The Place of Tech in Ed Tech

This is a follow-up, or another view relevant to my last post. George Siemens posted this goodbye to his involvement in Ed Tech because:

(E)ducational technology is not becoming more human; it is making the human a technology. Instead of improving teaching and learning, today’s technology re-writes teaching and learning to function according to a very narrow spectrum of single, de-contextualized skills. . . . (Ed Tech programs) require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click. So much of learning involves decision making, developing meta-cognitive skills, exploring, finding passion, taking peripheral paths. Automation treats the person as an object to which things are done. There is no reason to think, no reason to go through the valuable confusion process of learning, no need to be a human. Simply consume. Simply consume. Click and be knowledgeable.

2 pointsOne, this is partially the result of Tech without ontology and an appropriate teleology. There is no question that Ed Tech is more efficient at whatever it is doing, but without specifying an ontology, it’s really not possible to know what it is doing. This was an underlying problem with Behaviorism. Behaviors were being changed but without a framework that would clue you in to the “what”, “why” and to “what end”. This is why so much Ed Tech is no more than a more complex Skinnerian teaching machine.

Second point, Tech can be used as a more efficient substitute for a human in simple transactional interactions, (think ATMs, self-checkout lines or checking your flight status) but not in systems that are highly variable (Try getting software or customer support help from an automated system. It’s usually a disaster.) Simple decontextualized skill acquisition is an important part of education, but only a small part. Current Ed Tech is good for memorizing math facts, increasing reading levels or memorizing basic decontextualized domain facts, but the hope for education is for much more. Ed Tech is striving to do more, but here are 3 aspects where I believe Ed Tech is not near to being a substitute for a teacher:

  1. Fostering creativity. This is advanced language use (including math) to evaluate and synthesize knowledge and to reach new combinations, new uses and new ideas.
  2. Engaging in social practices. Most of what we do is not to just use knowledge, but to engage with practices that we share with other people, or as Wittgenstein put it; to engage in language games. These are things that even deep AI cannot come close to imitating.
  3. Develop meaningful networks and connections with other people. This may be the most important ability in the future and the only way it can be learned is in direct engagement with other people.

I believe that Technology can help in these areas, not as a substitute for teachers, but by fostering new affordances for teachers which is an intense pedagogical research project and will require new tech from what I’ve seen so far. As an example consider the text editor. Conceived as a replacement for hand writing or the typewriter, it allows new affordances like email, blog posts, spelling and grammar checking or language translation. All these things extend human capabilities, but cannot substitute for it. Ed Tech will require teachers to become more capable and knowledgable with advanced pedagogy and it will make teachers more efficient but only if it creates new affordances for teachers. It must recognizes and constitute a new pedagogical framework that centers on the teacher and the teacher student diode.

Workforce Development in the Robot Age

Changes are needed in education and one aspect is to develop the creative capacities of students including students at the post-secondary level. But, creativity can not just be a bolt on to an existing program. I think an approach is needed to see creativity as a part of wider social cultural activities and not just make it an isolated skill.

This was a very needed article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today: “Robot-Proof: How Colleges Can Keep People Relevant in the Workplace“.

This is a comment I made:

Great piece and concept, but there is a bit of a “build it and they will come” aspect. We act into a social cultural field and this field needs to change with education. First, creativity can only occur in a personnel context in which business is ready to accept it; to know what to do with it. Not addressing this just leaves students hanging while trying to exercise creativity. Second, creativity often needs a deep level of disciplinary or functional analysis, not just a surface level. A good example are design processes that get deep into the weeds to understand what is needed. Another example is Audrey Walter’s lament about the lack of appreciation for the history and theory of education by Ed Tech efforts:
“all around me, I see Skinnerism – click-for-immediate-feedback. People as pigeons. Zynga. Farmville. Gamification. But without the language and the theory and the history to say, “hey we recognized in the mid 1960s that this was a wretched path, one with all sorts of anti-democratic repercussions,” we’re not just making the same mistakes again, we’re actually engaging in reactionary practices – politically, pedagogically.”

