wallpaper animals

Last week I introduced an exercise to stimulate deep thinking about education and technology. You had to think of a question which interested you. The exercise didn't lead you to answer the question. Instead, the exercise aimed to highlight the CONSTRAINTS around the question you asked in the form of analytical constraints, critical constraints, and experiential constraints. This week I want to further explore this issue of constraint on thinking with regard to the process of reading in academic study.
When we get to University, people tend to assume we can read. Of course most of us can perform the mechanics of reading - we can read a passage of text out loud, we can gain a sense of meaning of a text, and so on - just like we were taught to do in primary school. But beyond acquiring the mechanics of reading in primary school, we tend not to re-examine what it is to read. Unfortunately, there are many side effects of our early reading education which can cause problems when reading at a higher level. The worst side effects are:

• The expectation that things should be read from the beginning to the end:
• Samuel Johnson famously said "who reads books through?" Academics tend not to read things from cover to cover. Usually the process is one of constructing an understanding of a book (or a paper) by frequently 'dipping in' and working backwards and forwards.
• The expectation that Reading is a separate activity to thinking:
• Reading and thinking are entwined. A page of a book is some kind of environmental stimulation of thought. We don't understand how this works!
• The expectation that the words of a text indicate the meaning of a text:
• There is an assumption that the meaning of a text can be revealed through laborious study of the words and their meaning. The words of a text in a book are signs of the constraints operating on the author. Your job is to get to know the author. C.S. Lewis reminds us that "We read to know we are not alone". You will rarely get to know an author through a single book.
• The expectation that the study of texts is hard work:
• This is the most damaging of all. My advice is that you should never read anything unless you do so feeling excited, curious and passionate about what you are doing. If you don't feel like that, do something else that will make you feel like that - and then read!

The texts I'm asking you to examine as part of the exercise are:

• T.S.Eliot - Notes on the definition of culture - The introduction (available in the Amazon Preview): http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Towards-Definition-Culture-Eliot/dp/0571063136#reader_B004EPXXB0

• Gilly Salmon - E-moderating - "What is e-moderating?" and "Jane's diary" (available in Amazon Preview) http://www.amazon.com/E-Moderating-Gilly-Salmon/dp/0415335442/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390247723&sr=8-1&keywords=gilly+salmon+e-moderating#reader_0415335442

As I wrote a couple of days ago (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/higher-education-and-why-bolton-question.html), there are fundamental ethical problems with Widening Participation as the de-facto business model of educational institutions like my own. It is inescapably about paying salaries of University employees (large salaries in the case of rich Senior Managers) with money borrowed by the poor. How different is this business model from that of Pay-Day lenders like Wonga? It looks very similar: in fact, at least with Wonga, the poor have the short-lived satisfaction of having 500 quid in their pocket for a short time before they're roped into endless repayments; Universities make them sit in dull lectures and gives them tedious assignments to complete! Like Wonga, we lure them into their bargain with promises of a better life that we are in no position to keep: getting a degree does not guarantee a better life, although it might remove some bureaucratic barriers to success.

We've stepped over a line in education and now we have a big problem.

Nobody's going to pretend the 'education industry' doesn't exist. Nobody's going to pretend that "not having a degree" isn't now a big problem for young people seeking employment, and that the provision of a degree entails some kind of economic bargain. We've made all of this happen in our society. The question is about how we deal with it.

There is a political question about loans versus general taxation, and the extent to which the interest rate of student loans in under political control. David Willetts yesterday suggested that the loan rate would remain under political control: a move underlying the fudge and nervousness about the whole situation (see his talk http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=14616) Is a loan a tax? What's the difference between a tax and a loan when a basic need like education is the subject? But then the question is Is it fair? Individual capability (by that I mean Amartya Sen's definition: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach), social and cultural capital (Bourdieu) all tip the scales in favour of the middle classes - the kids who would succeed whether they went University or not. So what about Bolton?

