Discursive Learning

The Production of "Truth"

2009-11-10T06:14:00.000-08:00

Here's an article by Marcus Munafò and Jonathan Flint on how scientists end up publishing papers that does not represent truth, pressed by financial interests and the pressure to publish in prestigious journals.

An excerpt:

"Outright scientific fraud is rare, but less deviant behavior may be much more common. For example, researchers may run multiple statistical tests on their data: they keep analysing the results in slightly different ways (known as "data mining") until they get a P-value less than 0.05. This is tempting because it is much easier to get one's research published if the findings are "statistically significant" (i.e. the P-value is less than 0.05) – a phenomenon known as "publication bias".

With enough data, and by running enough statistical tests, it is easy enough to find a significant effect, given the probabilistic nature of the statistical methods used. And with enough people trying, this effect might even be found more than once, giving the appearance of replication. The problem is that the results almost certainly won't be true."

Preparing for a "better" tomorrow

2009-10-28T05:42:00.000-07:00

ICSE has decided not to listen to Kapil Sibal—they will go ahead with a board exam in Class 10 and award marks instead of grades. Essentially, no change. The board probably prefers to be transparent in their belief in competition, differentiation (bright/not so bright, lazy/hardworking, etc.), and “performance”-based rewards—all of these against a set criteria on which students have no control. After all, students are being schooled to believe that if they perform, compete, and live up to the pressures, they can be achievers. If not, what awaits them is shame and disappointment—or, the acceptance of a mediocre life.

Educational Reforms - a Matter of Opinion?

2009-09-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

The considerations that go into making a public policy, especially on education which does not have a quantifiable economic output, is a complex one. But most times reforms are driven by things that are obvious to the reformer or the social class that the reformer represents.

Reforms should first be justified by the need for reforms--although there could be multiple versions of needs as well as reforms, at least we need a ground from where to start. Here are some fundamental questions: What are the ills that are plaguing our school system (school system, yes--not necessarily education system)? Should schools assess students’ progress and if so how? Is the school system in tune with the changing times? Is it necessary for a school system to keep pace with the times and if so how? Do we need a school system to begin with? Considering we have the answers to all the above questions, on what basis do we address them? I have my answers, you have yours and reformers will have theirs. But these answers mean nothing if these are not supported by hard evidence (is there such a thing as hard evidence in the field of education?).

On the other hand, reforms are most often the product of certain belief systems. When you have a belief system, you only tend to look for evidences that support your beliefs. But these beliefs or ideologies (if that word has any meaning left in it) are always shrouded by the articulation of good intentions and the evocation of some universal values (and these sound quite impressive when expressed in public school accents on English news channels in India).

Very simply put, educational reforms end up being a matter of opinion--worse still, the opinion of a few people.

Gaps and Silences

2009-08-11T23:41:00.000-07:00

Gaps and silences are essential in a world beset by information proliferation. Our sense of self is spread too thin across Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Flickr. We are constantly contesting in a reality show, performing to an imagined virtual audience. Wisecracks, one-liners, personal existential statements which are of no significance to anyone else--anything for "five minutes of immortality". It’s the enduring charm of the published word, now played out as conversations in virtual space.

No wonder we consider simulations and games as high-value propositions today. It is not just because of their complexity or engagement factors but because they reflect contemporary life (where we've mastered the art of role-playing) far better than traditional media.

Writing dialogues for e-learning: The “typical” trap

2009-05-27T01:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a few e-learning writers ask me this question: What is the best way to figure out how “typical” Americans speak? My answer is “This is not the right question.”

Who is a typical American, or British or Indian? There is simply no answer to this question unless you want to open a cultural Pandora’s Box and insist on finding a mythical answer. You may find some commonalities in speech patterns in the people belonging to a certain community or living in a particular region or even a country. But try foisting these commonalities onto a “typical person” and what you get is someone who resembles no one. America and UK are countries with vast immigrant populations and none of these people speak like a “typical person”. In India we may not have many immigrants, but you cannot imagine someone from Andhra speaking like someone from Rajasthan (you may also find some things that are common). And it’s not just the difference in language (Telugu vs. Rajasthani) that I’m talking about but the differences in expression and the manner of speaking. Of course, this is not to say that everyone in a particular state speaks the same way.

You have the species (Homo sapiens), races, regions, nations, states, towns, residential areas, communities, sub-communities, families, educational institutions, factories, offices and real living individuals who belong to any of these spaces—who are different in many ways and common in some. So, instead of asking how a typical American, British or Indian speaks, we must start with figuring out our characters. What is her name? How does she look like? Where was she brought up (find the specific locality as opposed to just saying Bombay or New York)? What are some of her prejudices? How does she react when she is angry? Does she have any particular mannerism or an accent? What kind of humour appeals to her? Who does she hang out with? What is she likely to say in the context that you are building for your scenario?

