wallpaper animals

At the #CETIS12 session on visualisation, one the of principal reasons for visualisation was suggested as being “as a way of showing the impact of the JISC interventions in the sector”. The pretty visualisation pictures were deemed “better than a report saying ‘this has been used by x, y and z’”. It probably is better than doing that, but at the same time, we might reasonably worry that visualising the impact of interventions is no more honest or productive than writing a report about it; indeed, it might be worse because it is more visceral. I joked that we should visualise the impact of research in visualisation (didn't go down too well :-/)

1. The project with 'fixed ideas' (i.e. it has a theory which doesn't change in the light of practice)
2. The project with no ideas and flexible methods

The first scenario is obviously unrealistic (although aspects of it do exist!), whilst the other two are more plausible. For people with fixed theoretical ideas, there is high certainty (low uncertainty) over the way they react to certain situations. This may be characterised as low entropy - we know what they will say! This is in comparison to the project with no ideas and flexible methods – there there is high entropy with some uncertainty over the selection of possible meanings.

image via tumblr

(and meaningful domains)

In the list of things children worry about, I might modestly suggest (with some experience!)

• school
• friendships (particularly as they are maintained through mobile phones and social networks)
• maintaining space and security in the family
• being creative and having ambition (making things)
• emerging political consciousness around global warming, terrorism, etc
• fears of crime and insecurity

.. generally this boils down to fear of loss of attachments brought about in a variety of ways, including 'looking stupid' or 'being embarrassing' (loss of friends) to loss of parents, or environment or ability to express oneself.

Because of the importance of each of these domains, each one can be said to be 'meaningful' to the child. Each domain of meaning carries risks which affect other domains of meaning. Looking stupid in school has a knock-on effect on maintaining friendships, relationship with parents, online behaviour, etc. Sometimes, activities which occur in one domain of meaning (say school) can directly conflict or threaten others.

I want to suggest that whilst we think of the problem of learning as being one of 'acquiring knowledge and skill', the real concern of children is how to join up and manage the different domains of meaning which they engage in. Seen in this way, performing an acquisition of sufficient knowledge and skill in school has to be reconciled with the online domain, the family domain and the domain of the self in the wider social environment.

Some domains are richer than others in terms of providing a caring environment. Family and School are top of the list here. The online domain can feed both of these and must be managed, but in itself does not provide care.

Having started to identify these different domains, it is worth thinking about how the provision of care in schools and families works. In families, care is provided on the basis of mutual inter-dependence. Within the family, as long as one member is unhappy, all are unhappy. Families struggle to deal with this aspect of their condition.. sometimes leading inevitably to pathology - which of course has knock-on effects on the child's ability to reconcile meanings.

But the rule in school is different. The school community doesn't demand that everyone is happy; it instead demands that everyone is concernfully engaged in learning activity. The organisational situation in school is not the natural self-organisation of families, but an organisation based around the effective coordination of learning activities by teachers. The good teacher will do this well, and in the good teacher's class, all children will find a level of activity with each other which they may or may not enjoy, but which nevertheless the child can find a place for themselves where they can feel relatively safe. In the bad class, this will not be managed well (although it may not be the teacher's fault... problems with the curriculum are more often to blame!!) and many children will be left confused or wondering what they are meant to be doing. In such situations, the meaningfulness of the activity in school is compromised. As with the pathology of the bad family, this has knock-on effects.

The tricky thing (which education ministers never seem to understand, despite the fact that they will themselves have experienced it) is that not all bad families, or bad schools necessarily have bad results for the children. Indeed, they may even help them establish strong and positive identities later in life. But to understand this is to understand the priority of establishing a coordination between the different domains of meaning that children experience. For example, a bad lesson will leave the entire class with much to talk about in the playground.. and, when they get home, online. Thus meaninglessness in one domain fuels meaningful engagement in another. The net result can be a strengthened sense of identity. Indeed, just like the kids, teachers often learn most from bad lessons!

This is important, because it means that politically-driven attempts to 'weed-out' bad teachers are probably misguided insofar as they seek to establish standards of practice which are believed to work in 'coordinating learning' but which ultimately decrease the flexibility teachers have for experimenting and responding to the needs of the children for integrating meanings.

But the most worrying recent development is the reaction of schools to the online world. Recognising that the online world is an important domain of meaning to the children, schools are currently attempting to integrate social networking practices within lessons. This is well-intentioned, but probably flawed. The problem for the children is that they themselves have to coordinate their domains of meaning: it can't be done by anyone else. Bringing Facebook into the classroom is like bringing all the family feuds of each child into the classroom. Domains of meaning collide and the knock-on effect risks being chaotic and confusing, thus compromising not only the meaningfulness of the classroom itself (because the learning activity is harder to manage  for the teacher), but also (for the children) a real threat to other domains of meaning involving their friends outside school and their families.

Part of the blame for getting the integration of technology and education wrong in this case must lie with woolly thinking about 'community', and a naive notion that communities can combine: so the school community can combine with the online community, or the home community. I suspect it is in fact seeing the community of the school, and the family community through the lens of what is popularly believed (but mistakenly) to be the 'online community'.

I think the challenge of education for children is the integration and coordination of domains of meaning. Only they can do this; and if anyone else tries to do it, it ultimately only gives the children a bigger problem.

The communities studied by anthropologists are much richer in their means of communication and collective action. From the Inuit Indians who shared the 'potlatch' gifts studied by Mauss, to the Eastern Samoan tribes of Mead, to the communité de l'arche established by the catholic priest Jean Vanier.. there is much more to their 'communitas' than what appears online.

