What's the Learning in 21st Century Learning?
Preparing an abstract for a presentation at SFU’s Ed. Summer Institute, and have been inspired by Diskurse des Lernens(Discourses of Learning) by Käte Mayer-Drawe. Here’s my translation of a page from the introduction:
Learning begins… where and when that which is familiar loses its utility and that which is new is not yet useful: “when the old world is, so to say, abandoned, and a new one does not yet exist” (Mead). Its path leads not from shadows to the light; instead it brings one into the twilight, at a threshold between no longer and not yet. From a pedagogical perspective and in the strictest sense, learning is an experience. This is the central thesis of this book. As simple as this may sound, its implications are both subversive and anachronistic. Disruptions, difficulties and other inadequacies are unpopular, because frictionless, high-speed accommodation within a stress-free atmosphere is the ideal of our time; and in this context, a pedagogical theory of learning that focuses on inefficient uncertainties can have particular meaning. In a time where [instructional] technologies are used for the production of members of a globalized society, there is no room for any lack or absence. Accumulation is the decisive keyword; accommodation is the successful action.
It is the dictatorship of the machine which also determines our view of learning. Machines generally have nothing to gain when they enter into difficulties. Difficulties in this sense are only interruptions which must be eliminated. Maturana and Varela speak of perturbations, which bring about or resolve change, and which are themselves “determined by the structure of the perturbating system.” The structure of the organism determines what happens. Indeed, we are not absolutely different from machines, but we diverge decisively from them in that we profit from indeterminacy and that difficulty and loss actually makes us more knowledgeable. We know of the pain of thinking. “The unthought hurts because we’re comfortable in what’s already thought” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 20). (Mayer-Drawe, 2008, p. 15).
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CTheory – Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface
Just published a paper on CTheory.net titled:
Doing with Icons makes Symbols; or, Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface
Here’s a sample: “Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts of human development and activity. They are not simply metaphors enabling, say, a particular conception of memory, perception or language — as is the case for Plato’s wax tablet, Descartes’ camera obscura or Chomsky’s computational “language organ.” Instead, media form the organizing principles for the psyche and its functions overall; they provide the pivotal moment for maturation and humanization — the point where human development allegedly diverges decisively from the animal to the human. But in these contexts, media are not simply the basis, cause or source of psychological phenomena; they are inextricable from and in a sense even constitutive of them.”
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Dewey's Cosmic Traffic: Politics and Pedagogy as Communication
[slideshare id=12240322&doc=deweyscosmictraffic-120401024713-phpapp02]
View another webinar from Norm Friesen
This is a set of slides and audio recording from the Media Transatlantic IV Conference in Paderborn. (Richard Cavell and I hosted Media Transatlantic III at UBC in 2010). (Apologies for the less than perfect audio.)
Here’s a draft version of the paper and below, an extended abstract:
Given the appearance and reappearance of this notion of transaction, interaction and communication across his writings, Dewey can be said to be an important and early contributor to discourses on “traffic” as an event and as a medium. His wide-ranging and gradually evolving thought offers an opportunity to see how various issues can be configured in terms of dynamic flow and circulation. These issues include the development of technical media that were profoundly reshaping nearly all aspects of everyday reality in Dewey’s time. Among these technical media are the railway and telephone, as well as the mass media of radio, film, newspaper and other print forms. As one would expect, Dewey frequently portrayed these as facilitating ever an ever-widening gyre in a larger, generative economy or medium.
At the same time though, Dewey was forced to address far-reaching critiques of communication in the political arena, which saw new media as distorting and blocking effective communication. In this presentation, I focus on Dewey’s remarks on media and circulation in both his 1927 book, The Public and its Problems, and in two early works, “The Primary-Education Fetich [sic]” and “Lectures vs. Recitations: A Symposium.” As McLuhan perceptively noted, “Dewey” was in effect “reacting against passive print culture [and thus] surf boarding along on the new electronic wave.” Through this examination, I show how Dewey is indeed, and perhaps unwittingly, riding along an electronic wave that was just beginning to well up in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Special Issue of Techné on my Article "Dissection and Simulation"
Robert Rosenberger (Georgia Tech) has put together a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology based on my article on Dissection & Simulation: Transparency or Encumbrance? (draft).
This special issue contains articles or responses by Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Estrid Sørensen, Darin Barney, and Rosenberger himself, as well as my own response to them.
