The Student of Learning (2) — Context/Communications

I have worked as a teacher and administrator for over forty years and the following reflections on context and communications are a product of my effort to understand and change the way our educational institutions think about teaching and learning. I have also been the head of a university of art and design for many years and have “learned” a great deal about the institutional, cultural and social constraints on innovation and change. 

One of the difficulties is that learning often takes place in environments that have not necessarily been designed to optimize the relationship between learners, teachers and institutions. When I talk about context, I am talking about the many complex factors that institutions have to work with in order to accomplish a variety of tasks and respond to a vast number of demands and expectations.

Educational institutions bring with them a heritage that cannot be disengaged from their role as social engines for change and economic, cultural and social well being. And, that history has seen schools and the education system carry the weight of our societies’ conceptions of children and adults and the ways in which institutions should and should not operate in response to all of their needs.

The definition that our society has of schools is determined by paradigms that are utopian and geared towards the future. So, the weight is not only to provide immediate solutions to the social, cultural and economic needs of society, but also to envision what future generations will do and what skills they will need to become active participants in the development of society.

The modern university has become so big in large measure because of the complexity of all of these expectations. Smaller institutions often have problems surviving because those expectations are superimposed onto their mandates. Professional institutions are in an even more difficult position because they are required to play the dual roles that come with specialization and breadth. 

Context is of course a very fluid concept. We can speak of many different approaches to context, many different ways of understanding the role and influence of a variety of factors on individuals and on society. At the beginning of 1970, I was fortunate enough to be involved in the early development of a college in Montreal. I say fortunate because it is rare to begin a teaching career with an institution that has no immediate history. Those of us who started there found ourselves in the business of building an institutional context for learning. I will will not address the many exciting events that made the experience a unique and exhilarating adventure in institution building. However, there is one aspect of that history that I do want to explore and it relates right back to what we mean by learning and context.

Let me use the model of human conversation as a starting point. When two people address each other, they make many different assumptions about the process of communication and interaction. For example, I may walk up to a stranger and ask the time. He or she will decide if my invasion of their private space warrants a response and then whether or not the request can be responded to. Once I have the time, we can quickly part ways or exchange some pleasantries. All things considered, this is a very simple interaction. Yet, is it? Won’t both of our histories play an important part in the exchange? Lets say that the individual walks away from me and mutters something about crazy people, the city and the lack of privacy. Or perhaps, if it is a woman, she justifiably may see my intrusion as a danger and become frightened. Suddenly, a seemingly simple event has become the pivot for many different possible scenarios. I have merely described a few.

It is this sense of multiplicity that makes any context both unpredictable and fluid. A short conversation may have a desirable or undesirable effect, but the bottom line is that our conversations are generally impossible to plan. This is one of the sources of  our desire to communicate and I would add, to clarify the meaning of what we say to each other. For the most part, clarification is what conversations are about. We try to convert assumptions, misinformation, and lack of knowledge into a structure of exchange that may lead to a meaningful outcome. We move from some sort of lack to a process of partial fulfillment. The road may be rocky and more often than not difficult, but the conversational process is all about trying to find a common ground that will allow two people the chance to understand each other. 

Now, how possible is it to extend the communicative experience that I have just described into a context where a large number of people are being addressed by one individual? Surely, the problems multiply. The burden of history that schools bear is governed by the utopian notion that modes of address can be found to overcome the barriers to communications that are created by the challenges of conversation and understanding. From the start, we have built schools on a fragile foundation of communications and interaction that needs continual patching.

So, working backwards from the inevitable problems that classrooms create (and I have taught classes with six hundred students in them), teachers and administrators try to find solutions to the overwhelming cacophony of information that a diversity of students of differing backgrounds bring to the public arena of the classroom. The complex emotional and intellectual phase that any given student may be experiencing at any particular moment in his or her life further complicates all of this. And, the stage of life in which teachers find themselves adds additional complications to the interaction.

For example, the fact that so many teachers are significantly older than their students would not be a problem if the aging process were acknowledged as having an important effect on the quality of life of teachers and students. We cannot expect the same excitement about pedagogy from someone who has spent thirty years teaching students who seem to get younger with every class. Nor should one dismiss the impact of repetition on the discourses that are exchanged among all participants in teaching exchanges.  

The important thing to remember here is that we are dealing with students at a time of their lives when they may or may not be receptive to learning and this is of course largely dependent on context. In fact, the variables are many and multi-layered. How can all of these variables be included in a model of learning? How can a context as complex as a school allow for and encourage enough diversity of approaches, to create an exciting and interesting environment for students to make their own intelligent choices about what to know and how to approach learning (how to learn about learning)?

Choice and the ability to make empowered decisions are what schools should be about. More often than not, the culture of schools does not permit students to move at their own pace towards an empowered decision about their futures. Yet, the context of schooling from the point of view of society and government policy suggests that empowerment will lead to employment and a recognition of civic stature and duty. 

I began by saying that learning and context go hand in hand and I have perhaps belabored the point. For me, context becomes even more complex when I factor in the broader social and cultural as well as political context that defines so much of a student’s life.

Let me come to what I consider to be a very crucial point through another story. Some years ago, I gave a presentation on media ethics and euthanasia to a very large group of doctors, nurses and hospice workers. I spoke to them about the role that media play in defining the most basic elements of what we consider our culture and social context to be. I asked the following question: “ How many of you have watched the Oprah Winfrey show?” The vast majority of the audience had not watched the show. The discussion that followed was revealing. I tried to point out that for many patients, it is possible that the Oprah show, with all of its emphasis on the wellness movement was an important element in people’s subjective perceptions about their health. Oprah’s advice and her guests might have a determining impact on a patient’s view of themselves as well as their doctor.

