Final post: actor-network theory

Holy cow! Why have I waited this long to discover actor-network theory??

My first introductions to ANT came about serendipitously in person:

• I attended a talk by Matt Ratto (University of Toronto) a few years ago on “Critical Making.” His language about “materiality” and his invocation of the name Bruno LaTour made a big impression on me. His presentation lit up my brain, and although I didn’t pursue researching ANT at the time, I had a frame of reference that had me interested in learning more. Appropriately enough, Ratto’s expertise is on STS (Science, Technology, and Society), which is where LaTour made his mark and where ANT drew its founding inspiration.
• I then also came to know Sean Justice, Ed.D., while he was working on his dissertation at Teachers College. Sean again used that word “materiality” and his perspective as an arts educator seemed familiar and yet innovative and surprising. It was in conversation with Sean that I assembled the starting points of this week’s bibliography.

And it followed through this week with a lot of rigorous, stimulating reading. I’ll lead with my bibliography, listed in the sequence in which I read them:

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R., & Sawchuk, P. (2015). Emerging approaches to educational research: Tracing the socio-material. “Chapter 1: Why Sociomateriality in Education?” Routledge.

Cressman, D. (2009). A brief overview of actor-network theory: Punctualization, heterogeneous engineering & translation.

Wright, S., & Parchoma, G. (2011). Technologies for learning? An actor-network theory critique of ‘affordances’ in research on mobile learning.Research in Learning Technology, 19(3).

Johannesen, M., Erstad, O., & Habib, L. (2012). Virtual learning environments as sociomaterial agents in the network of teaching practice.Computers & Education, 59(2), 785-792.

Esnault, L., Zeiliger, R., & Vermeulin, F. (2006). On the use of actor-network theory for developing web services dedicated to communities of practice.Practice, 298-306.

Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social. Conclusion. Hampshire: Oxford University Press.

Phew! Once I got started, I could scarcely stop. I’ll keep my update this week brief because I am sure that many of the ideas I encountered here will inform my final project next week.

ANT articulates a stance that I find to be very powerful when considering the design of learning environments by emphasizing the interrelatedness of things.

“[ANT argues] that everything – people, organizations, technologies, nature, politics, social order(s) – are the result, or effect, of heterogeneous networks.” (Cressman, 2009, p. 4)

What a powerful idea to take into consideration as designers! The learners, the curriculum, the materials, the tools — all of these things are results of actors, both human and non-human, which interact with each other. As designers we need to consider them all equally. And that’s part of the power of ANT: that all actors have agency (including non-human actors), all actors are results of networks of their own, and so every level of analysis is equally rich and worthy of analysis. Thinking in this way can help us consider the impact of UI in a virtual learning environment and the storage bins used in an art classroom, and how these “minor” details behave in the rich networks of learning environments.

ANT opens ideas that have otherwise been black-boxed. (Reading LaTour take down sociology, as an entire field of study, by opening up “the social” was pretty amazing.) What are all of the black boxes we have glossed over this semester? How can we examine more closely the processes at work in learning environments? How can we learn to discuss the pedagogical and political implications of the “smallest” decisions we make?

I’m looking forward to digging into some of these ideas in my final project.

Losing count of weeks: blended learning

Edu-buzzwords have their own life cycles. MOOC, for example, burned brightly before burning out, and is now struggling to reassert itself in the public consciousness by extending the acronym with qualifying indicators (e.g., cMOOC, xMOOC). Blended learning, in my opinion, is living through its own cycle. What it is being blended, and how that might be innovative or valuable, is different now from what I think it will be in just a few years. As of right now, blended learning is…

“a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home.” (Blended learning in practice: Introduction to case studies from leading schools)

I teach a pretty well-blended 8th grade computer science class right now, but I read this definition unfavorably. Blended learning, in this definition, is essentially a different delivery mechanism with a few positive byproducts (“some element of student control”). My hope is that, as we come to understand the affordances of blended learning and as we shift what it is that educators are blending, I will come to view it a bit more favorably.

I have looked for citations to ground this comparison but I will offer it off the cuff: we can learn from what media scholars have discovered from the advent and life cycle of other new media. At first, the new medium replicates the old (e.g., early television as radio with pictures), and over time the medium to establishes itself as something unique with its own potentialities and shortcomings.