A word of caution: Don’t just invent the answers to all of these questions (you can invent some but not all). The best way to do this is to spend at least a few days observing your target audience (assuming your characters resemble your target audience). But if you can’t do that, then the least you can do is to get answers to these questions from your client or from someone who’s been with them. If even this can’t be done, then go ahead and invent your characters using commonsense and imagination, and hope that your target audience will be able to relate to them! But by all means, avoid starting with the “typical” person.

Evangelical Positions

2009-04-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

An evangelist is not a seeker of truth. On the other hand, he considers himself the privileged possessor of truth. He will not engage with anyone from other camps as a partner but either as an enemy or an object of ridicule. A greater part of the history of colonialism, the cold war between America and the erstwhile USSR, and the rise of fascism are prime examples of evangelical positions and their consequences.

An evangelist often has nothing new to say—he is constantly packaging and repackaging the same arguments, the same rhetoric, and the same persuasions in order to convert (both enemy and friend) or decimate those who hold an opposite or different view.

Evangelists don’t come only from political and religious camps—there are Darwinian evangelists, intelligent design evangelists… even Web 2.0 evangelists. There is nothing wrong with having a conviction and better still supporting this conviction with evidences, proofs and logic. But that does not provide us the legitimacy to speak from a moral high ground when we engage with people who do not hold our convictions. Because a seeker of truth, however convinced he may be of a proposition, always leaves room for questioning the truths that he holds dear.

The least we can do is to be aware of the evangelist in ourselves.

Stories and Learning (Stories—Not Scenarios, Not Branched Simulations)

2009-02-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

If you judge learning through the lens of learning objectives and the measurement of behavioral outcomes, you might as well not depend on stories to aid learning. Stories move you. They make you think. They provide insights. They have high recall. However, emotions, thought and insight are ambiguous terms. And what you recall from a story are the things that moved you, that made you think, that laid bare some meanings. The recall is personal—not exactly what the “teacher” or “SME” wants. So, you can’t go back and tell your learners “That’s not what I meant at all. That’s not it, at all.”

Listening to or reading a story is not a passive exercise—the reader or the listener interacts with a story through the sheer act of interpretation even after the story has been told. For e-learning designers, interactivity mostly constitutes drag, click or text entry—and now game-play, collaboration and personalization. But that’s just a Web idea of interactivity. Interactivity also means interaction with characters, plot, theme, and ideas—without necessarily having to click on options and alter outcomes.

So, you can use stories to teach. But you can’t close their meanings.

The Sharpening Lines of Division

2009-01-27T01:29:00.000-08:00

Let’s face it: there are no equal opportunities in this world order. (In fact, there’s something wrong with the phrase “equal opportunities’; it should have been “equal access to opportunities.” But changing the phrase doesn’t solve the problem because there is no equal access either.) This is especially true when it comes to education. Opportunities are defined mostly by the fortunes or misfortunes of one’s birth. In India, it means that a poor child gets to go to a municipal school (regional language medium) with a high probability of an early dropout whereas a richer child gets to join a premium international school and from there goes on to study in any of the top Indian professional colleges or universities abroad. The middle classes, depending on where they are in the middle, choose between a government-aided English-medium private school and a private CBSE or ICSE school.

In the last 15 to 20 years, these lines of division have only become sharper (with a steady increase in the number of private schools) and no governmental policy has had any impact on bridging the divide. (The current Right to Education Bill has included 25% reservation in private schools for children from low income households; the bill has not yet been implemented.) As a result, the richer schools have managed to make poverty invisible inside school campuses. This is not just about reinforcing the class divide; it has more to do with shutting out the physical presence of poverty and replacing it with the glorification of charity. (Writing cheques for charity is a way of avoiding living in the presence of the “objects of charity”.)

A decade ago, state-funded schools, despite their deficiencies, enabled different economic and social classes to mix and learn from each other. These schools also placed more or less equal privilege on regional language—the language of local people and literature—and English—the language of commerce in today’s world order. However, today it is exclusive education (a stiff fee, posh infrastructure, teachers trained in the UK or the US, and little stress on regional language literature) that appeals more to the middle class parents, who as children most probably attended state-funded schools. Naturally, mainstream films, TV and the press are so interested in playing up these middle class aspirations that constructive debates around the growing divide are looked down up on as old fashioned debates of the 1970s.

