E-Learning Myths & their Undoing

Dr. Norm FriesenCanada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices

Thompson Rivers Universitynfriesen@tru.ca

Thompson Rivers University Open Learning• 16,000 students a year • 52 degree, diploma and certificate programs • 400+ courses offered

Research

• Describes and demonstrates use of qualitative research methods in use of blogs, discussion, chatbots, manipulables

• From Peter Lang, Spring 2009

http://scott.tru.ca

Overview

Based on e-learning Myths:1. Technology drives Educational Change2. The Myth of the Knowledge Economy3. The Mind ≈ Computer Myth4. The Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime Myth5. The "Net Gen" Myth

Technology drives Educational Change

• Technology or technological change impact education

• Technology as a disruptive force• Laws of technological change:

– “tipping point”– “Moore’s Law”– “Kurzweil’s Law”

Technological Progress & Pedagogy

• Certain technologies “afford” certain pedagogies by virtue of their function

• Function conceived of in abstract terms:– “anywhere, anytime communication” as student

centred– Student “construction” in blogs and other online

contexts as facilitating a constructivist pedagogy

• Technical functions realized in specific contexts through negotiation

Encoded in Research Designs

Rogers’ "Dissemination of Innovation" Model:• Technology disseminated through a population• Technology as pre-given in its uses, design,

purposes, functions, etc.• technology as a kind of "unmoved mover,"

decisively influencing education from the outside• Adoption and resistance as the only responses• Implied values: "early adopters" "mainstream" or

"laggards."

Encoded in Research Designs

quasi-experimental designs that define technology as a treatment or control

• Measure its educational effects or outcomes• produces results deemed either controversial,

inconclusive or as “fatally flaw[ed]” (Bernard et. al. 2004; Russell, 1997

• In both cases, the question as to why we have the technologies we do, is unanswered, and unasked.

Technological Determinism

• technological determinism: “the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an ‘inevitable’ course.” Smith, 1994, p 38; also http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html

• “optimistic” hard determinism: “the advance of technology leads to a situation of inescapable necessity [with the future being] the outcome of many free choices and the realization of the dream of progress…”(Marx & Smith, 1994; xii).

Counter-Examples

• “progress” can sometimes fail, or be stopped dead in its tracks

• The persistence of the classroom as a site of educational practices

• The Web as being modified and adapted for education: WebCT or Moodle, Blogs & Wikis

• adaptation has occurred in a manner that seems to have had the end effect of reinforcing rather than disrupting many conventional educational practices and organizations.

Alternatives

• “Empower” users; place designers in dialogue• Focus on practices and practitioners (not

design, development) and the way they end up adapting the technology to their needs

• active end-user “domestication,” “taming,” or appropriation of the technology (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992; Pinch & Outershoon, 2004).

• Study technology design processes; “technology in the making” (ANT)

At the same time….

• It is important to recognize that technological designs and developments can bring their own agenda with them.

• E.g. Of the design of WebCT and Moodle tools, accounts and roles

Myth of the Knowledge Economy

• In what is coming to be called the “knowledge age,” the health and wealth of societies depends increasingly on their capacity to innovate. People in general, not just a specialized elite, need to work creatively with knowledge.

• “we must think of a developmental trajectory leading from the natural inquisitiveness of the young child to the disciplined creativity of the mature knowledge producer.” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003; 1370)

History of the K. Economy

• "knowledge-driven era... education is a life-long endeavor and may —only occasionally—be mediated by the traditional artifacts of our historical learning experiences” (Gandel et al, 2004, p. 73)

• Daniel Bell: Coming Post-Industrial Society (1973)• Identifies a shift: “from an industrial to a knowledge

economy…" (Gandel, et al, 2004, p. 42)• Intellectual technologies: "form a complex adaptive

system that is the foundation of the electronically mediated global economy"

Knowledge theory of value

• What “adds value;” what is the “value add” in products, designs, etc.?

