Learning, Technology, and Technique | Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology

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This is my latest paper, Learning, Technology, and Technique, in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (Vol. 48 No. 1, 2022).

Essentially, because this was what I was invited to do, the paper shrinks down over 10,000-words from my article Educational technology: what it is and how it works (itself a very condensed summary of my forthcoming book, due out Spring 2023) to under 4,000 words that, I hope, more succinctly capture most of the main points of the earlier paper. I’ve learned quite a bit from the many responses to the earlier paper I received, and from the many conversations that ensued – thank you, all who generously shared their thoughts – so it is not quite the same as the original. I hope this one is better. In particular, I think/hope that this paper is much clearer about the nature and importance of technique than the older paper, and about the distinction between soft and hard technologies, both of which seemed to be the most misunderstood aspects of the original. There is, of course, less detail in the arguments and a few aspects of the theory (notably relating to distributed cognition) are more focused on pragmatic examples, but most are still there, or implied. It is also a fully open paper, not just available for online reading, so please freely download it, and share it as you will.

Here’s the abstract:

To be human is to be a user, a creator, a participant, and a co-participant in a richly entangled tapestry of technologies – from computers to pedagogical methods – that make us who we are as much as our genes. The uses we make of technologies are themselves, nearly always, also technologies, techniques we add to the entangled mix to create new assemblies. The technology of greatest interest is thus not any of the technologies that form that assembly, but the assembly itself. Designated teachers are never alone in creating the assembly that teaches. The technology of learning almost always involves the co-participation of countless others, notably learners themselves but also the creators of systems, artifacts, tools, and environments with and in which it occurs. Using these foundations, this paper presents a framework for understanding the technological nature of learning and teaching, through which it is possible to explain and predict a wide range of phenomena, from the value of one-to-one tutorials, to the inadequacy of learning style theories as a basis for teaching, and to see education not as a machine made of methods, tools, and systems but as a complex, creative, emergent collective unfolding that both makes us, and is made of us.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/14622408/my-latest-paper-learning-technology-and-technique-now-online-in-the-canadian-journal-of-learning-and-technology

Can GPT-3 write an academic paper on itself, with minimal human input?

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Brilliant. The short answer is, of course, yes, and it doesn’t do a bad job of it. This is conceptual art of the highest order.

This is the preprint of a paper written by GPT-3 (as first author) about itself, submitted to “a well-known peer-reviewed journal in machine intelligence”. The second and third authors provided guidance about themes, datasets, weightings, etc, but that’s as far as it goes. They do provide commentary as the paper progresses, but they tried to keep that as minimal as needed, so that the paper could stand or fall on its own merits. The paper is not too bad. A bit repetitive, a bit shallow, but it’s just a 500 word paper- hardly even an extended abstract – so that’s about par for the course. The arguments and supporting references are no worse than many I have reviewed, and considerably better than some. The use of English is much better than that of the majority of papers I review.

In an article about it in Scientific American the co-authors describe some of the complexities in the submission process. They actually asked GPT-3 about its consent to publication (it said yes), but this just touches the surface of some of the huge ethical, legal, and social issues that emerge. Boy there are a lot of those! The second and third authors deserve a prize for this. But what about the first author? Well, clearly it does not, because its orchestration of phenomena is not for its own use, and it is not even aware that it is doing the orchestration. It has no purpose other than that of the people training it. In fact, despite having written a paper about itself, it doesn’t even know what ‘itself’ is in any meaningful way. But it raises a lot of really interesting questions.

It would be quite interesting to train GPT-3 with (good) student assignments to see what happens. I think it would potentially do rather well. If I were an ethically imperfect, extrinsically-driven student with access to this, I might even get it to write my assignments for me. The assignments might need a bit of tidying here and there, but the quality of prose and the general quality of the work would probably result in a good B and most likely an A, with very little extra tweaking. With a bit more training it could almost certainly mimic a particular student’s style, including all the quirks that would make it seem more human. Plagiarism detectors wouldn’t stand a chance, and I doubt that many (if any) humans would be able to say with any assurance that it was not the student’s own work.