My concern is that, while replicating older models, blended learning will exaggerate negative outcomes:

• I worry that it will deprofessionalize teaching. In the case studies, for example, KIPP stratifies lead teachers, intervention specialists, and instructional assistants. I have concerns that this is penny-wise in the short term for some schools, but pound-foolish on a larger scale.
• I worry that it will further limit students’ learning opportunities to the things which are most easily measurable.
• I worry that the actors with sufficient resources (financial, human, technical) to build blended platforms will design systems that cater first to their own interests, which may be completely unrelated to what is best for learners.
• I worry about the implications of “efficiency” in this whole process. That word, though it is frequently paired with under-resourced schools doing the best they can with what they’ve got, sets off alarm bells for me to view this more closely with a critical lens. Efficient to what end? According to whom?

As I think about what blended learning might come to be in the future, I hope that designers of learning environments can blend much more than the delivery format of instructionist lectures. Instead what if blended learning blurs the lines between…

• online and offline
• digital and physical
• discursive and embodied
• intellectual engagement and civic engagement
• curricular and “extra-“curricular

I can imagine exciting possibilities that might emerge by blending these dichotomies, but I am certain it will take talented, committed, professional teachers to pioneer these territories. Here’s hoping our nascent 2016 attempts at blended learning don’t stick us too deeply in the mud to get there.

Week 11 change: distributed cognition

I was excited to pursue my own path of curiosity this week. Rather than sticking with informal learning, as prescribed on the syllabus, I read about distributed cognition.

Why?

I take a constructionist approach to learning, especially with my work as a teacher in a school makerspace. But I see limitations with constructionism: it focuses solely on the mental activity within the learner’s head, and does little to take into consideration the learner’s context, environment, and tools. Distributed cognition can provide a way to broaden this understanding.

What?

Distributed cognition posits that human thinking does not happen exclusively between the neurons in our brains. As defined by Andy Clark (2010),

“the local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body, and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.” (Introduction, para. 10)

A compelling frame

And so distributed cognition provides us a useful tool as designers of learning environments. Our bodies and our material tools become “transparent equipment” (Chaper 1, section 1.2, para. 4), like the hammer in the hand of an experienced carpenter or a cane in the hand of an old person: means through which we come to know the world directly, not directly as it may first seem. As Clark elaborates:

“Fluently using a stick, we feel as if we are touching the world at the end of the stick, not (once we are indeed fluent in our use) as if we are touching the stick with our hand. The stick, is has sometimes been suggested, is in some way incorporated, and the overall effect seems more like bringing a temporary whole new agent-world circuit into being rather than simply exploiting the stick as a helpful prop or tool.” (Chapter 2, section 2.1, para. 6)

What might this mean for learners in an environment that is rich with materials? How might students explore ideas through physical and digital materiality? Sean Justice’s approach is situated from an arts education perspective, but this sense of materiality has broad implications:

an enacted encounter with materiality points to the learning sometimes reported by artists, novelists, songwriters, and theoretical scientists, where after prolonged engagement with a particular material, such as paint or language or melody or mathematics, insight or innovation arrives suddenly or as if by accident. (Justice, 2015, p. 14-15)

This intersection of materiality and distributed cognition also has implications for digital materials as well. Rheingold (2012) introduces a new phrase to consider:

“When I talk about ‘cyborg literacy,’ I mean a set of skills and social practices that optimize the ability to use physical and cognitive technologies that augment, amplify, or extend human thinking and capabilities.” (Chapter 2: Augment, amplify, extend, para. 2)

In what ways will digital tools and environments allow us to form a collective knowledge, from which all people can draw?

Looking back to look forward

Across these varied readings, I found it interesting that almost each one returned to language as the first mind-extending tool that humans have, and reading and writing after that. Literacy studies are a natural fit, and its rich research base gives us a lot of working material when trying to understand how people negotiate meaning, express themselves, and come to understand each other by using tools and signals as fundamental as language. I see more clearly now the ways that new literacies stake a claim on the maker movement in education as much as constructionism.

 

What’s next

I hope to take this foundation into my next batch of readings on blended learning. My interest is to design a learning environment that blends learning not just by blending offline and online lectures, but by blending the boundaries between all types of knowing — discursive and embodied, personal and distributed, mentally and environmentally. What would a learning environment look like that helps learners navigate between these spaces?

 

References

Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension [Kindle edition]. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from Amazon.com.

Justice, S. (2015). Learning to Teach in the Digital Age: Enacted Encounters with Materiality. Marilyn Zurmuehlen Working Papers in Art Education,2015(1), 3.

Rheingold, H. (2013). Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? [Kindle edition]. Ted Conferences. Retrieved from Amazon.com.

Week 13: Critical perspectives

Leaning into criticality has typically been the most important unit of each of my GSE courses. With that said, this week I want to take a turn to focus on one detail that captured my attention:

For all these reasons, computer-mediated communication can be considered… a “fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge” (Harnad, 1991, p. 39), following three prior revolutions of language, writing, and print.

– Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010, p. 179

Two things about this observation struck me: first, the 1991 date of the Hardnad citation, and second, the significance of the first three revolutions listed.

The fact that Harnad recognized computer-mediated communication as a revolution in 1991 is remarkable. That’s three years before the Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web. Think of the wild growth that has happened in the 25 years since this quote!

I pause not just to recognize Harnad’s prescience, but also to remark on how slowly the world of education has been to adapt. In what ways has the American system of education adapted to this revolution in two and a half decades? How has this revolution lifted up the oppressed and challenged inherited power structures?

I am trying to imagine a nation of connected citizens (like ours today) on the verge of an earlier revolution. What would it be like to study at GSE two and a half decades into the invention of language? Or writing? Or print? What true revolution could such a group of scholars and practitioners ignite if we were only now at the crest of these former mountaintops?

Putting computer-mediated communication into this perspective is jarring and powerful. And we need to be reminded of it more often. I’ve enjoyed reading commentary recently that acknowledges the changes we are facing and the political implications of all education (see Sylvia Libow-Martinez’s latest and Will Richardson’s), but a few voices here and there are not enough — not when this moment is a revolution on the scale of language, writing, and print.

Week 10: Do we have a problem here?

I have found that I spend most of my time in my weekly blog posts problematizing the readings. I’m beginning to feel like a drag: for all of the wonderful, insightful research that I’m getting to read, most of what comes across in these posts is the 0.08% of it that I take issue with, or could imagine someone else taking issue with. The instinct to engage with it and have something to say about it has turned all the problematizing into a whole bunch of problems and generally feels pretty negative when I now sit down to write my weekly post.

So this week I’m going to focus on the positives. And to do that, I’m going to avoid saying much about educational data mining (as described in the Baker & Siemens piece). I’m also going to avoid ranting about the oppressive, top-down assumptions underlying the Reyes piece.* Instead I’d like to focus on the pedagogical framework designed by Wise, Zhao, and Hausknecht that supported their research. A few key takeaways:

• Embedded analytics are pretty cool! I think of these essentially as data visualizations. The thing that makes them valuable: they are designed to be tools that empower.
• The authors are beautifully aware of the dangers of educational data mining:
  • “When working with learning analytics a number of concerns have been raised about the dangers of rigidity of interpretation, lack of transparency with regards to data capture and access, the hegemony of optimizing to only that which can be measured, and possible impediment of learner’s development of metacognitive and self-regulative learning skills” (p. 5).
  • The word hegemony is central here. Their emphasis on embedded analytics, transparency, and a supporting pedagogy are great to see.
• Embedded analytics are also used as tools for awareness and reflection. Sometimes we need a 3rd party to hold up the mirror to help us see what we don’t. If that can be done automatically by computers, then that’s fine with me because the power is still in the hands of the learner.
  • And as a bonus, it was interesting to see how embedded analytics helped the researchers overshoot the neutral stance of holding up the mirror, taking the next step to nudge the class dynamics toward parity between teachers and learners.

In framing my blog post this week toward the positive, and in doing so focusing the opportunities for learning analytics to support critical pedagogy, I have one last big-picture idea to share:

In a class called “The Design of Learning Environments,” it’s hard to avoid the embedded power differential between the designers and the learners. Some people will design the environment, other people will learn in it. It’s easy to allow the two things to be separate. However as critical pedagogy has taught us, education can help equip learners to challenge power differentials and understand the nature of the constructedness that is all around us. I was excited by this week’s example of learning analytics being used in this way, and I hope to keep that example on my mind through the other topics I read in the coming weeks.

* See what I did there? I promise I really am trying to avoid the negative here. 😉

Week 8: New Literacies

I very much enjoyed this week’s readings, and would love to spend more time immersed in this domain. I’d like to share some observations, but first a revelation: this week I finally understood why the experts on gaming and learning happen to be literacy experts. Thompson’s piece on new literacies, through his rich and varied examples, made clear the connection that has always been a bit fuzzy to me. His exploration of “what will be the video equivalent of a Post-it note?” (p. 12) was utterly delightful, and made me think of Jim Gee’s work through the lens of literacy first. (As an additional note, this chapter made me think of Ian Bogost’s term procedural rhetoric and the larger dialogue about computational literacy and participation. I’m excited for widespread use of programmatic/computational Post-it notes as tools for learning and seeing. Really rich stuff here!)

