Can a technology be true?

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Dave Cormier is a wonderfully sideways-thinking writer, such as in this recent discussion of the myth of learning styles. Dave’s post is not mainly about learning style theories, as such, but the nature and value of myth. As he puts it, myth is “a way we confront uncertainty” and the act of learning with others is, and must be, filled with uncertainty.

impression of someone with many learning stylesThe fact that stuff doesn’t have to be true to be useful plays an important role in my latest book, too, and I have an explanation for that. The way I see it is that learning style theories are (not metaphorically but actually) technologies, that orchestrate observations about differences in ways people learn, to attempt to explain and predict differences in the effects of different methods of teaching. Most importantly, they are generative: they say how things should and shouldn’t be done. As such, they are components that we can assemble with other technologies that help people to learn. In fact, that is the only way they can be used: they make no sense without an instantiation. What matters is therefore not whether they make sense, but whether they can play a useful role in the whole assembly. Truth or falsehood doesn’t come into it, any more than, except metaphorically, it does for a computer or a car (is a computer true?). It is true that, if the phenomena that you are orchestrating happen to be the findings and predictions of science (or logic, for that matter) then how they are used often does matter. If you are building a bridge then your really want your calculations about stresses and loads to be pretty much correct. On the other hand, people built bridges long before such calculations were possible. Similarly, bows and arrows evolved to be highly optimized – as good as or better than modern engineering could produce – despite false causal reasoning.  Learning styles are the same. You can use any number of objectively false or radically incomplete theories (and, given the many scores of such theories that have been developed, most of them are pretty much guaranteed to be one or both) but they can still result in better teaching.

For all that the whole is the only thing that really matters, sometimes the parts can be be positively harmful, to the point that they may render the whole harmful too. For instance, a pedagogy that involves physical violence or that uses threats/rewards of any kind (grades, say), will, at best, make it considerably harder to make the whole assembly work well. As Dave mentions, the same is true of telling people that they have a particular learning style. As long as you are just using the things to help to design or enact better learning experiences then they are quite harmless and might even be useful but, as soon as you tell learners they have a learning style then you have a whole lot of fixing to do.

If you are going to try to build a learning activity out of harmful parts then there must be other parts of the assembly that counter the harm. This is not unusual. The same is true of most if not all technologies. As Virilio put it, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck”. It’s the Faustian bargain that Postman spoke of: solving problems with a technology almost invariably creates new problems to be solved. This is part of the dynamic the leads to complexity in any technological system, from a jet engine to a bureaucracy. Technologies evolve to become more complex (partly) because we create counter-technologies to deal with the harm caused by them. You can take the bugs out of the machine, but the machine may, in assembly with others, itself be a bug, so the other parts must compensate for its limitations. It’s a dynamic process of reaching a metastable but never final state.

Unlike bows and arrows, there is no useful predictive science of teaching, though teaching can use scientific findings as parts of its assembly (at the very least because there are sciences of learning), just as there is no useful predictive science of art, though we can use scientific findings when making it. In both activities, we can also use stories, inventions, beliefs, values, and many other elements that have nothing to do with science or its findings. It can be done ‘badly’, in the sense of not conforming to whatever standards of perfection apply to any given technique that is part of the assembly, and it may still be a work of genius. What matters is whether the whole works out well.

At a more fundamental level, there can be no useful science of teaching (or of art) because the whole is non-ergodic. The number of possible states that could be visited vastly outnumber the number of states that can be visited by many, many orders of magnitude. Even if the universe were to continue for a trillion times the billions of years that it has already existed and it were a trillion times the size it seems to be now, they would almost certainly never repeat. What matters are the many, many acts of creation (including those of each individual learner) that constitute the whole.  And the whole constantly evolves, each part building on, interacting with, incorporating, or replacing what came before, creating both path dependencies and new adjacent possible empty niches that deform the evolutionary landscape for everything in it. This is, in fact, one of the reasons that learning style theories are so hard to validate. There are innumerable other parts of the assembly that matter, most of which depend on the soft technique of those creating or enacting them that varies every time, just as you have probably never written your signature in precisely the same way twice. The implementation of different ways of teaching according to assumed learning styles can be done better or worse, too, so the chances of finding consistent effects are very limited. Even if any are found in a limited set of use cases (say, memorizing facts for a SAT), they cannot usefully predict future effects for any other use case. In fact, even if there were statistically significant effects across multiple contexts it would tell us little or nothing of value for this inherently novel context. However, like almost all attempts to research whether students, on average, learn better with or without [insert technology of interest here], on average there will most likely be no significant difference, because so many other technologies matter as much or more. There is no useful predictive science of teaching, because teaching is an assembly of  technologies, and not only does the technique of an individual teacher matter, but also the soft technique of potentially thousands of other individuals who made contributions to the whole. It’s uncertain, and so we need myths to help make sense of our particular, never-to-be-repeated context. Truth doesn’t come into it.