Another critique I missed is the behavioral critique of big data that is implied by the author’s view that analysis will be the purvey of artificial intelligence. Analysis is necessary for creativity and this level of analysis is not part of robot capability.

What to Do about Testing: A Response to Audrey Waters

Audrey Waters posted about John Oliver’s takedown of testing and Pearson Ed.  She asks:

How do we seize the opportunity of all this media attention to the problems with standardized testing to do more than talk about testing?  . . . Can we articulate (a better alternative) now so that Pearson and other testing companies don’t replace the old model with simply a re-branded, repackaged one?

Samuel Messick was a Vice President and Distinguished Research Scientist at Educational Testing Services (ETS).  His was an authoritative voice on test validity advocating for restraint in the use of test scores, better and more in-depth interpretations of test score. the collection of multiple sources of information for making important decisions and for consideration of the consequences of test use.  I believe that much of his legacy has been ignored, co-opted, or argued away (even at ETS I suspect).  I’ll speculate on what would he advocate;

  • using more than one or two sources of information when making complex important decisions,
  • understanding the information in the context of a decision and considering the consequences of your testing practices.
  • I also suspect that I could argue with him for the consideration of the validity of testing practices with how it fit within an overall set of district practices.  (i.e. If a student fails, how do you respond?)

Technically Pearson may not be at fault for it is the district use of tests that is most problematic, but Pearson is at least implicit in not providing better guidance and for developing ways for districts  to collect other sources of information.  Eg. The value added model of teacher assessment needs many more sources of information and in fact does not really provide an assessable model of pedagogy, only largely discredited positivist assertions. The first step is to expose those who advocate positivist models of empiricism for which even analytic philosophers would no longer advocate.

Finally it necessary to look at the overall model of education which is still primarily built of a mechanistic metaphor with the student as a vessel to be filled.  The metaphor should be a biological organism adapting in an environment that is primarily social, networked and interactive.  When Pearson speaks of their “potential game-changer: performance tasks”, they are talking in this direction, but their really co-opting performance tasks within the old metaphor.  They have a long way to go.  We should expunge the mechanistic metaphor from educational leadership and assessment models.

The bottom line for Pearson

You may not be technically wrong in your assessments, but when your the brunt of a comedic takedown, you should really look at the consequences of your products use and attempt to deal with it.

The Goal of Edtech: Transparent, Tangible and Trustworthy

This post Lies at the intersection of 3 recent events:

  1. My intuition (and experience) on the need to make tech easy for teachers to adapt into practice
  2. A recent post by Jose Ferreira on Big Data and the Mathematics of Effectiveness and
  3. Comments of charter school educators I heard at the recent NYEdTech Meet up on 4-15

First, I believe that design should be an important factor in the coming ed tech revolution in educational practice.  Tech must be designed in 1 of 2 ways.  Either design it in a way that it can easily be adapted to existing practice (one comment at nyedtech was; “I don’t have 2 professional development days to learn a new computer program”.) or we should see a redesign of practice that is both relatively easy to implement and worth the effort.  I believe that real progress will require some type of redesign, but it has to fit the larger picture of what is needed in education as it evolves into a data intensive practice and it must make teacher’s work more productive.  Anything that increases the workload will not cut it.  My own take is in some version of the flipped classroom that involves adapted learning.  Lower level knowledge tasks are handled by technology and are linked to higher level skills that are more teacher intensive.

Data intensive technology is certainly the future of education, but as InBloom has highlighted, people are very sensitive about students data.  InBlooms CEO Iwan Streichenberger and Jose Ferreira both characterize this sensitivity as a misunderstanding, however this mischaracterizes and trivializes valid concerns.  For data to have meaning, it must be embedded in practice.  What critics of InBloom were mostly worried about were potential problem in practice.  The Reuters Article K-12 student database jazzes tech startups, spooks parents, Quotes Frank Catalano:

“The hype in the tech press is that education is an engineering problem that can be fixed by technology,” said Frank Catalano of Intrinsic Strategy, a consulting firm focused on education and technology. “To my mind, that’s a very naive and destructive view.”