Here’s a moment I’d like more time to dwell in: “Tools for thought often are most powerful when they become second nature, thus somewhat invisible. Writing transforms thinking only after the point where you no longer have to struggle with the act of writing itself” (p. 6).  There is an intersection here with activity systems theory, but I do not yet feel comfortable enough navigating these ideas to articulate it. My instinct is that it is something about the way that literacy experts think of language (and how, I think, Vygotsky treats “signs”) — that the theme here is about externalizing thought so as to interact with it in different ways, to leverage ideas as tools, and to use 3rd party tools to offload some of the cognitive burden of a task. I’d love to step into this more deeply, particularly when computation (and machine learning! and artificial intelligence!) is integrated as a tool, like pen and paper. For example, I’d love to read Doug Engelbart’s 1962 piece referenced here and to understand the schools of thought it likely formed.

Perhaps the only thing I struggled with this week was a nuance of Halverson’s treatment of arts-based education. I agreed with most of what she was saying, but I struggled by the end to draw distinctions along such clearly disciplinary lines. Math and science would benefit from a more production-centered approach — but does that need to be considered an artistic pursuit? I would have liked to see this discussion focus on production-centered or not, rather than dividing lines around disciplines instead of practices. I don’t like the idea that art teachers are the only ones privileged to teach in a studio-based approach.

Week 7: WWJDD? (What Would John Dewey Do)

I have, for a long time, been interested in the things that education can learn from video games and virtual worlds. Experiences both professional and academic over the last 10 years have given me chances to dip into developing games, doing research, and reading a whole lot of Jim Gee.

But none of these readings resonated with me.

Maybe I’m old, maybe I’ve been thinking about these things for too long, or maybe I’m growing into a purist of some sort, but finding ways to wedge video games and virtual worlds into formal academic settings just doesn’t seem like a worthwhile endeavor. What would John Dewey do? Why do we need to design learning games at this point: isn’t the experience of participating in real reality enough? Rather than a 3D game designed to engineer specific learning experiences, why not create contexts for actual ones? The challenge, as I see it, is to create a compelling context to situate learning. The more time I spend with students, and the more time I watch the patterns in tech, the less I value or see long-term viability in this particular kind of ed-tech.

However I did encounter a few points in the readings that challenged my close-mindedness:

• “But unlike face-to-face teaching, interaction in game-like applications is perceived to be free from the fear of failure” (Berns, Gonzalez-Pardo, & Camacho, 2011, p. 219). Now that’s an interesting case of how the virtual might afford something that can be hard for the real world.
• Challenge, fantasy, and curiosity absolutely are viable principles of intrinsically motivating instruction (Dunleavy, 2014, p. 29). I don’t fault any educator any attempt to build experiences around these principles.
• I appreciated Dunleavy’s metaphor of the mobile device as a “lens” for the students to see things in new ways, rather than just a screen. Students deserve all the tools we can give them for exploring and understanding the world around them.
• Smetana & Bell appropriately point out that simulations are different from games. I think it’s important to disentangle these domains, and I am much more interested in simulations than games. (And as for games, I take an approach similar to Gee: to learn from them and extract what we can from the way they work, and not necessarily transplant them into formal learning environments.)

Now that I’ve tried to give voice to both sides of the issue, I think I can put a finer point on the problems I see with game-based learning:

• Video games at their best cannot top the real world at its best. And so I think students deserve academics and practitioners to focus on how to make their real-world experiences more real, more meaningful, more connected. Video games (and, in some ways, 90% of ed-tech in general) seems more and more to be a distraction.
• Something about video games in formal academic settings strikes me as disingenuous. The objectives of the educators in the room, the programmers behind the game, the students in the room, and the virtual students in the virtual world amounts to too many different variables. I’m not sure how all these can really align — and I’m suspicious that the student’s objectives are driving the conversation.
• Rather than developing better tools to deliver curriculum more efficiently, I think the more forward-looking approach to take in 2016 is to challenge the sovereignty of curriculum itself. Will Richardson’s message about “doing the wrong thing right” is resonating with me this week.

Week 6: scaffolding you can touch

In my first glance at the syllabus weeks ago, my expectation was that this week — scaffolding — would be the centerpiece of the entire course. In my experience, the design and implementation of scaffolding is the central challenge of designing learning environments. However this week’s readings left me disappointed: Kim & Hannafin’s discussion was so broad that it was forced to remain largely theoretical, and Yoon & Wang’s study seemed superficial. I don’t have major takeaways from either of these two selections. Allow me to justify my whining:

• “Dynamic scaffolding is a holistic, integrated, and synergic approach to support learners in accomplishing their learning goals through the just-in-time and proper integration of multiple resources (experts, peers, technologies, and learning context)” (Kim & Hannafin, 2010, p. 407).
  • Yes! This sounds exciting. And at the conclusion of the paper, I am better equipped to understand the way that these factors interrelate. However I don’t have a better understanding of how to take action from these ideas. The article did not help me see the theories’ implications on the design of learning environments.
• “Thus, we suggest that the nature of AR, as a newly emerging technological tool, can also support visitors’ learning by holding their attention for longer” (Yoon & Wang, 2014, p. 54).
  • My concern with this article is that the focus seemed to be on the novelty of AR and not its affordances in learning. And so again I struggled to apply the lessons here to the design of learning environments: are expensive, shiny new tools worthwhile investments to learning because novelty pays short-term returns in time on task?