At a reception after the lecture, a hospice worker from South Carolina came up to me and mentioned that at his hospice the cancer patients were mostly men who had gotten cancer from their jobs as tobacco farm workers and they watched Oprah everyday. I suggested that he spend some time discussing the show with them and get back to me. Subsequently, he wrote me a long letter about the experience. For the first time, he felt as if he had found an entrée into their lives. They joked about Oprah but also felt that she was a real person and had some very important things to say. Most importantly, he was able to find the measure of their concerns, fears and hopes. In other words, he was able to develop a shared base with them and a shared language that encouraged further exchanges and a deeper understanding among everyone.  

Clearly, this suggests something very important about context. How can a teacher address a group of students whose central obsession might be Justin Bieber or Paris Hilton? And, this from a position of shared knowledge and understanding? Why do students have to learn from people who may have very little experience of the cultural context in which students live?

The same question could be asked of students in relation to teachers. This issue of intergenerational communications and sensitivity is often forgotten as teachers and students struggle with the everyday problems that they face in schools.

Popular culture provides a central if not crucial foundation for the lives of students. In not recognizing the importance of this, teachers may be missing some of the most important elements in a student’s understanding of their own lives. Yet, it seems clear that an improvement in the level and breadth of communications cannot be achieved if there is not some mutual giving in all quarters. I am talking here about more than just a shared discourse. We need a shared language and that will require a profound shift in the ways in which culture is both seen and understood within learning environments. 

I am suggesting that popular culture from television to music to films to video games and the Internet must be a part of all school curricula. I am not suggesting this because I want some courses added to the already burdensome number that students have to take. Rather, I am talking about the inclusion of popular culture in workshops and discussions.  I am arguing for the importance of shared knowledge even as I also recognize how fundamentally difficult it is to create and sustain sharing through conventional forms of communications within school environments. 

This brings me to the next point about context. Many of the models that we work with in the school system at all levels are based on assumptions about individual development, stages of growth, age, gender and background. There is no way of disengaging the complexity of these variables from the communicative process. Every one of these variables is at work during every conversation that we have.

At the same time, in order to make sense of the need to communicate a variety of assumptions are made about cognition and human development that are in large measure based on popular notions of the human mind. These popular conceptions, irrespective of their scientific validity govern both sides of the conversation in schools. For example, there is the presumptive idea that simply speaking about a topic will result in ‘some’ comprehension. This presumes that there has been listening and it also presumes that there has been some remembering. Quite often, conversations are also about forgetting. So much information is exchanged when we speak to each other and so much is going on in our minds, that it is often impossible to concentrate, often difficult to specify what has been heard and what hasn’t. For a conversation to be truly dialogical, we have to recognize these weaknesses and build on the elements that do work. This presumes a context of nurture and personal attention that our present structure and its economic base, the way schools are funded and why, hinders if not undermines. 

As must now be clear, I am less than convinced that educational institutions have been designed to handle the essentially personal nature of the learning experience. My discussion so far has centered on the gap between the private world that we all occupy and the public spaces within which we communicate. The word gaps provides me with many useful metaphors. We would not find it necessary to communicate with each other if there were no gaps. We would certainly not do any significant research if the gaps between present knowledge and future knowledge were easy to bridge.

The social context of information and the ways in which information circulates could easily move from data to knowledge, if there were not so many mediators between information and understanding. Gaps are about mediators and this then adds another crucial element to the explanation of context within the educational system. If the cognitive model that we have of learning is limited to what can be validated empirically and to the realization of expectations and close approximation of anticipated results, then it is likely that we will find it very difficult to succeed. Mediation suggests that many different and unrelated elements may be working together to separate people from each other. It is when we recognize both the layers and what differentiates them, that we will be able to work on rebuilding the communicative space within the school system.  

The most recent answer to many of these dilemmas has been to refocus the energies of teachers on the outcomes of their classes. This is another way of saying, irrespective of the many contradictions, that by structuring your classes to fit into an ‘outcomes’ approach, you are likely able to anticipate the results of the pedagogical process that you are engaged in. At a minimum, this seems to make course outlines more relevant to what is taught. But, it is an illusion. The reality of classroom practice (as well as studio-oriented courses) is that it is not possible to anticipate how the interaction will turn out. Information that is more precise does not necessarily mean learning that is more precise. This in no way detracts from the need to analyze the outcomes of learning experiences. But, the analysis will always be a retrospective process and hopefully will be able to take account of the complexities communication and understanding.

Context. The introspective nature of this discussion is a reflection of my own frustrations with the slow pace of change. I recognize the many hurdles that those of us who have dedicated ourselves to education face. I believe that the creative models now available to educators, as well as the impact of Internet technologies will shift the balance of power to students. I look forward to the moment when first year students entering a university are not lumped together in large classrooms. I keep hoping that the context for change will accelerate as we learn more about the human mind and the extraordinary ability that students have, to learn in the face of obstacles that are often hard to overcome. I look forward to the joining of educators from different disciplines so that engineers can learn from artists and artists can learn from social scientists and so on. All of this will only happen if we can address the structure and context of our schools and think in terms of ecologies, environments, balance and communications.

Prince Edward Island

An Experiment in Video and the beginning of a new media project. 

The Student of Learning (1)

To me, the experience of learning is dependent upon the context in which it takes place. Educational institutions have developed in tandem with a series of grand expectations about their impact and usefulness. That history is bound up with the hope that there will be social and economic benefits from what students learn and what they become. I use the word hope advisedly because the history of education is littered with the remains of many failed experiments to fulfil those goals. There have also been many successes. The last twenty years have been difficult for the educational system.

Expectations have grown and at the same time, institutions have had great difficulty in keeping pace with demands from all sectors of our society. This is not due to a lack of effort. Quite the contrary, the story of education in the 20th century is about educators trying, at every level, to resolve the issues of learning, empowerment and student development. The problem is that institutions do not change willingly and when changes occur, they are often difficult to maintain.

The most important question that needs to be answered about the future of the educational system is how we are going to encourage the creation of new paradigms of learning. Learning is largely based on the complex circumstances and context of classroom and school culture. Learning is also profoundly affected by the ways in which educational institutions are governed, as well as the expectations of students. This mix of features is made more difficult by the challenges that faculty and staff face in keeping the educational system in good shape. The complexity of all of these elements, their interaction and the challenge of planning for improvement have become central features of the debate on the future of education as we know it.