Is it fair that students with less capability and less social and cultural capital should be 'taxed' (have to borrow money) at the same rate, when their life-chances are hampered before they even begin? Education is not a level playing field. Are student loans like a "poll-tax" on capability? The inequality is exacerbated by institutional business models which increasingly aim to cut costs and 'pocket' money borrowed by poor students to bolster financial 'reserves': such behaviour is less about the security of the institution (which is how it is usually portrayed), but much more about the security of the leader in a world where financial performance is the measure of success. Indeed institutional security can be damaged by withholding money that poor students have borrowed, to the under-resourced detriment of educational experiences for those students, whilst putting more pressure on staff to 'deliver' to those students for less money to both their detriment and the students who pay for it. The 'efficiency' model is inherently unstable and morally repugnant all-round.

The question is How to level the disparity of capability? There will, in fact, be some kind of subsidy for less capable students because their salaries will not reach the £21,000 mark for repayment in the UK. Indeed, there are deep worries that even for capable students in a depressed economy, this target will not be reached, leading to an ever-deepening black hole of government supported student debt, and the likelihood of an education-oriented financial crisis (Think how popular Universities will be when welfare cuts are imposed because student loan debt has become uncontrollable!)

We need to address the capability imbalance: this is, and always has been, the job of education. At one point in our history, the capability imbalance concerned literacy: mass education addressed the problem when many believed it wasn't possible. We now have different kinds of capability imbalances and technology forms an important element of them. Accessibility to technology is now as fundamental as literacy. But in terms of addressing capability imbalances, methods of teaching and learning are very important. The combination of teaching and technology is currently underexploited in the classroom. This is not about social media, or effective internet searches. It is about how technology can give us a better insight into ourselves, our learning needs, effective teaching, our emotional management and our attachments to others. Whilst it feels like "e-learning"  has run out of steam, the capability gap and its ensuing moral problems in education demand that we move forwards and invest in the high-tech capability-raising of the poor. To not do this will maintain an injustice whose ultimate consequences will be explosive.

This is why Bolton should go high-tech. Virtual Reality, bio-feedback, sophisticated analytics, corpus-oriented self-steering, video, flipped classrooms, flexible curricula, service learning are all important. But going high-tech means something else. Currently there is a tendency to invest money current poor students have to borrow in projects for the future (so current students whose money it is do not benefit). Technological investment benefits the students who pay for it: to each according to their needs. It creates opportunities for reorganising the classroom where those with more capability can help those with less: from each according to their ability.

I have blogged for a while about balancing the needs of society with the learning needs of individuals. The needs of our society are simple: we must redistribute wealth, risks and capabilities. Now I think that the way of achieving this is to drive the process of redistribution of capability in the University - in Bolton - using technology as the means to do it.

This is a short "course" in thinking about education. I've put "course" in "" because I'm not really sure what a "course" is. Except that I can see that education is full of them, and if you want to do anything in education, you have a create a "course".

But you can change someone's life in 5 minutes!

There's something peculiar about a course in stretching the 5 minutes to 6 weeks! (Ezra Pound first made this point in his "ABC of Reading"). Maybe (Pound suggests) we do it just to try and justify sufficient payment for the employment of teachers for longer than 5 minutes.

Why am I doing this? In the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton, we continually receive requests from students to study for a PhD. The number of these requests has grown in recent years (the PhD "market" - more inverted commas! - is likely to become very excited in the next few years as students try to differentiate themselves in a world where everyone has a degree). The problem is that a PhD is a very high risk strategy for a student. It is unlike any other academic award because, in the end, the award is a kind of declaration of trust between the student, the supervisor and the external and internal examiners. If either of the examiners are not comfortable with the award, it tends not to be made. After 3 or more years work, that can be a bitter blow. As with most failures in life, the root causes are usually deeply buried in the origins of the study. By the time it comes to the PhD examination, there's often little that can be done to remedy these kind of problems. The biggest problem, particularly in educational PhDs lies in assuming education to be simpler than it is. It may be that Vice-Chancellors and education Ministers can get away with this (although they shouldn't), but PhD students usually can't.

