Time draws near

What a plethora of metaphors inhabits that title!

SOmewhat arbitrarily I'll be thinking less about "time" in the near future, and more about time, i.e. deadlines. Leaving aside the philosophical problems, time seems to represent people's response to patterns in the world, patterns of repetition & newness. (Thanks Mic.k) One response - perhaps not solely my own - to newness is anxiety and one solution to anxiety is, perhaps, to repeat a solution, or to seek a repetition, a familiarity in the newness.

This is not a question of imposing "order" (time) on "chaos" (kaos); chaos is as much a human superposition as time. Time represents a comforting order; other orders are not precluded, perhaps simple not recognised, or, indeed, required.

Technology & time, both responses to the world. Insofar as technology creates repetition and reduces anxiety it could be said to create time. The common complaint about technology, that it steals time, reflects the fragmentation and destruction of predictable orders

More from the NYT

 Another link from the Education supplement to the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-medium-heffernan-t.html?_r=1

The necessity of drilling/rote learning and technology to render it less painful.

Technology update

Well, it's been a bit of a mixed week.

Firstly I got sidetracked by a technology-in-itself, called TiddlyWiki. Check out http://www.tiddlywiki.org
 for details. There's something about the building up of the wiki through fragments & the alternative associational structures (linking & tagging) that I find appealing; as is the fact that the wiki is a single file containing both the software & content, which means it's physically portable on a USB, readily backed up into the cloud by email and can actually be used to run a website, which if you're not fussy about the name, you can set up to run from home in about 30 minutes. It's really very elegant.

The other thing about it that I like is that you can adapt the software that runs it really easily, and it's all maintained in the same one file. There's a whole essay crying out to be done on what constitutes technical elegance (and to what extent it's personal), but this thing ticks lots of my boxes. OK, I have to learn javascript to exploit that, but a.) I've been meaning to for years & b.) it isn't in any way necessary to use the base product.

The only objectionable thing I've found so far is that it doesn't work as well in Chrome (for uploads & synchronisations & imports) as it does for FireFox. But that's OK, since UTS forces me to use FireFox anyway.

Another thing is that although the concept has been around for quite a while, there still seems to be a fairly active community involved in tweaking it. Plus, there is free hosting at http://tiddlyspot.com and doubleplus there is an experiment in communal wiki cross-linking happening at http://tiddlyspaces.com. I think I'll be following up the latter as I get time.

Anyway, check it out!

AS committed in my learning contract, the self-learning documentation needs to be in a public forum, and you can find it at http://tejjyid.tiddlyspot.com. At the moment there's no feedback option built in - but I'm working on that. Anyway, you can comment here if you feel the urge - very grateful for any comments, including critical  & questioning ones.

From the thematic viewpoint, I wanted to look at psychology this week, but it has been difficult to get into without being overwhelmed. (I feel overwhelmed) What I have found, which I think will be interesting is some  psychologists with a phenomenological bent, and also a group of people interested in FBFW "narrative psychology". I don't like the way they express themselves (they talk about narrative as if it exists independently of people) but the idea that story-creating and story-consuming are reflective of, or parallel with internal meaning-creation is interesting. Structure, and particularly structure-in-time, is a big part of the response to a story. Here we have time-as-pattern, a pattern created by people as narrative-(participants). It's a little tricky at this stage. But it will be profitable to ask, how do machines affect the structuring of narratives and the resultant cohesiveness of those narratives?

Then I think I can look at learning as both the acquisition of narrative ("text-producing") skills and also a narrative in itself. Technology and time are then implicated in both the content (the to-be-learned) & the delivery (basis-for-learning).

Technology & Time (1)

I'm well into the swing of reading up on time & technology; I seem to have stumbled on a quite a promising can of worms, although, so far, there's not much connecting it back to education directly. Interestingly there is a lot of stuff in the business sector - I would've thought phenomenology was a bit anti-capital for the MBA crowd.

I'm developing some ideas that don;t fit directly into what I'm reading, even though notionally sharing some underpinnings. For example, in their intro. to 24/7, Hassan & Purser talk a lot about the human perception of time before  switching to a discussion of the way in which computers (the main technology I guess, in general (although, come to think of it, the telephone must have been an interesting impact-er on perceptions of, say, "communicative distance", must get back to that (I still remember calling my grandparents at Christmas for the 1st time, and how over 4 years it went from an expensive complex process to something taken-for-granted))) alter the way in which clock is measured - almost without acknowledging that they have completely altered their perspective.

Anyway, tentatively I see it this way - human time (phenomenological time) has an envelope of "now" which OVERLAPS past and future; this human time is not wholly sequential. That envelope allows us to perceive the sense of a sentence, or a piece of music, or indeed any sequence - images are maybe a different case. So then if we look at this envelope, what constructs it & what constrains it? If it were constructed by the sequence, ie, sense dependant, it seems likely that we would comprehend quite complex ideas readily when spoken, but the difference between written & spoken language suggest that the envelope is media, rather than content sensitive. Also, it seems plausible that the envelope is managed by the brain, so it would come under cognitive/psychological discussion. Perhaps the brain cannot manage (given some complex of conditions) an envelope beyond a certain size, or perhaps there is a behavioural/affective COST associated with expanding the envelope.

I wonder how the idea of "flow" (the educational version) might fit into this? Is "flow" another way of looking at the envelope? "In the zone" is an extremely-extended envelope?

Lots of questions.

NIC 2025 Project

NIC 2025 Project

Back to the Future

Asia’s economic powerhouses—China and

India—are restoring the positions they held

two centuries ago when China produced

approximately 30 percent and India 15

percent of the world’s wealth. China and

India, for the first time since the 18th century,

are set to be the largest contributors to

worldwide economic growth. These two

countries will likely surpass the GDP of all

other economies except the US and Japan by

2025, but they will continue to lag in per

capita income for decades. The years around

2025 will be characterized by the “dual

identity” of these Asian giants: powerful, but

many individual Chinese or Indians feeling

relatively poor compared to Westerners.

Although democratization probably

will be slow and may have its own Chinese

character...

Right. 民主化, as it happens. More tin-eared writers.

One question that always puzzles me is why India should be, with almost identical population numbers, achieving "progress" less rapidly than China?

An Introduction to Connective Knowledge ~ Stephen's Web

An Introduction to Connective Knowledge ~ Stephen's Web: "Various writers (for example Shirkey) write and speak as though the power law were an artifact of nature, something that develops of its own accord. And because it is natural, and because such systems produce knowledge (we will return to this point), it is argued that it would be a mistake to interfere with the network structure. This argument is remarkably similar to the argument posed by the beneficiaries of a similar inequality in financial markets. The rich get richer, benefiting from an inequal allocation of resources, but efforts to change this constitute 'intereference' in a 'natural phenomenon', the invisible hand of the marketplace, intelligently allocating resources and determining priorities."