Context is about stories and in most instances, the stories that surround and underlie learning are rather more ephemeral than we would want to believe. Many of our theories of learning and so much of the practice of teaching does not account for the profoundly subjective nature of the school experience. The desire to convey information and the social and cultural pressure to make learning into something that can be validated empirically makes it appear as if subjectivity is a distraction. It is not supposed to matter if students are experiencing some of the most turbulent periods of their lives as they move through the educational system. Somehow, they have to suffer through all of the expectations of the system and of their families, all of the social pressures and physical and psychological transformations that transitional periods of life engender and still succeed. Thankfully, many do. Because of a variety of societal pressures, the complexity of the context that I have just described is often marginalized in discussions of education.

If you add in the various layers of experience that teachers go through as they transit from one stage of life to another, then it becomes clear why there is no simple way of describing how, or even whether, learning takes place inside educational institutions. This situation has been made even more difficult by the fact that over the last decade the demands for change in schools has become very intense. The subjective space of the teacher, for example, from family problems to illness is more often than not kept in the background of institutional life. Yet, communication cannot be abstracted from the realities that people are experiencing and from the pressures that they are under. I am not suggesting a focus here. Rather, I am discussing a territory that is more complex than we are often ready to admit.

Leadership in the 21st Century

Photographs as Data (1)

Here is a partial list of the ideas and terms that would be worth thinking about with respect to the role of data, information and visualization in our culture.

Mind/Brain/Memory/Vision/Body/Thought/Sensation/Knowledge

Information/Screens/3D Worlds/Virtual Reality/Images/Artifacts/

Meaning/Messages/Representation/Technology/Visualization/Models

All of the above is an inventory of ideas and terms and is also a potential index. Can all of the above be easily classified?

Lets start with a map that might also be an illustration.

If you are a reader of texts and articles on the digital world as well as books on business in the Internet era, you will be familiar with this type of diagrammatic guide. It is supposed to reflect the impact of new digital technologies and lead you to a better understanding and visualization of ideas that may otherwise be difficult to explain in words alone. The mapping process is also meant to take raw data, ideas and terminology and allow you to visualize greater and greater levels of complexity — to, in effect, produce a taxonomy. The taxonomy is both a reflection of reality and a representation of active material practices. It is a way for ideas to become concrete, for phenomena to be linked and for the visualization of networks of ideas to be given some concreteness.

Classification is an important aspect of trying to comprehend digital environments. How can large databases and blocks of information be explored? What are some of the categories that we normally use to classify data and knowledge? How can we link taxonomies to real life experiences?

For example, the challenge of trying to search through a database of images is an enormous one. Since images can represent, document, and be metaphors of information and ideas, the search parameters would have to be very large to accomplish even minimal search tasks. In addition, can information of this complexity be organized around interfaces that respond to the intuitive needs of users so as to facilitate often times subtle types of searching? Can the serendipity of exploring images match the pressure to classify them within digital environments? 

At the core of these issues are the developing nature of computers and mobile devices and their evolution from desktop environments into everyday appliances with phones, for example, functioning effectively as replacements for cameras. The ubiquitous presence of these devices suggests that they can perform every function that is demanded of them. There is also a cultural sense that smart technologies have an infinite capacity to engage with any number of different problems, which is why apps have become the software language of mobility.

Consequently, software is being pushed into realms of greater and greater complexity. The underlying impact of all of this activity is quite ironic: as machines take on more and more tasks, it becomes less and less clear how intentionality (who did what and why) actually comes into play at both the hardware and software level. For a computer or a phone or a tablet to be powerful enough to do what we expect of them, millions of lines of code have to be written. In effect, this is another level of data construction and visualization (however abstract).

All of this effort will inevitably be opaque to the user. Therefore, the issue of visualization is even more complex than what a list, diagram or taxonomy could ever offer. For example, how do we visualize the programming process? What do you make of this programming script in one of the dominant languages used for the web, JavaScript?

<!--  Begin

function MakeIt(form){

var txt='<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="'+form.description.value+'">\r\n';

txt+='<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="';

if (form.keywords.value)

txt+=form.keywords.value+'">\r\n';

form.source.value=txt;

}

function AddText(form, Action){

var AddTxt="";

var txt="";

form.keywords.value+=AddTxt;

}

function ResetPage(form){

if(confirm("Do you want to clear all and start a new META-tag Creation?")){  

form.description.value="";     

form.source.value="";  

form.keywords.value="";       

   }

}

// End -->

This script is designed to add a meta-tag to a web page in order to facilitate categorization by search engines. It is one of the most important ways of making sure that pages are recognized and classified in order for users to have access to the information that Web programmers and content providers have placed on the web. The JavaScript facilitates searching and is a way of envisioning or anticipating usage. At one level, the opaqueness of this script is a good thing because it allows processes to happen without the need to understand the underlying logic. On the other hand, does this lack of knowledge hinder what users do as they search for information? 

As we know, images are full of information. Digital images are carefully designed representations of complex coding. We don't explore photographs in order to explore their code. Rather, we want images to visualize what we have seen.

More on this in the next part of this series.

Amanda Palmer and The Art of Asking

3D Printing

MOOCS (Part Three)

I have begun and not completed a couple of MOOC-type courses. I have also looked into and closely examined many others. I have spent some time on the Khan Academy site, explored his approach and been generally enchanted by his naïve assumption that when something is explained with clarity, it will be understood. I regularly watch a variety of other “teaching” videos through iTunes University and related sites. There is a common thread in all of the presentations and lessons. What matters most is content and most certainly not form or aesthetics. Outcomes drive the process. Learn, learn quickly, interact through forums and chat spaces, complete exercises, let a robot correct your tests and make tests simple because if the tests are not simple, already astronomical dropout rates will rise even further. Avoid essays. 