If it’s not already happening, this is coming soon, so I’m wondering what to do about it. I think my own courses are slightly immune thanks to the personal and creative nature of the work and big emphasis on reflection in all of them (though those with essays would be vulnerable), but it would not take too much ingenuity to get GPT-3 to deal with that problem, too: at least, it could greatly reduce the effort needed. I guess we could train our own AIs to recognize the work of other AIs, but that’s an arms war we’d never be able to definitively win. I can see the exam-loving crowd loving this, but they are in another arms war that they stopped winning long ago – there’s a whole industry devoted to making cheating in exams pay, and it’s leaps ahead of the examiners, including those with both online and in-person proctors. Oral exams, perhaps? That would make it significantly more difficult (though far from impossible) to cheat. I rather like the notion that the only summative assessment model that stands a fair chance of working is the one with which academia began.

It seems to me that the only way educators can sensibly deal with the problem is to completely divorce credentialling from learning and teaching, so there is no incentive to cheat during the learning process. This would have the useful side-effect that our teaching would have to be pretty good and pretty relevant, because students would only come to learn, not to get credentials, so we would have to focus solely on supporting them, rather than controlling them with threats and rewards. That would not be such a bad thing, I reckon, and it is long overdue. Perhaps this will be the catalyst that makes it happen.

As for credentials, that’s someone else’s problem. I don’t say that because I want to wash my hands of it (though I do) but because credentialling has never had anything whatsoever to do with education apart from in its appalling inhibition of effective learning. It only happens at the moment because of historical happenstance, not because it ever made any pedagogical sense. I don’t see why educators should have anything to do with it. Assessment (by which I solely mean feedback from self or others that helps learners to learn – not grades!) is an essential part of the learning and teaching process, but credentials are positively antagonistic to it.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/14216255/can-gpt-3-write-an-academic-paper-on-itself-with-minimal-human-input

#AthaU22 – may your journey be rich, gentle, and challenging

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In the convocation prayer offered by Elder Maria Campbell each year for Athabasca University graduands, she asks for blessing that their journeys be “rich, gentle, and challenging”. I can’t think of a more perfect wish than this. Each word transforms and deepens the other two. It’s truly beautiful. Every time I hear those words (or, technically, read them – they are actually spoken in Cree) they tumble together in my head for days. I am reminded of these lines (that are about music, but that seem perfectly apt here) from Robert Browning’s Abt Vogler:

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

On this graduation day I wish all our departing students rich, gentle, and challenging lives, and (as Maria Campbell goes on to say, gently acknowledging troubles to come) that the roads they travel are not too bumpy.

And I wish the same to you, too.

Solving The Wrong Problems: Why Online Education Is and Must Be Different from In-Person Education – slides from my invited talk at ICEMI 2022

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icemi22

These are the slides from my invited talk at the 11th International Conference on Education and Management Innovation (ICEMI 2022), June 11th. The talk went down well – at least, I was invited to repeat the performance at a workshop (where I gave a very similar presentation today – if you’ve seen one, you probably know the content of the other!) and to give a keynote later in the year.

It’s about how methods of teaching that solve problems for in-person teachers don’t apply online, and it provides a bit of advice on online-native approaches. I’ve talked quite a bit about this over the past decade so there’s not much new in it apart from minor refinements, though I have put a greater emphasis on what goes on outside the classroom in physical institutions because I’m increasingly thinking that this matters way more than we normally acknowledge. Notably, I discuss the ways that physical institutional structures and regulations provide significant teaching functions of their own, meaning that in-person teachers can be absolute rubbish or (in some subject areas or topics) even fail to turn up, and students can still learn pretty well. This helps to explain the bizarre phenomenon that, across much of in-person academia, professors and lecturers are not expected to learn how to teach (and many never do).