Even the so called alternative schools that pride themselves on innovative curriculum and teaching methods have priced themselves so high that they too ensure that the vast majority of children from low income households are kept out of their premises.

Basic education is a right and not a commodity to be purchased. It’s not about making education accessible to all—it’s about ensuring access to well-trained teachers (who are capable of not only transmitting knowledge but who can also enable students to question what they learn), sound educational curriculum and content (which includes technology-supported learning), a decent infrastructure (clean toilets, working libraries, well-maintained playgrounds, and easy access to the Internet among others), a sensible student-teacher ratio, and access to a social network (school mates) that cuts across different economic classes. I’m not advocating the nationalization of all schools—variety in curriculum and teaching methods can make the field of education richer. However, providing variety in educational experiences is not an excuse to strengthen class divisions (the fee structure of elite schools automatically excludes the poorer sections of society).

Implementing 25% reservation in private schools for economically disadvantaged children will be a good start. However, all schools—be they private or government funded—need to address the issue of bridging the class divide and ensure that the field of education remains a level playing field. I know this sounds naïve in the absence of workable alternatives, but I believe that alternatives can only emerge if we start seeing education as part of the collective, public space and not just as a means for individual success stories.

Corporate E-learning Rules for 2009

2009-01-19T23:38:00.000-08:00

1. Don’t bring down your prices; rather, strip down your solutions.

2. Think about how stripped-down solutions can produce the right outcomes. (Therefore, innovation in 2009 will be about coming up with price-sensitive solutions that produce results.)

3. Focus on outcomes before thinking about formats (a multimedia game is only a format—the outcome is performance).

4. When you select formats and develop methodologies, focus more on workability than on packaging. (Packaging is a kind of mask. In times like these, we need more honesty and fewer masks. In fact, one of the reasons for the current crisis is the use of too many masks. Remember collateralized debt obligations (CDO)?)

5. Test your solutions and see if they work. What doesn’t work doesn’t have the right to exist. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that the money spent on learning produces the results that it is supposed to produce. If everyone in the learning profession had insisted on this aspect at all times, we wouldn’t have witnessed learning budgets being cut drastically even during lean times.

Computer Penetration in Schools in India

2009-01-19T02:07:00.000-08:00

“Despite India being an IT superpower, barely 14.25% schools have computers, with a huge gap between states. In Karnataka and Andhra—seats of big IT companies—only 11.44% and 13.46% schools, respectively, have computers. In Delhi, Chandigarh, Kerala and Puducherry, computers are available in 60%-70% schools. In Bihar, the figure is less than 1%, West Bengal 1.79% and UP 3.3%.”

As reported in The Times of India on Jan 16.

Shouldn’t educational technology professionals in India be talking something more fundamental than games and gadgets?

Plans, Challenges, Predictions

2009-01-05T05:05:00.000-08:00

Response to LCB's Big Question for the Month

Plan

Avoid going with the flow of trends. When a new trend or a new tool is being announced almost everyday, it is something to be skeptical about. So much has been written about the changing use of media and millennial preferences that we have probably failed to see what was really changing. Web 2.0 cannot wish away formal learning in the foreseeable future—the idea is to make learning richer using technology, not poorer. (It’s a poor strategy to play the wisdom of crowd against the wisdom of specialists—both have their place).

A question to think about: Why do people leave corporate jobs to join graduate programs when they could have just picked up those skills informally at the workplace?

Challenge

Finding answers to the following questions:

1. What are we in this profession for? Are we genuinely interested in helping people learn or are we just peddling our beliefs and pet fads as what constitute good learning? Or, is it just about sticking to the client brief even when we instinctively know it's an ineffective solution? If we are genuinely interested, how much do we push our clients to figure out whether people really learn from our solutions, how significant those learnings are for them, and whether they get to apply that learning at work?
2. Do we really matter as a profession? What happens if our kind disappears and we are not replaced?
3. At a very practical level, what impact will the R word have on us?

Prediction

Opportunities to sell learning will reduce. However, opportunities for learning will increase.

On Collaborative Learning

2008-12-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

Collaborative learning seems to be a much misunderstood term. This is my take on it: Collaborative learning is not about achieving mastery in a certain subject; it’s about learning to collaborate. The topic or project for learning is only the context within which collaboration takes place.

If learning is only about processing information related to a specific subject, retaining this information and being able to apply the principles of the subject in multiple contexts, then probably collaborative learning is a distraction. Because what you get in collaboration are multiple foci, active and passive players, relevant as well as non-relevant conversations, dominance and reaction, and the many things that group dynamics bring to the fore. Therefore, in a sense, even collaborative learning helps one process certain type of information, except that this information may not strictly be about the subject in question but about how each person in the group was approaching this subject in the presence of a group.