This is a great article, and I picked out this extract because - perhaps serendipitously, perhaps not - it connects (pun inevitable) Learning & Change with Learning Technologies. In L & C we see two schools (Chicago& Marx) contesting economic history; here we see the possibility that narrative agendas can drive interpretations of something as "concrete" as a computer network. (I like the idea of a concrete network)

What is an event, FFS?

I shouldn't even think about reading philosophy, because it just hurts my head, but sadly I appear to be addicted to it.

This to hand, from an apparently reputable commentator (Wikipedia):

 "Since every mental event is some physical event or other, the idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time, for example, that snow is white, is a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which can be characterized as both a thinking that snow is white (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event)."


That just seems wrong before you even begin to think about it. "A certain time" causes me real problems. If I think snow is white, that's going to take time; that's "think" as an action verb, not a state verb, BTW. If you're going to make difficulties with that then we'll just translate the discussion into a language which uses different words for the state & action aspects of the English "think" - and there are plenty to choose from. "Over a period of time" would be much more appropriate.


Why is that important? Because down the track in this argument, "events" get conflated with "states". But I would say that there are multiple states between t0 & t1, and I might want to go on to say that an event is a change between states (seems reasonable, no?) in which case the mental event maps to a large number of physical events. 


That's important because thinking, believing & knowing are all in the domain of education, and we should be clear how we individually conceive them, and how they work. Mind/body is still a contentious problem & for educators it's more than a theoretical one.  

Rhetoric

I'm going to comment on something from Wilson (2010) which I ran across in PDF form the other day. I'll post a link when I find one. Meantime, his words are in black, mine aren't. I want to stress that this is a good book & I am in sympathy with a lot of it; but I think he is spoiling a good case with bad argument.

There can be no doubt that in the modern world we are reliant on ‘best
evidence’. I think there is a great deal of doubt, in fact I imagine that very few people would agree. "Best evidence" is a rhetorical tag, which get used to justify decisions and conceal the inevitable politics of those decisions. Increasingly persuasive work in cognitive psychology supports the view (which you can find in Hume - and Dodgson -, if not earlier) that the decision comes first and the arguments second.Governments act on the basis of what the science tells them – No they don't. Governments balance a large number of competing interests; one of those may be "the science" but it is quite likely that each of those interests will come armed with its own "the science".
in the UK, for instance, the well-publicised responses to outbreaks of mad
cow disease, foot and mouth disease and avian flu in the last ten years or
so have all been relayed to the general public as the government acting
on what the scientific evidence says. Perhaps, although I recall a degree of "we must re-establish confidence in ourcusomers in the global marketplace" as well.We see it in the way that medical
practitioners are advised to prescribe medication on the basis of economy Is "economy" included in "best evidence"? through a meta-analysis of clinical trials and surgical techniques, and we
are now beginning to see it with regard to climate change I would have said that climate change provided the best possible counter-example to the idea that there is a monolithic "the science"and the ways
in which energy needs can be best accommodated in the future. This
fixation Curious choice of words with best evidence has slowly but surely entered the various fields
in which people work with other people. This may be direct work that
helps those in need, such as health care, social care or education, or it may
be indirect work, such as observing human beings and their interactions
with the world in order that we may understand ourselves better, as in the
social sciences.

I do not suggest Actually, I don't see any other way to read the previous paragraph than as an attempt to undermine the idea of "best practice" that we should not work to what is considered at the
time to be best evidence, for it clearly has an important place, but I would 
suggest that focusing so heavily on the ideal of best evidence through 
positivism is detrimental to wider notions of learning and understanding, I don't understand why he spends the first paragraph rabbiting on about best-ness, when actually, it's the nature of evidence that he is concerned with. Suggest away, mate, not many people are going to argue with you on this one. I'm not sure how many people you will find who are prepared to admit to being positivist (although I suspect under rigorous interrogation a lot of constructivists would tun out to be more positivist than they realise). So, anyway, are we talking about the problems with "best evidence", or the problems of what constitutes evidence? My gut feel is that everybody, no matter how unremittingly subjectivist, does what they think is best, on balance, in any given situation. The much more important question is what constitutes evidence, and how is it to be evaluated?
particularly as there are only a limited number of research approaches
which are considered to be scientifically ‘sound’. Should there be an unlimited number of research practices? I'm pretty sure you can find a research practice to justify any decision you want to take, if you are sufficiently broad-minded in accepting research practices.We have even seen this
in recent years in the UK higher education system, once a bastion of new
knowledge and academic endeavour Now that's the rosy tint of nostalgia, untroubled by narrow ideas of evidence , whereby universities have been
scrutinised through the Research Assessment Exercise and any published
works are subject to, and only considered valid if they are grounded in,
scientific rigour As opposed to the idea of, say, "scholarly rigour", whatever that meant, or general "soundness". In short, the practice of recording what is observable and 
narrow I'm assuming this is what "scientific rigour" is being taken to mean? I guess science will be surprised to hear that its narrowness has prevented it from opening up new fields. is prioritised over more theoretical work that could open up a field
of inquiry rather than close it down. The field of health care, more so than
social care or education, has historically wrestled with the issues in the
debate on art versus science, but the question is now spreading into these
other domains too. I'm not really in a position to dispute this, but I'm a little surprised that engineering & architecture have been left out of the discussion. I would have had my money on them for the earliest practitioners of evidence based inquiry, and probably the first to concern themselves with the art vs science question as well.


All this boils down to is that the ways of constructing evidence in science may not be appropriate, or at least, may be unduly limiting, in education. I don't see much mileage in attacking the idea of "best". Even if you have the philosophical ingenuity to make it work, are you going to win a funding war by asking people to do not the best? 

Post-Block 2 response/thoughts

I found the presentation on the coaching program in China ("Culture Club") to be particularly thought provoking, partly because I have a long-standing interest in China, and have worked there on two separate occasions – but also, and mainly, because I thought it raised some very interesting questions, both directly, and indirectly.

To take the indirect question first; if we look at the goals of the project, simply put, they were:

1. Create a blended learning program with 90% online & 10% face-to-face components
2. Implement it in China
3. Successfully train people in China
4. Be commercially viable ( it wasn’t stated, but it’s good to make it explicit)

I can only guess about the fourth – but since they are planning to go back & do it again, we can probably assume that if the program wasn’t, it soon will be. However, each of the other three goals was achieved. The only questionable result was number three, and this is what raises the question – how do we know, or how do we decide, what is successful?

