“He might well be a Roman emperor in ten years time”

There is a resident at Grandpa’s dementia centre who is constantly moving – his zimmer frame (the seat shamelessly loaded with purloined goods) clocks up the sort of kilometres each day that would impress someone preparing for the half marathon.

However, what impresses me most is not the total kilometres covered each day but the liminality of the route travelled.  The zimmer frame tracks the fringes, the outer edges, the borders, the periphery, the outer reaches of the furniture and the people in each room.

The zimmer frame travels so close to the margins that it constantly nudges other residents – this nudging, a little like those toys that bump into an obstacle and immediately reverse motion 180 degrees and then try again, this repeated nudging can, and does, precipitate verbal and physical confrontation between nudger and nudgee.

It is simply not contestable to suggest that Grandpa has never been especially tolerant (of anything), and zimmer frame nudging is a seen as a highly provocative act... when visiting I suggest that the nudger is to be tolerated ... "he is simply exercising Grandpa – the equivalent of a dementia gym bunny" –

Grandpa is quick to point out the fallacy in my argument – he uses a thin end of the wedge argument to explain that if I don’t allow him to thump the margin traveller then “he might well be a Roman Emperor in ten years time”.

I observe the zimmer frame wanderer with new interest ... am I looking at a future Caligula?

Neglecting the obvious time frame problems in Grandpa’s argument, the truth is that, even if thumped, the zimmer frame wanderer would continue to explore the margins – he has long since lost the ability to learn from experience ...

Learning – behaviour that is changed as a result of experience.

Perhaps the Georges Perec “common thing”  that I should be thinking about with respect to learning is what counts as experience in schools - for in the classrooms I visit it certainly isn't movement - with or without a zimmer frame

What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.

We fuss and froth so much about school, (well I do anyways), about the educational impact of funding, of tax breaks, of the quality of teaching staff, of the curriculum, of pedagogy, of disparity, of class sizes, of the impact or not of social technologies .... perhaps I should simply question something habitual.

What seems habitual to me from watching the zimmer frame wanderer is our acceptance that learning in school (apart from in specialist disciplines) does not require movement. 

It starts with learning to sit on the mat to listen to the often patronising discourse of the new entrant teacher  ... and finishes when as adults we attend conferences and sit contentedly through patronising keynoter discourse from the over priced professional 21st Century edu_tainers on the circuit.

Furthermore it seems that learning in the 21st Century happens when you are not only stationary but also staring at a programmable light source rather than something more real and less representational - like the real desert locust or frog pinned in a wax tray, like a LED, a piece of coarse fabric, fermenting milk, the precipitate in the bottom of a test tube,  a canvas dripping with paint or even another  human being.

I note here that I am not ready to talk about the role of those Barbie and Ken doll like SL avatars in all of this ...

So I want to think about

• How is learning advantaged when we are stationary and gazing at a screen?
• How is social connection advantaged when we are stationary and gazing at a screen?
• How is society advantaged when learning and social connection is what happens when the learner is stationary and gazing at a screen?

Comments

[Cherrie]

I wonder (and I don't know) if similar questions were asked when "learning" became formalised/institutionalised and people learnt sitting at desks with pen and paper?

Actually, linked to this - what came first? Education or learning?
Although formal education has been around so long, it's hard to say, right? Dunno.

Actually, I guess 'institutionalisation' and 'sitting at desks with pen and paper' aren't the same thing, are they?

[Artichoke]

The most interesting stuff I have ever read on these ideas Cherrie is in Ivan Illich's In">http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=illich+vineyard+of+the+text&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPP1,M1">In the Vineyard of the Text

It is a book to read and re-read - a text that you underline, highlight, copy out extracts and mark with post it notes ...a simply formidable book and must have for anyone fascinated by text and technology

[AllanahK]

I also spend a part of each day at a rest home and watch, as Mum calls her 'the phantom wanderer'. Mum gives her the nod and she moves on to try and find whatever she is looking for.

To use your analogy- what are we looking for when we use 21st century technologies in our classrooms?

[Artichoke]

If we are looking ... then maybe we have lost something in the "complicated maze of red tape and regulation" that makes up classrooms today. - or at least we think we have lost something - maybe we haven't lost anything at all ...its just that people keep telling us we have lost something

Either way when searching for what we imagine we have lost, we are tempted to trivialise the search and embrace the myth of technodeterminism because the alternative - "looking for the restroom" (the simple stuff we overlook about what schools do to kids that compromises learning)seems too hard to change, lacks glamour and doesn't have such a big fan club.

As Professor Farnsworth notes "You can't just waltz into the Central Bureaucracy. It's a complicated maze of red tape and regulation. I've never been, but a friend of mine went mad just looking for the restroom."

[Tony Forster]

"I note here that I am not ready to talk about the role of those Barbie and Ken doll like SL avatars in all of this ..."

Let me know when you are ready to talk of the joys of watching Powerpoints in Second Life. Oh, the joys of the 20th century talk and chalk classroom lovingly recreated. With your avatar, its just like being there, apart from the lag and the user interface that is.

But seriously, SL has a lot of potential as a creative space, its just not being realised. Architecture, hairdressing, hospitality for example.

And computers can do some stuff better even though "the real desert locust or frog pinned in a wax tray, like a LED, a piece of coarse fabric, fermenting milk, the precipitate in the bottom of a test tube, a canvas dripping with paint or even another human being" have their pluses in RL. With computers you can do some things better than RL like watching 100,000 years evolution, watch a gas molecule or travel to the stars. (see http://schoolgamemaker.rupert.id.au/samples3/ or install Vpython and run the sample programs)

Tony

[Artichoke]

I really want to agree with you Tony - and several of my identities do - and i held the same hopes as you do about the potential (as yet largely unrealised)for 3D modelling in SL - and I've seen kids do some great learning with gamemaker - thanks for the links

However when you see what real people in RL can do with mitosis I think you will agree that it is impossible to imagine anything more compelling than RL as a creative space for 3D modelling synchronised swimming mitosis

[Karyn Romeis]

"What seems habitual to me ...is our acceptance that learning in school ...does not require movement."

I've never understood that one. As a parent I got tired of hearing that my elder son could "never sit still". He was sent to a variety of therapists and one of these, an unconventional sort, admirably demonstrated that my son (aged 5 at the time) was tracking the conversation very closely, while treating the furniture in the room like an extended obstacle course.

I puts me in mind of Amanda Baggs's argument in her YouTube video about autism - we have very narrow tolerance of the way people interact or respond.