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.

Personal Learning Environment

I'm going to try to write a map of my PLE...

My initial take on the topic was largely based around the LE I would/will set up/configure/modulate for this particular subject, or perhaps this particular degree. I note from some of the other discussions that the opportunity exists to looks at the question in a wider context - indeed, I have found the supermarket a very rich site for learning. In China supermarkets learned* me: lexis, cultural patterns & embedded language, circumlocution, and some recipes.

* I'm on personal crusade to rehabilitate this usage (well-attested in the OED from the C14), partly because it annoys the grammar nazis, and partly because I think its useful to have a non-agentive verb to hand, for at least 2 reasons - supermarkets don't form intentions & student-centred-learning needs to de-privilege the language of the teacher-role.

I'm definitely going to expand my analysis into that space (the undifferentiated whole world space) at some stage, but right now I think I'll stick with purposive leaning sites/tools.

Physical Environment
I've noted elsewhere that I'm a reluctant fan of e-learning: eyestrain is a big problem for me as I approach legal blindness in one eye. I also spent a LOT of money on medical support for my back/neck/shoulders during my last MA, which wasn't even paticularly "e"; but essay & dissertation writing caused a lot of problems. So one feature of my PLE now is that I have invested heavily in mechanical tools; giant screens, customisable keyboards, adjustable chairs, lighting. I have always felt that the physical environment should be invisible, in a sense. One of the great comforts of pen/paper for me is that I am not aware of them as I work - whereas typing, fan noise, screen lighting, all form irritants sapping energy & motivation. We'll have to see how that all goes - but at least I'm meeting it with a plan this time around.

(Semi-)Social networks
I have to say that one of the great aspects of this program seems to be the commitment of the students to the content (as opposed to the qualification). I'm really excited about that - it hasn't been a feature of previous tertiary experiences. This is one way in which I think e-learning has tremendous potential; in some way it should always be possible to find a critical mass of interested people by looking to other institutions/sites. It doesn't look like we particularly need to do it on this course, but of course the opportunity still obtains. (This idea of students in a cross-institutional class parallels another of my academic dreams - the non-institutional degree; or perhaps the idea that one could get one's degree and one's education at separate places. In fact, already quite possible in Europe, but not so in Australia, although RPL is a movement towards it. )

I think that forum-type environments can be very powerful - I've used them very successfully in the technology world, to deal with very specific questions. They need a lot of moderation to maintain an accessible structure, though,and for geneal discussion they can be a lttle unmanageable. It will be interesting for me to see how/whether NING-type sites can avoid some of these traps.

In the past (and I assume the future) corporate intranets have been a site for networking/data sharing. They also suffer from indexing problems, like forums, which search functionality doesn't always solve. There isn't much difference between most corporate intranets I've worked with, and Blackboard.

Email is an important tools for me in terms of maintaining contact with people who don't use social networking sites, and also establish contact with authors.

Tools
I use specifically Google Docs, Reader, Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, Adrive, Panoramio as online tools. Typically I try to use Opensource software for offline tools; thus, OpenOffice, Kinovea (video editing), Super (codec management), Audacity (audio editing), Wavepad (audio editing), Perl & CSIProlog (programming), Bibus (bibliography), SQLite (database), but occasionally I succumb to Microsoft-itis; hence Windows XP, Windows 7, MovieMaker. It's along list of tools (probably not comprehensive) but it's lead me to think over time about how to manage such a complex environment, and one of the key ideas is "standards". It's kind of boring, but as I have been forced to move from one tool to another, rebuild data collections,waste time on developing & understanding interfaces, I am acutely aware of how, while on the one hand enabling, on the tother hand, digital tools are terrible time thieves. The proprietary non-standards imposed on us by manufacturers are at odds with the scholarly (well, maybe it's just my idea) idea of ready information flow. To counter that, we need to build proprietary-independent standards - and then learn and use them. Perhaps this is not thinking digitally, but it is looking to create a kind of common digital language.

Of course, learning has always had to adapt itself to the world; the compromises of the pre-e-learning world are to some extent hidden in compromises made before us, and inherited invisibly by us, with limitations that are not particularly questioned.