Frank also recommends:

We need to pull back and think small, not big.  . . .  By precisely packaging and identifying what data is gathered, how it will be analyzed (or “mined”), and what result is anticipated, you remove the vague what-ifs. Everyone is then judging discrete products that can be understood, poked, prodded and dissected.  . . .  Transparent. Tangible. Aiming for trust. It’s not a perfect plan. But it sure as hell has got to be better than what’s happening now.

Finally there was a comment by Dr. Eric Tucker of the Brooklyn Lab School on the schools role in identity formulation.  This wasn’t highlighted in the wrap-up, but I think it deserves recognition that the impact of data should be conceived as a educational outcome, not the solution of an engineering problem.  Students are not widgets.  Nore are they data points.  We must not loose sight that we are building educated people and the core of that process is found in identity formulation.

Clarifying Concepts in Education and Pedagogy

This post is a preface to my post on Gergory Loewen’s hermeneutic pedagogy.

Much of the empirically based research in education seems fadish.  We must consider that the problem might originate in what Wittgenstein referred to as a conceptual confusion, based on a miss-understanding of how concepts relate to methodology.

‘The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.’   In the same way, using the techniques of  mathematical proof cannot solve the fundamental problems of mathematics.  In both cases we must turn back to a deep and sustained examination of the conceptual basis of each discipline. (Wittgenstein and Psychology)

In education today, what is it that we want students to learn, who do we want them to become and what pedagogy do we employ to those ends?  This question is at the conceptual core of education.  To this I have a 3 fold answer.

  1. We want to pass on to the next generation what it means to be a functional person in todays society.  To know the beauty possible in music, the complexity and competing claims in the development of democracy, the depth of self-understanding in Shakespeare, or the ability to evaluate scientific claims.  The beginning of these aims, the first steps, is to be found in the knowledge of facts, theories and disciplinary concepts and languages.  Skills in reading, in numeracy, and in using various discourses.  Histories, common narratives, and cultural traditions.  This is the goal of cultural transmission.  It is not the end, but understanding the culture into which we are immersed is the beginning of any educational journey.
  2. Second, we must do more than “parrot” this knowledge.  We must read not just for comprehension, but to interpret language in multiple way and to understand how it can be directed to different people.  We must have more that the ability to calculate, we must understand how numbers fit a purpose, whether it is making a budget, devising a mathematical proof or evaluating a statistical claim.  We must know more than historical narratives, we must know how they relate to ourselves and to others.  This is extending basic learning and making it function as practical knowledge.
  3. Finally, we must use this knowledge to carve out our own path.  To become the self-reflexive practitioners that are the creative innovators, collaborators, communicators and strategiers; able to solve the problems of  both today and tomorrow.

Once we are conceptually clear on the ontology our students, who we want them to be and to become, then it will be time to address the pedagogy.  How will we make it happen.  This is my corresponding pedagogy.

  1. Direct Instruction monitored for recall of basic facts and knowledge as well as the schema that allow us to efficiently categorize this knowledge base and retrieve it when needed.  (Including both the schematic conceptualizing and the technological scaffolding to enable us to access and find information when it is needed; i.e. Artificial Intelligence)
  2. Performance abilities and project methods that give us the opportunity to engage in practical activity using our knowledge and to be able to participate and be literate in disciplinary discourses.
  3. Opened Ended Projects involving complex problem identification and problem-solving.  The opportunity to demonstrate character and persistence.

 

Why Performance-based Education is Needed

We (have arrived) at a most surprising conclusion: . . . the things supposedly contained “in” (our inner lives) are not to be found “inside” us as individuals at all, but “in” the continuously unfolding relations occurring between ourselves and others (or an otherness), in our surroundings.  (We cannot) hide the contents of our inner lives wholly inside ourselves, for, Like it or not, we “display” them in the unfolding movement of our living out our lives, responsively, amongst others.  . . . we cannot but be immersed in it. (Quoting Wittgenstein) “Only in the Stream of thought and life do words [and our other activities] have meaning”. John Shotter, 1998, Social Construction as Social Poetics

Compare the activities of 2 students.