From: My E-Learning Journey

Now, if this sounds like I am being negative, I am not. I understand the benefits, even the necessity of engaging with online learning. I support the role online learning can play in providing access to education to thousands of students. Athabasca University in Canada is a leader in this field as is the Open University in England and both organizations can claim many successes.

Part one of this series showed the intimate links between today’s online course material and correspondence courses given over the last hundred years. Millions of people have benefited from learning at a distance through the mail, radio and television. But, the exponential growth in numbers within the context of MOOCS raises some very important issues that have been glossed over in much of the commentary to date. Fundamentally, learning is neither simple nor just driven by the way we shape and transform information into different media. Good information that is well presented may not result in learning. For better or for worse, learning remains a deeply subjective experience, more often than not judged by standards that appear to be objective and driven by the need for results.

MOOCS and online learning in general seem to operate outside of the conventional concerns that most media have about communications. This will change with time and experience. The idea that teaching is just about content or outcomes is of course at the centre of many of the pedagogical challenges faced by instructors in conventional classrooms. The best teachers struggle with the shape and form of their language, the examples they use and the modes of communications that best suit certain subject areas.

The aesthetics of presentation are an integral part of the challenge. A talking head loses his/her audience very quickly. PowerPoint slides that show words without being framed by pictures and some modicum of design, rarely succeed in holding their audience. Yes, design is important. The design of information and the ways in which information can be communicated will have as profound an influence on the content as the medium being used.

The key question is, can learning online be turned into more of an aesthetic experience? Stay tuned.   

MOOCS (Part Two)

Professor Josie Taylor, Director of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in England, says: “If you think the target audience for the MOOC you are about to launch could include a lot of inexperienced learners, then as a teacher, you have the obligation to provide for them ways in which they can be supported. If you don’t, you are abdicating your responsibility to the people you are encouraging — and ethically, that is not a good thing to do.” (Times Higher Education, 14 Feb. 2013, p. 13) Taylor was speaking at the Online and Open Access Learning in Higher Education conference in London in early February. 

Taylor also suggested in her presentation that the pedagogical methods used in MOOCS are talking heads based on old styles of presentation that many lecturers no longer believe in and more advanced forms of online learning are reworking.

Phil Hill at e-Literate

There is a great deal of truth in what Taylor is saying. The problem with MOOCS is that the technology and its potential have excited universities and the public, with little examination of the learning framework that needs to be developed for MOOCS to work well. For example, how do contextual factors affect the interaction between learners and screen based environments? See Constructivism in Practical and Historical Context.  There is no easy answer to this question. Learning is both a very private and a very public activity. Learning is driven by exchanges and conversations. Most learning is unpredictable, as it should be because why would you be interested if you already know the outcomes of the activities you engage in? Yes, chat rooms and social media expand the base of conversation. And, of course, the Web is an amazing tool for learning all sorts of new things. But, how deep does that learning go? How can we judge?

When over 100,000 people take a course, can context be understood at all? Perhaps, through the stories learners tell others as they learn? It is possible to make all the feeds from Twitter to Facebook unveil more about the individuals in the course. Clearly, the instructor(s) can only engage with a small percentage of his/her learners irrespective of efforts to engage. However, it is likely that a large number of interactions will provide at least some sort of data based measure to think about use and context. It might be possible to aggregate all sorts of information about learners, based on their answers to questions, and the kinds of conversations they decide to participate in.  

Let me step back for a moment from the argument I have been pursuing. The University of British Columbia is offering courses via Coursera (https://www.coursera.org) that enrolled 134,000 students. Even if 5 percent of those students gained something from the course, (7 thousand students) would it not be fair to say that learning has happened? Seven thousand students is the size of a small university or college. What are we talking about here? Let’s hypothesize that most of the learners find something in the course, an idea or an image or even a broad concept that excites them. That detail about their reaction may come available to the teachers through comments and interactions, essays or any other pedagogical techniques the teacher feels will aid the process. Even if students are just interested in information gathering, they may still learn a great deal.

If we agree that dialogue and conversation are crucial to the success of learning, then do chat rooms, Facebook pages and live discussions via Skype add to the quality of conversation? The answer is obviously yes, but to some degree the lack of an embodied interaction must also be examined and, with great care. In the US over half of middle school students use their smartphones to record lectures or take pictures of notes. Over a third of the students use Facebook to collaborate with their peers on projects and papers. These statistics are constantly changing, but they point toward a merging of off-line and on-line experiences and to a smooth continuum of relationships among virtual and real pedagogical experiences.

MOOCS fit into this flow with all of the constraints and challenges these courses have in going beyond information into criticism, analysis and intellectual engagement.

The next entry in this series will look more closely at a specific course.

The following comment was sent via email by Lya Visser, who is a specialist in distance education.

I liked your reflection on MOOCs, especially as it coincides with a course I am currently teaching for George Washington University and where we have discussed RLO (reusable learning objects) and MOOCs extensively.

I just want to mention that I think it is important that we should not only discuss the business model of MOOCs (so often the topic of reflections), but as you argue, discuss whether they improve education, or better still learning. I also want to emphasize that these MOOCs may offer important opportunities to students from developing countries – it considerably increases accessibility to get an affordable quality education not often available to learners in these countries. It seems to me, but has to be researched, that offering instructor-assisted MOOCs  to students in developing countries may be an effective and efficient way of using the current (free) learning opportunities.

Armando Fox, who leads the UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences department,  told the San Francisco Business Times (1 February, 2013) that fewer than 10 percent of enrolled students have finished the class, but let’s not forget that only 25 percent of students enrolled in the class are from North America. Although the percentage seems to be low, it is only a good decade ago that I did research with one of the external MA programs of the University of London, and discovered that only 32% of the enrolled students finished the very expensive and sponsor supported program. 

Lastly, I saw your reference to Brent Wilson, who is a great scholar and one of the contributors to the Second Edition of Trends and Issues in Distance Education: International Perspectives, edited by Lya Visser, Yusra Laila Visser, Ray Amirault, and Michael Simonson (published by IAP in 2012).