What struck me was that one of the presenters said that the quality of the final assignments was particularly high – which sounds like an excellent definition of success! And yet, despite the good results, the focus was on the lack of success of the program in generating the same kind of learning behaviours as had been previously seen in Australia. I absolutely understand that – we tend to be very process focused, so an unexpected procedural twist can be quite disconcerting. But, and I stress this is purely speculation, should we be looking beyond the process to the results? At least some of the time?

Of course, it’s not that simple. If you have a program that relies on online participation, then irrespective of the results, it seems logical that improving the interaction will improve the results. Lynne raised an interesting point about “lurking” being an effective learning strategy (see below for references). It may be effective, but it’s hard not to worry that if EVERYBODY lurks, less is going to happen than with broad scale participation. And, as in any groupwork scenario, there is something of an (at least perceived) ethical question about those who only take without contributing.

In 2008-09 I worked in China rolling out a blended learning program. We had a similar issue – students were, according to our assessments, very successful. But there was a strong perception that the process was broken: the difference being that, unlike here, it was our customers who felt the process was broken, despite their apparent – to us - success. Now, unhappy customers make for a stressed organisation; but that’s a different story.

The reason that our customers were unhappy was exactly the same as one of the main issues directly identified by the Culture Club team. Our students, exactly as the CC students,  valued F2F time hugely over the online participation, irrespective of the fact that F2F time was largely wasted without the online preparation. This, combined with the well-known phenomenon in language learning that subjective perception of progress, for most people, lags objective measurement (see references below), made for a very volatile situation. I was very interested to hear that this hyper-valuation of F2F time exists in Chinese customers outside the language teaching market.

Another issue that was raised during the presentation was that of the differences between China as an "high context" society, requiring a lot of unstated common ground context, and Australia, a “low context” society where social context is commonly overtly made manifest. I wonder about this (I have a friend who says you can't understand Westerners until you understand the Bible - perhaps all OTHER cultures look high context), but it’s a very interesting idea and one I shall certainly be following it up. It makes the question of providing online language learning environments (my specific filed of interest) much more challenging.

The final point that I found particularly valuable was the fact that it is wrong to just parcel up learning issues under the heading cultural differences. Irrespective of cultural differences, there are still multiple intelligences – nine by my last count, natural, visual, verbal, analytic, social, musical, kinaesthetic, existential and reflective  – and these (see reference below) need to be taken into consideration. There are also personality differences; every culture has its extroverts & introverts and these traits can have a significant impact on learning outcomes. There is a multi-dimensional model of factors addressing learning success, and culture is only one of the dimensions. Too often, in mixed culture learning contexts, the cultural differences are stressed to the exclusion of other issues.

References:


Lynne's comments on lurking were motivated by:


Susan Greenfield (Baroness, no less) on research conducted at Harvard.
(http://www.visualizationfx.com/Harvard_Visualization.html)

Reported in 

The Australian 

June 14, 2008

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/society-hard-wired-for-a-fall/story-e6frg8gf-1111116627284

Also this conference:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/deakin/stories/s296994.htm

and:

"Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School. There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups. The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano—but had nothing to do with the instrument at all. And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises. The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all. Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement. But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons. "  

http://www.101bananas.com/library2/greenfield.html)

Nine intelligences comes from: 

http://skyview.vansd.org/lschmidt/Projects/The%20Nine%20Types%20of%20Intelligence.htm

or you can track it down in ERIC:

Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century.

H Gardner - 1999 - eric.ed.gov
ED435610 - Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. 

For a view of perceptions of progress, not given in the wiki, try:

Michael Harris
Self-assessment of language learning in formal settings

ELT J, 1997; 51: 12 - 20.  

More ranting about Koohang, Riley, Smith, & Schreurs

Learning assessment elements are integral to the learner-centered model for designing e-learning assignments/activities.

Erwin (1991) defines assessment as “…the systematic basis for making
inferences about the learning and development of students. More specifically, assessment is the process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to increase students' learning and development.”

 I'm not very comfortable with the way KRSS handle assessment either. Assessment is an area fraught with politics, as primarily assessment is the exercise of power. No-one really likes to deal with that, because it feels a little unpleasant to be a wielder of power, so plenty of protective rationalisations are undertaken to avoid dealing with the power issue. That doesn't stop it hanging around.

Where to start?

If knowledge is what the student constructs, which by definition it is for us (in the context of this article, which claims to be constructivist), we can't really compare the student's knowledge with some other knowledge, say, the teachers', without violating the principle that the student is constructing, rather than reproducing, knowledge. See point 8 from Murphy's 1997 list below. The whole question of making a clear distinction between constructing & reproducing knowledge isn't vaguely close to being answered, IMO, but assuming that it might be, if the knowledge that the student has to construct has to map closely to the knowledge that some other party has constructed to be deemed "well-formed" (which I don't think you can avoid with summative assessment; formative assessment is perhaps a different matter) then that is reproduction-by-construction. If other non-constructive methods of reproduction are available, how is it the teacher's right to direct the student which method to use, in a learner-centred paradigm?

That's a problem beyond KRSS, but they seem curiously unaware of it. In fact, what's even more curious is their choice of Erwin to elucidate their view on assessment. Erwin's words strongly suggest that assessment is used by teachers (I'm assuming a bipartite situation, student-teacher/assessor, rather than the tripartite student-teacher-assessor, which of course, can exist and is significantly more complex) to control students ("making inferences", "using information"). Again this discordance student-centred rhetoric & teacher-centred assessment.

Superficially it might look like self-assessment on the part of the student addresses these concerns. Leaving aside the grave political problems with self-assessment (which political party is likely to implement self-assessment for language skills any time soon?), in a truly student-centred model, whatever has been constructed will be a perfect representation of what could have been constructed, given that student. Comparisons with other knowledges remain invalid for as long as our goal is construction rather than reproduction.


This is getting a little bit out of hand & taking up too much of my time so I'm about to close it down with a bullet point commentary on the Murphy summary below:

Murphy (1997) presented an excellent summary of characteristics of constructivism learning theory
based on a comprehensive review of literature. These characteristics are as follows:
1. Multiple perspectives and representations of concepts and content are presented and encouraged.
 These "concepts" are somehow independent of the knowledge construction process?
2. Goals and objectives are derived by the student or in negotiation with the teacher or system.
Negotiable assessment?
3. Teachers serve in the role of guides, monitors, coaches, tutors and facilitators.
4. Activities, opportunities, tools and environments are provided to encourage metacognition,
self-analysis -regulation, -reflection & -awareness.
5. The student plays a central role in mediating and controlling learning.
Is there some paradigm where the student is forced to learn? As opposed to forced to attend class?
6. Learning situations, environments, skills, content and tasks are relevant, realistic, authentic
and represent the natural complexities of the 'real world'. Why put real world in inverted commas? And if it has to be qualified withou discusion, what use is it? IF there is a real world, isn't constucting knowledge a bit fraught with risk?
7. Primary sources of data are used in order to ensure authenticity and real-world complexity.
What the hell is authenticity? Is this data theory dependent?