Here’s the abstract…

In-person educational institutions teach, at least as much as the individual teachers they employ. Students are taken out of their own environments and into that of the institution, signalling intent to learn. The physical environment is built for pervasive learning, from common rooms, to corridors, to campus cafes; students see one another learning, share learning conversations, learn from one another. Even the act of walking from classroom to classroom makes events within them more salient. Structures such as courses, timetables, semesters, and classes solve problems of teaching efficiently within the constraints of time and space but impose great constraints on how teaching occurs, and create multiple new pedagogical and management problems of their own. The institution’s regulations, expectations, and norms play a strong pedagogical role in determining how, and when learning occurs. Combined with other entrenched systems and tools like credentials, textbooks, libraries, and curricula, a great deal of the teaching process occurs regardless of teachers. What we most readily recognize as ‘good’ teaching overcomes the problems caused by these in-person environments, and exploits their affordances.

Online institutions have radically different problems to solve, and radically different affordances to exploit, so it makes no sense to teach or manage the learning process in the same ways. Online, students do not inhabit the environment of the institution: the institution inhabits the environment of the student. It is just one small part of the student’s physical and virtual space, shared with billions of other potential teachers (formal or not) who are a click, a touch, or a glance away. The institution is just a service, not the environment in which learning occurs. The student picks the time, the space, the pace, and virtually all the surrounding supports of the learning process. Teachers cannot actively control any of this, except through the use of rewards, punishments, and the promise of credentials, that force compliance but that are antagonistic to effective or meaningful learning. In this talk, I will discuss the implications of this inverted dynamic for pedagogy, motivation, digital system design, and organizational structures & systems for online learning.

 

 

 

Pedagogical Paradigms in Open and Distance Education | Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education

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This is a chapter by me and Terry Anderson for Springer’s new Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education that updates and refines our popular (1658 citations, and still rising, for the original paper alone) but now long-in-the-tooth ‘three generations’ model of distance learning pedagogy. We have changed the labels for the pedagogical families this time round to ones that I think are more coherent, divided according to their epistemological underpinnings: the objectivist, the subjectivist, and the complexivist. and we have added some speculations about whether further paradigms might have started to emerge in the 11 years since our original paper was published. Our main conclusion, though, is that no single pedagogical paradigm will dominate in the foreseeable future: that we are in an era of great pedagogical diversity, and that this diversity will only increase as time goes by.

The three major paradigms

Objectivist: previously known as ‘behaviourist/cognitivist’, what characterizes objectivist pedagogies is that they are both defined by assumptions of an objective external reality, and driven by (usually teacher-defined) objectives. It’s a paradigm of teaching, where teachers are typically sages on the stage using methods intended to achieve effective learning of defined facts and skills. Examples include behaviourism, learning styles theories, brain-based approaches, multiple intelligence models, media theories, and similar approaches where the focus is on efficient transmission and replication of received knowledge.

Subjectivist: formerly known as ‘social constructivist’, subjectivist pedagogies are concerned with – well – subjects: they are concerned with the personal and social co-construction of knowledge, recognizing its situated and always unique nature, saying little about methods but a lot about meaning-making. It’s a paradigm of learning, where teachers are typically guides on the side, supporting individuals and groups to learn in complex, situated contexts. Examples include constructivist, social constructivist, constructionist, and similar families of theory where the emphasis is as much on the learners’ growth and development in a human society as it is on what is being learned.

Complexivist: originally described as ‘connectivist’ (which was confusing and inaccurate), complexivist pedagogies acknowledge and exploit the complex nature of our massively distributed cognition, including its richly recursive self-organizing and emergent properties, its reification through shared tools and artefacts, and its many social layers. It’s a paradigm of knowledge, where teachers are fellow learners, co-travellers and role models, and knowledge exists not just in individual minds but in our minds’ extensions, in both other people and what we collectively create. Examples include connectivism, rhizomatic learning, distributed cognition, cognitive apprenticeship, networks of practice, and similar theories (including my own co-participation model, as it happens). We borrow the term ‘complexivist’ from Davis and Sumara, whose 2006 book on the subject is well worth reading, albeit grounded mainly in in-person learning.

