Smelly Knowledge

Tomaz Lasic has an interesting post on teachers banned from contacting their students over online social networking sites in Queensland, Australia. I sympathize with his argument that education is an inherently social activity and that online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are ways to encourage this social mode of learning. I agree that “banning” much of anything (without first putting in place some guidelines) is probably not the best way to explore what the potentialities of something are, for better or for worse.

He does note the “other side,” however, that keeping kids safe from “online predators and abusers” (most of whom are not teachers) is very important. I think that positioning one’s argument against such an extreme is usually counterproductive.

In my view, there are much more immediate and subtle effects of using social networking sites to communicate with students, blurring the boundaries between “teacher” and “friend” and out-of-school and in-school learning. Reading Axel Brun’s commentary on Trying to Remain Faceless on Facebook and Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook (Dr. Brun hails, ironically, from Queensland) and Anton Steinpilz’s Thesis #3 in Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress are some takes on this idea. Not that I think that there shouldn’t be some overlap between “teacher” and “friend,” but it’s more complicated than Facebook makes it out to be.

But my argument can best be put by danah boyd, who warns us of a combination of technological utopianism and determinism which is so easy to slip into:

…[W]hen we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife. Take social network sites as an example. You use this for professional networking; teens use it to socialize with their peers. Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you’re polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.

Her post, some thoughts on technophilia, is not long, and well worth the read for anyone who is concerned about education, technology, and students. If educators are insistent on using online social networks–and there are some good reasons to do so–I wonder if following Axel Burns’ advice is the way to go, setting up a Ning, or better yet, a Moodle on the school network (if such an option is available), dedicated to the class or a specific project, maintaining stricter boundaries between school work (and yes, it is, in so many ways, work) and friendships.

I am making a big historical jump here (although not necessarily a philosophical or narrative jump), but I am now reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and found this paragraph in a section of the book where she lays out her distinctions between work and labor (concepts I will return to later):

Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and thought have more in common with each other than any of them has with work or labor. They themselves do not “produce,” bring forth anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things–into sayings, of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment and… the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. (emphasis added; Arendt, 1998, p. 95)

Most of the time, we think of students learning something new as opposed to learning as a process of recalling or remembering (as Socrates also viewed learning). This idea of learning something new places the teachings as subject to the learner rather than having any objective place in the world.

I have had in my mind a critique of the concept of “inquiry learning” in science for quite some time–or at least how it is often carried out–and Arendt’s writings have given me a language to express it. In inquiry learning, students are expected to discover anew what is already known, but the idea that it is already known is often forgotten: by the curriculum, by the teachers, and of course the students, who probably didn’t know it in the first place. It is tacitly assumed that through their own observations students will experience perturbation and their cognitive structures will reorder themselves to make sense of their observations.

The scientific principles and concepts that the students are supposed to be discovering or recovering are removed from the arc of history and are often denied their transformation into a tangible state. Extending Arendt’s theorizing (as I read it), whatever students do uncover through science inquiry runs the danger of becoming a fleeting intangible and forgettable “thought” rather than “patterns of thoughts or ideas.”

Please do not misread this–inquiry-based learning is a great strategy for developing curriculum and for teaching. It is important, however, to place such inquiry within a tangible context and allow for the reification of ideas and thoughts in inquiry. This means more than just placing these scientific principles within the world of concrete things and phenomena (in which inquiry-based learning excels), but also remembering that the principles themselves are found within a larger historical context of human understanding and making explicit that the students are remembering what has been taught before.

References:
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This past weekend, for the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, we packed up our family and went to the Negev Desert in the south of Israel. We spent several hours at the Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater), a really beautiful and dramatic part of the country. In Israel in general it is difficult to escape history, but especially so at the Makhtesh; just below the Visitor Center is an archaeology walk, with structures from the Iron and Bronze Ages. That is to say nothing of the evidence of the geologic time that can be found in the crater walls.