8. Knowledge construction and not reproduction is emphasized.

9. This construction takes place in individual contexts and through social negotiation, collaboration
and experience.
10. The learner's previous knowledge constructions, beliefs and attitudes are considered in
the knowledge construction process.
11. Problem-solving, higher-order thinking skills and deep understanding are emphasized.
12. Errors provide the opportunity for insight into students’ previous knowledge constructions.
Define "error" in the context of constructed knowledge.
13. Exploration is a favoured approach in order to encourage students to seek knowledge independently and to manage the pursuit of their goals.
14. Learners are provided with the opportunity for apprenticeship learning in which there is
an increasing complexity of tasks, skills and knowledge acquisition.
15. Knowledge complexity is reflected in an emphasis on conceptual interrelatedness and interdisciplinary learning.
16. Collaborative and cooperative learning are favoured in order to expose the learner to alternative
viewpoints.
17. Scaffolding is facilitated to help students perform just beyond the limits of their ability.
No-one performs beyond their level of ability.
18. Assessment is authentic and interwoven with teaching.” (Murphy 1997)
There's that bloody "authentic" word again.

SWOT - TEFL

TEFL is a massive complex area & I still haven't completely worked out how I want to narrow it down.

I would seriously welcome feedback on this.

 Basically I'm looking at 2 areas; PD for teachers OTOH and language acquisition OTO.

1.) To use an online learning environment for PD:

Opportunities:

For a complex of reasons, TEFL is not a particularly rewarding commercial proposition for a business. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, given the apparent massive demand, but in reality in the TEFL business margins are low & business failure rates are high. Many institutions run their TEFL programs at break even or as a loss leader to more remunerative educational programs (tertiary & VET, with their huge staff-student ratios and low number of contact hours are at least relatively low in labour costs). One side-effect of this is that EFL teachers are (outside the tertiary sector) generally extremely poorly paid, in an attempt to reduce labour costs, and very little investment is made in professional development, to reduce operating costs. Entry requirements to the profession are very low, so the typical EFL teacher is under trained, inexperienced and unsupported formally within the workplace. (And possibly a tad cynical). I'm looking at ways that we could, as an industry or as an employer, improve the development & support opportunity for staff to; improve their work experience, and potentially their motivation and commitment, both short & long term; to improve their classroom performance and consequently the learning experience of their students; to encourage and support debate of the ethical dimensions of TEFL.

Strengths:

if it is possible to great the sort of community energy that exists within certain, say, Facebook, communities, then the advantage an online system would have is the ability to knit together groups across multiple campuses & multiple shifts; also potentially across multiple employers, although then (see Threats) there comes the question of who is going to finance the network (if finance is required). A very large number of staff rooms in EFL-ville are not particularly happy places, for a complex of reasons within the culture& economics of the industry - see opportunites. Fragmentation of staff is common, as is the casualisation of the workforce; thus it's difficult for teachers to form relationships & leverage off them. When we review the large number of EFL communities that do exist online, they generally seem to function primarily as a clearing house for resources, rather than relationship-facilitators. I actually have observed first hand (at a large multi-campus school I managed in China) staff using Facebook as a way to establish and maintain community sensibilities, although admittedly for social rather than professional reasons.

Establishing communities goes to the core of motivation & long term commitment, but it also creates a platform for mentoring & PD relationships. Importantly, when an online platform for PD gives a great deal of potential for, is the re-use of mentoring & PD materials. Privacy, I think, has to be maintained in a mentoring relationship, but nonetheless, if a mentor creates sample work to illustrate a discussion, that work can be easily sued. The observation process is challenging for a lot of new teachers (and threatening wouldn't be too strong in many cases, having implemented an observation program into an ESL school where one had never previously existed), but videoing a class & posting the video for online discussion with a mentor is significantly less threatening. IN this case the remoteness of the online experience actually becomes a strength.

There is an enormous opportunity to develop learning support materials for online/digital use. I doubt that anyone seriously questions the potential of digital tools to do this; where the process usually falls down is that it more difficult/expensive to develop those tools than anticipated in project budgets. But, for example, pronunciation is very challenging to teach successfully & one of the main reasons is that actually the majority of teachers don't actually understand it particularly well. It's a complex subject glossed over in most teacher training. Visual tools & animations are tremendously helpful in both explaining the topic & exploring pedagogic strategies; an online PD environment is obviously well suited to such tools. Another advantage of the online environment is the possibility of fragmenting such training into what is specifically useful for a particular class - teachers feel themselves to be time-poor, and often resent resent PD as too remote.

Weaknesses:

Setting up an online community doesn't create one. The same reasons that teachers find it unnecessary to enter into a F2F community will militate against an online community. People will need to anticipate some tangible benefit. Non F2F relationships can, perhaps, more easily suffer from routinisation; the mentor who has a "standard message" which they email on a calendar basis to their proteges. As I've noted in a blog post elsewhere, online communication is actually slower & less responsive then F2F communication; this runs the risk of increasing alienation & anxiety in an online community over a 3D community.

Threats:

Money, maintenance overheads, training, infrastructure failures, external communities threaten internal communities & vice versa, politics. (Nothing major :))

2.) Online language learning

Opportunities:

My particular interest in online language learning is actually political, although it overlaps significantly with economic arguments. The boom in the popularity of the "communicative methodology" for language teaching has meant a significant increase in class cost. For the price of a grammar-translation textbook a student is lucky to receive one communicative class. This increase in cost of language acquisition, at a time and in a world where keywords of economic success are "globalisation" and "English", results in the raising of a barrier to participation in the global economic community to an increasing number of people. The question is, can online learning increase access to, and participation in, global English-language-based economic activity.

Strengths:

There are two major strengths, and a potentially significant - but possibly difficult to quantify advantage to an online language learning methodology. The obvious one is economies of scale, meaning that materials developed can be reused an enormous number of times, amortising the cost of their production to the negligible. This can be simply & persuasively illustrated by comparing existing commercial computer-based language programs, such as Rosetta Stone (USD $999 as per their website on April 15 for English) , with the cost of pursuing an equivalent proficiency (IELTS 6.5) via face-to-face tuition ($360 per week, face price, Ability Education*, over 40 weeks, $14400). 