No one paradigm dominates: all typically play a role at some point of a learning journey, all build upon and assemble ideas that are contained in the others (theories are technologies too), and all have been around as ways of learning for as long as humans have existed.

Emerging paradigms

Beyond these broad families, we speculate on whether any new pedagogical paradigms are emerging or have emerged within the 12 years since we first developed these ideas. We come up with the following possible candidates:

Theory-free: this is a digitally native paradigm that typically employs variations of AI technologies to extract patterns from large amounts of data on how people learn, and that provides support accordingly. This is the realm of adaptive hypermedia, learning analytics, and data mining. While the vast majority of such methods are very firmly in the objectivist tradition (the models are trained or designed by identifying what leads to ‘successful’ achievement of outcomes) a few look beyond defined learning products into social engagement or other measures of the learning process, or seek open-ended patterns in emergent collective behaviours. We see the former as a dystopic trend, but find promise in the latter, notwithstanding the risks of filter bubbles and systemic bias.

Hologogic: this is a nascent paradigm that treats learning as a process of enculturation. It’s about how we come to find our places in our many overlapping cultures, where belonging to and adopting the values and norms of the sets to which we belong (be it our colleagues, our ancestors, our subject-matter peers, or whatever) is the primary focus. There are few theories that apply to this paradigm, as yet, but it is visible in many online and in-person communities, and is/has been of particular significance in collectivist cultures where the learning of one is meaningless unless it is also the learning of all (sometimes including the ancestors). We see this as a potentially healthy trend that takes us beyond the individualist assumptions underpinning much of the field, though there are risks of divisions and echo chambers that pit one culture against others. We borrow the term from Cumbie and Wolverton.

Bricolagogic: this is a free-for-all paradigm, a kind of meta-pedagogy in which any pedagogical method, model, or theory may be used, chosen for pragmatic or personal reasons, but in which the primary focus of learning is in choosing how (in any given context) we should learn. Concepts of charting and wayfinding play a strong role here. This resembles what we originally identified as an emerging ‘holistic’ model, but we now see it not as a simple mish-mash of pedagogical paradigms but rather as a pedagogic paradigm in its own right.

Another emerging paradigm?

I have recently been involved in a lengthy Twitter thread, started by Tim Fawns on the topic of his recent paper on entangled pedagogy, which presents a view very similar indeed to my own (e.g. here and here), albeit expressed rather differently (and more eloquently). There are others in the same thread who express similar views. I suggested in this thread that we might be witnessing the birth of a new ‘entanglist’ paradigm that draws very heavily on complexivism (and that could certainly be seen as part of the same family) but that views the problem from a rather different perspective. It is still very much about complexity, emergence, extended minds, recursion, and networks, and it negates none of that, but it draws its boundaries around the networked nodes at a higher level than theories like Connectivism, yet with more precision than those focused on human learning interactions such as networks of practice or rhizomatic learning. Notably, it leaves room for design (and designed objects), for meaning, and for passion as part of the deeply entangled complex system of learning in which we all participate, willingly or not. It’s not specifically a pedagogical model – it’s broader than that – though it does imply many things about how we should and should not teach, and about how we should understand pedagogies as part of a massively distributed system in which designated teachers account for only a fraction of the learning and teaching process. The title of my book on the subject (that has been under review for 16 months – grrr) sums this up quite well, I think: “How Education Works”. The book has now (as of a few days ago) received a very positive response from reviewers and is due to be discussed by the editorial committee at the end of this month, so I’m hoping that it may be published in the not-too-distant future. Watch this space!