Now that my whining is out of the way…

• I look forward to being proved wrong. I would love to talk to Prof Yoon and understand that my frustration with the article on AR stems from my own short-sightedness on the topic; I would like to discuss the Kim & Hannafin article and learn that I was the one disoriented by its breadth, and that it in fact tie directly to practice. (Put another way: I point out these issues in the hopes of engaging them and learning from them… and perhaps what I need is more scaffolding to understand them better myself!)
• I enjoyed Reiser & Tabak’s piece. I’d like to acknowledge it here without focusing on it much further. (Except to note that it mentioned machine learning at the end. And again I feel the pull to dig into this realm further!)
• I think I would like to spend more time with scaffolding during this course, if possible. Specifically I am interested in ways that scaffolding can be embedded in the learning space itself. How might we, as designers, make the space the third teacher? What can we learn from educational movements like Reggio Emilia and Montessori?
• I’ve invested lots of time and energy into designing learning environments over the years, online (LinguaZone.com, Prima Lingua’s online workbook), offline (a summer camp, a school makerspace), and blended (computer science and shop classes). One thing in particular that has tickled my brain recently: a different kind of blended environment that facilitates natural transitions between on/offline and digital/physical. I would love to explore research that positions itself at this crossroads.

Week 5: Assessments, power, and second-hand tech

This week was a tricky one for me. I’ve always wrestled with tests and how they fit into my practice as a teacher, and I’ve always found that conversations with other educators get vague (and less productive) when talking more generally about “assessments.”

I serendipitously read the 3 assignments this week in the perfect order: I was disappointed (Darling-Hammond & Adamson), elated (Davidson), and then angry (Clarke-Midura & Dede). Ok, well maybe those adjectives are a bit strong, but the point still stands: before the readings this week, I felt unclear and uncomfortable; following the readings, I knew exactly what I didn’t like about those conversations about assessments.

So let’s start at the end. Clarke-Midura & Dede’s ideas about virtual performance tests is really interesting. And I think it is especially interesting in March of 2016: Facebook’s Oculus Rift is about to be released, and other major tech companies are racing to keep up. Clarke-Midura & Dede’s suggestions will only become more alluring as virtual and augmented reality establish themselves in our culture. But I have concerns:

• that edtech has and will always, necessarily lag behind consumer tech, leaving even “cutting-edge” VR simulations feeling obsolete for students within one or two testing cycles
• that those who fund VR simulations for testing will also invest in the pedagogical innovations of the last century in order to effect real change
• and that — hey! — why are we throwing money at virtual performance tests when we could be empowering students to do real work in the real world?

And that last point redirects our attention to Davidson, who stands in contrast to Darling-Hammond & Adamson. Whereas Davidson acknowledges that, “All assessment is circular… we substitute test results from some basic truth about a whole person” (2011, p. 109), Darling-Hammond & Adamson seem most concerned about adequate funding for nationwide testing.

And so the thing that upsets me is that, while Davidson and others seek to reexamine our underlying assumptions about testing and assessments, most of the dialogue I hear is about improving existing infrastructure, usually by replacing human inefficiency with technology.

And though it’s useful that this week’s readings helped me more clearly articulate this frustration, I don’t yet have a solution to propose. The thing that I still really just can’t envision is the most honest, democratic, humanizing way to make educational opportunities scale. “Tests” are expected to be quantifiable, and simple numbers are easier to compare and pass around the educational pipeline of teachers, institutions, and districts. Are portfolios and badges really a good enough rebuttal to the siren song of that kind of expediency?

An interview, a meta-interview, and tech

I sat down for an interview with “Max” (a pseudonym), a high school senior I teach. Max knew we would have a conversation about how he uses technology and what he thinks of technology, and Max also knew that he would have an opportunity to edit the interview before I submitted it to my class. What Max didn’t know, and what I reveal at the beginning of the recording, is that I would also be recording our editing process.

The following recording is a 5 minute interview and a 40 minute editing session and conversation edited (by me, with Max’s input) into 10 minutes.