MOOCS

MOOCS are an exciting development in the story of distance learning. However, massive open online courses are part of a long tradition in the history of learning technologies.  

For example, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, International Correspondence Schools delivered hundreds of thousands of learning modules/books/pamphlets to home learners using the post office and small delivery trucks. The courses were sold by salesmen who worked in a variety of cities throughout North America. International Correspondence Schools as it was known was founded the 1880’s as the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania and over a short period of time became the learning method of choice for hundreds of thousands of people. (Over a million people had enrolled early in the 20th century, mostly in the US but also in Europe.) Most of the learners were adults from varying backgrounds, although men dominated and their overall goal was to increase their chances of developing skills for new professions. Many of the courses were vocational in nature. The courses ranged from “ornamental design” to “electrical engineering.” There was a course in “show-card writing” (which was a mixture of training in typography, drawing and illustration for posters, placards and store signage.)

In the 1920’s, radio was used as a vehicle of learning for hundreds of thousands of listeners accompanied by material that was sent through the mail. In the 1970’s video was used around the world to teach nearly any subject that could be translated into the medium. Film was used in the 1930’s in particular with some cinemas having audiences attend in the mornings to learn about current affairs. Television has been an important medium to teach learners in their homes almost since the technology became widespread in the 1950’s. In 1926, the BBC explored a ‘wireless university.’ In 1971, Open University, a University of the Air, began teaching thousands of students in Britain with a focus on late night TV broadcasts, which over time became an important part of the lives of many students. To this day, radio is an important part of learning in most of Africa and some parts of Asia. Mobile technologies now play an increasing and important role in learning since they are cheap and easily learned.  

All of these phenomena point to an important set of activities that connect the desire of the public to learn with a variety of media, some more effective than others. MOOCS extend and expand on the already existing networks that have been built to accommodate a seemingly insatiable desire for information and knowledge. They are also opening learning up to groups who couldn't gain access via traditional means either because of cost or because the time needed to go to university.

But, how do you teach 125,000 students? For that matter, how do you teach 125 or 50? I once taught a class with 600 students attending on a regular basis and it was an incredible challenge. I will have more to say about this in another blog entry, but what is missing in many of the discussions of MOOCS is what is new about the pedagogy being used. Tony Bates says the following about Coursera which is a consortium of major universities: “…the teaching methods used by most of the Coursera courses so far are based on a very old and outdated behaviourist pedagogy, relying primarily on information transmission, computer marked assignments and peer assessment.  Behaviourist pedagogy has its value, especially where there are right and wrong answers, facts or procedures that must be learned, or students lack higher-level cognitive processing skills. In other words it works reasonably well for certain levels of training. But it is extremely difficult if not impossible to teach higher order skills of critical thinking, creative thinking, and original thinking using behaviourist pedagogy, the very skills that are needed in a knowledge-based society.” (Tony Bates Website last accessed on February 11, 2013.)

Bates is a bit extreme because some of the courses that are available really do open up a variety of different knowledge portals and even with the constraints, these do lead to some form of experiential learning that may not be dominated by a behviourist approach. He is however quite right to question the teaching methods being used.

Most of the literature on MOOCS tends towards utopian claims of a new age of learning. It is as if the struggles of institutional and non-institutional learning will be solved by MOOCS. The beauty of MOOCS is that they aggregate a large number of interested learners into a community of shared interests. It is however challenging to know whether that community is learning. There is simply no way in which the huge scale of MOOCS can be evaluated but at the same time, as Stephen Downes (a founder of MOOCS) says: “I never had any doubt that the model itself would be successful. Though we hear a great deal about the quality of learning resources and the need for credentials, the demand from people without access to any university resources has been consistent and strong. There is a large following throughout the world for all this work in open online education, because it eliminates one of the great advantages the wealthy have always enjoyed over the poor. And with open access, we can work on things like quality, assessment and credentials on an ongoing basis.” (Stephen Downes Website last accessed on Feb. 11, 2013)

I will explore my own contradictory feelings about MOOCS in another post although for a much less ambivalent view see MIT Technology Review.  

International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Penn

Revisiting and Reviewing Moulin Rouge by Baz Luhrmann

In the first few minutes of Moulin Rouge, the film by director Baz Luhrmann, two major references are made to the history of the cinema. The first is to Auguste Lumière and his 1895 film about a train arriving in the main Paris train station. For many, this film was one of the first documentaries, and the film plays on the stark realism of trains, travelling and everyday life. In a shot reminiscent of that early and important moment in film history, Ewan MacGregor arrives in Paris in 1899 in search of love, liberty and bohemian culture. The use of Lumière is as much of a statement about the cinema as it is an exploration of how we tell stories through films. Moreover, this is one of the central themes of Moulin Rouge — does narrative still work in a postmodern age that often relies on cynicism and overstated irony?

From the film, Moulin Rouge

The other reference in Moulin Rouge comes from Meliès whose early films were seen as fantasies because he used sets and had little interest in shooting images from “real” life. After a brilliant sequence of singing and dancing from Nicole Kidman and McGregor and when it has become clear that they are falling in love, they march out into the night and stand on the rooftops of Montmartre. Shooting stars appear (much like Peter Pan and other Disney movies), and as they sing we see the moon smiling in the distance. The moon is drawn exactly as Meliès drew it in the 1890’s film, Man on the Moon.

The question is why would Luhrmann make such explicit use of these references? Why in fact does he make use of hundreds such references throughout the film? Why create this wonderful phantasmagoria of popular culture quotes? Luhrmann not only uses the history of the cinema but also the history of rock music and of musicals in general. No line in this film is spoken, delivered or framed without alluding to or explicitly invoking prior forms, genres and styles from other forms of popular cultural expression. At no point do the actors depart from their highly stylized representation of a world dominated by romanticism and the desire for pure love.

