The language of language

Most of you probably hated English class. I was one of those weirdos who didn't, but I know a lot of people, then and now, who are still wondering why we had to read Shakespeare and write essays and wasn't Ben Franklin's autobiography the absolutely most mind-numbing read in the history of printing. I don't blame them for not getting excited about it. Motivating my students was always my biggest challenge in teaching.

But, apart from all the prim and proper, upstanding, prudish, school-marmish notions of English instruction that we all had to suffer through, there is another -- darker, more fun, livelier, and challenging -- side to it as well. It's about communication, but not as any of you who have had to suffer through a communication class are now imagining. English (and here, any of you can substitute your own native language from your own native culture ... everything I have to say applies mutatis muntandis for your own) is about the magic -- and I use the word consciously -- of language. The person who said the pen was mightier than the sword knew what he was talking about. Words -- and I can't say this often or emphatically enough -- are the most powerful weapons known to (hu)man(ity).

We suspected it for a long time. When the notion of higher education first arose, you studied the Trivium after your general education. The Trivium consisted of just three subjects (and you need to think this as analog to a bachelor's degree today): grammar (how words are fit together to make sense), logic -- actually dialectics (how to combine ideas to make sense), and rhetoric (how to influence others with what you say). That's it. It was all about using language to make friends (and enemies) and influence people. No more, no less. These days we all complain about most people's terrible spelling and using 50 words when 5 would have done the trick and pull our hair out trying to figure out what they meant in the first place. Oh yeah, we've come a long way, haven't we?

Regardless, I'd like to ask you to do a little exercise. It won't take long and I guarantee it will tell you more about yourself than you ever really wanted to know. This is it; I call it Fivers:

1. Which are the 5 words you find most uplifting?
2. Which 5 words upset you the most?
3. Who is your favorite person to listen to?
4. Who is your least favorite person to listen to?
5. List the last 5 books you've read and the years in which you read them.

Now comes the hard part: Look at your answers and think long and hard about how they relate. Satisfied? Regardless, the answers to those five simple questions tells you (and everyone else) all they need to know about what floats your boat, what gets your goat, how they can get you to go along, and whether they even have to worry about you figuring out what they're doing.

Really. Think about it.

The dumps

After re-reading the last sentence of my last post, I realized I'm pretty much down in the dumps again. It's too easy to get depressed. Maybe I just shouldn't sweat the little things.

Depending on who you talk to (and I'm not counting Creationists here, they don't know, they can only believe, and I don't have time for that particular kind of nonsense, though ceteris paribus what I'm thinking right now would include their "arguments" anyhow) there have been humans on earth now for a few hundred thousand years. Yes, if you consider our hominoid forebears we can maybe stretch that back to a million or more years, but that only makes matters worse, not better.

What am I talking about? It's simple really: how dumb are we, actually, as a species?

Really. Yes, I know how lots of folks like to go about all our "progress" and technological advances and that we were on the moon and we've decoded the human genome, and ... well, I'm sure you get the picture, but none of that really answers the question. Yes, we've developed what appear to be some very sophisticated tools, and we can accomplish some clever tricks, but what have we really learned? Are we any "better", whatever that may mean, as a species. Is the world a "better" (same qualifications apply) because of us?

And that's where I'm not getting those good positive vibes. I'm not sure we've accomplished much at all.

We're close to having irreversibly destroyed the climate. We've polluted and have as good as irreparably damaged every environment we've settled in. We can't solve the simplest interpersonal problems without raping, killing, maiming, pillaging, and plundering (or at least thinking of them). We're emotionally unstable. We're pretty handy and making weapons, but are hopeless when it comes making a home or ends meet. We are hands down the most selfish creatures that have ever existed, and when it comes to others -- and I mean that in it's simplest sense: someone not us ... people from other towns, regions, countries, cultures, religions, etc. -- we most often display and arrogance and cruelty that would make baboons blush, if they were capable of doing so.

Most importantly, we are the only creature on earth that knows of evil. And committing it, is apparently what we do best of all.

I'm sorry. I'm missing the "better" part ... still.

Thinking even more about learning

If we accept that Carr may be onto something, then we must ask ourselves what behaviors, what learning the Net supports. It would appear that it is largely behavioral: the successful following of a link, the Facebook 'thumbs-up', the signal tone indicating an incoming SMS … all of these are positive reinforcements that Pavlov and, in particular, Skinner could be proud of. This point needs to be explored in more depth, but we would be remiss to dismiss this all as the jaundiced view of a luddite. Carr's point is that we are, in fact, rewiring our brains, and that this rewiring favours certain mental functions and capacities. If he is right, our understanding of education may be in need of revising … or saving, depending on how one looks at it.

