Artichoke

Centralised aims through decentralised means

The "Centralised aims through decentralised means" thinking that captures me tonight, comes from George Siemen's Connectivism Blog post: Knowing before Doing?

Siemens' post was a catalyst for a recurrence of that Jaron Lanier induced “hive mind anxiety” and “meta meta meta site unease” that I had only just managed to narcotise and tie down with Bill, Tony and Bott’s help.

"New technology is still applied in traditional means – with the intent to manage, control, and direct activities or outcomes."

“Most individuals, however, have started to create a scattered identity and presence. I have pieces of my thoughts scattered across numerous articles, website, podcasts, and presentations. I don’t really want to join a CoP. I want the connection values of communities to be available to me in my own online space and presence. I imagine there will be disagreement here, but I think edubloggers have formed a community of practice. We dialogue (sometimes directly, but mostly with an awareness of others). We share resources, presentations. We offer opinions, reactions, and (for new bloggers) informal mentorship. The nice aspect of this community is the end-user control. I don’t have to go to anyone who owns my identity and my content. We still achieve centralized aims (dialogue about learning and technology), but we do so through decentralized means.”

Siemen's "Centralised aims through decentralised means" is such a powerful insight for edubloggers

But it wasn’t until I was re-reading Koestler (he is too dense to be understood fully on even the third reading) that I realised that all these centralised aims through decentralised means discussions could be blurred into the tension that has always existed between partness and wholeness

For example Koestler (1964 p286) could have been describing Siemen’s edu_bloggers and communities of practice when he wrote in The Act of Creation Koestler p287 

“… every member of a living organism or social body has the dual attributes of “wholeness” and partness.”

It acts as an autonomous, self governing whole on its own subordinate parts on lower levels of the organic or social hierarchy; but it is subservient to the co-ordinating centre on the next higher level. 

In other words edubloggers display both self assertive and participatory tendencies.

So according to Koestler’s analogy 

We are PART when we allow our online blog identity to become subservient to a LMS or a Community of Practice.

As a PART we will experience participatory emotions involving an expansion of consciousness.

Even though we retain a level of autonomy our impulses will be the impulses of muscular action – hit, run, mate, devour, kind of  emotions – and these will be experienced through hunger pain rage and fear.

Perhaps that’s why forums can experience turbulence and strife. Graham’s post on “Setting personal standards of self reflection” touches on this issue.

There’s been an interesting discussion over at the TALO group about another discussion in an EdNA forum that, to paraphrase Alex Hayes, has turned rancid.

We are WHOLE when we create a blog identity. 

As a WHOLE we will experience self asserting emotions involving a narrowing of consciousness. 

Our emotional behaviour will be internalised and visceral – and experienced through sensations of longing, worship, raptness, and aesthetic pleasure.

Dunno about this but as many bloggers are discovering,

Koestler’s aesthetic pleasure and the whole part-whole tension in blogging are perfectly captured when watching your Blog develop into a graph at WEB SITES AS GRAPHS 

Check out all the blog graphs on Websites as graphs on Flikr
 

Why we will struggle to enculturate the key competencies

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone," it means just what I  choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

For RoseG with apologies for its turgidity and turbidity: So what does the old argument over acculturation and enculturation look like when it escapes the confines of the breadbox?

The distinction between acculturation and enculturation is blurred, but for the purpose of  this post I define

acculturation as a process whereby a foreign culture is imposed – where there is a struggle  to maintain culture of origin whilst adopting new culture, and
enculturation as the process whereby an established culture teaches an individual its  accepted norms and values, so that the individual can become an accepted member of the  society and find their suitable role.

Both words are about the teaching and learning of accepted norms and values. Norms and  values like our soon to be introduced Key Competencies.

Key competencies are essential throughout life, for work and play. They are the capabilities  people need to live and to learn and to make a contribution as active members of their  communities.(MoE 2005)

I suspect that if our schools were really focused on developing “understanding” which could  be used to make meaning in new situations, rather than a Christo like obsession with "covering the curriculum" and all those "knotted handkerchief rememberings" to be recalled in tests, we’d have no need to talk about the  “how to do it” bit of inculcating the Key Competencies.