Sources
Online newspapers are a great source of information about Education, both because it is a highly politicised topic & because teachers are a major customer group of newspapers. Online newspapers often publish quite detailed research notes,including bibliographic information, so they can be a great starting point for research.

Google Scholar seems to me to be an almost complete waste of time; I would much ratehr make the journey to the State Library (when not a student of a tertiary institution) and search the scholarly databases there. But the mechanism access is perhaps beside the point, the resource is the publications online.

Good Writing (3) and other things

Akrich and Latour (1992) — Actor‐Network Theory

Prescription; proscription; affordances, allowances: What a device
allows or forbids from the actors ‐‐ humans and nonhuman ‐‐ that it
anticipates; it is the morality of a setting both negative (what it
prescribes) and positive (what it permits).

NB: IF you are looking for this, you can find it in Chapter 9 (pages 259-264) of Bijker & Law (1992) - Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change

Let me briefly muse on the advantages of having a brand, as Latour undeniably does: if a student produced this in, say, an IELTS test, they would be marked down for their inability to handle pronoun reference. But since Latour is inside the Guild, we must struggle to read him "up" to coherence.

So, the first "it" is clearly the device. Is the second "it" also the device? Is "it" simultaneously a device and a morality? I guess that's possible - but I find it extremely difficult to imagine that simultaneity. Perhaps "it" means "they", the pre/pro-scriptions etc.: it's a common error to allow the intuitive singularity of "What" to override the formal accuracy of determining number by "what"'s reference. That seems easier to understand; now the "prescriptions/proscriptions/affordances/allowances" are the "morality" of "a setting". Is this a setting of the device? Or should we read the device and the setting as equivalences, dual metaphors (in the name of variety) for a site in the network? Maybe this distinction doesn't matter so much - we can postpone finalising it until it becomes necessary. "Morality" is a very interesting word to have chosen. Why not "ethics", or "statute", or "constitution", or "rule set"? Morality is much more heavily loaded word than any of these others, and morality is a word strongly associated with people, rather than machines, or "devices"? Are the authors trying to re-invest their model with humanity, having originally set out to divest it? Is there a attempt to signify the complexity & the emotional intensity associated with public discussions of morality?

There's also a curious asymmetry in the final binary - "negative" includes "prescribes", which presumably stands for "proscribes" , while apparently neither "affordance" nor "allowance" can stand for both, and instead another word has to be introduced "permits". (There is also the question of whether the "it" is the morality, the setting, or the device; I've provisionally assumed "morality"). Is there a purpose behind this asymmetry, or is it an(other) accident of style?

It's not at all how I would set up the binary, either. OK, I guess you can see "prescription", which says "Thou shalt" as negative, in that it strongly suggests that you shouldn't do the opposite, but it's a bit of a triple-twist with tuck. Why not characterise "prescribe/proscribe" as compulsion, positive or negative? Does that simpler division miss some point?

I'm not completely sure that I'd include permission in "affordance" either, although that might be more idiosyncratic. I see affordance as "opportunity of resource", and allowance as "opportunity of authority". So the binary that I would set up from the initial four words is compulsion vs opportunity. I am not persuaded by this that I should change my mind.

So, another question. Is this good or bad writing? It's very sticky, in that it stuck in my mind the instant I saw it, and has been bedevilling my morning runs for 2 weeks now. It's very suggestive, in that I think I can construct from it a useful (set of) discourse fragment(s). In a generous mood, I might call it "poetic". They're all good things. But is it clear? Does it give me confidence? No.

Of course, maybe it wasn't intended to.

d-literacy

Funny that everything is e-prefixed except literacy. I like d-literacy; reminds me of delinquency, deliberate (a), deliberate (v), delight, delicious and you can take this where you want to to finish. Musicality!

Another big topic. Lets assume traditional literacy (t-literacy) is reading and writing. Abstract: the ability to consume & construct the dominant text form of the print period.

D-literacy will in fact have the same abstract, but suspect that the dominant text form of the future (present) will not be long strings of words printed on paper. We might look at it in terms of the tools that are used to create it (but note that literacy is not necessarily about tools as one might hire a scribe to write while one dictates - text construction is still taking place. Mind you, if the scribe is responsible for imposing the features of the written text on the dictator's oral text, it might be possible to question literacy. Still, lets not overcomplicate at the beginning).What tools?