  • One studies a book, hears a lecture, and memorizes facts and theories of lead-base paint as an environmental hazard, before taking a test of recall.  This is educating the latent mind of a student.  But realistically, how long will this information be available?  How well prepared is that student to be a productive part of society?
  • A second student also studies this book, but is not concerned with recall, confident that the content exists in digital resources that act as a scaffold to their understanding and can be located whenever needed.  This students then participates in a peer discussion locating potential lead problems in their community and strategizing how this problem might be solved including additional research for resources through governmental and environmental organizations.  The students defends their activities and strategies orally and they include a record of the resources they used in devising and supporting their strategies.  They also documents their actions in a digitalized portfolio.  How well prepared is this student to participate in society, to understand this topic in depth and over time, and to be responsible to their peers and their teacher for their engagement and their actions?

This is the educational relevance of Wittgenstein’s preference for finding meaning through practice.  We have an idealized view of cognition, that our knowledge can be contextualized without contextualing cognitive skills.  Knowing something is a cognitive skill.  Being able to apply that knowledge within practice is also a cognitive skill, abet at a much higher functional level of cognition.  This higher functional level represents the difference between project-based learning with performance assessment and lower level pedagogy with recall-based standardized assessment.  Certainly the second student has emerged from this activity as a more capable, confident and engaged person.  This doe not mean that facts and theories are not important.  These types of things make up a significant portion of the discourse that students must have in order to engage each other, as well as the experts in this topic.  But until they have engage responsively with others in authentic situations, this higher level of cognition will not be fully developed and even the lower level knowledge will not be significantly understood.

Locating Performance in Pedagogy

Philosophy has a radical way of approaching and dealing with knowledge – for instance, it tries to overcome doctrines which do not question themselves and to compensate for the progressive drift of using and expanding knowledge only technically. Philosophy tries to understand the world . . ..  From: Lucian Ionel

As Lucian Ionel notes, this is an important part the philosophical method of Gregory Loewen’s Hermeneutic Pedagogy.  It’s yet another way of looking at the educational process and noticing what normally flys under the radar.  Loewen’s method seems to be categorizing pedagogy into three classes: Hexis, Praxis and Phronesis.  These 3, along with Episteme and Techne, form the intellectual foundation of Greek philosophical thought.  Episteme is concerned with aspects of knowledge and Techne is about craft or skills in production, both important, but Hexis, Praxis and Phronesis seem to make up the the core ideas of Loewen’s educational processes. I’m studying his approach and think that it might fit the direction of my recent thoughts about performance assessment.  This post is preliminary, about how my previous thought might map onto Loewen’s basic framework.

The specific analysis that Loewen pursues is decidedly Marxist and I do not share this approach.  For instance in Helix (introduced below) Loewen focuses on the reproduction of capitalist repression.  It’s true that current problems with inequality are an supported by the reproduction of a political economy, (see the Piketty discussion everywhere on the web these days), but I want to focus on the need for reproduction if we are to have any kind of culture.  We can discuss what should not be reproduced, but to stop reproduction would mean stopping culture itself.  Praxis also has a Marxist interpretation in Loewen and it has been a term with a substantial history in Critical Theory, but again, extension can be more than just a method for resistance.  Extension (as praxis) and phronesis (as wisdom) can be seen as the way in which culture remains a living and growing entity, able to adapt to current and future challenges.  Thus, I like Loewen’s analytic framework, I just disagree with it narrow NeoMarxist interpretation.  Indeed, it is possible that by extending this framework to approach all aspects of a complex and multifaceted culture based reality, it may be able to reflect back and re-approach it’s original intent from a more productive direction; though it is not my intention to pursue this.

Helix

I will key Helix as repetition and re-production.  It focuses on the passing of cultural knowledge.  In current educational practice, think of Helix as represent the standardized curriculums associated with No Child Left Behind and the Common Core.  These curriculum represent the basic knowledge that is expected by all citizens (re-production) and is (at least partially) achieved through memorization and direct instruction; pedagogy that is high in repetition.  Many current educational practices can be represented by Helix.

