(A selection of radical thoughts about learning and education from Mobilityshifts event – Part 4)

WE NEED COURSES THAT LAST FOR A HUNDRED YEARS

Benjamin Bratton’s presentation was (quite appropriately) titled ‘Ambivalent Remarks on Computation, Political Geography, Pedagogy’. He referred to an interview of philosopher Bernard Stiegler and his concepts of short and long circuits in education.

“The problem of long circuits turning into short circuits is a fundamental condition which we have to grasp – that is – the time of digital technologies is too short – what we need in very very long classes, not very very short classes.”

“The condition of education… is to train the attention of next generation, to train them to have attention, to pay attention, to comprehend their own attentiveness – it is to train them to have a memory, to train them to have a conception of time that is appropriate.”

Benjamin proposes that we need courses that can be located within long arcs of time:

“I think 500 years is a reasonable span for a course to try to locate for the students, so that they can locate themselves in this arc. Courses that don’t have a 500 year arc, that aren’t teaching what it is that they are teaching in terms of a 500 year context are probably too shallow. And I think this can be just as true for very practical courses – you know, is there a way to teach a ‘how to hack a website’ workshop, or how to build an android app, with a 500 year arc of understanding what that means. How did we arrive at the possibility of asking this question and even proposing this skill.”

We also need very long courses:

“Instead of a course that goes on for 10 weeks, or even for one year, prefer courses that go on for 10 years, or perhaps a 100 years, a faculty handing off one to another, like architects of medieval churches.”

IN ORDER TO LEARN, STUDENTS NEED TO BREAK THE LAW

On the flight to the conference Benjamin happened to sit next to a Israeli cryptographer who had two arguments about education that Benjamin wanted to pass on to the conference audience:

“Students have to understand that we are currently building a legacy codebase at a planetary level which will exist and endure for generations.”

“In order to be successful in the design of this legacy codebase for the generations to come we have to be willing to assign students things that are as of today illegal – with the presumption that it is the things that exits outside the legal structures will form the base of the constitutional structures to come”

(A selection of radical thoughts about learning and education from Mobilityshifts event – Part 3)

“What happens if we don’t believe the only way of giving credit is the way we have inherited?”

Cathy Davidson’s presentation was related to her book ’Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn’. The presentation included two amazing historical anecdotes:

ABCD GRADING NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR MEAT:

Mount Holyoke College was the first university in America to give ABCD grades, in year 1897. The second institution to start using this system was the American Meatpackers Association – for grading the quality of meat. Soon afterwards the association gave up the system, since they found it too inflexible to grade the quality of meat.

THE INVENTOR OF MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST:

Frederick J. Kelly was the person who proposed using multiple choice tests for large scale assessment in education. This happened in 1914, during wartime when hundreds of thousands of immigrants were arriving in the country. A new law was passed that required 2 years of secondary education for everyone and this created a crisis: the existing education system could not cope with this. Mr. Kelly proposed multiple choice tests to deal with this emergency, but he thought that this would only be a temporary solution. After the war he was hired as the director of University of Idaho where he established an education programme which emphasised general, critical thinking (“College is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated”). He was fired from the job after only two years – the university faculty protested against his reforms, they had not expected such from the guy who invented the multiple choice test. (A longer article about this can be found here)

Cathy (as well as many others at Mobilityshifts) mentioned Mozilla Open Badges as a promising initiative to change the way learning is evaluated (more information here: http://openbadges.org/en-US/faq.html).

(A selection of radical thoughts about learning and education from Mobilityshifts event – Part 2)

‘We need to refuse anonymous peer review’

Geert Lovink gave a presentation about the different publication methods that Institute of Network Cultures has been using so far (Studies in Network Culture, INC Readers, Network Notebooks and Theory on Demand. He also made some general remarks about ‘Do-It-Together Publishing’. I especially appreciate the idea that one of the aims of the publishing process is to further radicalize both the content and style.

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INC Principles of Do-It-Together Publishing

• Collective decision making over the choice of format, length and deadline
• Promotion of the concept/essay style
• Regular support, both content-based and emotional assistance in writing process
• Intense copy editing, in particular in the case of non-native English writers, with the aim to further radicalize both the content and style
• Dealing together with the digital delivery

Larger Agenda of D.i.T Publishing

• Refuse peer review and disassociate from IP-driven publishers (common exodus)
• Conversion to a system of mutual aid
• Critical engagement with open access standards (incl. software and typography)
• Engagement in dialogue, discussion, comment cultures (social reading)
• Networks to share experiences how best to distribute titles through multiple platforms

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Video recording of Geert’s presentation can be found online: http://vimeo.com/32725309

Here are a couple of quotes (at approx 25:00 in the presentation):

‘The peer review system as it exists in the academic world is  is corrupt to its core’ -

‘In particular of course anonymous peer reviewing, which is so largely used to bring down the self-esteem of many many people, it’s a very humiliating form of discussion’ – ‘it’s the most nasty form of contemporary debate we have’

Related links:

• The Unbound Book conference
• Out of Ink project

(A selection of radical thoughts about learning and education from Mobilityshifts event – Part 1)

WE CAN TEACH WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (a book by Jacques Rancière) tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher and educational philosopher (born in 1770).

A key experience for Jacotot was the occasion when he had to teach French language to students who only understood Dutch, a language he could not speak himself. He gave the students a book with the same text in two languages (French and Dutch) and asked them to compare the texts in order to learn. To his surprise, the students learned French in a similar pace as the students that he was able to teach in a conventional way. He had to admit that his ability to teach was not based on knowledge, but on something else.

The key elements of Jacotot’s teaching manifesto are:

1. All men have equal intelligence;
2. Every man has received from God the faculty of being able to instruct himself;
3. We can teach what we don’t know;
4. Everything is in everything.

(Related to ‘Rancière: Ignorance Will Have Learned’ presentation by Jairo Moreno, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Music: http://soundcloud.com/thenewschoolnyc/ranci-re-ignorance-will-have)