Some causes of simplistic thinking have their roots in the academy. Particularly at fault are the off-the-peg methodologies that are sometimes (unfortunately) presented to students as "ways of studying phenomenon x". At the extreme end are the kind of naive empirical studies involving pre and post-tests which see education as a branch of pharmacology. But naive thinking extends to methodologies whose supposed intentions are more realistic, but in their application, a gaping void of unexplored questions opens up between the real problems of education and those problems exposed by the methodology. Action research is a good example - great for hands-on trying-things-out, but generally poor at deeper explanatory frameworks which would ground critical analysis and build a foundation for the advancement of knowledge (which is what the PhD is meant to be about). Grounded theory is another popular technique but now too often uncritically applied as a kind of crank-turning process whose underpinning phenomenological foundations are rarely explored (and many of which are rather suspect!). This is to say nothing of the increasing use of text analytic software and the automated statisticisation of real experience which only serves to mask that experience in a fog of measurements. I'm not in principle against any of these techniques - they can all be useful. But I am against not thinking. And not thinking is the surest route to failure in the PhD.

So I want to provide students with a way of assessing the risk they face when embarking on a PhD before they pay the money to sign up for one. It also helps us assess the risk we might face in supporting them. In doing this, the purpose of this course is to get students to "challenge everything". This is how we think in IEC, and my hope is that having pursued this, students might be better prepared to make the decision whether to come and study with us or not.

The course is structured around activities, not content. Although we use some texts, the real purpose is to get students to produce artefacts which allow an inspection of how they think, and a framework for creating a strategy for deepening their thinking. The activities are:

Week 1: A 'way of thinking' mind-map. This activity focuses on the difference between analytical thinking, critique and experiential testimony. It's purpose is to highlight the difficulties of thinking straight about education.

Week 2: Reading critically. This activity focuses on two texts considering them from the point of view of analysis, critique and experience. The texts couldn't be more different: T.S. Eliot's "Notes towards the definition of Culture" and Gilly Salmon's "E-moderating". Students are asked to write a short analysis of the comparison between passages from each.

Week 3: The critical experience of writing. We look at  the experience of writing. How to deal with the creative process of trying to write about education and organise your thinking? How to deal with critically re-reading your own work and reorganising it. The exercise this week will use the mind map you produced in week 1.

Week 4: Method and Ideas in education. Using the mind map from week 1, we will explore the relationship between methods and knowledge about the reality of education. What is a research method and how does it relate to the way we think about education? This week's exercise involves you critiquing your own work.

Week 5: Technology and Experience. How does technology change the way we think? How do different media of communication change the way we think? What is the experience of using technology? Students will be asked to produce a short video on this topic and publish it online.

Week 6: Thinking and Modelling. What is a model? Why are they useful? Why can they be problematic? In this week's assignment you will be asked to draw a simple model of an educational problem that interests you. You will be challenged to identify the communication dynamics between the different actors in your model, together with the critical areas of doubt that you might have about your model.

So here's the video from Week 1: A "Way of thinking" mind-map
My example, which build's on my question "Why is education usually rubbish" can be seen by following the link to the Prezi presentation below.
Obviously, students will need to think of their own question.

Have fun!


A link to the Prezi presentation used: http://prezi.com/gpfp-hvofnzr/education-ppt1/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

January is a good time to reflect on the previous year. This has been a horrible year in HE. It has been a year of rampant managerialism in Universities, where the thinkers have been subjected to a full-blooded assault by non-thinkers. "Thinking is waste - where are your outputs," screams the Research Excellence Framework; "Don't think, just keep your students on roll," scream managers who (to be fair) find themselves playing ridiculous accounting games which even they know are daft. But people have been desperately frightened. They still  are frightened: even when important things happen (deaths in the family are pretty important, for example) they struggle on into a work environment which they are barely in control of, but which they are terrified of being ejected from (as they have seen so many ejected before them).

