Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

A long rambling excursion to start the new year

January 1, 2006 at 9:53 pm | In yulelogStories | 8 Comments

Maria tagged me for a “four things” meme, but I just can’t bring myself to follow up on it. I did start — yesterday — but then had to blow the computer up because something got hung. I was downloading a whole bunch of Stephen Downes’s audiocasts to my desktop (they’re MP3s), so that I could then drag & drop them into iTunes (yes, there’s a feed, but I was doing it this way). Something went funky while I was downloading them, and suddenly I couldn’t even open a terminal window: total colour wheel freeze. Had to unplug the iBook and take out the battery, and there went my unsaved scribble about the four movies I like, the four jobs I’ve had, the four things….

I’m no good at these games anyway. The notion of picking out four movies or four CDs as “favourites” seems absurd: tomorrow or 4 minutes from now, I might think of something I like better. Twenty years ago I didn’t like comedies as much as I do now, but that’s because I had a lot more navel-gazing leisure time for contemplating life-the-universe-and-everything type issues. That question (the four movies you could watch over and over again) did, however, take me back to Hanna Schygulla, and today I downloaded an MP3 interview with reading of Schygulla from Die Zeit. Tomorrow I’ll listen to it when I take my dog for a walk.

Yes, for my birthday I got an iPod mini (that’s last year’s version). I have become a pod-person, and I’m not at all sure I can live comfortably with this. Having missed out on the whole Walkman thing, I never did the mobile listening moves. Yesterday was my first experience of walking down the street while earbuds provided not an extension but an intension of my sensory self: dodging traffic, trying to pay attention to ambulance sirens, and watching in fascination as nearly half a dozen London Drugs employees raced on foot after a thief escaping on bicycle (he got away), trying to ensure that my dog’s 8-metre retractable lead wasn’t making anyone trip on the sidewalk, etc. All the while I listened to Stephen Downes’s nearly year old 2005 Northern Voice presentation, Community Blogging, which I found totally compelling (it’s a rant against The Long Tail (i.e., power laws), against tagging, against all this old hierarchical stuff that’s mutton dressed up for lamb by new technology). But it was like work, and not at all like a walk along the city streets. That silly sheep was suddenly neither fish nor fowl.

Incidentally, the earbuds are terribly painful in my shell-like ears and they don’t match my earrings at all. As a fashion statement, it’s like wearing stiletto heels (uncomfortable) with a knitted toque: doesn’t match.

One of Downes’s main objectives (I think) is breaking down hierarchies. I’ve listened to some of his other talks on e-learning, which are inspirational as well as infuriating. As a parent, as a former professor, as someone who struggled with the breakdown of the canon in art history, I sympathise with his agenda, but I also worry about how a body of knowledge still gets transmitted without being discombobulated to the point where it no longer is a body that I or some other expert in some other niche would recognise (the signature Downes question, oft-repeated in his talks is “Paris”: he asks the people in the room to think of Paris, and determines that no one has the same idea about it. It could be “Paris the capital of France,” it could be “Paris Hilton,” it could be “plaster of paris.” In every case, “Paris” is something that is constructed through connectivism (see here, too), and I’m totally in sympathy with that p.o.v. What do I do, however, if I want to construct for learners (plural) a body that is recognised as “Paris the capital of France,” a body I happen already to have an image of? This brings learning-and-education much more firmly into the realm of design, specifically product design. I’m thinking here in particular of Del Coates’s chapter, “Form and Information,” in his book Watches Tell More Than Time; also of course Donald Norman’s Things That Make Us Smart.). These questions cut across the disciplines, whether his (e-learning) or mine (formerly art history: how do you teach art history? as a linear history? thematically? what happens when you present cave paintings next to modernist abstraction? or Chinese ink paintings next to Dutch 17c landscapes? do you get a bunch of people making connections that are just stupid, because they’re missing all sorts of information from inbetween the two points in time and place from which each form derived? what is time? why should one teach something within the context of a narrative? who gets to speak/ create that narrative? isn’t that a political question? what does it mean to claim that the narrative has any kind of formal significance? does it at all, or is this too just a construct that upholds hierarchies that anyone in their right mind wants to call into question? Design and really good e-learning/ distributed education brings with it a focus on the individual (the individual learner), but we’re also still in world where teachers are asked to instruct entire groups (hence my emphasis, above, on learners, plural). Until we really can make the individual learner the focus, we’re stuck with most of these old industrial factory school problems. Big problems.

And so on. The title of this post wasn’t a joke: it really is a long rambling excursion. Did I mention my earrings yet?

And that’s at the metacognitive level. What about the (seemingly?) simpler level of, say, teaching cellular biology or organic chemistry, which after all is less a matter of interpretation (as art history is) and more a matter of understanding basic scientific concepts which aren’t “themes” or tropes? A theory about abstract painting is a theory about abstract painting, but an allele is an allele. DNA is DNA. A chemical equation has to balance, period. How do you break down the hierarchy of learning there? How is it really possible to get away from the “I-Teacher have some knowledge which I will transfer to You-Learner”? Where is it possible to draw the line and say, “well, the student/ learner who studies high school biology is mature enough to make certain decisions about her learning [the famous: "take learning into one's own hands, be an active learner"], but the student at the [fill in the blank: elementary, junior/middle school level, whatever] isn’t, and he must be led, like a horse, to water. We’ll figure out how to make him drink later.” Naturally, leading that student to “water” is plain silly, which helps account for the fact that teachers and their ministries (or departments in the US) are struggling mightily with nonsense like “no child left behind,” and various buzzword-type variations on “measuring” progress.

Think “outcomes,” for example: outcomes-based assessment is one of the latest hot topics in education. But Downes has a hilarious analogy how this, too, can just end up as mutton dressed for lamb. Say you decide to assess getting rid of all highway rules and regulations, based on outcomes. No more speed limits, no rules about which side of the road to drive on, nor what is allowed on highways, nothing. We’ll assess whether the new plan is working based on “outcomes.” Of course the outcomes come after the new situation has been experienced for some time — multiple road fatalities, lots of minor accidents, that sort of thing — which in turn will necessitate increased bureaucracy and policing to manage. You, the user-of-the-highway (or learner in the school) won’t benefit from this outcomes-based assessment because (a) it’ll be too late (you’ll already have been killed on the road, or missed learning a subject in school), and (b) you’ll have more “authority” to deal with than ever before (insurance companies figuring out how to deduct points from your “good driving” premium; education ministries figuring out how to punish schools and learners for not learning).

Anyway, this particular talk of Downes’s is especially interesting for those of us who blog because it’s all about blogging and “community,” and how and why the long tail is just another hierarchy, and why tagging doesn’t work as a true “folksonomy.” I’m not clued-in enough to understand all of Downes’s points, nor can I assess what he says about semantics, metadata, and other arcana (sometimes he seems wildly optimistic, other times less so), but, yikes, it sounded like there were some really upset people asking questions (shouting, actually) at the end. Fascinating.

n.b.: edited today (Jan.2/06) to add links for “The Long Tail” and added link to “power laws” — see comments) (Also, the Hanna Schygulla audio is of someone reading from her book, not an interview. The excerpt is fascinating: death is the leitmotiv, and there’s lots about dreams/ dreaming, and how an actor liberates herself from the “marionette-like existence” of acting through recording dreams, and about ageing. Quite good.)