Roszak, as we saw, made the case that it was our revised notion of "information" that makes the Net possible, and it is this notion that is undermining the institution of education itself. Carr is indicating that there is a body of sound, scientific, neurophysiological evidence to support Roszak's contention. It would seem worthwhile, then, to at least devote part of the time searching the literature to establish a foundation upon which a position can be taken, for if Roszak and Carr are correct, we may be in the process of undoing our understanding of the notion of education without even realizing it. We need to make a distinction, of course, between what the Net does best and what the Net can be used for. A shoe is not a hammer, but in a pinch it can be used to pound in a nail. A hammer may be better for pounding in nails, but if the window is open and it is breezy outside, it functions very well as a paperweight. In other words, it is not the tool in and of itself that determines its "best" use, rather it is the situation, the context, and the intent that best determines what is best. I believe we need to take a similar approach to the Net and technology-enhanced learning.

In terms of design, what works may be a reasonable enough approach. What is optimal may not be a matter of absolutivity but of relativity. In design, awareness of consequences and side-effects may be as important as knowledge about design itself or about the technology platform on which the learning is supposed to take place.

References
Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, New York & London, W.W. Norton and Company.

Roszak, T. (1986) The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking, London, Paladin Graftin Books.

Thinking some more about learning

In reading Nicholas Carr recently, it became clearer to me that we need to look more closely at the relationship between learning and technology, in particular learning and the technology of the Net (hereafter used to refer to both the internet and worldwide web as we find them today).

One of the reasons for introducing technology-enhanced learning into the educational system was to take advantage of whatever it is that the Net has to offer. What is this? Carr maintains that it is not what we think it is. He believes that there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that our ability to understand is being challenged by the Net. What does this mean? Understanding is our ability to give meaning to the world around us, to our lives. It is a matter of establishing a frame of reference against which (hopefully) sound judgments can be made. These judgments may be about which smartphone to buy or about whether we invade a foreign country.

Every judgment we make has, to be sure, a factual component, but I suspect it has a moral component as well. (Which smartphone, or whether a smartphone says something about the buyer's view of the place of such technology in their lives and its potential impacts, say, on the environment. This is much closer to the moral dimension but is certainly not in the forefront of the buying decision. Where is should be is another issue that will have to be discussed elsewhere.) Understanding, hence meaning, is what makes our lives worth living, and so long as we have a why, as Nietzsche noted, we can endure almost any how. It is not a mere intellectual game, a cocktail-party sport, to consider what the world might become should we no longer have a basis for making a why-judgment.

The Net demands that we make many, quick decisions. Hyperlinking demands that we decide, at a minimum to-follow-or-not-to-follow. (That has become the question, but who cares any more about the Prince of Denmark?) This constant decision-making overloads the pre-frontal cortex to such an extent that the brain is more involved in deciding than it is in transferring material from working to long-term memory. If we do not do this, we no longer understand, for the underlying schema upon which, or against which background, long-term, life-relevant decisions are made is undermined. It atrophies. As Carr puts it, we become "mindless consumers of data" (p125). I'm not sure this is what we want going on in the classroom.

Reference
Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, New York & London, W.W. Norton and Company.

Thinking about learning

Learning situations are especially complex. Everyone involved has his or her own predispositions, needs, wants, desires, experiential background, schooling, social environment and more, all of which impacts learning. Learning, we may say, is that process, in which the individual is changed (or is different at the end) in some way, be it in terms of knowledge, skills, competence, values, or their view of the world. In order to compensate for the variability of the individuals involved, a clearer understanding of the learning process itself can be helpful.

What is learning? How does an individual learn? What factors impact learning or influence learning? How are we able to take what we "learned" in one situation and apply it in another (transfer)? What roles does the mind or brain play in the process? These are the types of questions that a theory of learning should answer.

All theories are based upon certain assumptions that we make about the world around us. These assumptions are based on a number of factors, such as culture, language, or zeitgeist, among others. These assumptions sit deep and are, for the most part, self-evident, given, and unquestioned. For example, behaviourism, the dominant learning theory in the first half of the 20th century, postulates (assumes) that all learning manifests as observable and measurable changes in behavior. Cognitive learning theory, the most dominant theory in the second half of the 20th century, by contrast, attempts to explain learning in terms of brain-based processes, which are often compared to or measured against computers, an assumption which in turn is based upon a certain understanding of the notions of information and data processing. Constructivism, which is currently very much in fashion (in a variety of flavors), takes the view that the learner him/herself is actively involved and engaged in constructing his or her ideas and concepts, whereby language, culture, and experience all play significant roles in the learning process.

