The right to be unproductive - PD, PLEs, etc

I have to say that I'm a little hyperactive at times, and get kind of guilty when I do things that don't achieve much. That said, social media has kind of made that worse. When faced with distracting noise or tasks I don't want to do, Facebook becomes filled with bright shiny things to take my attention off what I'm doing.

That said, productive time is not just time spent making stuff, marking stuff, doing stuff with a result. These things are part and parcel of anyone involved in productive vocations; outcomes are important. But how do we get better outcomes and personal flourishing? We need to invest in being unproductive.

I've decided that in many ways this year is about me: my professional development, my enjoyment, my interests. With an eye on work, of course there should be and is an alignment with my interests and development and my job role. More than that, I'm interested in flourishing rather than floundering at work. Thankfully my job as an educator means this is more than possible, even if there is the usual drudgery (think marking) to go through.

Developing oneself means taking time out of the grind, the usual rhythms of work to spend time not doing stuff (though see below). Having been to iMoot, an online conference on the Moodle LMS and related issues, I stopped marking, lecturing and reading content matter, and focused on pedagogy, tools, and other aspects of learning in an electronic environment (note nod to Moodleman, no elearning). Not every session I listened to gave me immediate takehomes, but so what? I've also done some MOOCs, and to be fair at times the link with any specific task I do may have been a bit tenuous.

My point is twofold. Firstly, to invest in what we do (and hopefully love), we need to stop focusing on it at times to learn new things. That's a simply pragmatic thing. Lifelong learning sometimes means stepping out of regular life for a bit. Conferences are not jollies then but necessary escapes (virtual or f2f). Secondly, not everything you experience will be either immediately or ever relevant to what you do. Why doesn't that matter?

Well firstly, somethings need time to peculate, to interact with other ideas and experiences until something emerges in a self-organizing sense as a new idea. Secondly, inspiration for what I do may come from something totally unrelated. Maybe it is the presenter or bloggers passion, inventiveness, or we simply get a random thought unrelated to what they've said (seemingly), but you simply had to be exposed to it in the first place, and reflect upon it later. Thirdly, unless you are God or Laplace's intelligence, how do you know ahead of time what will prove useful. The curse of being so output focused is that we forget that trial and error, and non-linear, wavy paths are what characterize real life, real progress. So enjoy wasting time, just be selective about how you plan to waste it.

Easter memes

Open education - or here I go again

Well here I go again. A number of people who read this blog are fellow students from E-learning and digital cultures, an excellent MOOC from Coursera. As an educator in an organization looking at making more of online learning and working for a government that wants to move to open government - why not do an online course on open education?

For h817open students, if you didn't do EDCMOOC, have a look over my past few posts to get a feel for my thinking (and as an ad for a MOOC well worth doing next time around).

I won't be doing every activity I don't think in my limited time with other MOOCs going on, writing projects and oh yes, my job. I will aim for the badges though (jealous of my son who is a cub scout lol).

Shallow learning comes from shallow experiences

I love memes, as anyone who saw my artifact for the Coursera MOOC, E-learning and Digital Cultures would have seen. This one which I didn't generate captures what is not uncommon in students in maths and physics. Post-exam, crammed formulas are forgotten over a few beers.

It seems to me then, and this is as much a reflection on my own teaching as anything, is that shallow learning comes from shallow experiences. You learn a formula, you plug numbers into it or worse still, follow some long and tedious derivation you have to repeat, and then forget it afterwards. So what would a deep experience of a formula be such that not all of the details would be forgotten?

Of course it depends upon the subject, but number plugging means nothing unless you understand what terms mean, where they come from, their limits and so on. What happens if I ignore this term? How can I scale it such that other terms become unimportant? Can I relate it physically to real problems?

In the end of course, memorizing most formula isn't the point, but recognizing them and using them well. Still, the cry of 'I've forgotten everything' has too often been said with pride. Learning outcomes
need to be such that students see the point of what they are studying (like I'm telling you anything new? and are engaged enough to recall some of it afterwards - wanting to study for more than the sake of passing the exam.

Human learners in a less than human world: EDCMOOC digital artefact

Human learners in a less than human world

I think, therefore I am
by: cloudcounter




I've been lucky enough to do three MOOCs, the E-learning and Digital Cultures, Introduction to Philosophy and Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. In a sense all three look at what it means to be human, how do we define ourselves, what is our significance, and how do we go about asking fundamental questions. In order to educate ourselves and others, it helps to understand who we are so we can understand how we learn.