Here’s the chapter abstract:

Building on earlier work that identified historical paradigm shifts in open and distance learning, this chapter is concerned with analyzing the three broad pedagogical paradigms – objectivist, subjectivist, and complexivist – that have characterized learning and teaching in the field over the past half century. It goes on to discuss new paradigms that are starting to emerge, most notably in “theory-free” models enabled by developments in artificial intelligence and analytics, hologogic methods that recognize the many cultures to which we belong, and a “bricolagogic,” theory-agnostic paradigm that reflects the field’s growing maturity and depth.

Reference

Dron J., Anderson T. (2022) Pedagogical Paradigms in Open and Distance Education. In: Zawacki-Richter O., Jung I. (eds) Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0351-9_9-1

Higher Education: an Owner's Guide – slides from my Times Higher Ed Student Festival keynote

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Higher Education: an Owner’s Guide, slides from my keynote at the THE Student Festival, UK, 2021

With a possible audience of thousands, and without a clue they were there because the Zoom output was streamed to a different site (weird), I talked very fast about my experience of higher education for about 20 minutes at the THE UK Student Festival yesterday. The talk was recorded and will be used again for the THE Canada Student Festival later in the month. It’s a huge event – over 8000 enrolled (though not all attending every session) – with quite a lot of other keynotes and a great many other talks, panels, and discussions, aimed at helping students starting out in higher education. The audience was very different from those I normally talk to, and the  (very sensible) strict 20-minute format gave me a lot less leeway than the usual hour allowed, so I found it interestingly challenging. These are the slides I used.

The brief I was given was not to preach, but to share my experience of higher education, as a student and as an educator. My personal agenda was to talk about why and how online learning is worth doing (especially at AU), so I tried (a bit clunkily) to aim my story in that direction. I failed to remember to mention some key things, I spent too long on others, and I suspect that the most memorable message that came through was, for in-person students living on campus, to get a kettle (it’s a great way to make lots of new friends fast) but, hopefully, my bigger message got through to some. kettle

The essential point of my wild ramble was not that kettles are the solution to success in higher education, but that students and the rest of us should take ownership of our own education: it should be done by us, not to us. We should learn the way we want to learn, and we should learn what we want to learn; we should seek adventure and challenge rather than easy pickings; and we should hang out with interesting people and/or those we care about, because that’s how most learning happens, as well as being a large part of what makes it meaningful. I noted that we should focus on learning and should to try to ignore grades as much as possible, because grades destroy the love of doing something simply because we enjoy it. Essentially, my advice was about finding the things that intrinsically motivate us and reducing the effects of things that demotivate us. My own educational journey, and (I think) that of most committed educators, has largely followed that path: that’s how we thrived in a system not conducive to intrinsic motivation, and it’s the path we try to encourage our own students to take. I observed that it is much easier to own your own education when it is done online, at least if it is done in ways that take advantage of the medium, and not through a pale simulacrum of in-person teaching, because the teacher cannot be in control, the level of challenge is much more controllable, and there are way more people (online and in your own environment) who can support you.

Challenges of the Physical: slides from my keynote at XII Conferência Internacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação, September 2021

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Here are the slides from my opening keynote today for the XII Conferência Internacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação in Portugal. first slide of the presentation

The conference theme was ‘challenges of the digital’ so I thought it might be fun to reverse the problem, and to think instead about the challenges of in-person education. In this presentation I imagined a world in which in-person teaching had never been invented, and presented a case for doing so. In fairness, it was not a very good case! But I did have fun using some of the more exotic voice changing features of my Voicelive Play vocal processor (which I normally use for performing music), presenting some of the arguments against my suggestions in different voices using a much better mic than my usual (pretty good) Blue Yeti. I might not use the special effects again that often, but I was quite impressed with the difference the better microphone made.