If our “learning environments” were already environments for “understanding” our MoE’s  rhetoric suggesting that

A rich learning environment, including co-curricular learning, will offer students many  opportunities to practise the key competencies, within and beyond the classroom.

… would not be so easily dismissed with incredulous eye rolling,  and Tui Beer Billboard mumblings of “rich learning environment  …Yeah right”.

We’d have no reason to fret over the pedagogical strategy used to teach norms and values  like the Key competencies, if we were already immersed in a classroom culture that espoused  and valued managing self, participating and contributing, thinking, relating to others,  using languages, symbols and text.

As any student will tell you our schools are not about preparing students to “live a  good life in a well functioning society” through the key competencies, and the current MoE  focus on introducing them is exposing this. As one student claimed this year, "how can schools be about developing student  understanding of “managing self”, when all they offer us at school is the “experience of being  managed by others”?"

The trouble is that our schools are generally not about developing “understanding” that can  be used at other times and places to explore other things.  Read Howard Gardner "Truth,  Beauty, and Goodness: Education for All Human Beings" for an outline of how schools might  do this. 

What our schools are about is listening and copying - Harpaz’s mimetic chain – where the  experts “copy” the world, the curriculum writers “copy” the experts, the teachers “copy” the  curriculum writers and the students “copy” the teachers. And how can we tell if our copy  copy copy approach is successful? We get students to repeat back every thing they can  remember. 

The arguments over the appropriateness of acculturation or enculturation approaches to the  Key competencies arise when we discuss methods of instructional design, and the learning  environments proposed for developing student understanding of the key competencies.  So many  suggested approaches reinforce conformity, imprinting, uncritical acceptance, and  indoctrination, reinforce the antithesis of the Key competencies.

For example, acculturation of the key competency thinking, through learning experiences  designed to force a student to adopt the norms of thinking using tools from a “thinking  toolbox”, differs from enculturation approaches to thinking, where students are allowed to  form and negotiate the norms and meanings of thinking in a “learning community” based on  developing “understanding”.

To assume that the first will cause students to adopt the norms  and values of the key competencies is risible, but to find a “learning environment” based on  developing “understanding” is difficult. 

Instructional strategies used in schools are commonly; Copy, copy, copy - Direct teaching,  Mould, mould, mould – Emulating and Unconscious adoption . This classification is useful in unpacking arguments about how schools might approach the  acquisition of both learning through ICT (those skills versus pedagogy Blu(e) Fairy  arguments with Botts), and cultural norms and values like the Key Competencies. 

Why do instructional strategies matter? They matter because learning through enculturation  must ensure the free establishment of values and dispositions, rather than the  imposition of values and disposition. It frightens me that enculturation in schools can too  easily become indoctrination. 

But in the case of the Key competencies, I would argue that regardless of the instructional strategy proposed, the existing institutional structures of schools mandate against their  successful enculturation.

I predict that the reality of the existing learning culture in schools will lead many of us  to choose to acculturate the Key competencies.  Enculturation would only reinforce Gatto’s  confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self esteem, and you can’t hide. 

Unfortunately or fortunately the futility of the task escapes us, I fear that it is going to  be like “student goal setting” all over again, only this time on a larger map, and that for  all our discussion and initiative acculturisation means we will ultimately only trivialise Key Competency norms  and values for students.

What gives me hope is that school is not the only opportunity students have for learning how to think,  manage self, participate and contribute, relating to others, and using languages, symbols  and texts.

An untapped resource or environment for enculturation of key competencies lies  in student gamer conversations.  The role of gaming be it Magic the Gathering Trading Cards  , or massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG)  represents an opportunity to  connect to the authentic student learning conversations, about game related key competency  dispositions, occurring every day in school, and out of school. 

As I have claimed before, when students are  interacting with others in a quest to accomplish complex goals, some of which may well  conflict with their own goals, these enculturating conversations do not stop at 3.10pm, they  are ongoing.