• Used to be labour; now is knowledge• Just as labour was a productive force, now

knowledge is a productive force in the economy

School in the Post-Industrial Society• “The major problem for the post-

industrial society will be adequate numbers of trained persons of professional and technical caliber”

• “The needs for social planning...will require large numbers of persons trained in the social and biological sciences.”

• School becomes vitally important in the post-industrial society; but it is an industrial (or pre-industrial) institution

Problems with this Argument

• Knowledge is not just a productive force; it comes in may forms, and not all forms contribute to economic value.

• Economy is not just about knowledge; top areas of employment in 2014 are:1. hospitality, 2. health care,3. retail, then financial services and construction

We live in a knowledge and SERVICE economy

• This society, in which knowledge workers dominate, is in danger of a new class conflict: the conflict between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of people who will make their living through traditional ways, either by manual work, whether skilled or unskilled, or by services work, whether skilled or unskilled. (Drucker, 1994, p. 67)

• education must instead actively cultivate a range of skill sets germane to different economic fates.

• Knowledge is important to education, but is not just of one kind

Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime Myth

1997-2001: Confusing & Confused period in e-learning – millennial universalist claims

• e-learning was seen as "the next killer app" (Chambers, 1999)

• e-learning threatened to turn traditional campuses into "relics" (Drucker, 1997)

• "death of distance" (Cairncross, 2001)• prejudices like race and gender a thing of the past

(e.g., Ried, 1998).

Anywhere, Anytime: Post-2001

• International Digital divide: "anywhere" and "anytime" stop abruptly at the borders of the 30 "developed" member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (WSIS, 2005)

• Internal digitial divides, gaps in expertise and knowledge "are compounded by digital divides which in turn deepen existing social divides" (C.B.N.C., 2005, p. 7).

Anybody Post-2001• produce cybertypes that look remarkably like racial

and gender stereotypes" (Nakamura, 2002; pp. 5). • The Internet "propagates, disseminates, and

commodifies images of race and racism" (Nakamura, 2002, pp. 3).

• E.g. Male vs. female: – Female: "aligned orientation towards [other]

interlocutors" – Male: "adversarial orientation" (Herring, 2000).

Literal vs. Figurative

• Language of the Internet & Web are profoundly figurative, metaphorical in nature:

…navigate or maneuver across (or down or through) a superhighway, a teeming marketplace, a frontier, the vasty deep of cyberspace -- yet all the while situated physically in safe domestic or professional cubicles, tethered to the computer screen... (p. 20)

• Metaphorically anybody (id, identity), anyplace (cyberspace), anytime (realtime)

Figurative

Figurative

Being Addressed: Interpellation

• a policeman shouts "Hey, you there!" on the street.

• If you turn around to "answer" that call, you are "addressed" by that call

• you are be positioned: as a subject relative to the dominant system of beliefs or ideas regarding law and crime.

• Similar when we encounter emails, blog entries esp. advertisements on the Internet

• "Anyone, anywhere, anytime" invokes not only an abstract, default time and place – of consumption and production – but also kind of "default" person

Mind ≈ Computer Myth(& communication as information transmission)

Mind ≈ Computer

• information theory model

• "mind as computer"

Examples

• "transactions" (e.g. Garrison and Shale, 1990) and "interactions" between content, student and teacher (Moore, 1989; Anderson, Annand & Wark, 2005).

• descriptions of ICTs as "cognitive technologies" (Pea, 1985; Greeno, 1998), "cognitive tools" (Lajoie, 2000) or "mindtools" (Jonassen, et al, 1999)

Mind as Computer

• instruments that form a "partnership" with the learner to "share" "extend" and "amplify" her cognition (Jonassen, 2000).

• communicative and interactive forms between humans or with computers, become directly comparable or even subjected to an "equivalency theorem" or a "media equation" (Anderson, 2003; Anderson, Annand & Wark, 2005; Reeves & Nass, 1996).

• We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinemato-graphical kind. -Bergson, 1907

Fritz Kahn

• “Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture" --Edison, 1913

Dual Role for Technologies

1. They provide a way of understanding dynamics of thought, learning and communication;

2. They are also the means of choice for supporting, revealing, mirroring, or modeling these phenomena.

tautology: "To be effective, a tool for learning must closely parallel the learning process; and the computer, as an information processor, could hardly be better suited for this" (Kozma, 1987; 22).