The second major strength is the possibility of exploiting technology to deliver very precisely student-targeted training,with a consistency that human teachers would struggle to emulate. Although the teaching of pronunciation is an ideologically fraught issue in TEFL, my view is that outside the TEFL industry itself, minimal accent speakers are more highly regarded, and that this regard translates into a general increase in estimation of a speakers ability (and, often, sadly & wrongly, the speaker's intelligence). Pronunciation is largely a mater of drilling, with consistent modelling & useful feedback. Given the idiosyncrsy of pronunication issues&the time it can take to tacklethem, it is notpractical fora human teacher to undertakeiton a classroom basis. However, repetiiotn & consistency are not problematic for a computer. There are many such potential areas where twchnology may provide better modelling &feedback.

The third.more nuanced claim, is that potentially online language training might be more ideologically neutral than actual language teachers. Language & teaching are both tools wielding power, and frequently, with inexperienced teachers, or teachers lacking insight, or, sadly, abusive teachers, this power is used to benefit the teacher and not the student. Teaching English is inevitably, perhaps, a kind of colonial action & it would not be possible to remove all power from any language program; however an online program has the potential for abuses to be negotiated out, or at least down, and the (presumed beneficial) outcomes of those negotiations to be instantly available to all students.

*I work there; in reality student pay between $220-$250 after discounts

Weaknesses:

I think it is a long time in the future that computers will be "communicative".Those elements of language acquisition that are deeply communicative, such as the negotiation of meaning, the setting and achieving of goals, the relevance of context and social relationships will be difficult to emulate in software. To the extent that these are indispensable, the online training program cannot hope to be complete.

It is not at all clear that the online infrastructure required to deliver this kind of program does, or can, extend far beyond the range of existing language classes, that is, a cashed up middle class.

Threats:
Software has much promise, but fulfilment is not so easy. Cost of developing programs that meet the goals of this project may be prohibitive. There may also be significant political objections to the extension of a globalising language process into communities that are perceived, or perceive themselves, as having cultural identities under threat. Finally, it should be noted that that CBT may not be able to deliver truly effective language training.

Yes, well, indeed, what IS constructivism?

This is my first attempt to grapple with the contradictions of constructivism, as generally espoused, which I find an odd thing to be doing as it is transparently obvious to me that knowledge is now and generally has been (seen as) "constructed". Presenting this as an insight of Dewey , when it appear to have been an obsession of Socrates some two-and-one-half thousand years previously confuses me. Or, I could pluck a quote out of the mid-nineteenth century: "To learn is not to know; memory makes the one and philosophy the other" (Dumas pere). Is it a coincidence that a Doctorate of Philosphy is the highest accolade of the academy?

Maybe it isn't fair to pick on Koohang, Riley, Smith, & Schreurs, but they happened to be standing in the door at the time.

OK, so, in the "E-Learning and Constructivism: From Theory to Application" article they define constructivism for us:

… The key idea is that students actively construct their own knowledge: the mind of the student mediates input from the outside world to determine what the student will learn. Learning is active mental work, not passive reception of teaching.


Do you think it's possible to passively construct knowledge? If it were, wouldn't it still be knowledge? After all, it would still have been constructed, and that seems pretty suggestive. What's the word "actively" telling us here?


Mind is a pretty loaded word too; it's certainly smuggling something into the discussion. I hate the word mind and its compounds. I don't trust them; I find myself letting the use of it pass for the sake of politeness, and suddenly I'm apparently committed to a whole bunch of bizarre stuff. Particularly I want to know, what is this mind that is not the brain, or the brain plus the neural network attached? Anyway, I'm letting it pass again (it would take weeks to pick through it), but making the point explicit. I remain uncommitted.

Mediates, I don't understand that word. Is there an implication that it is possible to turn the mind off, and let the "outside world" flood in unmediated? I have the germ of an idea that that is the basis of autism, so should I understand that there are two mind-states? Autism, and learning? Maybe three, asleep.

Input from the outside world? So, no input from the inside world? Maybe that's the mediation, the mind mediates between itself-as-inside-world and input-as-outside-world. Of course, that's what the brain is always doing; for example, information arrives in the form of photons with a wavelength of 650 nanometers. (That, BTW, is really "pure" information in a digital 1-0 it's-there-or-it's-not kind of way. When you talk about digital learning, remember that for all time sight has been digital in a very very deep way). They eye turns the photon (well, chunks of them) into an electro-chemical signal for the brain & your brain provides a mass of associated data in various contexts; that might include the word "red" in an english-speaking brain and the idea "sex" in a contemporary of the Wife of Bath.

So, was that bit of mediated input (colour processing) from the outside world, learning? It doesn't seem very active does it? Perhaps we should bar automated brain processes. Not "mind-y" enough. Hmm, OK. What about language then? Obviously I didn't start learning English (it's my native language) until I was 8 and started actively thinking about how it worked & how to use it. The 5 or 6 thousand words I already knew by then - hang, on, could I have known them if I hadn't learned them? - plus the several hundred grammatical features with which I was familiar (great language, there's a euphemism for everything, "familiar" = "know") were acquired without effort. So, to be a constructivist, I apparently have to hold that one's native language isn't learned, nor is it known. I'm glad I started writing this down. No-one has drawn that to my attention before.

I love the idea that I get to determine what I learn. Would that be the little homunculus in the brain that makes the decision? (When he's finished mediating, no doubt) I wonder why, every time I try to study French, he decides that I can't learn it? I am really startled to hear that one learns what one decides to learn. It's very annoying that I decided to forget all that stuff that I have forgotten & and only remember that I have forgotten it. I know sarcasm isn't the soundest foundation for an argument, but this kind of determinism makes me cross. I've just discovered that everything I thought I knew because I remember reading/discussing/seeing/(pick a sense-ing)it previously, isn't actually knowledge. I mean, I've always felt pretty stupid, but now I feel a whole lot more so.

Putting aside the emotion though, maybe this is just a requirement of the constructivist view; but like the requirement for "active" mediation which ruled out language acquisition as learning & therefore knowledge, this requirement for determinism (and let me just reiterate what a fraught concept that is in the 21st century) is going to rule out a lot of stuff as knowledge as well. That may be OK, but the other stuff is still around, and has to be accounted for. I haven't seen any discussion of this in the literature so far (OK, I'm a novice in it) but frankly, the limiting seems to be a bit stealthy. When I consider the rhetorical dross that occupies large chunks of academic writing to re-inform me of the blindingly obvious, I have to say that I wouldn't mind another line reminding me that constructivism as a view of learning/knowledge is a seriously narrow view that leaves out an awful lot of stuff that the unwary non-specialist might be inclined to assume was actually in there.

I've already had a go at "active", but now I want to look at "passive reception of teaching". Is the "passive reception of teaching" actually possible? If the authors didn't think it were possible, presumably they wouldn't be trying to contrast it with the active reception of teaching, but what do you thinkg that "passive reception of teaching" actually looks like? Be careful, it's not the passive IGNORING of teaching. Is it some kind of code to denigrate the (2500 Asian years old) practice of rote learning? Do you think the writers have actually every tried to do rote learning? It's not in the least bit passive. Or, does this definition of learning actually privilege rote-learning, because of its activity? Is the student who attends lectures, takes notes (is that passive?) or listens carefully (is that passive?) or stays awake (but passively) and then accidentally remembers the lecture, learning? Or what?

