wallpaper animals

I've been at the OER Hackday today. I wasn't intending to go as OER isn't really my thing, but I found it useful anyway. Before I went, I started to think about how OER might link into my thoughts recently on the Risk society, and how Education relates to the societal manufacture of Risk that Beck describes.

There are many use-case models of OER. One is its use in 'informal learning'. I'm a little uneasy about the definition of 'informal learning', but I guess in comparison to 'formal learning' there is a difference in the risk that learners are subjected to by institutions. Formal learning imposes a risk of failure which is absent in informal learning, although informal learning may still carry an imperative related to the context within which the learning occurs.

This leads me to think that one of the questions I've been thinking about, "what is the risk produced by education" can be answered by saying that education creates artificial risk situations which are intended beneficently to aid learning (without the risk of failure, would students do anything?). (it's interesting to compare beneficent risk production with malevolent risk production: Ryanair's risks are intended to catch people out!)

How might this work? Possibly, it could go like this:

EDUCATIONALLY-PRODUCED RISK -->
LEARNER ANXIETY -->
LEARNER CURIOSITY + LEARNING -->
which produces more risk, etc.

Informal learning might then look like:

SOCIETALLY-PRODUCED RISK -->
LEARNER ANXIETY -->
LEARNER CURIOSITY + LEARNING

If the latter is a use-case for OER, then OER must fit into the final stage. However, there is a problem and it relates to what the ANXIETY actually does. If the learner reaches for OER in response to societally-induced RISK, fine. But my reckoning is that this is probably not going to be the first thing they reach for.

If they reach for education at all, then I think it will be through formal learning in institutions. In assessing how the risks of the institution might affect them, there may well be a case for OER ("this is the sort of experience you will have as a student... look! here's a lecture..."). The fact that education carries RISK in response to RISK may be significant.. I'll have to think about that!

OER in itself is essentially RISK-less (at least for learners; not for teachers!), and I think there is a question as to whether a riskless resource can be useful for education (but I'm not sure..).

On looking for ways of dealing with anxiety induced by Risk, the most common thing people do is to reach for palliatives: entertainment. OER might fit here.. but on the whole, it is pretty un-entertaining. Maybe we should give a bottle of whisky to every learner who actually spends a couple of hours with an OER resource! That would be to balance the boredom of watching with the chance of pleasure in the outcome (i.e. getting drunk!). Of course, the risk would be terminal boredom...

There is a central question: in an economy that manufactures risk, what sort of education is required and what is its purpose?

"Everywhere educational reform is accompanied by a dependence on education. More and more groups get caught up in the race for educational credentials. As a result there emerge new internal differentiations. Whilst these may still respond to traditional differences between groups, the impact of education makes them fundamentally different from traditional ones. [...] In conjunction with novel patterns of upward and downward mobility and increasing local labour mobility as well, new hierarchies and differentiations develop which are internal to social classes. They presuppose the expansion of the service sector and the creation of new occupations."(Ulrich Beck, "The Risk Society")

Beck suggests that Berstein's distinction about linguistic performances is central.  How would we teach that? Would that be sufficient for education to meet the needs of the risk society?

Astrid and I went to a fantastic concert in Manchester last Thursday where we heard Delius's 'Sea Drift' which was a profound experience for me because it took me back to music which I was devoted to in my teens and have largely ignored since (partly through the snobbery about Delius in academic music circles). But it really is pure magic, and all the questions that buzzed through my head when I was a teenager came flooding back: how does he do it? Why does this sound so magical?

My first thought now is that the nature of a music is a caress. Musical caresses take a variety of forms. Much is achieved through texture: a suspended note which is then accompanied with a rich harmony a moment later. Suspensions in 16th century polyphony are of this sort... As are Bach fugues.

What about the melting harmonies of Delius? These are closely related to tritone substitution techniques of jazz (he learnt this when he was on the Florida cotton plantations). What do they do? How do they caress? I think they slow down the caressing motion by subtly disrupting expectations, and hovering between disruption and exhortation.

