I believe the following principles to hold true:
- Human goals are mediated by, and thenceforth only achieved through, the widespread adoption and use of new technologies.*
- Human purposes for adopting and making use of new technologies are often highly individualized (though nearly always aligned with an affinity group, even if that group is not explicitly named and even if that group is not comprised of other members of the learning community).
- While no educational researcher is qualified to articulate achievable goals for another human, the researcher is ethically obligated to support learners in articulating, and achieving, ethical educational goals.
- The efficacy and success of new technologies can be measured through multiple lenses, among which only one is the achievement of mainstream educational goals as articulated and assessed through traditional, often standardized, measurement tools.
If you (a) know me, (b) follow me on Twitter or a similar social network, or (c) read my blog, you know that being at a loss for something to say just doesn't happen to me. (On the one hand, this makes me perfectly suited to social media, blogging, and academia; on the other hand, it means I'll mouth off about the social revolution in nearly any social situation.)
But for weeks now, I've been trying to devise a model to represent the role of computational technologies in education. And for weeks, I've been failing miserably. Here's the closest I've come:
As you can see, this model is incomplete. I was in the middle of drawing an arrow from that word "technology" to something else when I realized that this model would never, ever do. So I tried to approach modelling from other perspectives. I tried backing my way in, by thinking of technologies metaphorically; I've tried presenting technology integration in the form of a decision tree. Which is fine, except that these don't really work as models.
And I have to come up with a model. I do. Though I don't often mention this, I'm not actually only a blogger. In real life, I'm a graduate student in Indiana University's Learning Sciences Program. Because I believe in the value of public intellectual discourse, I've chosen to present as much of my coursework as possible on my blog or through other public, persistent and searchable communications platforms.
I will, at some future point, discuss the challenges and benefits of living up to this decision. For now, you guys, I just need to come up with a goddam model that I can live with.
I tried thinking of technologies as sleeping policemen; or, in other words, as objects that mediate our thoughts and actions and that have both intended and unintended consequences. This was a reaction to a set of readings including a chunk of Bonnie Nardi's and Vicki O'Day's 1999 book, Information Ecology: Using Technology with Heart; a Burbules & Callister piece from the same year, "The Risky Promises and Promising Risks of New Information Technologies for Education"; and Stahl & Hesse's 2009 piece, "Practice perspectives in CSCL." The theme of these writings was: We need to problematize dominant narratives about the role of technologies in education. Burbules & Callister categorize these narratives as follows:
- computer as panacea ("New technologies will solve everything!")
- computer as [neutral] tool ("Technologies have no purpose built into them, and can be used for good or evil!")
- computer as [nonneutral] tool (the authors call this "(a) slightly more sophisticated variant" on the "computer as tool perspective")
- balanced approach to computer technologies (neither panacea nor tool, but resources with intended and unintended social consequences)
Nardi & O'Day, who basically agree with the categories identified above, argue for the more nuanced approach that they believe emerges when we think of technologies as ecologies, a term which they explain is
intended to evoke an image of biological ecologies with their complex dynamics and diverse species and opportunistic niches for growth. Our purpose in using the ecology metaphor is to foster thought and discussion, to stimulate conversations for action.... [T]he ecology metaphor provides a distinctive, powerful set of organizing properties around which to have conversations. The ecological metaphor suggests several key properties of many environmentsWhich is all fine and dandy, except the argument that precedes and follows the above quote is so tainted by mistrust and despair over the effects of new technologies that it's hard to imagine that even Nardi and O'Day themselves can believe they've presented a balanced analysis. Reading their description of techno-ecologies is kind of like reading a book about prairie dog ecologies prefaced by a sentence like "Jesus Christ I hate those freaking prairie dogs."
in which technology is used.
So the description of technologies as sleeping policemen was an effort to step back and describe, with as much detachment as possible for an admitted technorevolutionary like me, the role of technologies in mediating human activity.