But for the online community, online-ness is the validation of an ideal around which they themselves have organised. To deny the 'community-ness' of the online community is to deny the ideal around which so many have established their personal identities. And yet, the deficiencies of the online community as a community in an anthropological sense are obvious. 

The conflation of the word 'community' to create equivalence between the online community and the 'face-to-face community' is particularly suspect. So much more happens when people are together: the life-and-death realities of existence are encountered in direct and practically ineffable ways. Online, and the nature of 'community' is reduced to text messages made in a strategic way by individuals seeking to maintain their position within the 'online' (and face-to-face) community. 

I think it's a mistake to think of such a thing as an online 'community'. What happens online is strictly 'strategic'. My tweeting of this blog entry is a classic example: I seek to gain the attention of those I know, and I wouldn't be so bothered unless I could see some strategic advantage in it for me. I don't believe I am alone in this egomania! 

But that strategic drive for recognition and feeding the ego is not (or at least only partly) what happens in real-life communities. There, issues of recognition, empathy, care and concern for each other are paramount. There, the radical dependence of one individual on everyone else is directly confronted through gestures and glances which have profound meaning for all. 

We would like to think of technology as providing a 'virtual community', but I think this is mistaken not just because what is created online is not strictly a 'community', but it is also mistaken because the picture that is adopted of technology is one which always assumes that individual experience of face-to-face can be replaced by online experience. It can't. They are fundamentally different entities. 

But this is not to say that technology doesn't have something to offer real communities. But it is not in replacing the 'community-ness' of the communities, but rather in enhancing community-ness by addressing directly the problem of 'fractured meanings' in the lives of individuals. Clearly the making of strategic communications online has become part of daily life. But equally, people still live in families, go to school, sit in lectures, etc. Those are convivial situations within which real communities might develop. The challenge however, is always to find a link between the meaningfulness of the 'real' communities and the meaning of strategic exchanges of text messages online.

image via unknown source

That is what we directly perceive, and all we have to do is manage the purpose to which we wish to coordinate our actions with the computer. All we see is that THE SCREEN CHANGES! I have wrestled over whether this single point of coordination is a good thing. Certainly, when we did work on the Personal Learning Environment, the idea of a single point of coordination under the control of the user was seen as a good thing, avoiding the cognitive overload involved in having to coordinate too many types of action with too many types of tools.

But now I'm not so sure, and I'm certainly sure that the homogenizing of educational experience through the computer is not a good thing. 

I've been thinking about this particularly with regard to the iTEC project, which has sought to make technical interventions in education around the construction of 'innovative technological scenarios'. Each of these involves technology in one form or another. But the most revealing result of this process of scenario creation is the fact that all the scenarios appear to be the same. Because the computer is introduced in various guises (as a homework collaboration tool; as a data collection tool; as a means of engaging with outside experts; etc) in situations which would not normally require a computer, the richness of the experience of the not-with-computer homework task, or the not-with-computer data collection task is attenuated with the experience of "screen, keyboard, mouse". And no matter how much one attempts to be innovative with the scenarios, the inevitable branding of "screen, keyboard, mouse" has an inevitable (and rather dull) ring to it.

This I think is a problem, and it raises the deeper issue of the place for technology in education. Variety of experience is a fundamental component of education. But in our current conception of technology which is very user-focused, where the technology directly serves the learning process, the variety of experience is under threat. One might hope that teachers with iTEC scenarios will have the ingenuity to create rich experiences, although there is a risk that the scenarios themselves (and the technology) might get in the way of this. 

But technology is with us. It is part of the environment within which we try to educate our children. Its effects are highly complex, but one of the principal effects has been to challenge the meaningfulness of what happens in the classroom over what happens online (my daughter constantly complains that she could learn more from Wikipedia). There is nothing new in this. Education has always tried to justify the meaningfulness of what happens in the classroom in comparison to daily life. 

But schools are more like families than Wikipedia. They are not primarily instruments for information transfer - Wikipedia can, as my daughter knows, do that much better. They are instead social microcosms - safe places where human attachments can be explored against the context of norms and rules. We might think that even those processes can happen online in Facebook - but Facebook is no more similar to school life than to family life.  

The significance of this is that within families, schools and the online world communications are exchanged and different kinds of meaning are established. When my daughter complains about what happens in school it is because she cannot reconcile the meaning of what happens in the classroom with what happens online. In some ways, technology could serve to make that reconciliation of meanings even more difficult by being forced inappropriately on education - just as well-intentioned attempts to teach ICT actually led to one of the most disastrously boring subjects on the curriculum! 

Technology is clearly tied-up in the process of meaning-making. But Facebook may feel more meaningful because the coordination mechanisms within Facebook work better than the coordination mechanisms within the classroom. And those coordination mechanisms in the classroom (classroom management by teachers, curriculum, timetable, etc) appear less effective in the light of the effectiveness of technology. I believe the key is to see the link between meaning-making and coordination. Seeing that would mean that we wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that we have to put Facebook into the classroom (because that would confuse the coordination situation, not strengthen it), but rather we have to use technology to establish more effective coordination mechanisms in the classroom which can also serve to create conduits of meaning between the form of life in the school and the form of life online.

In short, the problem lies in the dissonance between different domains of meaning. The challenge is to help resolve the dissonance whilst maintaining the richness of the variety of experience in school.