolve to everyone’s satisfaction. We have been here before, several times: let’s hope the team behind NGDLE finds ways to avoid the mistakes we made in the past.

Address of the bookmark: http://mfeldstein.com/the-educause-ngdle-and-an-api-of-ones-own/