The only director of equal stature, who has come close to this depth and playfulness, is Dennis Potter. It is clear that Luhrmann has watched Potter’s work. It is also clear that what we have with Moulin Rouge is a film that explores the very essence of the narratives that dominate the cinema and music. “The Singing Detective” which is Potter’s most famous work and which to me is one of the most powerful television series ever made, does not use song in the same way. (Although Potter’s “Pennies from Heaven” is very similar to Moulin Rouge in the manner in which the characters break out into song — Steve Bochko tried to imitate this on American TV and it didn’t work). But, Potter continuously referenced not only popular culture but literature and theatre as well. Moreover, Ewan McGregor acted in a Potter production, “Lipstick on Your Collar,” which is about the British army.

Luhrmann playfully explores popular culture’s obsession not only with love, but also with the love song. At the same time, he examines the power of loss in all the genres of our culture. For, at one and the same time, Moulin Rouge celebrates the romance and beauty of innocent love with the pathos of love lost. The simultaneity of loss and love is such a powerful metaphor that one would be hard put not to find this metaphor circulating through most of cultural production in North American society.

Early in the film, McGregor breaks out into a song from The Sound of Music (“The hills are alive with the sound of music”) and the same words are repeated numerous times throughout the film. It is as if The Sound of Music stands for all musicals that the cinema has ever produced. More importantly, it is the audience’s familiarity with the music and the score that is so crucial. It shows, at the same time, the connectedness of culture and the universality of music as the crucial link between different periods of time and radically different narratives.

Mouin Rouge deserves to be studied repeatedly. Luhrmann has taken the music hall, cabaret, the circus, opera, and the grand tradition of popular theater exemplified by productions like Cats and melded them together. Although this kind of self-reflexivity often leads nowhere, in Mouin Rouge, Luhrmann has unveiled a wonderful strategy for examining the images and sounds that surround us. Take stories that we are familiar with and redesign them. Recontextualize how the stories are told in order to foreground their role and impact on the social context in which we live. Mouin Rouge is a beautiful movie not the least because it also uses digital effects to create the sense that we are in Monmartre — although at the same time, it is clear from the start that we are watching a set.

Teaching, Learning and Making in Design Education

One of the major assumptions in design education and pedagogy is that students have to “make” or “produce” objects, from for example, web pages to bicycles to books in order to prove that they have learned to become designers. This philosophy is further amplified in popular journals like Applied Arts, which features the work of designers (much as photographic magazines feature the works of photographers) as examples both of production and professional capacity as if the works themselves have enough presence and force to stand for the creative process.

KickerStudio

This outcomes based strategy is pervasive in disciplines that frame learning through the products or objects students create. The assumption is that students become more active learners if they transform information and knowledge into something tangible. To varying degrees, this approach has immense value. However, my sense is that the focus on outcomes often reduces the students need to engage in wide-ranging and critical analyses and therefore to make possible the kind of self-reflection that is essential to learning. In other words interpretation, discourse and critique become less important largely because the object is meant to stand not only for function but also for meaning, process and aesthetics. There is in this approach a thin border between 19th century vocational learning and teaching and the depth that should be required of university students in the 21st century who wish to become designers.    

The tradition of making that dominates contemporary art and design educational organizations is often portrayed as one of the essential differences that design schools have with more traditional institutions. Making is given a higher value than just thinking or research that may have no pragmatic or immediate outcome.  I would like to argue in this short article that the underlying philosophy of “making” to show progress in skills acquisition is fraught with dangers, among the most important of which is rampant anti-intellectualism. Furthermore, from my perspective, the learning process both within design and generally, is by its very nature so interdisciplinary that the focus on outcomes (most fully exemplified by the fourth year graduation project that comes to stand not only for years of learning but for the general capacity and competence of the student) tends to distort if not undermine creative process as well as innovative and speculative thinking. Of course, I am not suggesting that making is an end in itself, nor that the fabrication of prototypes or objects is harmful or without merit. Rather, one of the most important elements of any creative discipline, in my opinion is that learners become creative problem solvers. In order to achieve that goal many different pedagogical approaches are needed, not the least of which is an awareness of the differences among skills, learning and research. Gaining that understanding means that design students (and for that matter design teachers) cannot approach learning in a linear fashion. There is no easy or simple road to creative and innovative thought or production, unless the purpose of the educational process is framed by a limited understanding of the vocation or discipline within which both learners and teachers are engaged.

In contrast, experience design is part of an effort to recast design process so that at a minimum fabrication can meet creativity in a middle zone, a space where designers can reach out to potential audiences or users, a space that is both highly contingent and not entirely framed by use. The challenge for successful experience designers then centres on communication, language and quality of interaction, that is, how to fabricate a relational environment that may or may not have objects as their focus. Experience design suggests something about the challenges that now face all designers as the ground upon which creative engagement shifts from makers to users, inverting the creative process so that the latter is often more responsible for their experiences than the former.

Ironically, this is the same problem that artists face. The fabrication of something from nothing and the translation of ideas into artifacts cannot be reduced to a series of mechanical decisions, but requires a combination of self-reflection and self-appraisal as well as external evaluation and critique. Concepts don’t become aesthetic objects just because the craft needed to make or create something has been well learned or even well executed. If creativity were a simple matter of craft or even technique, then there would be little aesthetic or technical difference among artists or designers or users. Self-reflection can be learned. At the same time, learning to work beyond the limitations suggested by any craft or technique is the foundation upon which both innovative and critical articulation rests. The challenge both for learners and teachers is how to open up an increasingly narrow and narrowing set of assumptions about the pragmatic outcomes of the learning process. This is one of the key challenges both for the discipline and the institutions that teach design. (This article first appeared in Applied Arts)  

A New Campus and a New Era for Emily Carr University

A rendering (not the design!!) of Emily Carr's new campus at Great Northern Way

Yesterday, a historic announcement! The BC government will be contributing 113 million dollars to the construction of a new campus for Emily Carr. The total cost of the campus is 134 million. Our hope is that it will be a model of 21st century learning in the arts and design. We want the campus to tell a story about the impact, importance and need for the arts. Our vision is to create and support the development of a new cultural precinct for Vancouver and to bring industry, non-profit art organizations and cultural activities onto the campus. We also want to bring the eastern and western parts of the city together, and support the many communities that surround the site. Please check out some of these links. Vancouver Sun...CBC...and....see video below.