In short, the focus of collaborative learning is on collaboration rather than on “learning” in the brain science sense of the term. And because collaboration is a critical life skill, students will need repeated and spaced practice, context (which is provided by the learning topics and projects), practical application (instead of learning about collaboration in textbooks, collaborate in real situations), and a greater understanding of peer groups.

Watch that Hate

2008-12-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

The live TV coverage of the terror attacks on Mumbai that lasted from November 26 to 29 has exposed our children to the horrible face of real terror like never before—unlike the kind they see in cartoons and movies. Children are sensible enough to distinguish between fiction and reality. So we, as parents and educators, cannot avoid answering their questions on terror and the people who unleashed it. But we need to be careful with our answers and admit our lack of certainty, instead of getting caught in our own hate theories.

Emotions have been running high in this city. There is anger, frustration, fear and helplessness. In the process, you also see a lot of hate building up. Hatred towards politicians, towards a country, towards a community. But we need to watch this hate before we pass it on to our children and poison their impressionable minds.

When an event of this scale happens, our immediate response is to react against something. We want the government to act. Tighten our security measures. Do something. This is natural because we fear for our lives. And we want to bring the guilty to justice. That's why we have a government, which is supposed to act and protect the lives of its citizens and visitors. When a government or a system(meaning not just the ministers or the political class but the law enforcers, bureaucrats and other administrators involved in the affairs of the state and central government) fails to deliver, its citizens are usually left with only limited options—talk, write, complain, take out protest marches, express solidarity and hope someone will listen. While it is extremely important for us to react, we must also make an attempt to understand why all this is happening—not to excuse or justify terror, but to avoid jumping to conclusions, to avoid jingoism and communal hatred.

Things are magnified based on which area we focus our attention on. And truths are altered based on the prism we choose (or have access) to look at the world. So much depends on our birth and belonging and the various things that we have allowed ourselves to be influenced by. This is all the more reason for us to behave responsibly and not hand out our assumptions as certainties to our children.

The Public Space of Education

2008-07-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

Democracy is shaped by politics and public opinion. Our politicians don’t have PhDs in political science or public administration. A majority of our political columnists and correspondents are also not “academically qualified” to write on politics. But democracy has survived despite the lack of specialists to run the field of politics. This is because politics belongs to the public space. And debates in the public space are not directed by specialised educational qualifications but by ideological beliefs and leanings, commonsense and practical decision making, memory of events and interpretations, and the ability to read subtexts and make connections.

Education belongs to the public space, too. Because the most important aim of education is not just to provide students with knowledge and skills and make professionals and entrepreneurs out of them; it is to help shape responsible citizenship in a civil society. Education, like politics, has a role to play in reacting to terror, global tensions, deprivation, consumerism and depleting natural resources. And this debate cannot afford to be restricted to the boardroom of academics. We need more public participation to decide school curricula, to provide students with analytical tools that take human emotions into account and to let them know that puzzles far outnumber the answers that we know.

Digital natives and learning

2008-05-05T02:19:00.000-07:00

Response to LCB Big Question

As a learning designer based out of India, this question has very little relevance to me if I read it in the local context. Digital natives are a minority among a minority in this country. The greater responsibility of e-learning in a country like India is to help reach quality education to rural areas where there is a dearth of qualified teachers and classroom infrastructure. A majority of the youth and children in these places are not even digital immigrants. However, initiatives such as Akshaya in the small state of Kerala have shown that people who never used computers quickly adapt to technology when e-initiatives are rolled out with public participation.

As a learning designer who is involved in the design of learning solutions for an international audience, perhaps the question has some relevance. But isn’t the label—digital native—a little too singular and closed to club together a generation of learners? Except for some polemical arguments in favor of the need to design instruction differently for these learners, have there been any rigorous study conducted to see if these so called digital natives think and process information fundamentally differently from the previous generation? For example, my eight-year-old son is an avid gamer but is equally comfortable with books. While he loves his Harry Potter and Spiderman games, he gets quickly bored by the so-called educational games (agreed, these might be designed by “digital immigrants”).

I’m not arguing that we need to peddle old school education and training to the new generation, but we need to avoid being victims of hype and overgeneralization. My vote is for effective instruction and we all know that what is effective today need not be effective tomorrow. And maybe it makes more sense to leave the natives to figure out what is best for them. In the meantime, immigrants can prepare themselves for a native tomorrow.