I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.

Arthur: You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.
Ford: Why, what did she tell you?
Arthur: I don't know, I didn't listen.

 

A response to Tony’s NEW ZEALAND VEGETABLE SLANDERS INSECTS
"Stop press. In a test case, the wasps are taking legal action against a vegetable. The bees are watching carefully the outcome."

Hi Tony, I have used Andrew Giger’s bee vision computer program to look at a  “hive mind” , you will have to excuse the grey scale distortions in the text …

Grandpa is going to be 90 next month, because of his dementia I believe that Grandpa is an individual example of a collaborative wiki. By his own admission he experiences simultaneous discourses, escapes the tyranny of consensus, holds multiple conflicting views simultaneously, and has a complex interplay of these many threads within one individual.

I asked him what advice he had that might be useful for a young person starting out on life. And then I tried to match what he identified as useful advice with the much valorised MoE Key Competencies …“They are the capabilities people need to live and to learn and to make a contribution as active members of their communities.”( MoE 2005)

Don’t know if I have matched the quotes up correctly, some seem to fit across several competencies, but here goes …

Participating and contributing

I never knew how few rights I had once war started. I can’t say this word its most important. I didn’t know if anyone had any personal rights but we didn’t.  We got sent on things that no one wanted to do and you might survive or you might not - if I didn’t they might have sent my mum a postcard, they might not have,

I hate to be right on this but I’m sure before I die  I will see the take over of somewhere else in the world by someone else, they’ll be promising everyone “all these things are yours go out and take them”. That name, those false promises controls these boys future. They can’t hear this I know … I am a moaning old bastard.

Managing self

The war wasn’t arranged for me to enjoy I was just there at the time, filling in time.

I started the war, ….  Well I was in the outskirts of London in a Morris Minor car or a Vauxhall , they are the same thing actually, well not the same but it makes no difference.  I had in my car a young boy and his wife, and their first offspring David, sitting in between ….  the first civil defence sirens  were going off.  ….. What I found out later was the start of the war was when I lost all control over my life. ….

I found out the stupidest thing in life is to put your hand up and volunteer for something.  

Thinking

Don’t get yourself tied into someone else’s ideas, keep your own ideas.

If you asked her to do it J who is so faithful would try and get it there on time, but D who may not have any brains at all but reads all the writing on the box, finds out by using that soap powder all our washing machines would be fouled up , and she wont do it. You need your own ideas.

The worst thing is to be so firmly convinced you are right, that you don’t think of anything else.

It is easy, they just tell everyone they have to get an anti histamine injection. They buy into it and quote it as a part of life.  I have to tell you the things I would tell you to do, you may hate the idea, the knowledge that these things happen … don’t be persuaded by other people.

Relating to others

I’m an offspring of what is determined as a working class family. Deemed very important socially but not what is actually important in life.

Have the prescribed amount of children for your group.

I got a postcard from the Queen, you go into any committee room and you say “Gentlemen The Queen”, and they all stiffen up and salute. You never know who the Queen was, she could be anyone, that’s the strength of women.  You could never light up a cigar.

Using languages, symbols and text

I never knew about the number.  I was never allowed to be 100 because that is too nice a number to give to the working classes.  I am only allowed to be ninety.

I got a certificate of merit that praises me in my engineering hand skill that I would `be so useful to them when they sat in their offices smoking a cigar whilst I with my engineering handskill, I would be bashing a working classes hammer and chisel.

Hey that’s me Bombay fever called something else … I’ve got a piece of paper with all my inoculations on it from the Middle East. I was surprised by it, I wouldn’t be impressed if I saw someone else with it. All these pin pricks, they never knew if they would even work. Somewhere I’ve got a pamphlet with all these different drugs we were injected with for the benefit of the British Government.