Praxis

Praxis, generally understood as practice,  here is keyed as extension.   Think of representing applied knowledge that expands and changes according to the contexts and needs of practice; the learning necessary for practical performance.  This is often considered learning transfer, but in the wake of social cultural learning theory I think of this as extending by adding new learning.  This is not emphasized in current educational practice.  You can see it in activities such as creative writing, service learning or project-based learning, but it is often conceived as an after thought, not as a core educational component.

There are 2 things that should be  included in praxis education to make it more of a core goal of educational practice.  First, at this level you still want to provide lots of structure to these activities and to link them to existing curriculum.  Educational scaffolding can be used as the glue that links the curriculum to the activity structure.  Secondly, bring measurement into these performance activities. Measurement is a core component to education practice.  The inability to satisfactorily measure performance-based practice hurts its standing.  This means development not only in educational practice, but also development in educational measurement.  Note – This does not mean standardized assessment as currently practiced.  See this post on Ontologically Responsible Assessment for more info.

Phronesis

Phronesis is often translated as practical wisdom and it is the second part of my take on performance-based learning.  This is what I consider to involved higher levels of cognitive learning as well as what is often considered character education.  This certainly includes the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, but broken down into more socially relevant skills that are more practice oriented and more socially oriented.  Bloom’s categories are overly individualistic and do not include socially interactive and practice relevant abilities that are becoming increasingly important for today’s workforce.  This is even more true of Bloom’s Affective and Psychomotor Domains which are more closely based on outdated behavioral theory.

Some of the qualities and cognitions to include are: problem identification and solving, creative thinking, situated strategic thinking, self-motivation, persistence, resilience, metacognition and self-directed learning, collaboration, effective situated communication and the ability to form strategic relationships.  For me this is similar to the Praxis level, but it is more open ended and with less structure and less dependence on specific curriculum.  At the praxis level, scaffolding was more knowledge based and emanated from standard curriculum.  At the Phronesis level, we’re moving toward a more skill and abilities foci.  Scaffolding at this level are more socially oriented and come from teachers or peers.

This Phronesis level asks a student to explore self-knowledge; not to just use knowledge in a technical sense, but also in a consciously creative and moral fashion.  This is Lucian Ionel quoting Loewen:

What is gained through this process is what we call self-knowledge: “Phronesis sees through the practicality of repetition and extension by seeing them as rationalizations for the world as it has been. In its subtle but forceful presence, the wisdom of reflective practice asks us to stand outside of the dominion of discourse, the caveat of custom, and move ourselves into the brightest human light of self-understanding anew.”

Where helix and praxis can be scripted (at least to a certain sense in praxis) phronesis is open-ended and reflexive.  It leads to process questions such as: Why is it this way; how have we arrived at this point?  What does or does not make sense here?  Can things be different?  How would you scale a new approach?

These skills and abilities are some of the most important personal qualities in personal success, but fall mostly outside of current educational practice.  They are not only the most difficult to measure, but measures tend to serve different purposes in the educational process.  The overall process is more relational and less mechanistic than at either the Helix or Praxis levels.  These measures must be concieved in more of a joint dialogical nature and less of an automated and behavioral fashion.  This does not mean that we give up on scientific objectivity or become less empirical in measurement.  But it does mean that we do not allow narrow definitions of empirical objectivity to constrict the construct we want to measure.  Narrow (and more traditional) measures represent the “doctrines which do not question themselves” and are the ones who fail “to compensate for the progressive drift of using and expanding knowledge only technically” which Ionel mentioned in the leading quote.

Let’s Bring a Level of Artistry to Building Forms of Digital Life

Matthias Melcher’s post on the digital humanities has got me thinking about extending the ideas from my post here that  referenced Lee Drutman’s ideas on the creativity of quants.

Let’s start with this John Shotter quote about Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge; ideas about how the world got to be the way it is now.

But now, many take seriously Foucault’s (1972: 49) claim that our task consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs . . . but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.