Available here are Rosenberger’s introduction and my own reply to the various responses:
- Introduction by Robert Rosenberger
- Less is More: A Response to Ihde, Rosenberger, Borgmann, Barney and Sørensen by Norm Friesen
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Friedrich Kittler’s “Forgetting:” The Whistler at the Gates of Morning?
I’ve tracked down a copy of an early paper by Kittler, titled “Forgetting” (1979). The translation appears to be quite good, except for the unfortunate rendering of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn as in the title, above. But this actually proves Kittler’s point: Despite the insistence of hermeneutics on the integrity of the work and of the author’s communication through it, the hermeneutic “work” was in Kittler’s time (and much more clearly today) overshadowed by the database, catalogue, archive, and algorithms of translation and organization. Increasingly, these are the only means of access, persistence, organization and retrieval for these works –via online catalogues, full text databases and the ubiquity of Google queries:
The person who draws up catalogues does not understand them any more than the person who uses them. A book list, a representation of the keys on a typewriter, or a telephone book do not constitute sentences, but statements. Catalogues are statements which make statements manipulable. And if the most frequently printed and the most frequently used books today are tables, inventories, circuit charts which only schizo[phrenic]s write or read from front to back, then [how can] hermeneutics, without question, takes as its point of departure that subclass of books that some people still write or read from front to back.
Kittler further argues that these books and instruments are imperfect, providing flawed representations of the information they organize –pointing the user to missing files or records, deleted Web pages and dead domain names. Forgetting, in other words, is one of their key functions –and it appears as similarly indispensable in the methodology outlined by Kittler in this remarkable piece.
From: Discourse. Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Nr. 3, 1981, 88-121
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What's "The Canadian School" of Media Theory?
(Hint: It’s NOT the same thing as the Toronto School of Communications.)
I’ve been working with Darryl Cressman on an article on “Die kanadische Schule” for a German Handbook of Media Studies. The piece will be translated and then published by Metzler (the Metzler Dictionary of Media Studies and Media Theory, already in print, is to the right).
Here’s how we explain the difference between the two “schools:”
To speak of a general Canadian school of media theory is to use a specifically German label, one that can be traced to Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, where he inaccurately attributes the term to Arthur Kroker’s Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. …A Canadian school of media theory and Toronto school of communication both refer to the same general intellectual output, but differences in each name” and frames this output is significant. To speak of the “Toronto school” is to see this work as a local approach to communication, suggesting that it was a faction within the larger, contemporaneous and mainly empirical study of communication. To speak of a “Canadian school” suggests something much more substantial, namely the founding, as Dieter Mersch describes, of a “general theory of media” or of the original introduction of “the term ‘media’ as it is used in cultural theory today.”
See the entire article on the Canadian School (pdf).
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The Multiversity and Learning on a Shoestring Budget
An excellent article has just appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement: “Cap and Gown Learning on a Shoestring Budget.”
It focuses on low- and no-cost educational options that are starting to emerge as Open Educational Resources are not only accumulate, but are organized into groups and programs, and are (only very gradually) associated with credentials.
One sentence in particular caught my attention:
“some businesses that reimburse employees’ tuition fees are also becoming interested in free- and low-cost online education providers. This could put more pressure on traditional universities to accept academic credits from outside sources…”
I would only qualify this compelling claim by saying that this would put more pressure on parts of the university that respond very directly to businesses that reimburse employees’ tuition fees. This would include a range of disciplines and programs, but only a part of what the university offers. Particularly affected would be professional graduate programs (e.g., business itself), but large parts would remain unaffected (e.g., the general BA).
It may be helpful to recall that Clark Kerr (Berkeley U’s president during the tumultuous ’60’s; pictured above trying to placate student protest) characterized the modern university as a “Multiversity.” This refers to a loose collection of communities or groups rather than a unity implied in the term university:
the community of the undergraduate and the community of the graduate; the community of the humanist, the community of the social scientist, and the community of the scientist; the communities of the professional schools; the community of all the nonacademic personnel; the community of the administrators.
The point is that the university is a conglomerate, not a monolith: some communities, some programs and functions cobbled together in an institution that has encompassed everything from agriculture to zymology are more vulnerable than others. The multiplicity of elements that the “Multiversity” implies is certain to continue to change, with some elements being more susceptible to alternative models of organization and accreditation than others.
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