When I first arrived in the Middle East we lived in tents ….The tents were farther north in Iraq then, a separately totally different way of life.   I was in the air force, how did that happen?  If you don’t sign too many papers then you don’t get in anything. You can end up anywhere.  Nobody knows where you are supposed to be, you slip through the rules and are free.  Now they ask you to go to Maungawhau School and sign a paper to get voting rights, and everyone goes and signs

There is no great push in any of Grandpa's advice to adopt “group think” or the “hive mind”. 

He seems to argue against the “ruling class elite”, but he doesn’t want to replace it with another elite, a hive mind “elite”, instead he argues for the importance of individual thought.

Can we protect both the vegetable and the bees and keep the significance of individual thought within the hive mind metaphor?

Rushkoff argues quite reasonably

“Indeed, having faith in the beneficence of the collective is as unpredictable as having blind faith in God or a dictator. A poorly developed group mind might well decide any one of us is a threat to the mother organism deserving of immediate expulsion.”

But he keeps a jointed leg or three in both camps with this insight

“Kevin's overburdened "hive mind" metaphor notwithstanding, a networked collaboration is not an absolutely level playing field inhabited by drones. It is an ecology of interdependencies. Take a look at any of these online functioning collective intelligences — from eBay to Slashdot — and you'll soon get a sense of who has gained status and influence. And in most cases, these reputations have been won through a process much closer to meritocracy, and through a fairer set of filters, than the ones through which we earn our graduate degrees.”

"An awareness of things that appear to be nothing"

Am thinking about Bill's challenge to see Grandpa and technology as “variants of an evolutionary process”

Whilst others use technology to inhabit the virtual reality of mmorpg online worlds and  Centre4 e Learning communities I spend my Sundays immersed in Grandpa’s virtual reality, where the only technology used is to brew a cup of tea and reheat the pea and ham soup.

There are many parallels.  Grandpa describes living with dementia as being “lost in a  turmoil of bodily wilderness”, where “thinking that you are following a map is what counts, not the reality of the map itself.” An idea that I warm to immediately in the context of many of the initiatives I embrace in teaching and learning.

Grandpa and I share many moments of whimsy and insight on Sundays, where we laugh ‘till we cry, and cry  ‘till we laugh. Today was 80 years ago and he was “coarse fishing” in the River Thames with  his dad, this took me to Westbourne Park Station, and for a walk along a river path to  Staines. I learned about lighter rods with reels and 18 foot bamboo poles bound with  coloured cotton threads. That nothing tastes so good as fat laden pork and ham sandwiches  and a thermos of sugary tea. I discovered “swan upping” (which I didn’t believe) and the  advantages of sleeping on the river bank with “your head to the wind”.  And that to a 89  year old going on 10 catching fish isn’t as interesting as the mechanics of the knots and  the construction of the rod and reel.

Then I learned how to identify the difference between rudd, dace, perch, chub, roach and  eels and that the choice of maggot, redworms, cheese or rudd as bait wasn’t anything as  important as “an awareness of things that appear to be nothing” like wind, shadow, current, and  temperature.

I am made curious after my Sundays in Grandpa’s world and often Google my new learning when I get home.  Today’s Google search has me immersed in old paintings of the rudd with its  overshot jaw, the bluey green dented dace, the weirdly convex fins of the chub and the olive  green perch flashing vivid red fins. I look up the current record catch for a chub in the  River Thames and compare it with grandpa’s prize catch and puzzle over whether it is the  contraceptives hormones in the pee discharged in the river water that keep the  chub increasing in size or something else altogether. And then I check out “swan upping” which I didn’t believe at all – especially as when I expressed my disbelief Grandpa  promptly claimed” you can always make something true by adding a word or two” and included in his account an impressive array of Dukes, Earls, Viscounts, and Barons who were noted “swan  upperers” and he wildly claims close and personal friends of his.

Both pondering with Grandpa, and pondering with technology fit neatly with 

• MacMillan’s collaborative authorship “meddler” metaphor for learning process, with
• Tony’s “giant sandpit or constructor set where kids ability to create is only limited by  their imagination” metaphor and with
• Bill’s “microworlds” for immersion metaphor   

But can, as Bill claims, Grandpa and technology be represented as merely variants of an  evolutionary process?