In many discussions the humanities and the sciences are structurally defined by how they differ from each other.  But step back; distance oneself to see the practice and form of life that normally escapes notice.  People engaged with educational discourses are shaping educational practices (forms of life) and students (their object) much as a painter shapes the forms on his or her canvas.  This is not to critique these practices, but to bring to our attention the artistry that is possible in creating all forms of life: not just painting and literature, but no less in educational practice, data science, or social science.  Also, as participants jointly engaging in these forms of life, let us also bring artistry to the objects of which they speak; us.

Here’s my main point: Data science is about to transform education.  It can take many different forms.  Will we take the notice and expend the effort to add a level of artistry in what we create, or will we blindly stumble through.  Can data be an architectural tool through which we create a more beautiful world.

Unpacking Ontologically Responsible Assessment

In this post I want to unpack the term Ontologically Responsible Assessment mentioned in this post

Why Develop an Ontology:

An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them.  . . .   There is no one correct way to model a domain— there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind .  Source

When people say that students need 21st Century skills, what they really mean is that they want to change their ontological commitments as to what students are, and to what they will become.  When we move from a mechanistic factory model of education to a dialogic networked model; we are really changing our ontological commitments from components in a machine to actors in a network.  Ontologies try to clarify questions about the nature of being and becoming a student in the context of educational practice.  I would add (to the typical information systems objectivist account) that an ontology in educational practice also involves recognizing that students are constituted by networked relationships and the various domain discourses within which they interact.  The main difference in this ontology is that (in contradistinction to most information systems ontologies) its organization is not hierarchal and behavioral, but rather contexted, networked and dialogic.  This doesn’t mean there is no place for hierarchal behavioral objectives, just that they no longer form the core of our educational goals.

Why Responsibility:

Depending on whether one believes that reality is objectively given or subjectively / collectively constituted, the understanding of responsibility will differ. This, in turn, has a serious impact on how individuals and collectives can or should use IS (Information Systems).  . . . Reality is thus not given and open to objective discovery but outcome of the intentional activity of perception and interpersonal communication. This means that the dimensions of responsibility must be discovered through communication. (Stahl, 2007 Available from Research Gate or Ontologies, Integrated Series in Information Systems Volume 14, 2007, pp 143-169)

Education can’t be conceived through objective behavioral description, rather, it is conceived in the context of conversational realities.  Students are not cogs in a machine, but are people and the conversational realities where we meet them involves commitments, requirements, privileges, and various other high level latent traits that defy easy objectification.  To be responsible is to jointly actualize an educational program.

What Do I mean by Assessment:

What is the purpose of educational assessment?  Wikipedia speaks about documenting knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs.  Merriam Webster talks about making judgements.  Edutopia talks about assessment as a mechanism for instruction.  I want to focus on another aspects that may seem technical, but I believe gets to the heart of the matter.

What is it that we measure are latent constructs for the most part.  As Michael Kane (2013) frames it:

Test scores are of interest because they are used to support claims that go beyond (often far beyond) the observed performances. We generally do not employ test scores simply to report how a test taker performed on certain tasks on a certain occasion and under certain conditions. Rather, the scores are used to support claims that a test taker has, for example, some level of achievement in some domain, some standing on a trait, or some probability of succeeding in an educational program or other activity. These claims are not generally self-evident and merit evaluation.  Validating the Interpretations and Uses of Test Scores

More than anything else, assessment, at its core, is the process of estimating a latent trait and making it visible.  It is the first step in the analytic process of drawing connections, but we can’t connect the dots until they are visible to us.  There are 2 people for whom this is of primary importance: the teacher and the student.  If we observe the educational practices that involve testing, these are often the last 2 stakeholders that are given consideration, but they should be the first.

Conclusion

This 3 fold understanding of educational assessment includes developing an ontology where assessment practices recognize a full account of the being and becoming of students.  It does not restrict our view to what is easily measured, but essentially meaningless in the bigger picture or final analysis.  Secondly, it is responsible in that assessment is linked to an expectation for engagement that goes beyond behavioral description to fully recognize the full complexity of that student engagement as a dialogic and networked individual.  And finally, it does not use data in a mechanistic fashion, but uses construct measurement to make their joint responsibilities and ontologies visible to teachers and students in everyday educational practice.