This whole statement is so problematic that it looks like a memorised and recycled mantra that has undergone precisely no critical thinking on the part of its recyclers. Does that disqualify it as knowledge? It does for me; within about a page this article has gone from potentially extremely interesting to pure cant.

And that annoys me intensely, because I am a constructivist, or at least I thought I was, and being compelled to associate with this sort of nonsense makes me feel dirty.

I was originally going to post an anlysis of the whole article here, but it might get a bit long. I'll close now by quoting again:

Honebein (1996) advanced a set of goals that aid the design of constructivism in learning settings.

Pardon me while I speculate whether the definition of constructivism just offered to us qualifies for the word "design".

Relationship of mind to world
Mediated	Unmediated
Learning	Autistic	Asleep

Acquisition Method	Found in brain?	Is knowledge
thought	no	yes
thought	yes	yes
talk	yes	?
rote	yes	?
reading	yes	?
listening	yes	?
unconscious	yes	no
accidental	yes	no

So, just a couple of closing remarks on the tables: the question of retention isn't actually canvassed by the definition, but I only highlighted that for "thought". It's possible to guess that "talk" will be constituted as knowledge, because when you read the rest of the paper you find lots of emphasis on social construction, but listening is not so clear. It may be social, but it's hardly active.

The morning jog

Idea the 1st

I had an idea when I was out on the morning run; sun, wind, freshly mown grass, pain, sweat, inability to breathe, etc, etc. I will have to come back & refine it later, but I wanted to jot it down in case it struck a chord.

I've been grappling a bit with the nature of research, in fact it might be fair to say that it's been a bit of a distractor, but it does seem to me in some way pretty fundamental to why I'm here.

Why do research? Because research is a way of gathering rhetorical tools/devices/weapons - pick the metaphoric framework you want to slide into, before I decide to try and control it myself later by reducing that list down to one item - that will be used in some discourse conflict. That covers a lot of ground I think, from persuading an assessor to pass your dissertation through to sating the deep emotional need to be purple-shirtedly videoed by random tourists outside St. John's College Oxford. (If you're not doing LX1 you may miss the point of that)

It's not that I don't like the idea of research to add to the world's store of knowledge; it's a beautifully romantic idea and I'm quite susceptible. I feel it, but I don't believe it. Research adds to the world's store of research, that's it.

Idea the 2nd

 The internet interferes with the operation of time, or at least the intuition of the operation of time and in quite non-trivial ways. People feel the interenet is fast, in some way, all this information, there at your fingertips in milliseconds. Well, sometimes. Sort of. Maybe. But.

Let's say you are leaping arond the internet collecting journal article for research. Great, in a day I can track down thousands of articles. Still, reading 1000's of articles isn't going to take any less time than it ever did (in fact, if I try & read them on a screen it will take longer), so I'm going to have to select a readable number from out of the 1000. That selection process is going to take a long time. And I still have to read the articles. Has the internet saved me time? Not really. It might have increased the range of materials, but if it is going to take me a year to read them anyway, there wasn't really that much hurry to find them all on day 1.

E-mail seems so much quicker than letters. Of course it is, but email is not the same discourse as letters. E-mail substantially maps onto a conversational discourse; you can't talk to your lecturers (as a random example) but you can email them anytime. A quick comparison of face-to-face conversation with email quickly shows that email is really really slow.  There are the mechanical issues; speech runs at around 250 words per minute; typing, say, around 100 (if you're good at it). There are the structural issues; conversation has multiple parts, including clarification & confirmation. Each of these requires a separate email and since most people chunk their interaction witt email into daily/twice-daily/thrice-daily periods, and it's pretty random whether your periods corresponed with your correspondent's, you're lucky to manage a partial exchange per day. It can take several days to conduct a 10 minute F2F conversation by email.

ELX2 - A useful starting point in the literature

I've chosen to write about “An analysis of higher order thinking in online discussions”, McLoughlin & Mynard, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol. 46, no. 2, May 2009, 147-160.

It's fair to say that having spent perhaps more time on this article, through the necessity of writing about it, than many others, that it has not retained the initial impression that I formed of it. Nonetheless, it remains, at the very least, a useful jumping off point for a number of themes which I consider significant.

The first positive feature of the article is its clarity. As one new in the Education field (my background is Linguistics) I have not found all the publications uniformly accessible. Also, I have been struggling with some foundational questions, one of which is what constitutes the knowledge, or the knowing, that education facilitates? My own learning, or thinking style, is based around a dialogue between theory and practice – I find if quite difficult to think in purely theoretical terms, at least at the beginning of an endeavour. I found that this paper provided me some handy, admittedly simplistic, relations between theory and practice, which I have been able to use to start to construct my own theoretical position. Emphasis on the “start”.

McLoughlin & Mynard do not particularly position their paper as a response to the question of what education is; instead they discuss specifically what constitutes “higher-order thinking”, mainly through a suite of papers co-authored by Garrison, and they ask whether evidence of higher-order thinking can be found in online communities.

The short answer is that such evidence can be found. The model of higher-order thinking used is quadrangular, the reasonably intuitive categories being “triggering”, “exploration”, “integration” and “resolution”. In particular, “resolution”, which is defined as the ability to implement the knowledge in a useful way, allows this model to be neatly dovetailed with the (more abstract) behavioural & cognitive models of education which emphasis an endpoint of behavioural change (see for instance, Uden & Beaumont (2006), Chapter 1) .

I also found the discussion of Garrison et. al.'s “social presence, teaching presence, cognitive presence” model to be a useful starting point for thinking about the learning community as an abstraction.

One of the weaknesses of the paper might be its failure to place itself in a clear experimental context. The authors claim, I think, to be constructivist, citing Garrison as a standard bearer for Dewey: “...learning...a collaborative process of constructing meaningful knowledge” (p.149); however on p.150 “resolution” is being discussed in terms of “having acquired new knowledge”. I would have described the focus on data quality displayed on pp. 152-153 as being resolutely empiricist.

There are some other weaknesses in the paper qua paper, but even these weaknesses are interesting and useful. There was no particular need to, for example, introduce a discussion about the relative merits of face-to-face versus online learning within the context of this particular experiment, which was simply an evaluation of one particular online learning experience. However, the referencing to Freiermuth (2002) and Newman, Webb & Cochrane (1995) provide useful jumping off points to useful discussions of those relativities. More subtly though, this need to compare, going beyond methodological requirements, indicates to me how strong the comparative urge is, and how difficult is for more people than just me to maintain the extremely narrow focus of ethnography.