We still need words (probably, I admit the possibility of debate). We now have images & sound, as readily manipulable as words to those who have mastered the tools. Smell, taste and touch haven't been digitised yet, although touch might be coming. Movement in space seems limited to images of movement in space, on a 2 dimensional screen. Holography is beloved of science fiction & can't be to far away. Then we will have projected 3D images without funny glasses. It will still be an image, but it will have to engage with space differently.

Anyway, I'm gong to pause here and postulate d-literacy as t-literacy combined with v(ideo)-literacy and a(udio)-literacy. A-literacy & v-literacy are well established fields (they even give Oscars in them) but already the learning curve for d-lit looks pretty bloody long. I'm guessing it will be additive on t-lit. Complicating matters considerably though, is that each of these x-lits has an extant grammar, but is there a grammar that combines them - in other words, will the grammar for d-lit be the sum of the grammars of its component parts, or will it require its own, yet to be devised, grammar?

How long will it take to teach such a complex construct? Will those who master it have significant greater access to economic and political power as a result?

Currently these kinds of texts are primarily art texts. We attempt to widely foster some kind of receptive d-lit via a kind of expanded critical thinking.

Poufff. Run out of steam, but there is so much more to say.

Thoughts

The hugeness of it all is what strikes me...

I still think there's a lot of hype in e-learning and a tendency to overstate the deficiencies of the pre e-learning world. It's not intrinsic in the classroom model that there is one-way knowledge transfer that is regurgitated by mindless drones (a process I call "commodification" here); saying that it's not intrinsic isn't to say that it doesn't happen, it does, but it might be profitable to look at why.

There are of course lots of education scenarios; let's say for a start, school, work, civic, social. Take school, to start. People have to be there. Schools can't teach everything - there are separate questions of whether they should try - so inevitably some subjects for some students are simply obstacles to graduation. Those students want commoditised "knowledge" that they can regurgitate, and if you accept student-centred learning it's difficult to dismiss that idea out of hand. An e-learning environment will not, of itself, obviate this desire to minimise commitment. We might say, yes, but e-learning means we can offer everything, so no student will have to study anything they don't want. Maybe; but that would be choice, not e-learning that was the crucial differentiator.

When I studied law my interest was in legal history, jurisprudence and criminal law; what I might have called the intersection of the institution of the law with the personal. That meant there were roughly 15 other subjects in which I felt I only needed a pass. Believe me when I say I was a big fan of the 100% exam which allowed you to quarantine the time required for a subject into 2 weeks cramming.

I think most of the lecturers felt that most of the students had that attitude - certainly the contempt with which they dispensed their weekly nuggets (I did go to some lectures) was in notable contrast to the enthusiasm with which my enthusiasm for Crim Law was met. The lecturers merely reflected the attitudes of the students - well that's the charitable view, anyway. Again, e-learning isn't going to change that, particularly. But the point is that commoditised knowledge wasn't a by-product of the system, it was produced by the students.

I alluded to the exam system above - assessment clearly plays a part in the commodification process. Assessment is difficult and time-consuming. It lends itself to commodification. E-learning isn't going to change that; even Wesch can pause in his cheerleading to note that e-learning is no panacea for assessment.

Secondary teachers perhaps make more attempts to avoid reflecting the cynicism of their students (for as long as they can, anyway). My secondary teachers were determined that we would learn how to think, not that that we would only learn stuff. They wanted us to learn stuff so we had something to think about, something to think with, and to avoid wasting time thinking about stuff already thunk. That a whole bunch of us chose (and continue to choose) to manipulate that into techniques for scoring high marks in HSC isn't an indictment on the way they taught us.

If you look at the other sectors - civic/social/work - you might say that motivation is less of an issue; more often than not consumers of education in those sectors elect it. That means when looking at e-learning in those sectors we need to distinguish between the effects of motivation & the effect of platform.

Enough.

And now, for your entertainment, ladies and gentlemen, we present

famous in at least his own world,

the one, the only (if we include birthdate, birth location, and name)

Andrew Webb