Alternatives• "communication as transmission" could be replaced by

"communication as social action." • "speech act theory" (Austin, 1962), or "conversational

analysis" (Hutchby 2000) both of which highlight how we continuously "generate…commitments, through [both] speaking and listening" (Winograd & Flores, 1986).

• In the place of "mind as computer" and "thought as computation" one could consider possibilities provided by the constructivist notion of – "thought as dialogue" (e.g., Salgado & Hermans, 2005) –as a

conversation with a concrete or "generalized other" (Mead, 1934) – a wealth of paradigms and metaphors that escape the tautological

confines of technological metaphor.

“a non-cognitivist investigation of ‘mental’ phenomena”

1. "Investigate one or more of the topics associated with cognitive science by locating organized social settings in which these topics feature as perspicuous phenomena" (p. 228) In the case of e-learning, these topics can also include those designated by terms such as interactivity, problem solving, represen-tation, or augmentation.

From: Lynch and Bogen (2006), in: te Molder & Potter Conversation and Cognition. Cambridge UP

Lynch and Bogen (2006)

2. "Examine how the intelligibility of actions and expressions associated with these phenomena are bound to interactional, pragmatic and political contexts" (p. 228); and

3. "Treat assessments about what goes on in a speaker’s mind [or in the computer] as themselves part of the social interactional field of production." (2006; p. 228)

interactional, pragmatic intelligbility

• Alice: Hello?• Fred: Hello, Alice?• Alice: Hi, Fred.• Fred: Hi what are you doing. • Alice: Nothin what's up?• Fred: How about if I come

over for a while?• Alice: Great, I'd love to see

you.

• Ella: Hello, my name is Ella. Nice to meet you. Please tell me what name I should call you.

• Sandra: People call me Sandra

• Ella: Okay, I will call you "Sandra."

• Sandra: good =]• Ella: Really Sandra, but

there is more we need to discuss, right?

interactional, pragmatic intelligbility

• Ella: Really Sandra, but there is more we need to discuss, right?

• Sandra: sure • Ella: Okay with me also,

Sandra.• Sandra: okay• Ella: Thank you for being

agreeable.• Sandra: np• Ella: "No problem," is usually

good news, but maybe I need to consider what you say carefully.

• Fred: How about if I come over for a while?

• Alice: Great, I'd love to see you.

• Fred: Okay, I have a paper that needs typing.

interactional, pragmatic intelligbility

Examine in terms of conversational analysis:• "anchor point:" The juncture "at which they

start their actual chat 'business'" (ten Have, 2000)

• Conversation as acts: “business,” “work,” or “job,” involving finite “resources”

• Conversation as negotiation process –involving “interests” and an “agenda,” following a “trajectory”

Treat assessments of the mental as interactional, pragmatic

How is conversation “topicalized”?• "she didn’t keep your conversation, well it was not a

conversation at all"• "The conversation is very vague."• "It sort of ended the moment it started. There was

no sort of flow. It was just sort of more of a back and forth than anything."

• "…she’s not shown me the respect that I demand out of a conversation.“

• Ella in "computer land," not “much of a point [in] carrying on the conversation."

Assessments of the computational as interactional, pragmatic

• the mental is externalized to "the social interactional field of production:" – it is the nature of the conversation, not the mental states

of the interlocutor as important– Conversational work (unlike a game) is determined by

limitations and constraints constrained or limited. – Meaning and social action is “accomplished”: “"arrived at

out of a welter of possibilities for preemptive moves or claims, rather than a mechanical or automatic playing out of pre-scripted or automatic playing out of pre-scripted routines"

Conclusion

• Such "descriptions point to an alternative universe of embodied practices situated in historical and cultural circumstances"

• reveal a rich terrain for research in the profuse complexity and detail of interaction itself, rather than seeking answers in the figurative hall of mirrors presented by technical interpretations of the mind and corresponding technologies proposed for its enhancement.