My central points (mostly implicit until the end) were:

  • That the biggest challenge of the digital is all the baggage that we have inherited from in-person teaching, and our continuing need to interoperate with in-person institutions.
  • That pedagogies are neither universal nor neutral. They are solutions to problems of learning in a particular context, in assembly with countless constraints and possibilities provided by that context: people, tools, structures, methods, systems, and so on.
  • That solutions to learning in a physical context – at least in the one-to-many model of traditional education systems – inevitably lead to a very strong power imbalance between teacher and learner, where the teacher is in control of every moment that the teaching event occurs. This has many repercussions, not least of which being that needs for autonomy and competence support are very poorly addressed (though relatedness comes for free), so it is really bad for intrinsic motivation.
  • Thus, the pedagogies of physical spaces have to compensate for the loss of control and achievable challenge that they naturally entail.
  • That the most common approach – and, again, an almost inevitable (i.e. the shortest path) follow-on from teaching a lot of people at once – involves rewards and punishments, that massively impair or destroy intrinsic motivation to learn and, in most cases, actively militate against effective learning.
  • That the affordances of teaching everyone the same thing at once lead fairly naturally to credentials for having learned it, often achieved in ‘efficient’ ways like proctored exams that are incredibly bad for learning, and that greatly reinforce the extrinsic motivation that is already highly problematic in the in-person modality. The credentials, not the learning, become the primary focus.
  • That support for autonomy and competence are naturally high in online learning, though support for relatedness is a mix of good and bad. There is no need for teachers being in control and, lacking most of the means of control available to in-person teachers, the only reliable way to regain it is through rewards and punishments which, as previously mentioned, are fatal to intrinsic motivation.
  • That the almost ubiquitous ways that distance educators inherit and use the pedagogies, methods, and structures of in-person learning – especially in the use of coercion through rewards and punishments (grades, credentials, etc) but also in schedules, fixed-length courses, inflexible learning outcomes, etc – are almost exactly the opposite of what its technologies can best support.

Towards the end, acknowledging that it is difficult to change such complex and deeply entangled systems (much though it is to be desired) I presented some ways of reducing the challenges of the physical in online teaching, and regaining that lost intrinsic motivation, that I summarized thus:

  • Let go (you cannot and should not control learning unless asked to do so), but stay close;
  • Make learning (not just its products) visible (and, in the process, better understand your teaching);
  • Make learning shared (cooperation and, where possible, collaboration built in from the ground up);
  • Don’t ever coerce (especially not through grades);
  • Care (for learners, for learning, for the subject).

It’s a theme that I have spoken and written of many, many times, but (apart from the last few slides) the way I presented it this time was new for me. I had fun pretending to be different people, and the audience seemed to like it, in a challenging kind of a way. There were some great questions at the end, not all of which I had time to answer, though I’m happy to continue the conversation here, or via Twitter.

Why do we work from home but learn remotely?

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I am slowly getting used to the ugly abbreviation WFH that has emerged during the pandemic, though I don’t much like it because it’s not always accurate. Even in pandemic times I often work from my boat (WFB). In non-pandemic times I’ve worked from a tent (WFT), a library (WFL), a hotel room (WFHR), a park bench (WFPB), a conference (WFC), a plane (WFP), a bus (WF… OK, you get the picture), and much, much more. I have even worked at Athabasca University’s own buildings (Working from Work?) on rare occasions. But why do most of us in the trade so rarely use terms like learning from home when working from home (WFH) is so ubiquitous?

Terms like e-learning, online learning, distance learning, remote learning, and so on, are weird. Learning is never remote, electronic, online, or at a distance.  There is more sense to terms like distance education, online education, remote teaching, and so on, because education and teaching describe relationships between people, and there are different ways that those relationships can be mediated, that do (or should) deeply affect the process. There is also a whole slew of intentional and implicit structures, systems, methods, and toolsets that are assumed when we prefix education with terms like distance or online. But why online or distance learning?

As teachers we are (rightly) taught that it’s not about the teaching, it’s about the learning. For at least the last 30 years or more we have, for instance, therefore been strongly encouraged to use the term ‘learning & teaching’ instead of ‘teaching & learning’ because learning must come first. I’ve corrected people myself for getting the order wrong, many times. Charitably, therefore, it might be that we are trying to draw attention to the fact that it’s about learning. But, if so, why distance or online?