This year, we have to put a stop to this. My own University has probably been no madder than any other (although probably not as mad as the one that Tristram Hunt, the shadow education minister, recently referred to in a conversation (allegedly!) as "Oh, that's the one with the nutter in charge!"), but the degree of madness that everyone has experienced leads people like me to think "What do I do next?" Like many, I have trawled the job pages - and applied (unsuccessfully) for a job in a 'better' institution than my own (for considerably less money). Sobering experiences - but also good. It is good to be challenged. Pathological managements can have positive unintended consequences. I console myself with the thought that Shakespeare worked in a police state; Shostakovitch always kept a packed suitcase under his bed lest the KGB came knocking; Beethoven wrote the 5th piano concerto holed up in a basement appartment in Vienna as Napoleon blasted the city walls; Anna Akhmatova dared not write down any poems, but instead memorised everything in a world where her fellow poets were arrested and executed. I know it's fanciful to compare myself to these people, but the point is that great work comes out of difficult circumstances. The other (obvious) point is that great work comes through really passionately caring about something.

Like my colleagues, I passionately care about education. I'm not always good at it, but I care about it. I care particularly about my colleagues in my institution and the students we teach. I worry about the students who now pay our salaries, who don't really realise the scale of the debt burden they take on, and some of whom will struggle to benefit from their studies professionally in a way which would not be the case if they came from middle class families. "Widening participation" as a gift of the tax-payer was an invitation to opportunity; "Widening participation" as the de-facto business model of institutions which seek to survive on the back of money poor students haven't earned yet is something quite different and potentially malevolent.

What are the choices? Perhaps Bolton and institutions like it shouldn't exist. There are many people in the academic elite, in the Tory government and elsewhere who will pompously say something like this (or think it, even if they fear that saying it is not PC): "send those students to apprenticeships" (as they withdraw funding from apprenticeships). The problem is that we now have a society (thanks partly to widening participation) where not having a degree is a real problem, even for jobs which once upon a time didn't require it. If the box isn't ticked, the job application goes in the bin. Society has created the risk of "not having a degree" and in so doing created a market for qualifications. If Bolton didn't exist, plenty of other institutions like it would, and they would probably behave less scrupulously than us (look at the scandal of the job seeker services recently: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17476415)

We are in a bigger moral mess than a single institution. Is this the education system becoming a tool of the rich to make themselves richer with money borrowed by the poor? When we look at Vice-Chancellor's salaries, it looks this way. How long before the poor get angry and demand their money back? Large salaries may be a burden then.

In navigating this complex maze, I return to a simple question: what are the needs of society and how are they addressed through meeting the learning needs of individuals? This is an important question when thinking about student funding. Are student loans just another form of taxation? Some will say that the problem with that is that, unlike taxation, the student loan book is taken outside the political domain. But the political question is not about money; it is about What do we WANT? What kind of society do we want to build? How can education serve that society? What is the student loan money paying for? What do we expect our government to do in governing? We should demand equity.

Increasingly I see my own small institution as a key battleground for these questions. In my own soul searching, I have become more committed to Bolton: it's where things really matter (having said that, I'm at no less risk of being disposed of - but it really doesn't matter). With the ever increasing power of technology, globalisation, educational industrialisation, rich/poor disparities, it is in an institution like Bolton that we can try and do the right thing. It means rethinking education. It means reconnecting social needs with learning needs. It means taking care of students, not just over the period of a 'course' (how ridiculous our course fetish!), but over a life. Like any battleground, the dangers are all around. The temptation not to think is the biggest danger. The temptation to lure unsuspecting punters with glossy advertising as if it was a kind of Soho sex bar will be very great. But keep thinking and keep fighting - particularly as everyone becomes more frightened in a changing landscape.

When we are most frightened we need the most courage to speak out because this isn't just about our jobs. It's something much bigger and more serious. 