Educational technology: what it is and how it works | AI & Society

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https://rdcu.be/ch1tl

This is a link to my latest paper in the journal AI & Society. You can read it in a web browser from there, but it is not directly downloadable. A preprint of the submitted version (some small differences and uncorrected errors here and there, notably in citations) can be downloaded from https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/3653. The published version should be downloadable for free by Researchgate members.

This is a long paper (about 10,000 words), that summarizes some of the central elements of the theoretical model of learning, teaching and technology developed in my recently submitted book (still awaiting review) and that gives a few examples of its application. For instance, it explains:

  • why, on average researchers find no significant difference between learning with and without tech.
  • why learning styles theories are a) inherently unprovable, b) not important even if they were, and c) a really bad idea in any case.
  • why bad teaching sometimes works (and, conversely, why good teaching sometimes fails)
  • why replication studies cannot be done for most educational interventions (and, for the small subset that are susceptible to reductive study, all you can prove is that your technology works as intended, not whether it does anything useful).

Abstract

This theoretical paper elucidates the nature of educational technology and, in the process, sheds light on a number of phenomena in educational systems, from the no-significant-difference phenomenon to the singular lack of replication in studies of educational technologies.  Its central thesis is that we are not just users of technologies but coparticipants in them. Our participant roles may range from pressing power switches to designing digital learning systems to performing calculations in our heads. Some technologies may demand our participation only in order to enact fixed, predesigned orchestrations correctly. Other technologies leave gaps that we can or must fill with novel orchestrations, that we may perform more or less well. Most are a mix of the two, and the mix varies according to context, participant, and use. This participative orchestration is highly distributed: in educational systems, coparticipants include the learner, the teacher, and many others, from textbook authors to LMS programmers, as well as the tools and methods they use and create.  From this perspective,  all learners and teachers are educational technologists. The technologies of education are seen to be deeply, fundamentally, and irreducibly human, complex, situated and social in their constitution, their form, and their purpose, and as ungeneralizable in their effects as the choice of paintbrush is to the production of great art.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/8692242/my-latest-paper-educational-technology-what-it-is-and-how-it-works

My learning style

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I am a visual, aural, read/write, kinaesthetic, introvert, extravert, sensing, intuitive, analytic, thinking, feeling, judging, perceiving, independent, dependent, collaborative, competitive, participant, avoidant, wholist, analytic, verbalizing, imaging, visualizing, deductive, synthetic, expansive, serialist, holist, field-dependent, field-independent, intrinsically motivated, extrinsically motivated, impulsive, reflexive, convergent, divergent, levelling, sharpening, concrete-sequential, concrete-random, abstract-sequential, abstract-random, assimilating, exploring, adaptive, innovative, reproductive, experiencing, thinking, doing, reflective, directed, self-directed, undirected, application-directed, meaning-directed, deep, surface, strategic, apathetic, elaborative, impulsive, concrete, independent, self-assertive, cerebral,  affective, type 1, type 2, type 3, global, scanning, focusing, physical, logical, social, solitary, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, body, active, common sense, dynamic, imaginative, quadrant 1, quadrant 2, quadrant 3, quadrant 4, theorizing, organizing, humanitarian, legislative, judicial, executive, tactile, pragmatic, versatile learner.

My birth sign is Aquarius, and I was born in the Year of the Rat.

Incidentally…

It appears that 97% of American teachers actually believe in learning styles, by which I mean the belief that there are persistent traits describing how people learn that can be used to determine the best way to teach them. This is despite at least most, if not all, of the many scores of such theories existing somewhere between astrology and fairies in terms of evidence for their relevance or applicability in real life learning. Though there may be ever-shifting conditions under which we may at times prefer one or other of whatever learning styles the theory we like offers – this may be a source of the persisting appeal of the idea – there is no reliable evidence that this is in any way relevant to whether or not we will learn better or worse (whatever we think that means) when offered a learning experience that is tailored to that preference. It’s not by any means for want of trying – countless studies exist, and that’s not counting probably many more that never saw the light of day because they had only null results to report and so were not deemed worthy of publication – so the obvious conclusion to be drawn is that these theories are most likely false.

It wouldn’t be so worrying were it not that there is evidence that such beliefs are harmful to learners and, even if there were not, then the time, effort, and money put into trying to use them would be far better spent on things that actually might work.

