Norm Friesen - Part 7

CanCore Archived – & some thoughts

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Norm Friesen

I’ve revived the site for the CanCore Learning Object Metadata Initiative –complete with all the guidelines documents and updates to 2007. I’ve received the odd, periodic request for the guidelines in the last few years. It probably is a good thing that technical standardization is no longer seen as the driver of change in e-learning or open ed. (Of course, the latter was only in its infancy when the sun was setting on the LOM). Openness rather than technical sophistication and interoperation is a far more worthy and (I hope) attractive selling point for change in educational practice.

Say what you will about the fad of Learning Objects (and of course, many have). The early 2000’s were a time when the planets were aligned in a way that they have not been since, at least in the Canadian context. Federal and provincial governments, proto-edupunks, programmers and academics all took up common cause. And they did so from Europe to North America and around the Pacific Rim.
This terrain has since clearly become splintered and balkanized. Indeed, 2013 seems more like 1997, still with lone rangers roaming the plane (but now all on twitter), techno-progressivists and -libertarians still anticipating education’s final crisis, and others always eyeing a chance for a quick buck. Except that everyone knows that the stakes are somewhat lower: the NASDAQ isn’t going above 5000 any time soon, and “the big university campuses” (however expensive their maintenance may be) are not becoming “relics” as Peter Drucker predicted.

Maybe this history will end up appearing more along the lines of one of my favourite explications of the subject: This scene from Alain Tanner’s “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (from 1976): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8fhqHyRj6M

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Wandering Star: The Image of the Constellation in Benjamin, Giedion and McLuhan

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Norm Friesen

Just got word that this proposal was accepted for the “14th Jerusalem Conference in Canadian Studies” at the Hebrew University. It focuses on three great writers, and three very unique texts:

Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “constellation” marks a particularly rich conjunction of the material, dialectical and religious impulses in his work. First appearing in his habilitation study for the University of Frankfurt, the term refers to a “caesura” in the flow of thought and thus of the dynamics of historical consciousness and recollection, resulting in an “image of dialectics at a standstill.” Benjamin developed this notion further while working on his “Arcades Project” at the Bibliothèque national in Paris in the 1930’s, and while in contact with fellow Jewish historian, Siegfried Giedion. Found among his effects after his failed attempt to escape the Nazis, Benjamin’s famous study –and his notion of the constellation– are available to us only in fragments. Giedion on the other hand, was able to complete his Parisian research in America as Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history (1948). The constellation reappears in this massive work, particularly in Giedion’s brief methodological introduction. The task of the historian for Giedion is to “establish constellations” through a kind of atemporal lucidity –work that is “ever tied to the fragment [with] the known facts…scattered… like stars across the firmament.” Finally, similar characterizations are conspicuous in yet another programmatic opening; in this case, for a text which incorporates a related cosmic category into its very title: “Thus the galaxy or constellation of events upon which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation— particularly in our own time.” This is from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic man, published nearly 30 years after McLuhan’s first of many encounters with Giedion and his work.

In this presentation, Dr. Norm Friesen will trace the transmission of the constellation from the old world to the new, and across three landmark studies in material history. Dr. Friesen will highlight the significance of the image of the constellation in each, showing how it has changed and evolved from its initial conception in Germany to its final reappearance in Canada. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the continuing richness and potential of this concept in our own changing and precarious times.

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Two Ed Tech/Media Traditions: Rationalist vs Romantic

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Norm Friesen

Spoken language is the first and most basic medium, and various forms of writing come next. If this is true, then media have a long history. This is certainly the case for education & for learning speech & writing.

I try to trace some of this history in this paper, which is a much developed and elaborated version of my presentation on media and educational neutrality, below.

The rationalist tradition includes Descartes, Comenius, and Chomsky, and the versions of cognitivism and constructivism that follow him.

The first shot in oppositional, romantic theory is fired by Socrates (in his tirade against writing the Phaedrus). It is most powerfully articulated in Rousseau, and subsequently echoed by Humboldt (the linguist) and later by the likes of John Dewey, Seymour Papert and Roger Shank.

Each tradition seems to involve very interesting premises and to produce strikingly consistent results.

Download a draft of the paper (to appear in final form in a collection from Königshaus und Neumann).

