Terry Bisson’s short story They’re made out of meat. or the film version of Bisson’s short story by Stephen O'Regan (which won Grand Prize at the Science Fiction Museum's SF Short Film Festival this year) captures some of the problems I face when trying to decide on an answer to Doug’s question - “What is a human?”
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
Doug asks us to think about “What is a human?” arguing that the learning approach “we have in mind” –and the success criteria we choose for the experiences will "depend on the answer we give to that question”.
Bisson describes the learning experiences for sentient meat as “talk”, “explore”, “contact” and “swap”
“Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”
“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”
but in edu_talk we tilt towards
- Learning what is already known, and or
- Learning the constituent skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, scientific method, creativity, and or
- Learning with others – learning communities, inquiry or problem based approaches that encourage sharing knowledge, team work, authentic contexts and varied information sources.
And we mismanipulate success criteria designed for one approach to judge another approach.
As someone who has spent his entire career doing research writing and thinking about educational testing and assessment issues, I would like to conclude by summarising a compelling case showing that the major uses of tests for student and school accountability over the past 50 years have improved education and student learning in dramatic ways. Unfortunately that is not my conclusion.(Linn, 2000, p 14. in Knight, P.T. 2002 Quality in Higher Education, Vol 8, No 1.
When I try to think about what it is to be human, and contemplate appropriate learning experiences and success criteria for human beings I find myself retreating to my laptop to capture my early ideas – I am helplessly addicted to thinking with my laptop.
Nowadays I only write with a pen on paper when signing Hell Pizza delivery chits, the odd GreenAcres Lawnmower cheque, and birthday cards for the elderly. Without noticing, I have lost a pleasurable sensation. I miss the sounds of writing, that raw physicality of dragging a thick nib, laden with the blackest of black ink, at different angles and pressures over whiter than white parchment.
My relationship with pens, inks, cartridge paper, erasers and envelopes might rescue me from machine domination, it has always been a little too intense to be “normal” enough to fit easily within the bell bit of TG's human behaviour profiles, pushing out the tail. Given the consistency of this affection for stationery I predict that stationery departments and bookstores will remain an Artichokean emotional retreat, despite the plethora of computer stores in Auckland.
But my thinking really does seem clunky when scratched onto the surface of a page. What does this newly recognized dependency mean about my relationship/s with technology and the fragmentation of my identity?
“Don’t turn on the lights, cause I don’t want to see ..”
Is Doug right? Is part of the disquiet over learning in schools simply that some of us want learning experiences, and success criteria, suited to the behaviours of "cyborgian machines" and others are hanging on to the hope that we are still "sentient meat".
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