Instructional Design: If, When and But

2008-02-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

Response to LCB's Big Question for February 2008

Learning can happen under any of these conditions:
1. Where someone else (the education board, teacher, parent, government, organization or market) decides what you should learn and expects certain defined learning/behavioral outcomes from you.
2. Where others decide what you should learn (at a minimum), but they leave it to you to decide how much you need to learn and how you should learn
3. Where you decide what you should learn and the means through which you learn

Instructional design can certainly help in the first instance and to a lesser extent in the second; however, it has no role to play in the third instance. There’s another angle to this: you as a learner in the second or third instance can decide to opt for an instructional unit that gets created as an output of the first instance (let’s a say, an online game on leadership development).

The purpose of ID

Instructional design, as I understand it, is about drawing out a plan for a learning event or program. This plan is supposed to be based on certain instructional principles that have been proven (under certain conditions) to provide maximum retention and retrieval of the content presented in the program/event for the learners. The plan, supposedly, works under these assumptions:

1. A set of measurable learning/performance outcomes have to be defined before you set about designing instruction
2. The way you measure the mastery of these outcomes will also be defined in advance
3. A set of ‘objective’ criteria can be defined to assess mastery (If critical thinking and creativity are to be measured, what objective criteria can we use?!)

Despite being strongly skeptical about the objectivity of such a plan, I believe that you can reasonably bring about certain desired learning/performance results by using strategies based on "empirically proven" ID guidelines. Examples include teaching children to add, training employees in an organization to follow a strictly defined process, and teaching hypertensive people to perform yoga in a certain way.

Programmed instruction or planned learning events (based on researched ID) have been shown to be effective in achieving defined outcomes (mainly retention and retrieval), especially for those who are learning something for the first time. If the instruction is mediated by an instructor or facilitator, the plan can be customized based on learner responses—in such cases, ID becomes live and iterative.

Thoughts on open ID

What I mean by open ID are schools of thought (constructivism, connectivism, etc.) that are opposed to the behaviorist/prescriptive school. However, constructivist ID is a descriptive theory and is more of an ideological stance than a prescriptive instructional design framework.

On the other hand, simulations, games and goal-based scenarios are strategies that can be used in prescriptive ID as well as in an open ID environment. The moment you want to direct learning to a defined outcome, you have already come in the way of learner discovery (because you want the learner to discover what you want him/her to discover—the freedom that you are granting him/her is the process through which this discovery happens). When you contrast this with a pure research environment, you will see that the outcomes of a learner’s research could be very different from what s/he set out to discover.

So, does that mean open ID could support a research environment or an environment where you learn without pre-defined outcomes as opposed to outcome driven learning? Perhaps.

ID for informal learning?!

Informal learning can certainly do without external ID—the learner becomes the designer and manager of his or her own learning environment and content:
· S/he has some broad idea of what s/he is looking for
· S/he chooses existing stuff or stumbles up on things or people at different levels of expertise by accident
· S/he expands/limits the scope of what she originally set out to find
· S/he arranges and rearranges the sequence in which s/he accesses content
· She decides the method of practice (if she needs practice)
· S/he goes on…

Probably, you need a new breed of learning professionals to support and optimize these environments. They could be IDs, but what they do in this context will be very different from what they were doing before. I’m not sure how many of the existing instructional designers will favor working the way Reuben Tozman has described next generation IDs in his December 2007 article in eLearning Guild. He says that future IDs need to stay away from content development and prepare themselves for helping learners (in pulling learning) access the materials they are looking for by classifying and describing content based on instructional design principles.

As always, the future is uncertain

Instructional design will find its relevance as long as formal learning or outcome driven learning survives (and as long as there are stakeholders who invest in creating training and education). However, in the e-learning space, it’s time for us to start reskilling because conventional e-learning has severe limitations and might not survive for long (while the audiences are getting savvier, e-learning has not really kept pace). The newer platforms (Web 2.0, 3.0, etc.) can certainly do without ID (motivated learners will figure out what to learn and they will learn in ways that we can’t even think of). And if immersive learning (simulations, games, etc.) is to take the “paid e-learning” centre stage, we won’t go far with generic ID skills alone—we need to develop specialized skills (such as systems thinking, mathematical modeling, and game/play design) to tackle the future.

Are aesthetic objects knowledge objects?

2008-02-01T04:33:00.000-08:00

Aesthetic objects (literature, fine arts, performing arts and films that are not exclusively used for the purpose of education) are both containers (the form of poetry, fiction, etc.) and contents of knowledge—mostly of the non-falsifiable variety.