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Open Textbooks, Educational Content & Knowledge

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Norm Friesen

[slideshare id=15443685&doc=opentextbookseducationalcontentknowledge-121201133451-phpapp02]

Open textbooks are an important step toward accessible and affordable education. But there’s a gap between what’s currently happening with open textbooks and what commercial publishers have long been doing. Until this gap is closed, commercial publishers will be able to continue setting their own price for something that no one else is providing.

A presentation with Irwin deVries given at an Open Content workshop in Kamloops.

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Wittgenstein: Education as (Dog) Obedience Training ?!

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Norm Friesen

I’ve been revising a paper for Phenomenology and Practice, and was disturbed to learn that Wittgenstein can be read as urging punishment and conditioning for education in ways that would have made the crudest behaviourist blush!

It all goes back to the German term Wittgenstein used for what his translator (one of his students, Gertrude Anscombe) consistently and problematically renders as “training.” This word is “Abrichten,” and here’s how the standard German (Duden) dictionary defines it:

“(an animal, esp. a dog) to train for particular action and abilities; dressage.”

That’s it: there’s nothing about humans, children, or “education” in any nuanced sense.

Here’s how Luntley 2008 explains all of this:

“…it is a feature of much recent work on Wittgenstein that it has been based on reading in translation, written in English, and undertaken by non-native speakers of German. Wittgenstein not only uses ‘Abrichtung’ and ‘abrichten’ throughout his original ms. [manuscripts] where the translators have ‘training’, he also uses it to translate texts into German that were originally written in English: e.g. the Brown Book. Now, as Huemer points out, ‘the German “abrichten” is exclusively used for animals’ (p. 207); it refers to a process that ‘sets up stimulus-response patterns that do not involve any intellectual activity on the side of the trainee’ (p. 208). Indeed, ‘Abrichtung’ has a ‘very brutal tone’ and a native German speaker would ‘never use the term for children’ …Any account of Wittgenstein on training must confront this issue and explain what is going on in the text when Wittgenstein assaults the reader with inappropriate language” (pp. 296-297).

In the light of all of this, some well-known quotes take on new significance, and others just make more sense (perhaps unfortunately):

“Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained [conditioned, as through reward and punishment] to do so; we react to an order in a particular way.” (Philosophical Investigations, § 206)

Or:

When a person is trained in the use of the word “there”, the teacher will in training him make the pointing gesture and pronounce the word “there”. (The Brown Book § 20)

Or:

“educators ought to remember… Any explanation has its foundation in training [as in dressage or animal conditioning]” (Zettel § 419)

This puts into question writings by Winch (1998) and some others on Wittgenstein and education. As for Wittgenstein actually practicing education as obedience training, this is documented, and almost got him into serious trouble during his days as an elementary teacher in Austria.

A fascinating thinker becomes more darkly so.

ADDENDUM: I’ve been discussing these issues with Rainer Leschke and Wolfgang Huemer, and have learned that besides being a term reserved for discipline of animals, “Abrichtung” also has the connotation of “breaking the will” of the animal involved. For example, the term would be used for police or fierce guard dogs, but not typically for training a family pet. This connotation has not been mentioned in the few English-language discussions of this term. Wolfgang Huemer suggests that Wittgenstein used Abrichten, at least in part, for its effect: “Since readers will be surprised that the author uses the word for children, they might be more likely to pay attention to the distinction between Abrichtung and explanation.”

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Foucault on Self-Care as Self-Bildung

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Norm Friesen

Been reading Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1981-1982. In this text, Foucault articulates further his notions of “care of the self” and “pastoral power” (about which I posted this item a couple of weeks ago). In the passage quoted below, Foucault explicitly links these ideas to education and Bildung, while also linking these back to classical tradition, to the Alcibiades:

Socrates shows Alcibiades [in his dialogue of the same name ] that he does not know what harmony is and that he is not even aware of his ignorance of what it is to govern well. So Socrates demonstrates this to Alcibiades, and Alcibiades immediately despairs. Socrates then consoles him, saying: But this is not serious, do not panic, after all you are not fifty, you are young and so you have time. But time for what? At this point we could say that the answer that could come, the answer we would expect—the answer Protagoras would no doubt give—would be this: Okay, you are ignorant, but you are young and not fifty, so you have time to learn how to govern the city, to prevail over your adversaries, to convince the people and learn the rhetoric needed to exercise this power, etcetera.