I can easily see how they can be variants in a learning process.  For example McWilliam 2005 writes about the rhizomal learning networks established with co-creation as non-linear, they  can bypass or exclude learning nodes which prove to be ineffective.  The co-creation  learning networks process can bypass Grandpa when his account seems to lack veracity, bypass  a website when it misrepresents the perch, and bypass a teacher who does not add value,  altogether. 

Learning how to deal with an “ineffective node” is essential in “learning how to learn” and  bypassing an ineffective node is a strategy made for ICT. E.g Students can bypass ineffective nodes using social networking Web 2.0 communication software to collaborate over the  network to acquire, to record, to manipulate, to store, to create, and to distribute  “information surfaces”. They bypass when they interact in complex communal learning networks and communicate  synchronously and asynchronously through peer-to-peer internet telephone networks like  Skype, SMS text, instant messaging like msn, email, telephone, MyPlace, and f2f etc etc etc

BUT is immediately obvious that although I can recall “bait used and the species caught”  examples of learning process I lack “an awareness of things that appear to be nothing” when it comes to technology and learning.

This reminds me of the challenge that cj provided earlier this year with his question about What “is the “L”  word?” 

I will have to do some significant thinking about the comments Tony and Bill have provided  in the “Umm … meddler in the middle?” post, before I can begin to understand the meaning of  “What is technology?” and then understand how Grandpa and technology can be “variants of an evolutionary process”.

Ummm ... the meddler in the middle?

Brain: It proved that radio was a powerful tool. And now, Pinky, the advance of technology  has brought us an even more powerful tool. Do you know what that is?
Pinky: Ummm... the rubber band?

Bott’s asks an interesting question in trying to rescue the Blue(e) Fairy from Artichoke’s  deceit.

What point is there in understanding the pedagogy if i don't understand the use of the tool? and ultimately, the use of the tool is the easy bit.

The pedagogy/tool sequence thing is a chicken/egg kind of argument and may never be resolved - but I reckon the use of the “tool analogy” is worthy of unpacking again. 

In New Zealand our MoE is rather keen on the “tool” analogy, referring to ICT as “only a tool” in several MoE publications.

Nevertheless evidence is currently emerging from studies in the UK and elsewhere that  indicates improved outcomes for learners in schools where ICT is used as a tool for  cognitive development in curriculum areas. (Ministry of Education, 2003, p.8)

Analogy always interests me – in that it can both clarify and obscure understanding. In this case  when we talk about ICT as a tool I think we limit our imaginings and understanding of how  students might learn through ICT. 

I reckon we would be better served retreating to Taylor’s rather dated tutor, tool, tutee  classification of how “learning through ICT” happens in schools, (Taylor 1980). 

1. Computer in tutor mode (Computer as “sage on the stage”) :Computer assisted instruction enhances individual student learning outcomes. Behaviourist understandings of the learning process,
2. Computer in tutee mode (Computer as “guide on the side”)    Students develop metacognitive and critical thinking strategies and skills through “teaching” the computer or software to fulfil certain  desired outcomes,    Constructionist understanding of the learning process.
3. Computer in tool mode (Computer as a "streamliner")The computers’ facility to manipulate, store, create and distribute  “information surfaces” (Manovich 2001) streamlines student learning processes making them  more efficient. 

But even this 3T's analogy limits our understanding.  We need to improve on this tutor/tutee/tool analogy given  that it still  doesn’t capture Bott’s “digital native” allusion to how many students are  thinking and learning with ICT - when they have grown up with technology. 

I suspect a possible solution lies in McWilliam’s (2005) metaphor for pedagogical supply and demand in  the learning process, the “meddler in the middle”. She describes a process for teaching and  learning when teacher and student are mutually involved as co-creators of learning value. 

McWilliam uses IKEA furnishings and Scion cars as examples of this phenomenon of  collaboration between a company and the users. 