Ricardo Liberato, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons I think something nasty has happened to the term ‘learning’ when it is used this way, because I think that what we actually mean by it is ‘teaching’.  Some British English dialects take that dubious elision fully on board. When something nasty happens to someone as a consequence of something they have done that is perceived to be wrong, or even when some punishment is inflicted on them by someone else, it is common in some circles to say ‘that’ll learn yer’ (the ‘yer’ is important – don’t imagine the Queen saying in received pronunciation ‘that will learn you’ because it would be wrong). When I hear the phrase I imagine it being said with a snarl. It’s a cruel thing to say, though it can be used kind-of humorously, at least if, as many of my compatriots do, you appreciate a particularly crude form of Benny-Hillish shadenfreude (‘Ha ha, you fell flat on your face and hurt yourself. That’ll learn yer’).

Outside a subset of British and perhaps some other minor English vernaculars, learning is never something that we do to people. It’s something done by people, with what and with whom is around them (and that might include a teaching website, textbook, or course pack). So let’s stop calling people distance or online learners because it devalues and obscures what they are actually doing. They are not being learned at. They are being taught at a distance, and learning from home (or wherever they happen to be).

Mediaeval Teaching in the Digital Age (slides from my keynote at Oxford Brookes University, May 26, 2021)

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 front slide, mediaeval teaching

These are the slides from my keynote today at the Oxford Brookes “Theorizing the Virtual” School of Education Research Conference. As theorizing the virtual is pretty much my thing, I was keen to be a part of this! It was an ungodly hour of the day for me (2am kickoff) but it was worth staying up for. It was a great bunch of attendees who really got into the spirit of the thing and kept me wide awake. I wish I could hang around for the rest of it but, on the bright side, at least I’m up at the right time to see the Super Flower Blood Moon (though it’s looking cloudy, darn it).  In this talk I dwelt on a few of the notable differences between online and in-person teaching. This is the abstract…

Pedagogical methods (ways of teaching) are solutions to problems of helping people to learn, in a context filled with economic, physical, temporal, legal, moral, social, political, technological, and organizational constraints. In mediaeval times books were rare and unaffordable, and experts’ time was precious and limited, so lectures were a pragmatic solution, but they in turn created more problems. Counter-technologies such as classes, classrooms, behavioural rules and norms, courses, terms, curricula, timetables and assignment deadlines were were devised to solve those problems, then methods of teaching (pedagogies) were in turn invented to solve problems these counter-technologies caused, notably including:
· people who might not want (or be able) to be there at that time,
· people who were bored and
· people who were confused.
Better pedagogies supported learner needs for autonomy and competence, or helped learners find relevance to their own goals, values, and interests. They exploited physical closeness for support, role-modelling, inspiration, belongingness and so on. However, increasingly many relied on extrinsic motivators, like classroom discipline, grades and credentials to coerce students to learn. Extrinsic motivation achieves compliance, but it makes the reward or avoidance of the punishment the goal, persistently and often permanently crowding out intrinsic motivation. Intelligent students respond with instrumental approaches, satisficing, or cheating. Learning seldom persists; love of the subject is subdued; learners learn to learn in ineffective ways. More layers of counter-technologies are needed to limit the damage, and so it goes on.
Online, the constraints are very different, and its native forms are the motivational inverse of in-person learning. An online teacher cannot control every moment of a learner’s time, and learners can use the freedoms they gain to take the time they need, when they need it, to learn and to reflect, without the constraints of scheduled classroom hours and deadlines. However, more effort is usually needed to support their needs for relatedness. Unfortunately, many online teachers try (or are required) to re-establish the control they had in the classroom through grading or the promise of credentials, recreating the mediaeval problems that would otherwise not exist, using tools like learning management systems that were designed (poorly) to replicate in-person teaching functions. These are solutions to the problems caused by counter-technologies, not to problems of learning.
There are better ways, and that’s what this session is about.

front slide, mediaeval teaching

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