But this post actually has little to do with huge craters in the ground, but it does have something to do with history. Against this backdrop of a very concrete reminder of time, I read that Steve Hargadon will be interviewing Dennis Littky of Big Picture Learning as part of the Future of Education series. Intrigued, I went to Big Picture’s site and found a notice for an upcoming event they are sponsoring on “Disruptive Innovation” with the curious tagline “First Different, Then Better.”

I say curious because it seems to me–granted, there is very little information about the event itself–that educational change only for the sake of change (”First Different, Then Better”) is counter to what we would want for our schools and makes a number of assumptions about what we are changing away from, the nature of educational change itself, and what the ultimate goal of educational change looks like. I certainly don’t know much about Dennis Littky or his organization, and I am sure that they certainly have the best intentions in mind. I just worry about the unintended consequences of an educational change philosophy like this; we might end up somewhere that we don’t necessarily want to be (like, say, NCLB). However, since I’m reading some historical philosophy for my independent study, what might others say about this take on education? It should be noted for historical accuracy that when these thinkers did their thinking the modern conception of “education” did not exist. I also have to make a disclaimer that I am neither a philosopher nor a historian, but I will do my best to not rip these writings too far out of their historical contexts to learn from them for contemporary times.

The Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text of Hinduism, may seem an unlikely source here, but I was able to find this:

Action… is far inferior to the devotion of the mind. In that devotion seek shelter. Wretched are those whose motive to action is the fruit of action.

This statement is interesting in light of the concept of disruptive innovation, “whose motive to action,” it seems, “is the fruit of action.” Instead of action for its own sake, it seems that the Bhagavad Gita is counseling instead a mindful devotion to greater purposes. In education, can we define what those purposes might be?

Speaking of definitions, I will now jump to Greece. In Plato’s classic The Meno, Socrates is approached by a young man named Meno. Meno asks a deceptively simple question: does virtue come from teaching, from practice, or in some other way. Socrates response is also deceptive:

A sort of drought of wisdom has developed, and it seems that wisdom has left these parts for yours. At any rate, if you want to ask one of the people here such a question there’s no one who won’t laugh and say: ‘Well, stranger, perhaps you think I’m some specially favored person–I’d certainly need to be, to know whether virtue comes from teaching or in what way it does come–but in fact I’m so far from know whether it comes from teaching or not, that actually I don’t even know at all what virtue itself is!‘ And that’s the situation I’m in too, Meno. (emphasis added)

The Meno is a wonderfully rich and classic Socratic dialogue in which Socrates helps Meno develop a sense of virtue by asking questions. It is not an easy process, and Meno likens Socrates to the torpedo fish as Meno, who was so certain of his line of questioning and expecting a direct response, is stunned into a stupor of uncertainty. It is through this uncertainty–a disruption of certainty rather than a disruptive innovation–that both Meno and Socrates grow, plumbing the depths of their own knowledge as well as seeking out new limits to their understanding:

…we shall be better people… by supposing that one should enquire about things one doesn’t know, than if we suppose that when we don’t know things we can’t find them out eiter and needn’t search for them….

Note that this disruption and perplexity leads to inquiry into the nature and understanding of concepts and things and a consideration of their value and meaning. “First Different, Then Better” does produce a perturbation, but with little thought to the contingencies and consequences of this change; this would be little different than throwing a stone into still water and watching the ripples. We have no idea as to whether or not this is a “good” change for “good” reasons. My supposition, however, is that “disruptive innovation” assumes that change by its very nature is “good,” an assumption in dire need of a torpedo fish.

The last words belong to Confucius:

The Book of Songs says: ‘In hewing an axe handle, the pattern is not far off.’ Thus, when we take an axe handle in our hand to hew another axe handle and glance from one to the other, some still think the pattern is far off.

Here Confucius is referring to the idea that when making something new we need not look to some distant place, some place far off in the future. We can look at what we have already and learn from it. In the way that I am reading it, he is not saying that there is no room for any change, but instead we need to look at what we have for we may learn from it.

A “lessons learned” strategy to educational change seems to be one way mitigate change for the sake of change, but such a strategy usually draws upon a limited set of empirical research that point to efficiency or a particular definition of success and leave out the “why” and “what for.” Such research is important, nor am I advocating for a form of historical determinism, but such research is a small sliver compared to the collective inquiry and understanding built up over the course of human history.