When learning is portrayed as a form of co-creation (McWilliam 2005) or “collaborative authorship”, (Manovich 2001), it  immediately implicates the unique facility of ICT for enhancing the multiplicity of  variation and information surfaces available for meddling in. The student and ICT are mutually involved as co-creators of learning value.

It is not too hard to find examples of meddling in the middle.  Bott’s ICT proficient students are already meddling with examples of collaborative  authorship in sampling, remixing as in the music/video industry and in open source software.

This is especially obvious when you look at the computer game industries support for  creating mods/avatars/and patches.  For example, The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion RPG supports  a free download of The Elder Scrolls Construction Set and access to the Elder Scrolls  Construction Set Wiki.  This allows

… extensive expansion of the game and includes all of the basic world building tools used by  the designers, giving users many of the same opportunities to create original game content  as the designers.  The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion 

ICT is not a tutor, a tutee or a tool. ICT is a co-conspirator in "meddling in the middle".

Foreshadowing an Attack on The Blu(e) Fairy

The Blue Fairy: Now, remember, Pinocchio, be a good boy. And always let your conscience be  your guide.

The Blu(e) Fairy and I “go back a long way” in teaching and (e)learning. We have “a special  understanding”, "a long history", he's my "left hand man", but today it seems that we are only “fair weather friends”.

I have spent time today preparing teaching resources to betray The Blu(e) Fairy.

Next week I will be pulling off both his blurry blue wings and snapping his blittery blue  wand when I follow a directive to train teachers in the use of MS PowerPoint, MS Publisher, Audacity and Photostory3 software.

I cannot even feign ignorance or indecision as I pin him and pluck off his wings.  I will be removing the wings of Fairy Blu(e) whilst knowing full well that

“… by and large, teacher education programmes worldwide have not been very successful in  providing teachers with knowledge, attitudes and confidence in using technologies in  classes.”  Kwok-Wing Lai (2005 p13)

And that a critical factor in this failure is identified as

“Far too often the acquisition of technical skills, rather than the pedagogy of ICT use, has  been emphasised in teacher education programmes.” Kwok-Wing Lai  (2005 p13)

The Ofsted report (2004) describes this as  “the need for competence with the technology drove the training rather than implications of  the use of ICT for learning’ (p8)

A trivial concern perhaps, given some of my conversations with the other Blue Fairy, but I find it  interesting nonetheless to think about what we accommodate in our “day to day” work in the  fairyscapes of education, and how much of what we do each day betrays what we believe.

I suspect that Lunaboca will talk about Hollis’s “recovery of personal authority” – the  importance of finding “what is true for oneself and live it in the world” regardless of the  "pigment identity" of the fairy.

It is fortunate perhaps that my relationship with The Blu(e) Fairy “has a long history” – for by the time he re-grows his fractured blurry blue wing buds and whittles another  blittery blue wand, I might have done something in teaching and (e) learning to redeem  myself.   

Kwok-Wing Lai 2005 Teachers using ICT: Myths and Realities p 9 -22 in eLearning Communities Teaching and Learning with the Web. University of Otago Press.

Blogging and dialogic literacy

I have been thinking about the validity of claims that blogging is a strategy for elearning when it allows the blogger to escape all of the requirements for “dialogic literacy” deemed necessary  for "knowledge creation".   

Dialogic Literacy:

• Allowing others to finish their thoughts.
• Respecting others thoughts feelings views and realities even when they differ from your own.
• Listening deeply without needing to fix counter argue or resist (Conway 2001)

Blogging has allowed me to traverse many new Blackadder landscapes, unburdened by the mores and expectations of dialogic literacy.

Farewell, Blackadder [hands him a parchment]. The foremost cartographers of the land have  prepared this for you; it's a map of the area that you'll be traversing. [Blackadder opens  it up and sees it is blank] -They'll be very grateful if you could just fill it in as you go  along. Bye-bye.
- Lord Melchett & Blackadder

I have thrived on “filling it the map as I go along” even though when I blog post I don’t have to wait for others to finish thinking, I can  dismiss the thoughts feelings and realities of others, and I can suggest fixes, counter arguments and resist, resist, resist.