Aaron Swartz

Cory Doctorow has a wonderful series of articles on the death of the great internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. I have followed his career for ten years. Swartz was not only an extraordinary thinker, but an avid reader and his blog has numerous book recommendations which reveal the range and depth of his intellect. His belief in an open internet, one in which knowledge and information are freely available was guided by a deeper understanding and vision about networks and how they can be used for the common good. More than most, he understood that the circulation of information should never be constrained by narrow choices, policies or politics. He was an amazing man and will be missed. Click here for his analysis of Dark Knight. Here is his analysis of change both personal and through activist actions. Also, a wonderful tribute from Cyrus Farivar at the Ars Technica Blog and another from Tim Berners-Lee on the same site. Emily Bazelon at Slate has an excellent article as well. Another article from Verge can be found here.

The Craft of Quantum Learning

Learning both in the classroom and outside the classroom is generally approached in a linear fashion. The assumption is that if you make enough elements available to learners, they will learn at least part of what they listen to, read or watch. This is why teachers and classrooms have remained central to the learning process, even though there are now so many different ways students can find and appreciate and learn from any number of varied sources.

But, what if learning is very similar to the principles behind Quantum Theory? What if learning experiences, creativity and innovative thinking cannot be boxed into inputs and outputs? What if learning is defined by probability, chance and accident? And, what if there is only a slight chance that even the best-organized ideas, presented in the clearest possible way, do not lead to equivalent responses? What if the relationship between listening and learning is profoundly indirect?

If there is a fundamental asymmetry between what teachers teach and what learners learn, then should we continue to have tests? The principle that we examine the  memory of learners to see what they have learned, is the principle behind so much of contemporary education and yet memory is notoriously unpredictable. The irony is that it is difficult to observe learning when it is happening. The internal state of the learner is deeply subjective and it is often difficult to gain access to that internal set of thoughts, reflections and observations. 

The exception to this is creative process, learning through making and doing. When children, teenagers or mature students engage with the crafts that shape and form creative engagement, they produce objects, artifacts or prototypes that express the complexity of their thinking. They shape their ideas into “something” and this allows them to examine the relationships between what they know and what they have learned.

Learning is about probabilities and there are an infinite number of ways in which students learn. Ironically, our school systems and our learning systems have been designed to reduce complexity to simple equations. Everyday experiences tell much more complex stories about the unpredictable nature of engaging with events, information and knowledge. We need a transformational change in our assumptions about learning that accounts for contradictory trends and puts constant innovation at the core of what we do as learners, educators and citizens.

Newtown, Connecticut

On this day, December, 14 2012, we mourn the victims of a senseless and despicable murder. The killing of 28 people including 20 children is incomprehensible. As someone who has been an educator for over 40 years, the pain of this event will never leave me. My heart goes out to the families of the victims. President Obama's words ring true:

“The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” a visibly distraught President Obama said in remarks televised nationally.

After pausing to compose himself for 12 long seconds, Mr. Obama said, “They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” (Both quotes are from the New York Times)

Interface Realities

A superstorm hits Brisbane, Australia

The interface between reality and human perception has shifted from our eyes to eyes/screens/events/experiences/screens.

I am not sure where memories fit into this process/flow, but whereas in the past, reality was mediated by language and on occasion images, we now need screens to visualize not only what we are doing, but what we have done. This is a vast and expanding process of human annotation and visualization which now defines experiences according to the strength with which they have been recorded. Iphoneographers and Androidographers collate all these images into albums, folders and files. The management of all of this data requires more and more time and all of this time is spent within screenworlds. It is not that reality disappears, just that experiences become so layered that we become archeologists, constantly searching for meaning amidst all of the detritus left over from the many thousands of images we take over the course of a few months. 

Comment and response from Felix de Mendelssohn

Dear Ron,

I came back in September from a conference in Sendai, Japan about working with survivor families from Fukushima and the tsunami-affected region. Here the reverse had been true - only privileged people and foreigners had at the time been able see what was happening on CNN etc. The Japanese TV for the local population brought no news, no pictures, no-one knew what was going on. Then Hurricane Sandy hit the East coast of USA and I heard later from locals that at the time they knew nothing, they had only the unfathomable reality, but because the power was down there was no radio, no TV, no phone and no gas to get to somewhere to find out what was going on. So there is perhaps a flip side to your comment - when we lose the images and their interpretations we can be plunged into the terrifying Real.

Notes on Experience and the Tacit

Over the course of a year, I receive many proposals from consultants to talk to me about the services they have and how my organization will benefit from using their knowledge to better run the organization of which I am the President. I am also constantly involved with policy makers in government who seem to know as much as I do, both about my job and about my institution. 

Consultants are brilliant at proposals, but only a few ever produce reports that have real value and can be applied to the challenging problems of being a leader. Very few policy makers in government have actually had the experience of managing the educational institutions they control. 

This is because most of these people live in a theoretical world. I have nothing against theory, but there is a substantial difference between the lived experience of leading and the rather hypothetical nature of the advice offered by external parties. 

Why is this such an important issue? 

Organizations are defined by their cultures and as anyone who has ever been part of an institution for longer than a few years, knows, it takes a very long time to adjust to those cultures, to learn from them and about them. The adjustment period varies and is sometimes arduous, because so much of the knowledge about organizations is embedded and tacit.

This is even more the case in educational institutions. Aside from the fact that a significant number of professors and middle managers will have been employed for a long time, the curriculum contains within it a whole set of assumptions about values, learning and outcomes that are often more implicit than explicit. This is because the curriculum has been built up over many years and in some cases decades. It is layered by so many assumptions and points of view, that a great deal of experience is required to disengage its underlying rules and processes.