Narratives or art objects do not empirically prove anything, but they “show” slices of life (events, emotions, periods, ideas, egos, behaviour), and provide readers or viewers with an experience that moves them or a lens through which they start seeing things differently. The debate about whether this experience is regressive or progressive can be left to the realms of moral philosophy and sociology. But if aesthetics is examined purely from the angle of knowledge production, it is quite possible that knowledge is produced not just as a distilled unit (the insights and convictions one draws from a novel or a play) of the aesthetic experience but in the experience itself.

If you ask Person A to jot down what she learned by looking at a work of art, she might jot down her experience in a couple of pages of prose. Now, if you give this piece of writing to Person B, will it have the same effect on that person as the art object had on Person A? My guess is that it will not. So, what does that mean? What you wanted was a recording of Person A’s experience. And what the person did was to translate the distilled unit of her experience into written language. In effect, she created another knowledge object which is quite distinct from the original art object. A single art object can thus give rise to an infinite number of knowledge objects (distilled units of experience). Looked at this way, the art object becomes an inexhaustible repository of (or a trigger for the creation of) knowledge objects.

But what about the untranslatable (“something moved me, but I don’t know how to express it in language”) experiences? How do we know if untranslatable experiences get recorded or not in our brains? Do they affect our behaviour or perceptions in a certain way? If they do, then the untranslatable part (which is probably the bulk of the aesthetic experience) achieves the status of knowledge.

Seven Statements on Knowledge

2008-01-23T06:09:00.000-08:00

1. Knowledge is what one knows.

2. Not all knowledge is articulated.

3. Only recorded or articulated knowledge can be accessed.

4. Three types of knowledge are possible: True Knowledge, False Knowledge, and Non-falsifiable Knowledge.

5. True knowledge is falsifiable; it is knowledge that has been empirically or logically proven to be true until now.

6. False knowledge is knowledge that has been empirically or logically proven to be false until now.

7. Non-falsifiable knowledge is that which can neither be proven true nor false, empirically or logically. (Examples include some fundamental assumptions of moral and political philosophy, literary and aesthetic theories, and other non-falsifiable beliefs, insights and opinions.)

What did I learn about learning in 2007?

2007-12-20T06:58:00.000-08:00

Response to Learning Circuits' Big Question for December

Nothing new...

A bit of tabula rasa—some inherited genes—people and environment—history, social structure and change—memory and neural pathways—apprehensions and compulsions—competition—freedom and responsibility—experiments with failure—hunger and lust—pursuit of pleasure—fear of deprivation, accidents, illness, old age and death—pride and insecurity—inequality—knowledge and power—fact and observation—hypotheses and research—thought—the prison house of language—

Deep Learning

2007-12-05T00:19:00.000-08:00

With 20-minute modules, racy scenarios, multiple-choice questions (branched or direct), scant text and big images dominating the e-learning landscape, is it possible for learners accessing these programs to learn anything in depth?

The dominant view in e-learning has always been to make learning easier and fun and never to make it difficult. However, to learn anything in depth is a struggle, because depth is acquired not just through retention but by attempting to get to the core of things and making associations between different types of knowledge. You achieve a certain degree of success as a learner when what seemed to you as complex in the beginning appears relatively clear. This is almost like an adventurer landing in a strange country and slowly working his way towards making it his own. In the beginning, everything seems strange—people, places, language and customs. Slowly, steadfastly he struggles with this “content” until he becomes a part of it. He doesn’t have the luxury of first learning the language, then the people, then the customs, and so on in well-chunked modules.

So is the case with deep learning. It means wading through a large volume of content (in whichever form—text, graphs, lectures or films), spending long hours distilling other people’s thoughts through interaction and reflection, and articulating these thoughts in one’s own terms. A self-paced e-learning program, even when it is a simulation, usually does not allow for any of these.

Interaction with ideas, real people, real things and uncertainty is key to deep learning. So, how can e-learning promote deep learning? Does the answer lie in asynchronous e-learning that makes use of all the elements of classroom instruction: lectures, discussions, assignments and projects? Or, is Google the answer? Or learning communities sharing links and conversation? Or, is the answer yet to come?

Can instruction be designed?

2007-06-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

It is easier to understand design in the context of designing an object—a car, for instance. Even a piece of abstract painting is an object; there are visible patterns and colours against a canvas. The frame has a certain size, the colours have a certain depth, and each line has a certain length and width. In this sense, a designed object is a “closed object”; however, it doesn’t mean that a “closed object” has a “closed meaning.”

Is it possible for a non-object such as instruction to be designed in such a fashion? Probably, when it comes to self-paced instructional content, such as textbooks or self-paced web-based instructional material, design acquires this meaning (because textbooks and WBTs are also objects). However, when it comes to instruction outside of “pure content delivery”, instruction acquires the nature of a conversation. Now, is it possible to design a live conversation?