A progressive and humanistic approach to education and educational change needs to be in dialogue with the long arc of the human narrative rather than working hard to slough it off. We need to be mindful of the wealth of human understanding throughout history and consider the meanings and value of where it is we want to go rather than just perturbate the system for the sake of change.

References:
Commins, S., & Linscott, R. N. (Eds.). (1947). From The Bhagavadgita: The Way to Purity. In Man and Spirit: The Speculative Philosophers, The World’s Great Thinkers (pp. 107-125). New York: Random House.
Confucius. (1947). The Wisdom of Confucius. In S. Commins & R. N. Linscott (Eds.), Man and Man: The Social Philosophers, The World’s Great Thinkers (pp. 321-355). New York: Random House.
Plato. (1994). The Meno. In J. M. Day (Ed.), J. M. Day (Tran.), Plato’s Meno, In Focus (pp. 35-72). London: Routledge.

If it just so happens that you have not cleared this blog from your RSS stream, this is not a mistake: after some consideration, I have decided to dust off and restart the Smelly Knowledge blog. If you just happen to stumble upon this for the first time, I bid you welcome.

I was once accused of being an “academic” — and over time, that prescient “Anymouse” became correct in their assumptions. I am now a third year doctoral student in the Curriculum and Instruction program in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College in the Science and Technology Education Program. For the 2009-2010 academic year, my wife was named a Mandel Jerusalem Fellow. We packed up our life, our house, and two children and are now living in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem, Israel.

While here in Israel for the fall semester, I am lucky enough to participate in an independent study with Dr. Dennis Shirley. He and I are treating this independent study as a way for me to expand my base in educational philosophy and social research. My hope is that I will become a part of the conversation around developing a humanistic approach to science and technology education and curriculum, so I will be reading through a good deal of work in philosophy and the human sciences. I am now using this blog–in part–to sort through what I am reading, and to develop a better conception of what a “humanistic approach to science and technology education and curriculum” actually means. I will be taking cues from James Donnelly and Glen Aikenhead, but I hope to infuse an approach with the works of the thinkers I am most interested in–such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Martin Buber, Erich Fromme, and Steven Jay Gould, among many others–as well as direct some more attention to technology in education.

I have little doubt that these thinkers could have foreseen the ways that science and technology have become a part of our society and our educational system, and most of these thinkers are not considered “educational thinkers” (even though most–if not all–wrote about education). Following the lead of the story of Isaac in Genesis, I will dig these wells and sources of wisdom anew, mining their depths and exploring their possibilities for these times. This is quite a fitting metaphor for a year in Jerusalem.

As luck would have it, we are renting our apartment from Professor Emeritus of Jewish Education Michael Rosenak. His shelves are full of wonderful books, so I will be drawing from his library for my independent study as well as the occasional foray into other areas. Of course, I will be interacting with more than books–I am setting up meetings with educational faculty members here in Israel, and my conversations with them will be part of this sense-making process.

Lastly, I will occasionally write a post about the balagan that is life in Israel. Israel rarely fails to surprise me despite the steady march of globalization and what some might call the inevitable rise of a “flat world.” Of course, these posts will be from an entirely American in Israel perspective rather than the studied emic perspective of an anthropologist. It is often frustrating, but almost always illuminating, as I negotiate the linguistic and cultural landscape. (I lived in Israel for two years about 10 years ago, but have lost much of my ability to speak Hebrew at a functional level–as of yet, my brain is just not operating in real time.)

or, How A Meme With A Reference To A Jew For Jesus Hip Hop Artist Reminded Me Of Dangerous Ideas

I don’t really remember how I got there, but I ended up at memepool, the brainchild of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and Jeff Smith. Posted on January 5th, 2006, was an entry which read:

The popularity of 50 Cent has given rise to spin-offs that range from Jewish Hip-Hop to 80s Pop mixups.