Tacit knowledge is deeply buried inside the lived experiences of individuals and communities. The best example of this are craftsmen and people who work in the trades. They learn on the job and since there are so many variables in everything they do, that learning has to be quick and effective. This is also why the apprenticeship programs that accompany trades training are generally among the most effective ways of learning. It is also why there are so many more co-op and internship programs in graduate and undergraduate programs in today's universities and colleges.

Learning while doing is often looked down upon because it appears to be decidedly less intellectual than working on problems and ideas through discussions and texts. Learning while doing is often more demanding and sometimes narrow in orientation. It is not a panacea and I am in no way trying to romanticize it's importance. 

But, tacit learning points to something even more interesting. Learning by its very nature is dominated by less than explicit factors. Teachers know that the mood of their students or even one of their students will affect the quality of the classroom experience. Students also know that one of their biggest challenges is to maintain focus while also dealing with the complex evolution of their lives. Personal experiences and the demands of institutional life are as important as the contents of curricula. 

It is not an accident that it takes four years for students to learn how to navigate the system of a school. This is on the job training that is of great significance to their potential success. Yet, it is rare for anyone on the outside to fully understand the complex layers of knowledge that students have internalized as they evolve into learners because so much of it is not visible or even that clear.

Ironically, nearly every aspect of human interaction and communication is built on tacit learning and knowledge. These range from eye contact through to hand gestures and assumptions about the meanings of words and the physical signals that humans exchange with each other, which often determine the effectiveness of the words that they use.

I am not suggesting that external analysis of institutions is impossible. In some cases, it may well be desirable and advisable. I am suggesting that the training needed to do that work requires far more time than is often assumed and that the skills required will not be developed in conventional ways. 

The challenge is to understand what is not always visible and to have the intellectual as well as practical tools needed to bring the assumptions that guide embedded cultures into the foreground. This has to be done with enough skill to credibly engage not only with institutions as a whole, but also with the people who inhabit them. The routines that define everyday life in institutions and the structures that have been created to support those routines, cannot be disengaged from their roots. A more profound recognition is needed of the lived experiences of employees and learners. 

The usual response to this challenge is to have focus groups or interviews with key members of the community. Some of the information gathered this way can be useful. But, most of it will not strip away the underlying rituals that are so important to the successes and failures of institutional life. 

The problem and the challenge is that understanding institutional life with depth requires an understanding of ethnography and the methods needed to explore and examine complex systems that are in constant evolution. 

Ron Burnett in Conversation with Doug Coupland

Art Schools, Learning and Modernity - Ron Burnett in conversation with Douglas Coupland from Emily Carr University on Vimeo.

To Learn and to Be Taught (© Ron Burnett)

Leacock 132, McGill University

In the early 1990’s, I taught a course entitled, Introduction to Film at McGill University, that had six hundred registered students in it. This was well before MOOCS and Coursera and other massive online courses. It was also before the Internet transformed learning and education and the way we understand the flow of information in digital cultures.

I would like you to imagine six hundred students as a small community of people with a variety of differing interests, proclivities and identities. The students divided themselves into groups of varying sizes. There were the “guys” from the football team, who sat far away from the podium so that they could talk to each other. There were students from at least twenty different countries and they clustered into different groups. Generally, these clusters sat in the same place, from week to week during the yearlong course. There were Trotskyists in one corner and Maoists in another. There were gays, studious types, loudmouths and the ones who insisted on eating during my lectures. The course was evenly divided between men and women, which is now a rarity. I showed films, lectured, held seminars with the assistance of a group of terrific teaching assistants and generally spent many hours meeting students in my office. In fact, the Dean of Arts at the time had his office not too far away from mine and remarked that I seemed to have a lineup outside my office on a continual basis, everyday.

The purpose of this piece, however is not to reminisce about my extraordinary experiences in the teaching of that class. Rather, my own thoughts about the course have over the years profoundly affected my feelings about the nature and flow of information and how we learn new ideas.

Let me take one specific example of the issues I am exploring. When I stood in front of the class, I could only see a few of the faces among the sea of bodies in Leacock 132. I was simultaneously an observer, an actor, a participant and a teacher. Someone observing me would have seen how challenging it was to struggle with all of these roles and still stay connected to the students. By connected, I mean aware of the dynamics of interaction between them and me, sensitive to the difficulties they were having focusing on my words and manner of speaking, and conscious of the likelihood that a significant minority were essentially in a daydream. The latter group would hear my words through the haze of individual thoughts, and personal reflections that define what it means to be a listener.

In addition, the entire environment was social, defined as much by the content of the class, as by the interactions people were having with each other, both in the class and outside of it. This combination of experiences has an aggregated impact enlarging the ‘field’ of communications. It is challenging to map this multi-layered set of conditions. It is however clear that the simple notion of communicating information and ideas to a group of that size, through the format of one to many and with the force of words, is naïve if not misinformed.

I loved the class and I believe we had a great year together, but there was nothing linear or even clear about the experiences. At best, the link between the students and me was fragile. At its worst, there was a great deal of misunderstanding. This is inevitable in any situation of interaction between individuals in large groups. I was in a unique position as an observer, who was constantly being observed, and as a result I had to think about information and how to enlarge the potential points of contact between my students and me.

We generally think that the same event or set of ideas shared between two participants or observers will be described in similar ways. But, we never know exactly when the process of interchange has begun, how it is maintained and whether both parties are able to concentrate on the same things. Clarity of speech may not lead to clarity of understanding. In fact, all we can do is approximate our general assessment of what has been exchanged.

The process of information exchange is filled with static noise and is consequently very indirect. Ironically, new ideas grow from this conflict. The clash between expectations, failure and success leads to more and often richer efforts to find common ground. And, there is no way of developing a simple formula that will magically overcome these challenges.

This article is excerpted from my new book and is copyright ©Ron Burnett 2012