But it is precisely this that Socrates does not say. Socrates says: You are ignorant; but you are young and so you have time, not to learn, but to take care of yourself. It is here, I think, in the gap between “learning,” which would be the usual result expected from this kind of reasoning, and the necessity to “take care of the self,” between pedagogy understood as apprenticeship and this other form of culture, of paideia (we will return at length to this later), which revolves around what could be called the culture of the self, the formation of the sell, the Selbstbildung as the Germans would say, it is in this gap, this interplay, this proximity that a number of problems rush in which concern, it seems to me, the whole interplay between philosophy and spirituality in the ancient world.

Posted in Bildung, Michel Foucault, The Self | Comments Off

Science (Scholarship) as Open Source Process

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Norm Friesen

This very short piece from the late F. Kittler becomes increasingly relevant.as issues of open scholarship and open education become ever more established. For example:

However, it was practical when some programmers at the MIT resisted venality and when a computer science student at the University of Helsinki overcame the widespread fear of assemblers and cold starts. Th at is how immediately open source and free soft ware are connected to the university. Look how much “edu” is in the sources of the Linux kernel. That is also how directly the future of the university depends on these free sources.

I “open sourced” this short piece from Chun and Keenan, New Media Old Media. London: Routledge, with apologies to P. Krapp.

One note about the translation: Science in Kittler’s original German would have been “Wissenschaft.” Unlike the English word “science” (which seems to always imply “natural science”) the German term is regularly used to designate all forms of scholarly endeavor.

Posted in Friedrich Kittler, Media Theory | Comments Off

Foucault, Pastoral Power, Schooling and Subject Formation

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Norm Friesen

David Hamilton, a remarkable educational theorist and historian, has concluded the following about schooling; i.e., about education as secular, public project: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, on an international scale, schooling was conceived by Christianity and raised by capitalism.” The question that this important observation raises is: “How is the religious origin of education manifest in its current, capitalist, international and secular form?” An answer might be found in Foucault’s notion of pastoral power; namely by seeing education as being more or less substitutable with “pastoral power.”

I attempt such a substitution in this file (pdf), using Foucault’s overview of pastoral power, provided in Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject. Each reference to power in this part of Foucault’s text has been substituted for with the word “education” (or a related term, like socialization). I’ve undertaken this not to cast education or schooling as simply an exercise in hegemony; instead, following Foucault, I am principally interested in the formation of the subject, and see education as constitutive of this formation (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse).

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Foucault on the Lecture

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Norm Friesen

Just came across this excellent interview with Michel Foucault from Partisan Review way back in ’71. Foucault articulates a rather original position on the lecture as a pedagogical form. He defends it for being as at least “crudely” honest about the power relations implied in pedagogy involving one teacher and many students. He contrasts this negatively with the, which he sees as more coercive: as more insidiously bringing students into conformity with the teacher’s way of thinking. Here’s an excerpt:

In France, the lecture system has been strongly criticized: the professor comes in, stays behind his desk for an hour, says what he has to say, there’s no possibility for student discussion. The reformists preferred the seminar system because there freedom is respected: the professor no longer imposes his ideas and the student has the right to speak. Of course, but don’t you think that a professor who takes charge of students at the beginning of the year, makes them work in small groups, invites them to enter his own work shares with them his own problem and methods-don’t you think that students coming out of this seminar .will be even more twisted than if they had simply attended a series of lectures? Will they not tend to consider as acquired, natural, evident and absolutely true what is after all only the system, the code and the grid of the professor? Isn’t there the risk that the professor feeds them with ideas much more insidiously? I don’t wish to defend the lecture at all costs but I wonder whether it does not indeed have a kind of crude honesty, provided it states what It Is: not the proclamation of a truth, but the tentative result of some work which has its hypotheses, methods and which therefore can appeal for criticism and objections: the student is free to uncover its blunders.

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Forgotten Connections: Forthcoming from Routledge!

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Norm Friesen

I was pleased to learn this morning that Routledge has agreed to publish Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing! This is great news for a project that I’ve been working on (off and on) for a couple of years.

This project is important because it introduces (in an compelling way, I believe) some important ideas about education and media, and about education itself.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the book presents media –in this case, pictures, texts, books– as constitutive of modern education (i.e. schooling from the Renaissance to the present day). The book shows how the educational value of these new media are epitomized in early readers like Comenius’ Orbis Pictus. It combines text and illustrations in combinations that were earlier unknown and technically impossible (at least on a mass scale)

Also, as I describe in one part of the translator’s introduction, these points about media and education underscore the historical and cultural specificity of education as a set of inter-generational practices.

Posted in Bildung, Klaus Mollenhauer, Writing | Comments Off