But the metaphor doesn't really have much by way of practical use. What am I going to do, take that model into the classroom and say, well, here's why your kids aren't using blogs--as you can see (::points to picture of speed bump::), kids are just driving around the speed bump instead of slowing down....?
This became clear as I jumped into a consideration of so-called "intelligent tutors," which I described briefly in a previous post. Or, well, the speed bump metaphor might work, but only if we can come up with some agreed-upon end point and also set agreed-upon rules like speed limits and driving routes. But the problem is that even though we might think we all agree on the goals of education, there's actually tons of discord, both spoken and unspoken. We can't even all agree that what's sitting in the middle of that road is actually a speedbump and not, for example, a stop sign. Or a launch ramp.
The Cognitive Tutors described by Kenneth Koedinger and Albert Corbett are a nice example of this. Researchers who embrace these types of learning tools see them as gateways to content mastery. But if you believe, as I do, that the content students are required to master is too often slanted in favor of members of dominant groups and against the typically underprivileged, underserved, and underheard members of our society, then Cognitive Tutors start to look less like gateways and more like gatekeepers. Even the tutoring tools that lead to demonstrable gains on standard assessments, well...ya gotta believe in the tests in order to believe in the gains, right?
So I'm back to this:
A "model," explains Wikipedia,
is a simplified abstract view of the complex reality. A scientific model represents empirical objects, phenomena, and physical processes in a logical way. Attempts to formalize the principles of the empirical sciences, use an interpretation to model reality, in the same way logicians axiomatize the principles of logic. The aim of these attempts is to construct a formal system for which reality is the only interpretation. The world is an interpretation (or model) of these sciences, only insofar as these sciences are true....
Modelling refers to the process of generating a model as a conceptual representation of some phenomenon. Typically a model will refer only to some aspects of the phenomenon in question, and two models of the same phenomenon may be essentially different, that is in which the difference is more than just a simple renaming. This may be due to differing requirements of the model's end users or to conceptual or aesthetic differences by the modellers and decisions made during the modelling process. Aesthetic considerations that may influence the structure of a model might be the modeller's preference for a reduced ontology, preferences regarding probabilistic models vis-a-vis deterministic ones, discrete vs continuous time etc. For this reason users of a model need to understand the model's original purpose and the assumptions of its validity.
I'm back at the original, simple, incomplete model because I'm not ready to stand in defense of any truth claims that a more complete model might make. Even this incomplete version, though, helps me to start articulating the characteristics of any model representing the role of computational technologies in education. I believe the following principles to hold true:
- Human goals are mediated by, and thenceforth only achieved through, the widespread adoption and use of new technologies.
- Human purposes for adopting and making use of new technologies are often highly individualized (though nearly always aligned with an affinity group, even if that group is not explicitly named and even if that group is not comprised of other members of the learning community).
- While no educational researcher is qualified to articulate achievable goals for another human, the researcher is ethically obligated to support learners in articulating, and achieving, ethical educational goals.
- The efficacy and success of new technologies can be measured through multiple lenses, among which only one is the achievement of mainstream educational goals as articulated and assessed through traditional, often standardized, measurement tools.
Ok, so what do you think?
*Note: I'm kinda rethinking this one. It reads a little too deterministic to me now, a mere hour or so after I wrote it.
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7 comments:
Love that your dilemma is over the medium or form of your model. should it be a metaphor, a picture of technology with an arrow leading somewhere, a series of evolving principles about technology and education? or all of these inadequate. it is tempting to find the one puristic form that will adequately capture the messy dilemmas of technology and educational reform, but on the other hand why not present a mixed bag of ideas/forms and consider that a success. perhaps that is the best we have to offer, and if your thoughts culminate in some perfected uniform model, well that will be an interesting week probably tied to some interesting readings that week, but there's no need to force it or feel writer-blocky about it. There's also no need to think that a synthesis or a univocal uniform model is the best approach to capturing all the nuances of the issues.
I'm not sure whether it helps or if it's more confusing, but I often think of/speak of/write about/teach technology as language. Of course, language is itself a whole can of worms, which is both why I consider this helpful and unhelpful at the same time.