Hey, I’m always on the look out for more quality Jewish Hip Hop, so I followed the link to the website of Aviad Cohen, aka 50 Shekel (the shekel is the standard of currency in Israel, hence the connection to 50 Cent). His splash page looked earnestly Jewish, almost too much so. Clicking on the enter site link, it became quite obvious that Aviad-Cohen-50-Shekel is a Jew for Jesus. I don’t really want to get into a discussion on Jewish identity, and I have a fairly liberal perspective, but I have a distrust of proselytizing ministers who claim to have a direct mandate from God (and, by the way, ask for prayers and money to support his mission and to buy, among other things, a video iPod).

It seems very likely that pjammer didn’t even follow the “enter site” link. The photo of Aviad in a “Jesus/King of Kings” graphic tee or the link to Jesus-Is-Savior (”get schooled quick”) would have sent up a few red flags to even the most unknowledgeable goy.

To get on track with the underlying moral (as looking back at my writing, many of my posts have at least one), it seems that memepool is concerned with getting “memes” out, linking out to, being linked to. This is what I’d attribute to the Google Effect — with its relevence-based search ranking, using measures of link and traffic intensity — and it has had a measurable influence on the blogosphere (check out Francine’s 4 months of blogging… for a very nicely written and honest retrospective of blogging as a practice tightly intertwined with the ego).

What are memes, these things with which memepool is so concerned? A meme is defined by Wiktionary as, “a unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.” I had mentioned memes earlier in passing, without really delving much deeper. Jason Godesky of the Anthropik Network describes memetics with an example that just makes sense:

The term was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1978 classic, The Selfish Gene, where Dawkins ended with a discussion of humanity’s ability to adapt culturally. Cultural adaptation works many times faster than biological adaptation; a man can sew a sweater in far less time than it will take natural selection to make his great-great-grandchildren hairier. This cultural adaptation has given humanity an adaptiveness and evolutionary fitness rivaled in the animal kingdom only by cockroaches.

So we pass on memes because culture is adaptable in a more efficient and far-flung manner than biology (unless you’re a fruitfly). Most of the time, these memes are passed either laterally or down the generations tacitly through modeling. Unless one stops and thinks about it, the average person really doesn’t have a cogent reason for wearing sweaters in the winter (at least, we in New England wear sweaters in the winter — for now). Other memes are spread intentionally and explicitly, like those on memepool. While I have no evidence to back this up, it seems that the more explicit the meme in a time of relative stability, i.e., when adaptation doesn’t need to occur, the less likely the meme has to do with survival. Following this thought through, the explicit transmission of “junk memes” leads to an apparent trivialization of cultural adaptation.

If we consider the analogue of junk memes in DNA, junk genes mean that scientists don’t know what they do. The same could be said, really, for these junk memes.

For 2006’s World Question Center, The Edge posed, “What is your dangerous idea?” This question elicited some interesting responses, but the two I was drawn to the most were listed on pages 7 and 8. Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert wrote:

Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.

Similarly, physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis wrote,

I don’t share my most dangerous ideas. Ideas are the most powerful forces that we can unleash upon the world, and they should not be let loose without careful consideration of their consequences. Some ideas are dangerous because they are false, like an idea that one race of humans is more worthy that another, or that one religion has monopoly on the truth. False ideas like these spread like wildfire, and have caused immeasurable harm. They still do. Such false ideas should obviously not be spread or encouraged, but there are also plenty of trues idea that should not be spread: ideas about how to cause terror and pain and chaos, ideas of how to better convince people of things that are not true.

Incompletely and inaccurately labeling 50 Shekel as Jewish — rather than as a Jew for Jesus — probably isn’t going to start a war, cause widespread suffering, or the like; however, a seemingly innocuous meme has the potential to be dangerous in some yet unknown way. The danger will probably only be apparent in retrospect. So, in conclusion, isn’t it important to be mindful of the information and memes we explicitly pass on, and aware of its’ potential to bring about good as well as its’ potential to be dangerous?

If we aren’t mindful of this binary potentiality as memetic receivers and transmitters, as learners and teachers, someone else probably already is, and is willing to use this awareness not for the survival of the many, but for the benefit of the few.