I also found the analysis of effect of the type of prompt useful,and the apparent connections between prompt-type and response-structure are promising for further investigation.

In summary, I found this article very useful as a starting point for thinking about a number of complex issues because the discussion was grounded in an analysis of practice,which is a context in which I feel comfortable. Overall, I doubt that it is a strong paper, and I expect to make more use in the long term, perhaps, of some of the works referenced. However, as a starting point, I would recommend it to anyone with a practical rather than a theoretical background.

References:

Uden, L. & Beaumont, C., Technology & Problem Based Learning, 2006, Information Science Publishing

Other references are from the bibliography of the subject article, which is:

“An analysis of higher order thinking in online discussions”, McLoughlin & Mynard, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol. 46, no. 2, May 2009, p.147-160.

My LX1 required language community

I've provisionally elected to use Livemocha http://www.livemocha.com/learn/view as my learning community for critical analysis.

Livemocha is a language learning web-based community. It offers a range of free language learning programs, as well as a number of fee-for-service options. One of the questions I will be investigating is the "integrity" of the free offering - to what extent is the community designed to maximise revenue at the expense of social capital? The use of social capital to overcome buyer resistance is a strategy well-known and commonly exploited offline, as for instance, Amway & Tupperware. It might be interesting to see if this tactic is effective online as well. In general, "free" is a complex concept which merits exploration.

Livemocha describes itself as "... the world's most popular language learning site."(Google search "Livemocha").

Wikipedia characterises Livemocha as

Livemocha is a Seattle-based start-up company that is attempting to redefine the way in which people learn languages through the use of an online community of native speakers of different languages (language exchange), interactive online lessons andWeb 2.0 technologies. The system aims to create a level of language immersion that is not possible with the use of traditional language learning tools such as books and compact discs."

I've selected this site for a number of reasons:

1.) Language learning/teaching is my motivating field for undertaking this MA
2.) The balance between individual learning and community learning is readily student controlled.
3.) I will be travelling to Japan in the mid-semester break, so there is direct motivation.

There are ethical issues involved in participation in a learning community where one's prime interest is not necessarily learning, but rather critical observation. Since my learning time is already heavily constrained, it was necessary to find a learning community that was both flexible, and genuinely of interest. One of the ways that Livemocha enables this flexibility is by enabling community work to be conducted asynchronously with online participation; thus I can assess English & Chinese via email as one contribution to the community.

Curiously, although marking English assignments doesn't sound particularly exciting; it is actually motivating in two ways; firstly, one DOES feel like a useful member of the community, and secondly, seeing the progress that a variety of other students are making reinforces the possibility of making progress oneself.

Livemocha also builds community in a number of established online ways; both interacting with other social sites such as Facebook, and also facilitating the introduction of students at the same or similar level within the language group. (Actually, with the beginner vocab they offer in Japanese, this will take a while to get momentum, but communication is the essence of modern language learning theory, so at least this demonstrates a commitment to sound principles - in site construction, if not actual lesson design)

Another community mechanism that is in place is the ability to add tips/hints to lessons for future students to (potentially) use, plus a number of tools for developing materials for contribution to the community, both within one's own language learning community as a student, or in other communities as an assistant/facilitator. There are options to exchange materials for cash, for structured social capital within the site ("points"), or on a personal/group basis

The extent to which language acquisition can be negotiated by students is complex; one issue may well be that the learning community is much more prepared to negotiate than communities extrinsic to the learning community, as can be evidenced by employer group (one instance) rhetoric about the level of international student English, which is in marked contradistinction to the evaluations of the professional assessment community - typically a subset of the education community in which those students acquired their language.

Another issue of interest with an online learning community for languages is that reciprocity for language learning is a fundamental requirement, and reciprocity is highlighted in many studies of online learning as a low-frequency behaviour online.

How can I be a post-structuralist?

One thing overwhelmingly sways me towards post-structuralism; I strongly, strongly believe that knowledge, insofar as it is static, comprises and is comprised of discourses supported by power. To me that's almost a truism (which worries me, on several fronts, these being that it's had to believe a bunch of very clever people would get so worked up by a truism and also, truisms aren't, by their nature, very interesting. If something is a truism, either it's not understood, or it's not interesting.).

In fact, I much prefer the idea of knowledge as a dynamic knowing, although strangely, it wasn't until I got into the education industry on the teaching side, that I discovered that was in question. I was shocked to discover that knowledge was a monolithic thing that had to be acquired - although it did explain in retrospect why my initial tertiary education, which comprised increasingly desperate and ultimately futile attempts to find someone to discuss knowing with, was so far from my expectations of it.

But, but, but, the more I read about it, the more confused I get. Post-structuralism attacks positivism for hiding the theory-dependence of its data - fair enough, in so far as it is true, although there are plenty of examples of positivist anguish over how to deal with this question. I mean, it's certainly true that there are a large number of practising empiricists who are both blase & smug about the immutability of their data, but they are not positivism, not theorists of positivism. It wouldn't really be fair on Foucault to mock hm because I don't understand his theories. Anyway, if we want smug, how does Creswell sound when he says that post-structural research will collect the data first & then consider the theory - what data? Without theory there is no data...isn't there? Or is it only positivists who aren't allowed to hide their theories during data collection?

I'm not at all sure that positivism & post-structuralism shouldn't or couldn't co-exist. I mean, it seems pretty churlish to dis the entire positivist project while I sit at my desk typing on a laptop into a blog on the Internet, whilst planning my nighttime astronomy project with free software. In fact, Lather said (I believe) that post-structuralism (in the form of feminism) was a way towards a better empiricism. True, that was 1991 & perhaps she was taken out and shot.

It's also frequently said that P-S acts against the "totalising" of positivism. It should, no doubt, but I read a lot of P-S that seems pretty damn totalising to me. The tyranny of the "Excluded middle" replaced with the tyranny of the "Binary opposition". I know of many positivist attempts to redefine logic to eliminate the excluded middle - I can't find a single P-S attempt to create a "ternary" opposition, or explore the idea o a continuum from identity to not.

I don't see how the P-S project isn't generalising - isn't it the meta-generalisation that renders all others obsolete? Doesn't that make it as tyrannous as any other generalising project? And what of the meta-narratives that are allegedly common to all discourse? Are they really not totalising?

OK, maybe I can learn to ape the mechanisms of a specific paradigm on a paper-to-paper basis, but I'd like to work in a paradigm I feel both emotionally and intellectually comfortable with. What is it? How many papers am I going to have to read to find it, or worse, how many papers am I going to have to contradict to establish my own practice?

on writing...