When I put my obfuscatory  thinking online (just love the description Doug) I am in  dialogue with myself, rashly staking out my own thinking about the thinking of others.

Blogging - this reckless act of self exposure enables me to better understand my own  thinking, and interestingly it “creates a need for more careful reading, deeper comprehension, clearer  exposition, and more convincing argumentation” (Scardamalia 2003) without any expectation of  dialogue with others.    

Perhaps blogging creates the conditions of value when you are talking to yourself – the  conditions of value for internal dialogue – in the same way that individual interactions  with new media like a Photoshop menu can create the conditions of value in collaborative  authorship (Manovich 2001).

Whilst collaboration and dialogue, to fill in the map of new learning, is usually seen as occurring between  different individuals and or groups,

We might claim that blogging (keeping a reflective journal online) enhances your ability to collaborate and have dialogue, with yourself.

Blogging facilitates the "map filling in" actions of the individual cartographer tracking where they have been, where they are now and where they might go next.

And where we might go next with this thinking?

Perhaps we should develop a dialogical structure or conversational scaffold for student blog posting –  An “as I talk to myself online” conversational prompt.

I am thinking along the lines of  Ravencroft’s Interloc Dialogue Game. “I disagree because, I’m not so sure, Why do I say  that … My reason is ... Is there any evidence? .. But can we trust that? .. An argument against this  is? ... Another view might be? ... Is it ithe case that? .. Etc etc [Open Source Java application]

And when we get very good at this we could throw out Jeni Wilson’ and Mrs Potter type metacognitive triggers  and get student bloggers to reflect on their blog related new learning  through the mind disturbing triggers below   

What happened: 
What I believed happened: 
Wat I would have liked to have happened:
What I want to believe happened:   
What I want other people to believe happened:
What I want other people to believe I believe happened:

A reflective endeavour almost certain to lead to intense and acrimonious internal dialogue along the  lines of  "Baldrick, your brain is like the four headed, man-eating haddock fish beast of Aberdeen" "In what way? " "It doesn't exist "

“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and Metacognitive Reflection

I guess that since I have already transmitted my genetic material, I am in a sense of the “things  that matter most”, redundant.  I have moved without noticing it into a Peter Greenaway’s  “decorating life-phase”. 

What is surprising, given that I am supposed to be “decorating” my mind, is that I find  myself captured by an unusual tension between purposelessness and provocation. This is the  result of a “Maxwell’s silver hammer” incident that has given me some unexpected/ unwanted  “down time” and an uneven scar on my scalp that means I will never be able to shave my head  in future without alarming small children. 

This hammering event, the antithesis of

“If I had a hammer I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening all over this land
I'd hammer out danger, I'd hammer out warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land”,

has forced me to appraise Where am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?

I could start with what happened. Or perhaps more accurately what I believed happened.  But  I am interrupted by strong currents of thought that push me to relate what I would have  liked to have happened, and then what I want to believe happened.

These surges of “mind tide” are without compassion, they roughly shove me into thinking  about what I want other people to believe happened, and then before this is resolved abandon  me to drift and shift in the swash of what I want other people to believe I believe happened.

So what is real? It makes my mind ache just to think about it.

The whole experience of making meaning from this “event without meaning”, reminds me of our  approach to student learning and Vygotsky’s social contructivism. Without dialogue with others, verbal thought, reasoning, selective attention and reflection  I might have stuck fast with one reality – what happened. And I suspect this would be a lot  easier to deal with than the six realities currently jostling for mind space. 

Perhaps I have this whole curriculum and pedagogies for enhancing student thinking thing all  wrong.  Is the new focus on metacognitive reflection and self regulation causing students to  think too much?  Are we overwhelming students with our educational predilection for thoughtful analysis?

One reality is clear:
Beware the unstable schizophrenic burdened with imagined voices and a hammer.  Or as some of  my transmitted genetic material asked “Can you tell me the brand of the hammer involved? for  if it is not good enough to take you out I really don’t want to use it for any of my special  art and craft projects. “