Learning to use a technology is learning to adopt its grammar in a similar way as learning a language - you learn by using, tinkering, experimenting with it, not just by reading grammar books. You can be competent without getting theoretical. You learn socially, a language shared by other people and transformed gradually by other people, just as technology usage is itself transformed over time.
Of course, I'm basing myself on a certain view of language, namely Wittgenstein's understanding of language as in the Philosophical Investigations and Austin's view in How To Do Things With Words: language not as a medium between us and reality, but language as structuring the world itself. By extension, technology shaping the world itself, redefining. Every technology, in a way, encompasses a different interpretation of what the world is like. Just like every language does.
Which also opens up an interesting avenue for the intersection between technology, language and art as new experiments keep popping up.
Dunno. Maybe it's helpful to you. If it is, let me know. And if it isn't, well, let me know too. :)
Eduardo,
This is officially the second time in less than 24 hours that Austin's book has been mentioned to me. If one more person brings it to my attention, I may very well just have to read it.
I like this likening of technology to language and would like to know more about how you think about this. Have you written about it on your blog?
Untwitterable's point that the struggle over representation is interesting makes me wonder even more about the analogy to language. In general, we figure out how to make do with the words we have, with the language we're equipped with; it's rare, right, that we come upon a place where words literally fail us.
But in my struggle over model-building, representation has (so far) failed me. That's in part because I'm asking a model to do something different than I ask language to do, which is to represent, clearly and simply, a situation that extends far beyond the dimensions afforded us through speech. I wonder if the tech-as-language approach offers a way to consider this.
Thoughts?
I don't really think there's a problem with models per se, but rather with models that try to encompass too much - as in, a model that tries to capture the essence itself of language, or of technology. That will not do, as any model needs to leave stuff out for it to be effective (which in turns enables us to get psychoanalytic on models themselves - why does this or that model leave X or Y out? What does that say about whoever built the model?).
Models are helpful when we understand their motivations and objetives, their fallibility and perfectibility. So, ironically, models are useful as long as we can modify and adapt them over time to better explain what their supposed to model.
The analogy with language is useful here as well, because a similar thing happens with models attempting to describe or explain the purpose of language in culture (which in turn have to do so by using language itself, which is kind of self defeating). If we think of technology as language then we have to also deal with the fact that one-model-to-rule-them-all will probably be out of the question, replaced instead with multiple models with multiple purposes involved in weird cultural dynamics and competitions.
I have written about this and continue to do so often on my blog - all of it's in Spanish, though. If you're interested, I wrote a paper and gave a presentation on the intersect between technology, language and art some time ago. You can find both the paper and the slides on the blog. This was an attempt to bring together McLuhan, Austin, and current mashup and remix practices. Sorry it's only in Spanish!
There's probably more on the blog. And you'll find me more than willing to continue to talk about this. :)
Dunno if we can help you much with a finished model, but that first principle sounds suspiciously like The Medium is the Message. Perhaps if you looked back over some previous struggles from a different age might provide a glimmer. After all, everything old is new again.
Hey, no snark. Sorry to let you down.
Hi Jenna,
I agree with untwitterable about just jotting some ideas down and going with the flow. I had a really hard time starting my model (I had all these ideas of this GREAT model that I was going to do with all these cool metaphors of puzzle pieces within puzzle pieces etc.), and still I am not happy with what I have so far, but I figured that I would change it as my perspective about technology and education evolve. Perhaps that is what happens with technology and education, someone has a great idea on how to bring technology into the classroom, but somewhere along the way it just falls short of what the real point it was trying to do.
Personally, I liked the speed bump idea especially for educators, becaus, as we learned from Rochelle et al and Cuban last week, it seems as though we have all this great technology, but we need to slow down, get educated about it, and learn how to use it properly before we move on to the next thing.
wow eduardo, your ideas (and Austin's) seem so similar to Karl kerenyi when he writes "The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expessing truth that has already been established as means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diveristy is not a diversity of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world." (p.s. i stole this quote from adam)
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