Instruction has been in conversation with learning since time immemorial and it is probably inconsequential to ask which began first: instruction or learning. Both have been enriching each other through this conversation. Where there is no conversation, there is no instruction and no learning. In this conversation, learning encounters teaching (and vice versa); it modifies the content of teaching by rearticulating it in its own terms.

(It is important to note that this dialog is also linked to the multiple dialogs/observations of everyday moments: TV shows, newspaper headlines, a surprise question posed by a child at home, and so on.)

When a conversation becomes prescriptive

Most instructional design theories, however, tend to take on a prescriptive format. Here a dialogue with instruction is secondary (because instruction precedes learning and acquires an authoritarian truth value). Probably, it’s also to do with the fact that the word “design” itself denotes a certain objectification of the thing being designed (in this case, instruction).

In Reclaiming Instructional Design, David Merrill, says:

"Instructional design is a technology for the development of learning experiences and environments which promote the acquisition of specific knowledge and skill by students.
Instructional design is a technology which incorporates known and verified learning strategies into instructional experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective, and appealing.

While instruction takes place in a larger organizational context, the technology of instructional design is concerned only with the development of learning experiences and environments, not with the broader concerns of systemic change, organizational behavior, performance support, and other human resource problems.

Instruction involves directing students to appropriate learning activities; guiding students to appropriate knowledge; helping students rehearse, encode, and process information; monitoring student performance; and providing feedback as to the appropriateness of the student's learning activities and practice performance. Instructional design is the technology of creating learning experiences and learning environments which promote these instructional activities."

What we see here is an attempt to define instructional design as an “objective science,” and proper instruction as an act performed by an instructor who believes in the absolute certainty and truth of the content and method of delivering instruction. Merrill, in fact, reaffirms this position: “Those persons who claim that knowledge is founded on collaboration rather than empirical science, or who claim that all truth is relative, are not instructional designers.”

So, how do you design instruction?

Taking Merrill’s argument forward, an instructional designer needs to believe that the instructional content (knowledge/skills/attitude) s/he is designing is true (because truth is not relative). Then, s/he is faced with the task of making the acquisition of knowledge efficient and effective. In First Principles of Instruction, Merrill says that to facilitate learning effectively, the instruction/environment needs to:

· Engage learners in solving real world problems
· Activate existing knowledge as a foundation for new knowledge
· Demonstrate new knowledge to the learner
· Provide opportunities to the learner to apply new knowledge
· Provide opportunities to the learner to integrate new knowledge into the learner’s world

These points probably hold true when designing self-paced instruction under certain well-defined assumptions. However, this whole premise becomes contestable when you try to define knowledge (Merrill seems to equate knowledge with something as definite as a physical object: New knowledge is demonstrated).

Sample the following definitions of knowledge on the Web:

Cognition: the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Knowledge is the awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning (a posteriori), or through introspection (a priori). Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge

arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce state.
www.tecweb.org/eddevel/edtech/blooms.html

Organized or contextualised information which can be used to produce new meanings and generate new data.
www.christlinks.com/glossary2.html

... what the person knows.
www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/Intro.html

Of course, there is the traditional conception of knowledge as "justified true belief" and the famous Gettier problem that puts a logical spin on it with counter examples.

That said, I do agree that there are some forms of knowledge, such as 2 + 2 = 4, that will remain conceptually true forever. At the same time, one should also remember that not all knowledge can be categorized in the 2 + 2 = 4 mould.

Now, where does that leave us? Obviously, it doesn’t leave us without choices. In fact, it expands our understanding of the non-definable nature of knowledge; it makes us aware that we are forced to draw our limits if we have to (un)design instruction; it allows us to make our assumptions before designing and makes us aware that all of those assumptions may not hold true at all times. In the end, we know that we have to draw a line on the sand if we have to make a beginning.