In the extremely unlikely event that it were one day proven that an individual has a persistent style of learning that, when we teach to that style, consistently leads to improved learning (however we measure that), then it would be my duty as a teacher to try to teach them to learn in other ways, because here’s the thing: the real world in which we are and must be lifelong learners doesn’t come neatly packaged in ways that fit your learning style. We can all learn to learn in all the ways that I list above, and then some, and we can all become better and smarter by applying the right strategy at the right time. We therefore need to cultivate as many diverse learning strategies as we can, and learn when to use them. That’s just common sense which, as it happens and surprisingly enough, is itself a learning style, according to the 4MAT model.

No, you aren't a 'visual' learner

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It’s a damning indictment of our collective resistance to truth that the point of this article still has to be restated, yet again. Amazingly, 93% of the general public and 76% of educators still erroneously believe that we should be taught in ways that match our learning styles. I assume this is so in the US – unless things have changed recently, the percentages, for teachers at least, are even worse in some other countries where the idea has been pushed harder from the top down, such as the UK and Netherlands. To be quite clear: this belief is not supported by any compelling evidence at all.

The fact that it is false (or, at best, no more provable than, and just as likely as, astrology) doesn’t mean that designing for learning styles necessarily a terrible idea, inasmuch as it can encourage reflective practice on the part of teachers and can even result in quite useful outcomes. As the article puts it:

“If you’re trying to vary what you do in the classroom to respect different styles, variation in instruction is probably a good thing, anyway,” he says. But rather than formatting lessons differently for auditory, kinetic or visual learners, he and Macdonald suggest that teachers tweak their instruction based on content.

“I think it really depends on your objectives for the lesson,” Macdonald says. “Some types of content really lend themselves to visual presentation … if you’re teaching maps, that’s got to be visual. If you’re teaching music, those are [the] types of things that need to be auditory.

“But if your goal is to get a multifaceted exposure to certain content, it can be helpful to weave in all different types of modalities.”

That thinking about learning styles can be a useful design tool is a fair point, and one that I have often made myself (including in quite some detail in my first book), though it’s a happy side effect of a mistake, rather than a consequence of a good theory. Using star signs would probably work just as well.  I am not convinced that content should always lead design either: objectives-driven teaching is not the only fruit and, for some expansive subject areas and pedagogies, it is positively (positivistly?) harmful. But, notwithstanding its constraints and limitations, at least it is not based on a fiction.

There are many risks to using a false world model, even if it has some practical value or plausible results (pre-Copernican geocentric astronomy was better than Copernicus’s own theory at predicting movements of planets), not least of which being that it blinds us to real possibilities and leads us in worthless, wasteful, or even harmful directions. Even when the consequences include better teaching, it’s a terrible lesson to teach someone that they are a visual (or sensing, or whatever nonsense the particular theory suggests) learner. No they are not. They might have some habits, reinforced patterns, or preferences, sure. But that just means they need to try a bit harder to extend themselves and to learn to use some alternative approaches because they are definitely going to have to use them at some point when there’s no teacher in control of things but themselves, and nothing to fit their preferred style available. My learning style is and should be whatever the hell I need.

I’ve mentioned before that I believe a better (if less attractive) term would be ‘being-taught habits’ because one of the least savoury aspects of the whole learning styles gestalt is that it actually has little to do with learning, and everything to do with achieving better indoctrination; of asserting the power of the teacher (at least, it would if it worked). For that kind of thing, we’d learn more from the sciences and arts of the advertising industry than from any snake oil learning style theory. We might equally learn from preachers and religions: they are mostly pretty good at making people think and behave the way they wish.

There are other ways to gain the useful side-effects of designing for learning styles that do not rely on falsehoods, or that make no claims that they match reality one way or the other – de Bono’s Thinking Hats, for instance, or design-based research. And it doesn’t take much to make learning style theories less dumb. I am personally quite fond of Gordon Pask’s serialist/holist model, despite coming perilously close to a learning styles theory at times, because it describes a continuum of learning strategies, without suggesting too much (OK, fair enough, Pask slipped here and there) that such strategies be fixed, habitual, or generally preferred by particular learners.  They are simply perspectives we can choose as and when it is helpful to do so. However, if possible, when designing learning activities, we should use approaches that are based as much as we are able on how the world is, not how we think it should be. From that perspective, learning styles are a potentially dangerous and time-consuming dead end.

Address of the bookmark: http://theweek.com/articles/725352/no-arent-visual-learner

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Babies in the learning-style bathwater

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A recent Guardian article reports on a letter sent to the paper by 30 eminent academics from neuroscience, education, and psychology disciplines, voicing concerns about the absurd popularity of learning styles among teachers.