The short video above illustrates the path we've taken since the reductionism of de Leplace, Newton and others, called the Galilean Spell by Stuart Kauffman in his book Reinventing the Sacred, led to the foundationalism and dualism of Rene Descartes. This eventually led us to posthumanism.

So we are on the MOOC bandwagon, the latest in e-learning. We've all experienced poor online learning in various contexts, content, content, content, test. It's too easy to do. But EDCMOOC at least has been different. With a massive course, learning can't be simply a matter of content dictated from a lecturer's notes to those of a student. While the philosophy and astrobiology courses have had traditional video lectures, EDCMOOC forced us to think by looking at various resources, and documenting these using various social media. The contrast is interesting. I enjoy seeing a human lecturers on video (though the zooming in and out in the philosophy lectures was annoying and pointless) - because I want human connection. Yet in EDCMOOC, using Facebook and Twitter (and comments via Blogger), there has also been a valueable human connection. We need to be social learners.

Of course, what it means to be a learner requires us to think about what it means to be human. Abandoning the Christian idea of the imago Dei or image of God means human is harder to define. Cartesian skepticism is just the start (though Descartes was a Christian - hence his dualism to rescue the soul from a clockwork universe). Are we just brains in a vat? Could we become so? Connected to the Matrix? Uploaded into a collective consciousness? To what extent are we human-machine hybrids already?

Technology runs the risk of destroying the relationships we have in the real world for online ones. Of course one may argue the cloud opens up opportunities we would not have already - this is true. MOOCs are better than nothing, even when pedagogy is largely lacking. Access is important, but so is connection. Our technology can connect us as human learners, but given much of our learning is for real life, real jobs, real relationships, it should never be disconnected from those. Meetup has been used by some in MOOCs to do just this. Here, we see technology building social connection where there is no other option.

It seems a lot of the posthuman/transhuman hype comes from some sort of intellectual elite who lack connection to the rest of the world, and are dissatisfied with the limitations of what it is to be human. Don't get me wrong, disease, premature death etc should be combated. But we are seeing the reaction to drugs in sport. People don't think every form of augmentation is good. Perhaps the frightening nature of the world and the direction in which it is headed force people into longing for a techno-heaven (that's uploading the brain, not the world's best dance party!)

Imagine never unplugging, seeing the world all of the time through electronically mediated eyes like some of the videos in the course (Day of Glass and Sight). While online gaming teaches some hand/eye skills, the ability to plan and think strategically, the disembodied state enlarges people's personalities at times in an unhelpful way. Trolling, spamming, mental infidelity, and in education, a lack of filtering and discernment skills, plagiarism and all of the symptoms of old school learning made more efficient and easier.

Of course the whole issue of what it means to be human is challenged on a number of levels. Aliens, animal intelligence, and whether or not computers could ever become conscious. Science Fiction deals with some of these themes, but it is worth remembering some of it is still very much fiction and experts argue about whether or not Robbie or Gumdrop are possible. Daleks and Cybermen who us that maybe some robots don't want to be human, even if Data does!

Being able to do online searches means that we outsource our memories. Of course books have done that for centuries, and art since people scratched marks on bones and crawled through darkened caves to draw their prey. But is Google making us stupid? Is there something valuable in retaining memory skills like times tables, memorizing poetry and other facts - to enrich our lives. Rote learning is anathema and should (except in cases of competency where certain things must be memorized for the job role), but there is also some pleasure in knowing where to go without a computer to help. Our learning too needs to be multisourced and multisensory, since this is how we work. Not just a screen but...

Of course, technology can provide us with multisensory experiences, and the best online learning should embrace sound, video, text, and of course active doing - as EDMOOC has done (indeed that's the point of this digital artifact, hence I 'made' some memes and the Xtranormal video). Note too our skeptical African is being left behind in a digital divide. Utopia must be all inclusive or else it is dystopia unavoidably.

Learning is doing, risking mistakes, honing the senses (I've been reading Think like Da Vinci by Michael Gelb, well worth it). Let's make the most of online learning and new technologies, but not accept them blindly in a way that warps, rather than simply augments our humanity and helps us to flourish.

Tech-worshipping rhetoric

As part of EDCMOOC, I've been glancing through the Technology Enhanced Learning (tel.ac.uk) report. It rests on a reasonably sound premise that since much of society uses technology, so education should prepare us for real world tasks. Further, it should do so with purpose built or designed technology for learning.

What bugged me however, in the desire to see this happen is the following quote (p7)

Computational thinking is a powerful and general way of exploring how systems and processes work, including societies, the spread of diseases, interacting technologies, and our own minds and bodies. As the world becomes more and more automated and digital, the language of computers needs to become the fluent second language of learners.