 

Instructionism, Constructionism and Connectivism: Epistomologies and Their Implied Pedagogies

Ryan2.0’s blog recently hosted a discussion on different pedagogies based on Instructionist, Constructionist and Connectivist  theories of learning.  I tend to see these differences on an epistemological / psychological / psychometrics level.  (I’m an educational psychologist, not a philosopher.)  I think this line of thinking is helpful for exploring some of my recent thoughts.

First a note; I resist labels on learning theories.  A consensus may be developing, but there are so many sub-positions that if you look at 100 constructivist positions, you’ll find 100 different takes (as evidenced by many of the comments on Ryan’s post).  I just find labels unsatisfying as points of reference for communication in learning theories at this time; they convey too little meaning to me.  Tell me what you don’t like about a learning theory; I probably don’t like it either.

What’s the Point

Ryan’s main point is that all of these pedagogical position are evident in current education practices and we should think in terms of “and” not “or”.  This fits with my own view that paradigm shifts should proceed by subsuming or at least accounting for the successful parts of the previous paradigm, while enabling teachers and scientists to move beyond problematic aspects of older theories.  To really understand these different theories, it will be good to see how pedagogy changes as we move from one to the next.  My post here looks at each one of these different theories in terms of epistemology / psychology / psychometrics, and than discuss a place where implied pedagogies are relevant to practice today.

Direct Instruction

I’m not familiar with instructivism per say, but it seems similar to direct instruction, a pedagogy that is associated with positivism / behaviorism.  Direct instruction often uses empirically based task analyses that are easy to measure and easy to employ.  Applied Behavioral Analysis is a specialized operant behavioral pedagogy that is a prime supporter of direct instruction.  Many, if not most classroom use direct instruction in some form today.  It seems like common sense and many teachers may not be aware of the underlying epistemology.

One prominent area where advanced uses of direct instruction is growing is in computer based adaptive learning like the Knewton platform. Students follow scripted instruction sequences. A student’s specific path within the script is determined by assessments that follow Item Response Theory (IRT) protocols.  The assessment estimates a student’s command of a latent trait and provides the next instruction that is appropriate for the assessed level of that trait.  The best feature of Adaptive learning systems is the efficiency in moving students through a large body of curriculum or in making leaps in skill levels like the improvement of reading levels.  Because it is also easy to measure, it’s possible to use advanced psychometric computer analyses.

Critiques of direct instruction can be similar to critiques of behaviorism in general.  Even though test developers are becoming more sophisticated in measuring complex constructs (eg. Common Core), the learning that results from direct instruction can still be seen as lacking in conceptual depth and in the ability to transfer to other knowledge domains.  It also doesn’t directly address many important higher level cognitive skills.

Constructivism

Enter constructivism.  I think of constructionism as beginning with Piaget’s learning through schema development.  Piaget’s individual constructive approach is expanded by social theorists and ends up with embodied theorists or in ideas similar to Wittgenstein’s; that knowledge and meaning are closely linked with how they are used.  Wittgenstein’s early work was similar to the work of logical positivists.  He eventually found that meaning in everyday activities is inherently circular and the only way to break out is not through precision, but to look for meaning in what people are doing and how they are using knowledge.  In some ways it’s like a return to behaviorism, but with a position that is more inline with hermeneutics than empiricism.

I recently saw a presentation of an instructional program (MakerState) based on the Maker / Hacker Space movement that functions much like a constructivist approach to education.

MakerState kids learn by doing, by creating, designing, experimenting, building…making. Our makers respond when challenged to think outside the box, to think creatively and critically, to collaborate with their peers, to problem solve, to innovate and even invent solutions to challenges they see around them.

This program can be founded on the same curriculum as that used in direct instruction when developing maker challenge activities and it can use this curriculum to scaffold maker activities with STEAM principles.  But the outcomes are open ended and outcome complexities are well beyond what is capable through direct instruction.  Learning by doing is more than just an aside.  Making knowledge concrete is actualizing it; taking it from the abstract to make it meaningful, valuable and productive.  But, is this the end of educational objectives; does success in life not require even more.