They are, of course, correct to be concerned. There is no good evidence that being taught according to your learning style has any positive value, despite decades of spurious attempts to show a correlation. Moreover, even if there were such a correlation, it would behoove teachers to help learners to learn using different styles because real-life learning doesn’t come neatly packaged in forms that fit with how we want/are constituted to learn, and teaching should primarily be concerned with supporting learners’ capacity to learn. The fact that there are scores if not hundreds of incompatible learning style theories, most of which have similarly (un)compelling evidence to support them, should be a clue that there is something seriously wrong with the whole idea. And it’s not a harmless foible. Not only is it a massive waste of time and money, not to mention a terrible example to set in truthiness acceptance, it can be actively harmful to learners, teaching them to believe that they can only learn properly if things are packaged to suit their style.

What’s shocking in the article is the report on the number of teachers who, despite a total lack of evidence and copious amounts of debunking, continue to use and believe in the things. To our shame, I have even seen examples of it at AU (our own Math Site mentions them) where we really ought to know better. But we are not unusual in this. Not at all. In the UK and Netherlands in 2012, 80% of teachers apparently believed that individuals learned better when doing so in a manner according with their preferred learning style. This is like discovering that 80% of the world’s scientists believe that their horoscopes determine the results of their experiments.

That said, there’s a baby in this very dirty bathwater that should not be thrown out.

If a belief in learning styles means that teachers feel challenged to design learning experiences in different ways to suit more diverse needs, that’s not a bad thing, apart from that it increases the costs of learning development. In fairness, it would work at least as well if they used astrological star sign personality characteristics as a basis but, whatever the reasons, giving students choices is a worthwhile outcome. And, just like horoscopes, there is value to learners themselves in providing an opportunity and a framework for reflection, even if the framework itself is erroneous and based on fallacies.

I’m a sceptic, but even I use variants on the theme. For example, I often try to provide versions of learning content that are meant to cater for serialist and holist ways of learning (Gordon Pask’s approach to categorizing learning strategies). Notwithstanding the extra effort and cost of designing at least two ways to approach a topic, it’s a good creative catalyst for me, and it gives students greater choice and control over their own learning.

And, in fairness, not all learning-style types of theory are equally awful. Slightly less harmful variants talk of learning preferences rather than styles, which does not necessarily imply that those preferences are a good idea nor that they even need to be catered for, though it still perpetuates the myth that there are relatively fixed characteristics in such things. Much better ones, including Pask’s, talk of selectable learning strategies rather than stable characteristics or preferences of learners, which seems eminently sensible to me: it’s just about general pedagogical patterns. It’s not about labelling learners, though (sadly) some do try to apply the labels to learners, and even Pask himself (arguably) sometimes seems to present it in that way. The best of breed models recognize that learning strategies can and should change in different learning contexts as well as over time, and make no attempt to label or pigeon hole learners themselves at all. I think it is really useful to find regularities and patterns in learning designs, and that’s the baby we should not throw out when we (rightly) reject learning style theories.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/13/teachers-neuromyth-learning-styles-scientists-neuroscience-education

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On learning styles

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This post by James Atherton makes the case that, whether or not it is possible to identify distinctive learning styles or preferences, they are largely irrelevant to teaching, and are potentially even antagonistic to effective learning. Regular readers, colleagues and friends will know that this conforms well with my own analysis of learning styles literature. The notion that learning styles should determine teaching styles is utter stuff and nonsense based on a very fuzzy understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning, and a desperate urge to find a theory to make the process seem more ‘scientific’, with no believable empirical foundation whatsoever. This doesn’t make the use of learning styles pointless, however.

Teaching is a design discipline much more than it is a science. One of the biggest challenges of teaching is making it work for as many students as possible, which means thinking carefully about different needs, interests, skills, concerns and contexts. So, if learning styles theories can help you to think about different learner needs more clearly when designing a learning path then that can be a good thing.

The trouble is, thinking about personality patterns associated with learners’ astrological star signs or Chinese horoscope animals would probably work just as well. A comparative study would be a fun to do and, I think, the methodological issues would reveal a lot about how and why existing research has signally failed to find any plausible link.

There are alternatives. In the field of web design we often use personas – fictional but well fleshed-out representative individuals – in order to try to empathize with the users of our sites and to help us to see our designs through different eyes. See https://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html for a thorough introduction to the area. I use these in my learning design process and find them very useful. Thinking ‘how would John Smith react to this?’ makes much more sense to me than thinking ‘would this appeal to kinaesthetic learners?’, especially as I can imagine how John Smith might change his ways of thinking as a course progresses, how different life events might affect him, and how he might interact with his peers.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learning_styles.htm