These kinds of new knowledge are the understandings required in the 21st century. We are living in a world of increasing interdependence and complexity. Science and maths underpin so much of everyday life yet too few people understand how they are done. Quite simply, this knowledge is currently owned by the 21st century digital priesthood – we have yet to democratise it. This knowledge is essential if we are to be productive and engaged citizens.

I'm often confused by the rhetoric of the democratization of knowledge when it is obtained in this case by hard work, personal giftedness and a solid application to formal and/or informal education. True, opportunity is also an issue - economic or social disadvantage, but that's not being critiqued here. Certainly more can be done in computer education, but to use the religious slur (perhaps highlighting the author's bigotry towards religion) of digital priesthood as if they were holding back knowledge deliberately goes a bit far. While programming skills can be taught simply, stating that knowledge should be democratized won't automatically make everyone smart enough to program a supercomputer, though it may help in other tasks, including using interfaces to get useful jobs done. You can lead horses to water but not everyone can drink to the same depth.

This idea of priesthood also ignores what I said earlier - those who understand made the effort to do so and may have been attracted to this because doing medicine or economics for the money didn't attract them, or they were brighter than those who'd rather pontificate about technology than have the ability to understand and use it.

In short, metaphors carry a world of meaning. It's religiously discriminatory for the author to use priesthood as a way of tarring people in a bad light, it's also possibly blaming the innocent for the crimes of others. Finally, using democracy to speak of technology is probably ill-placed. Equal access, yes. But I can't vote to be smart or talented or informed; I can, if given access, attempt to learn something so that I can be productive and engaged.

More than meat? Posthumanism

The readings and videos for E-learning and online culture MOOC (EDCMOOC) om post-humanism gelled nicely with the past couple of weeks in the Intro to Philosophy MOOC where we've been looking at epistemology and radical scepticism and then brains, minds and computers.

Ever since the decline of the view of humans as the imago Dei, the image of God, we've been struggling to see what defines us. Of course some of us still hold to this view, but nonetheless want to take seriously the complexities of culture, comparative biology, the effects of technology and so on.

Rene Descartes asked us to believe in dualism. Simply put, reductionism, the view that the explanatory arrow always points downwards, led to the idea that everything was just meat - we were meat. Not being able to tolerate this I suspect from as much the phenomenological point of view, let alone the theological statement of humans as imago Dei (image of God), posited dualism. Since dualism is widely rejected in philosophy, identity theory identifies mind states with physical states (either tokens - each mind state is identified with a brain state or types, each type of physical mental state is identified with types of physical states). This view is considered too simple by Hilary Putnam, suggesting it is too anthropocentric. Evolutionary convergence shows intelligence and consciousness (of sorts) has arisen in different mental architecture several times, and so platform independence of things like pain (i.e. different animals and potential aliens) feel pain but using different brains suggests that a functional view of mind is more useful.

The point of all of this? What does it mean to be human? Apart from God, it can be hard to pin down. Is humanity plastic because drugs can alter personality? Can we find drugs that not only enhance us physically, but morally as well? Nietzsche declared God is dead, postmodernism declared the author as dead; has neuroscience killed the human?

And now posthumanism? Given homo sapiens is the thinking ape (if thought it not an illusion) and a tool using ape (ok granted the Gombi chimps, we still do so to a much greater degree), haven't we always augmented our reality with speaks, axes, clothes, shelters, and then writing, art, mechanization, modern medicine and finally computing. So in all of this - is our humanity advanced (if it exists) or is it perverted? 

From the outset I want to assert that I believe in the imago Dei in humans, and therefore hold onto what some would call a pre-modern view of humans. I also see this as a functional ontology, and hence it is less about how we are human but what we are human for - and this is relationship to God, each other and to the created world around us. So if technology draws us away from God, it does not enhance what it means to be human. If it seeks to make us Godlike - quite apart from what I perceive of the blasphemy of such an assertion (tower of Babel anyone?), it is the ultimate act of hubris if not delusion (singularity delusions). If it doesn't draw people together (hence the week 3 articles for EDCMOOC on the human touch) then it subtracts from what it means to be human. And if it replaces (rather than providing a degree of protection such as housing, clothes and good meteorological science and technology does) our contact with nature/creation, it takes away from what it means to be human. There is already research to show that cutting down trees is bad for our health.

So genuinely posthuman technology means just that as we will be less than human, beyond all that we value. Technology in of itself doesn't do that - but somethings come with an ontology that steers us in that direction.