A little while ago I wrote about 'three ways of thinking about educational technology'. It was partly inspired by Alain Badiou's work, which has been dedicated to bridging the gap between the analytical, phenomenological and Marxist traditions in philosophy. But it's got me thinking about how we 'shift gears' in our thinking about technology between analysis (most of our technical thinking is analytical), critique - when we want to justify our analysis or technical design in some way, and phenomenology - as we try and defend the (largely crappy) experiences people have with technology! I've become interested in ways of thinking and the 'gear switching' that goes on because I see it going on everywhere in the e-learning discourse, and I think it's largely to blame for the kind of circular arguments that we see around issues like "the purpose of education". We need to pay more attention to the ways that we think, and where we switch from one way to another.

I've devised a little exercise to try and illustrate what I mean. It's a kind of mind-map and a large piece of paper (or small writing) is required. The steps are:

1. Think of a question that interests you in education and write it in a bubble in the middle of your piece of paper. (My question when I did this was "why is education usually rubbish?")
2. Around this central bubble, there are going to be three other bubbles. First, draw a bubble in which you support your question with something you have personally experienced. This is the 'experiential' bubble where you can think about the 'common sense' behind your question. (My experience of education has largely - but not always - been rubbish).
3. A second bubble around the centre indicates doubts about the question: who says? in whose interests is this question asked? is it right? who would lose if we were to try and 'improve' things? and so on. This is the bubble of 'critique'. 
4. Finally a third bubble contains some kind of proposition to address the main question: what would we do? how would it work? This is the analytical bubble where logical solutions are suggested. 
5. Having created the three bubbles around the main one, look at each of the three in turn and around each of those draw three further bubbles: one for experience/common-sense, one for critique/doubt, and one for some kind of logical proposal. 
6. keep going until you fill the paper!

In my example, I found myself trying to defend the need for more funding as a way of addressing the crappiness of education, whilst also worrying about where the money was going to come from. Equally I worried about whether education is really rubbish for everyone, and considering the problem of value pluralism. And my experiences were shaped by socio-economic expectations - how to change those? What methodology can help us to find out about them? (in whose interests is a particular methodology?)

The point is that my thinking about educational problems is wonky. It moves from an analytical proposition to a critical defence, or a theoretical justification for experiences which in turn relies on methodologies which raise political concerns.

Take any example of input into the e-learning discourse and you will see the same wonkiness. From Salmond's 5-stage model to Koper's Educational Modelling Language to the Pask conversation model, the thinking often starts analytically (either in the form of a methodology, or in the form of a theory), but then retreats to critique or phenomenology in order to shore-up the shortcomings of the analysis and its consequent technical implementation. Sometimes further analysis is then used to shore-up the critique! Some interventions like the PLE already bring with them a heady mixture of different ways of thinking from the start (the PLE had Illich, and Service Oriented Architecture all thrown in to start!).

It's not just learning technologists who think in this wonky way. Since education is now techno-dominated (all interventions in institutional management have a technical component; computer-based metrics govern the governance), pseudo analytical thinking which rides roughshod over critical and experiential concerns is beloved of many Vice Chancellors. It's allure of objectivity gives them some sort of rational basis for making decisions which are (by and large) ill-advised. But VCs suffer the gear-switching disease.

I think it's important that we develop the means for identifying when this happens. The next phase of Education Technology is likely to be a 'critical' phase: where we look at all the money spent in the last 10 years or so and wonder what on earth we were thinking. We were thinking wonkily, and now we need to understand how that happened as we prepare for technologies which are going to be even harder to think about.

Computers blur distinctions - they're like a kind of solvent. They don't reduce one thing into another (it's not like reducing chemistry to physics) but they create common practices between different areas of activity where distinct practices had once prevailed. The common practice which is dissolving everything at the moment is data analytics. Whether you are looking at chemical signals in the visual cortex, traffic patterns across a city, dancer movements to music, sporting performance, interview responses or social networks, the same practices are emerging. Shared redundancy of practice is the main driver for innovation and change. And given what is going on, we should expect plenty of change in the next couple of years or so.