Definitions and Differences

2007-03-25T23:50:00.000-07:00

Teacher
• A representative of the establishment responsible for imparting knowledge (the establishment would want imparted) and for omitting and modifying what should be omitted or modified
• Authority on a given subject
• Explicator/Guide
• Provocateur
• Interpreter of texts
• One who knows what to teach when and how

Learner
• The powerless receiver of knowledge
• The one who is empowered to receive knowledge
• The seeker of truth
• The one who has a selfish motive to learn (job, money, fame, power, desire to appear smart)
• The one who studies out of fear (failure, reprisal, displacement)
• Assimilator
• Critique/Rebel
• Disciple/Protégée

Facilitator
• The teacher who wants to learn/unlearn
• One who colludes with the establishment and works his power through invisible ways
• An expert trying to act as peer (dishonest display of modesty)
• Teacher as peer

Learners as Teachers
• The blind leading the blind
• A powerful opportunity for dominant learners
• The democratisation of knowledge/the decentralisation of authority
• The victory of amateurism over expertise/the withering away of teacher-learner divide
• Information as instruction

Learning
• Memory and forgetting
• Thinking and feeling
• Creation and destruction
• Experimentation, failure, and discovery

Teaching
• A top-down activity to impart knowledge
• A progressive profession that helps dispel myths and imparts knowledge to those who:
o Do not know
o Are beginning to know
o Think they know but really do not know
• A methodology that familiarises the “defamiliar” and defamiliarises the familiar.

Learning the Unknowns

2007-03-04T23:11:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, the learning and training “industries” have focused on delivering the “knowns” (what someone else already knows) to the learners. Instructional design and teaching methodologies (and now Web and multimedia in their many avatars) deal with “how” to present these “knowns” in an engaging way so that learners are motivated to learn and retain the information taught. However, despite this focus on the “past,” people have gone out and invented new things, wrote and talked about new ideas and models, and improved the quality of life in many different ways. (Let me edit out nuclear bombs and global warming!)

Is learning always condemned to knowing the known? Sample the stuff that has led to inventions, discoveries and innovations—adventures, chance accidents, struggles with possibilities, leaps of faith, irrational hypotheses… In many ways, these are all different facets of the never-ending quest for knowledge or learning—learning not just as processing of information, or as collaboration or networking, but as a search for the unknowns.

I’m not denying the contribution of academic research and corporate R&D—both being extensions of formal education—to incredible scientific developments and new product designs. However, in a world where what is innovative today can be passé the next day, formal research alone cannot provide us all the answers (not that we can have all the "answers"). How can innovation be democratized (from being the privilege of few to the pursuit by many)? What answers can the learning industry provide? In what way has the Internet and Web 2.0 enabled people to contribute to the innovation inventory? Is this even a thought worth pursuing?

A Question of Questions

2007-02-14T02:53:00.000-08:00

Response to LCB’s Big Question for February

According to Nyaya, an ancient Indian brahmanical school of philosophy (around 3rd century AD), one should undertake an enquiry based on the following principles:

1. Enquire only if you doubt the validity of what is being enquired into
2. Do not enquire if you are certain of the answers
3. Enquire only if there exist different understandings of the same aspect
4. Enquire only if there is a possibility of a certain outcome to the enquiry

In short, the aim of the enquiry is certain knowledge and with that the conclusion of the enquiry. If it’s impossible to arrive at certain knowledge, it is pointless to start the enquiry in the first place. Of course, this enquiry must contribute to the attaining of the “highest good” or liberation.
Because learning professionals can never be liberated (and could soon be an extinct species), we might need to flip some of these principles.

1. Ask questions whether or not you doubt the validity of the information you are seeking
2. Ask even if you are certain of the answers (you could be in for some surprises!)
3. Ask questions whether or not everyone believes in the same answers
4. Ask even when you are absolutely sure that you won’t have a clear or certain outcome to your enquiry

In short, the aim of your enquiry is uncertain knowledge and with that the further opening up of the enquiry. If it’s possible to arrive at certain knowledge, you are probably asking superficial questions. Of course, this enquiry will not liberate you from all ambiguity, but might provide just enough clarity to form your hypothesis and get cracking on your design.

Game vs. Play

2007-02-11T00:56:00.000-08:00

Social scientist Shiv Visvanathan makes an interesting distinction between game and play in his article, Alternative Futures, which appeared in the opinion page in The Times of India (dated Feb 10th):

“A game is a bounded, specific way of problem solving. Play is more cosmic and open-ended. Gods play, but man unfortunately is a gaming individual. A game has a predictable resolution, play may not. It allows for emergence, novelty, surprise.”

How does one create play in learning? To begin with, is it even conceivable to create it? Maybe it’s possible to set the ground for play and shift the power to the learner/user to play. Google (along with G-Talk, G-mail, You Tube, Blogger) is one such ground, Second Life is another.

Play is the way you learn from life while you use Game to learn in an organization or in an institution. (I’m using Play and Game more in a metaphorical sense than in a literal sense.) Why? Because Play is open ended, non-purposive, and endlessly interpretative, whereas Game is purposeful, focussed and driven towards an objective. I’m not saying that Play cannot be purposeful but a game certainly cannot be non-purposive. Maybe I’ll try to expand this line of thinking some other day.