Connectivism

Enter Connectivism.  I associate connectivism with the work of  George Siemens and Stephen Downs.  I take this post from George as a good summary of Connectivism:

The big idea is that learning and knowledge are networked, not sequential and hierarchical.  . . . In the short term, hierarchical and structured models may still succeed. In the long term, and I’m thinking in terms of a decade or so, learning systems must be modelled on the attributes of networked information, reflect end user control, take advantage of connective/collective social activity, treat technical systems as co-sensemaking agents to human cognition, make use of data in automated and guided decision making, and serve the creative and innovation needs of a society (actually, human race) facing big problems.

I believe this take on Connectivism is modeled on computer and social media networks.  My own take is to include a more biological approach as another major node in connectivism: M.M. Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic known as a dialogic philosopher.  I want to draw this connection because dialogism is a reasonable way to make sense of everyday collective co-sensemaking activity by an organism interacting with its environment.  I see this as understanding the underlying way networks function when biological organisms (i.e., humans) are involved.

One of Bakhtin’s main ideas is heterglossia:

(A)ll languages (and knowledges) represent a distinct point of view on the world, characterized by its own meaning and values. In this view, language is “shot through with intentions and accents,” and thus there are no neutral words. Even the most unremarkable statement possesses a taste, whether of a profession, a party, a generation, a place or a time.  . . . Bakhtin goes on to discuss the interconnectedness of conversation. Even a simple dialogue, in his view, is full of quotations and references, often to a general “everyone says” or “I heard that..” Opinion and information are transmitted by way of reference to an indefinite, general source. By way of these references, humans selectively assimilate the discourse of others and make it their own.

Just as water is the medium that allows fish to swim, language is the medium that facilitates networks.  Rather than focus on words as the base unit, Bakhtin focusses on the utterance as his main unit of analysis.  This is from the main wikipedia Bakhtin article:

Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another… Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account…

I see this as a detailed account of the Wittgenstein use argument that I used earlier.  I take from a psych perspective: The inner psychological world reflects and models the interaction we have with the world.  Because learning is facilitated by social interaction with other people in dialogue, our mind is structured in a dialogical fashion.  This is to see knowledge as existing not only through network nodes, but nodes that reflect dialogue and inter-connected utterances. (This is similar to structuralism, but goes well beyond it in its implications.) Even when we are learning through self study we structure that study in a dialogical fashion.  When we engage in soliloquy, we posit a general other to which we address our words.  Transferring knowledge is not just cutting and pasting it to another node in the network.  We must also adjust to new intentions, new references, and often to the tastes of a new profession or discipline.  I don’t know what the neurological correlates are to dialogic activity, but cognition at a conscious level (and some aspects of unconscious levels), I see the mind as structured by its interaction with this complex social / speech world.

I don’t yet have a good example of pedagogy that reflects this dialogic connective theory.  It would certainly be activity based and structured more like an open-ended apprenticeship and some sort of performance.  I’m thinking that some relevant learning objectives would include: higher order cognition in unstructured situations (e.g. knowledge transfer, problem identification and solving, creative thinking, situated strategic thinking),  intrapersonal dispositions (e.g. motivation, persistence, resilience, and metacognition like self-directed learning) and interpersonal skills sets (e.g. collaboration, effective situated communication, relationship development).

I think a key to achieving a higher level of connective pedagogy is valid assessment in an area where assessment has proven difficult.  Assessment in this context must also be ontologically responsible to the student.  The purpose of ontologically responsible assessment is not to rank, rate, or judge either students or teachers.  That is a task for other assessments. Instead, ontologically responsible assessment is a way of making ourselves visible, both to ourselves and to others, in a joint student teacher activity that conveys the students history and future horizons.  (Horizon = A future that I can see only vaguely, but contains a reasonable route to achieve, given both the student’s and teacher’s  join commitment to each other and to the path.  Education as a doable, visible, committed and ontologically responsible joint activity by student and teacher.

TI’m neven satisfied with an ending, but this seems like a good jumping off point for another post and another time.  I feel the need for input before going further in this direction.