This is a bit of a distractor for me (I have a list of about 60 articles I should be reading), but if I don't procrastinate now, what excuses will I have later?

First of all, a link:

http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/bright-passages/

The NYT publishes a weekly breast-beat about grammar & usage errors, which is stimulating reading, even if, not being speakers of American English, you don't always agree with it. If you peruse the comments you can quickly get a feel for the importance of language qua language to a lot of people. Sometimes, as in the link above, the editor provides a list of what they (gender-neutral) believe to be good writing; I quite like the NYT house style, but sometimes I scratch my head to work out why they nominate some of the excerpts. But it is at least challenging to try to articulate the reasons.

There is a relatively short list of people who like mail-order cigarettes: teenagers, adults evading sales taxes and the Seneca Nation of Indians of western New York, which dominates the national market.

Taking the first excerpt as a jumping off point. How can we try to quantify musicality? Frankly, I don't know, but I look for/at sentences which I enjoy, and try to find patterns. Explaining the patterns is hard.

This extract ticks a lot of boxes; the list of three items is really common. Each item being longer than the previous, a kind of crescendo, is absolutely the standard pattern. (We could diverge here and talk about punctuation - I am a fan of the "Oxford comma" which precedes the "and" introducing the final clause with a comma. I know, from bitter experience, that others aren't)

That sentence then is paradigmatic in structure, but it really gains its excellence from the contrast of the twist in the tail with that formal regularity, the balancing of predictability (structural) and unpredictability (thematic). It's the meta-structure of a lot of jokes, in fact. If I wanted to be nasty, I could call it a cliche, but since I enjoyed the sentence I won't.

The fulfilment of expectation, and the thwarting of expectation, are both effects. The other day I had cause to discuss this little triad in a writing class:

"...Acquisition, retention and use..."

It's the classic three-item list with a thematic coherence imposed by temporality (first we acquire, then we retain, eventually we use), but it thwarts expectation with its monosyllabic finish. I like that though, because it focuses on the most important idea (to my mind). I could have opted for "Acquisition, retention and utilisation", thus fulfilling both rhythmic and rhyming expectations but then it seems to me like a swamp of syllables, noise for its own sake.

I went a bit OCD on this (local effects are easy to analyse in detail). You really only need to look at polysyllable vs monosyllable to judge the effect, but I went a step further an looked at the prosody.

Acquisition, retention and use

../. ./. . / assonance frustrated

Retention, acquisition and use

./. ../. ./ assonance frustrated

Retention, acquisition, and utilisation

./. ../. ..../. assonance fulfilled

Look at the neat footing of the first option; three nice anapests. The second isn't too bad, but I would suggest the virtue of variety doesn't outweigh the disadvantages of losing the thematic coherence. But the final one reveals its awfulness in the unstructured proliferation of unstressed syllables; we need to organise it into tetrasyllabic feet to make it scan, and, based on the evidence of poetic history, tetrasyllable are not comfortable music to the Anglo-Saxon ear.

Musicality is not all local effects of course. In a sense they are the easy ones. More difficult is the organising of thematic effects across paragraphs and ultimately texts.

Music can be thought of as something which maps or structures time; a text certainly is consumed in time, but an alternate metaphor would be the text as space.The structuring of space is the business of architecture (amongst other arts), and the architectural qualities of prose is another trope frequently used.

Later.

Some wherein this can of worms...

I'm trying to organise my thoughts on "digital culture" - this is not helped by the fact that Don Tapscott makes my skin crawl; the only immediately apparent difference between him and Jimmy Swaggart is the accent. He oozes salesmanship, in the least attractive sense of that word. Oh well.

There are two ways of looking at this digital culture that I can't settle in my own mind; when I ask myself "what is digital culture" I ask myself what digital culture is that other culture isn't. But most of what I've been reading is kind of ethnography - what is the culture of people who use digital tools, particularly, what is the culture of people under 30 who use digital tools.

I'm inclined to read stuff like Mizuko & think "So what?". "Hanging around"/"Messing Around"/"Geeking out", nice work from the marketing department in choosing catchy labels, but exactly the same 3 behaviours could be seen, in I suspect the same proportions, with the breakthrough technologies of the 1950's & 1960's, radio and TV - most particularly with the portable radio, adopted overwhelmingly by "young people". Maybe I could extend the idea to tertiary studies; everyone does a BA because you sort of have to, all your mates are; a smaller subset go on to do an MA; a very small number geek out and do the PhD. It's beginning to look a like a series of tropes - dividing things in three is a bit of an (Western?) obsession; the 80:19:1 division feels like something intuitively attractive as well. Not that I have even the remotest empirical basis for that ratio.

Still, discourse-constructed reality, you'd expect to find a few tropes lying around.

The thing is, I'm wrong to want to dismiss this kind of work. Actually, it's essential, and also, there is no absolute need to compare digital culture to other cultures. It certainly can be described in its own right, and there is plenty of analysis to do without looking outside the culture. In fact, there are ethnographic reasons NOT to compare cultures, because that usually ends up in the more powerful culture belittling the lesser (although I don't see that as inevitable, nonetheless you only have to look at pre-20th century ethnography - and not just ethnography, Jespersen on why English is a superior language to the effeminate French is a very interesting text in linguistics, especially given that he was Norwegian - to see how it works).

From Mizuko, then, what I mainly take is the pervasiveness & presence of communication. The nature of the tools enabling this (which is why this culture is called digital) is in some way irrelevant, except perhaps as a signifier of membership (note, signifiers of membership are actually very important). Prensky seems like another cheerleader; he is possibly persuasive of the fact that we are talking about cultural difference when we talk about the digital/non-digital, but he grossly exaggerates the difficulties of being an immigrant, and the advantages of being a native. Prenksy is the first place that I have seen claims that digital culture is producing new brains; he even manages to adduce evidence, in the sense of a voice of authority, which is more than Tapscott does making the same claim.

Tapscott claims, as do other writers, that the digital culture, through tools like the wiki, is creating a new kind of knowledge. Since he has introduced the comparison, I feel free to dispute it. A wiki does not create a new kind of knowledge; it is a tool which foregrounds the discourse basis of knowledge, rather than either actively seeking to conceal it, or rendering it unpopular/unfashionable. Knowledge has always been a product of discourse(s), but it hasn't always been so easy to participate in them, or see them. Going back to Aristotle we can find the idea that knowledge is based on the axioms of your reasoning - axioms which much be selected through a rhetorical (that is, discourse-entrenched) process. Epistemology is the unsuccessful struggle to eliminate the discourse-contingency from knowledge.

Putting these pieces together, I'm beginning to feel that the "digital culture" is one in which rhetoric will play a huge part; a rhetoric that may have to be re-imagined for the always-on world, but rhetoric nonetheless.