The caress is there, but it is distended. The technique is similar to Wagner's Tristan. But Delius does something Wagner doesn't... The climax isn't there... Just a continual seduction which suggests the possibility of a climax.  Wagner's prolongations are directed; Delius's prolongation is there for its own sake... Simply there to be magical.

Narratives involve property relations which will be partly determined in a normative context: for example, an economy.

I'm thinking the simplest way of sorting this stuff out is to bring Harre's triagular relationship together with Luhmann's distinction of psychic and social systems:

I'm wondering if the principle of 'exchange' is a principle of regulation of personal viability, identity and the material and social world. Identity is established in a way where 'property relations' are established with material and social reality (or at least external material artefacts and other people). Individual adaptation and 'steering' entails the evolution of identity by relinquishing some property relations and establishing new ones. The loss of a property relation would be seen as a threat to identity (for example, in theft); however, by providing compensatory stimulation, the feeling of loss of identity is balanced. Money is a universal mechanism to provide a balancing compensation for the loss of a property relation and its general form of stimulation is to compensate with 'possibility'. Education also deals with 'possibility'.. But what does education compensate for? The sacrifice that learners make for educational possibility is an important question: we might think they sacrifice 'freedom' in some way.. but how can this work?

But then, by my definition "freedom is the measure of the robustness of control an individual has over their identity", freedom is not a commodity or a property relation. Freedom is not something which one has a direct property relation to. It pertains to the state and organisational structure of an individual. However, that state can be manipulated through environmental circumstances. What is it when this happens? I think the question revolves around the extent to which one person can be in a property relation to another. Our children are in a property relation to us; slaves are in a property relation to their masters; husbands and wives, etc. Producers and consumers may be in a mutual property relationship (are they?).

These inter-personal property relations involve material changes to the environment whereby material property relations as expressions of individual identity are partly used to manipulate the identity and property relations of others. I think I'm back on a familiar theme: transformations to the environment through property relations which have either intended or unintended consequences on the identity and property relations of others. Once again, Positioning Theory starts to appear as the most sensible way of thinking this through.

Using this formula, imprisonment is relatively easy to understand. The prisoner is the property of the gaoler (or indeed, Her Majesty!). The property relation with the prisoner is manipulated by exploiting the property relations with the material world, which happens to be the environment of the prisoner. This manipulation deprives the prisoner of the ability to form property relations with anything (even their cell can be manipulated). However, property relations between people are rarely so extreme. The parent may well exploit their property relation with the child's environment, but will often engage in some form of exchange with the child so that the child is able to establish their own property relations and their identity. The same applies to teachers, who once again manipulate the learners' environment, but exchange some property-relations (but of what?) for the learners to develop.

What about service providers and service consumers? Here it is interesting, because what is manipulated is not just a product or artefact (although there may well be a 'phone' for example) or a person, but also a legal framework. In submitting to a legal framework (like a service agreement), consumers exchange money (possibility) for  (say) technology (also possibility?). They also expose themselves to some risk (they cannot escape the contract until a certain time, for example). The property relation they have with their phone is conditional, so whilst they might realise the possibility entailed through establishing a property relation with a new phone, they also carry the risk that that particular property relation, and consequently that part of their identity, might collapse.

Risk characterises the engagement with education. Whilst educational processes might create identity and realise possibility, they might also crush it. In exchanging possibility in the form of money for possibility in the form of education, what enters the picture is a heightened risk. (So Ulrich Beck rears his head again!). What do learners give up when they enter education? Yes, they give up freedom in the sense of submitting to an environment (effectively a legal environment) determined by the property relations of their teachers and their educational institutions. If their teachers are good teachers, they will know how to relinquish some of their property relations for the benefit of the learners. If they are not, learners will find themselves not just alienated from the environment, but on the receiving end of the legal consequence of the risk that they took on: a bloody big bill!