Unawareness of these underlying assumptions can lead us to conclusions that may not be as generalizable as we first thought. We cannot say that behaviorism is "wrong". There is a considerable body of evidence that documents that it works. We cannot say that cognitivism is "wrong", for here too there is much evidence that in certain situations and under certain conditions it works. The same applies to constructivism. What we can conclude from this is that there may not be one, encompassing theory of learning, or, it may be that certain theories are more applicable to specific types of situations or types of learning, whereas others apply in other contexts or situations. In other words, these may not be mutually exclusive theories, but could even be complementary. Unfortunately, we do not have enough evidence to know which might be applicable in which situations, but based upon the evidence that we have, it should be possible to make reasonable conclusions in this regard in relation to the given material, the given situation, and the goal that is intended to be reached.

Occam's razor

In keeping with the last entry, I'd like to continue with the theme of simplicity. Last time we saw that the world is by nature complex, whereas most everything we humans get our hands (feet, minds, ...) on gets complicated. What is more, complicated things are difficult, but complex ones are not really.

Sure, I can hear all you scientists out there yelling that we've only begun scratching the surface of understanding of many of the world's phenomena, from the human genome to the intellectuality of one-celled organisms to parallel universes to slicing bread. But, we should not mistake the map for the territory. I fully agree that we've only begun scratching the surface because from the onset we are complicating things. Complex things - with a bit of patience and perseverance - can be grasped, but we have to get our egos out of the way and let our consciousness work its magic.

Of course, since we're such technological creatures, we need tools. We love tools. Most of us don't work well with tools, but we love them anyway. And one tool that can help us out here is Occam's Razor. Well, this isn't really a razor like the one's we use to shave with, rather the term refers to a way of thinking, a sharp way of thinking, a heuristic, and by thinking sharply and cleanly, we can avoid a lot of complication.

As a side note, the tool is named after William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349), an English logician and Franciscan friar, to whom it is credited although he didn't come up with it. The same thought as the razor are to be found in Maimonides (1138?-1204), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), and John Duns Scotus (1266?-1308). It was Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) who first used the term itself.

The form most often used by Occam himself is numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, or, for those of you who opted out of Latin in school, "plurality ought never be posited without necessity". This should be thought along with the principle of economy which was well known to him and his predecessors, namely frustra fit per plura quod potest fiere per pauciora, or "it is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer". One of the most common formulations today is

Explanations should never multiply causes without necessity; when two explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.

So, I think you can see where I'm going with this. The next time you listen to all those explanations on the news why gas prices must be tied to oil prices, or why it "makes economic sense" to ship tomatoes from Florida to Mexico to be packaged so that they can be shipped to New York for sale, or why there is allegedly some inalienable right for private citizens (as opposed to citizens who are part of an official militia, like the Swiss) to own guns, or that a society can afford to pay CEOs hundreds of millions but can't see to it that single mothers can make the rent, or why any one religion got it all right while all others got it all wrong (... the list goes on ...), think of William and his razor.

It's been a long time since William and longer since we took him seriously, so let's take his razor then as the goal to strive for. In the meantime, any simple, sensible explanation will do. Do we still have it in us, or have we lost it completely?

Complex or complicated?

Wondering is something I do often, though I don't now how well. Still, I have been contemplating a pair of notions again, namely complicated and complex. Maybe it's because the subject came up at a recent strategy tutorial. Maybe it's because I spent three days last week immersed in the details of a software application that had little relevance to the world out here (but we absolutely have to have it). And maybe it's because there's simply a big difference between the two concepts.
Obviously, they have quite a bit in common: lots of little part, lots of relationships, lots of interconnectedness, lots of unknown beginnings and ends, lots of back-and-forths, lots of gives-and-takes.

Take any living organism, from single-cell plant or animal to human beings. What a source of wonderment, fascination, and awe, regardless of how you think they got here. The same applies to inorganic substances as well: just look at a petroleum molecule or a salt, and you will get the gist of what I mean.

What all of these have in common is an innate sense of beauty, be it the chainness of certain molecules to the perfect symmetry of crystals, the complexity brings forth shapes, colors and textures that literally take one's breath away. What this also have in common is that they are natural, that is, they occur in the world as we find it. And what they also have in common is that each of these examples is complex. It all fits together. It all works. The elegance of functionality wrapped up in the complexity of its being.

Complicated, on the other hand, is a bit different. Sure there is what appears to be complexity, but it doesn't really work. Software systems, government systems, pension schemes, businesses large and small, school systems, education systems, security systems ... the list goes on and on. We make these things taking nature as our (role) model, but somehow we just don't get it right. Let's face it. Most things are pretty well broken. Even five minutes of American infotainment lets that cat out of the bag.

And all these things (these machines, systems, programs, organizations) also share a common characteristic: they're ugly. Who's had stood in awe of the Social Security Administration? Who has had their breath taken away (in a positive sense) when passing through customs at the airport? Who has been (lovingly) brought to tears by the site of the garbage piling up on the streets? I don't think so. But all of these things have another characteristic in common: they're man-made, as we used to say, person-made, if I'm to be politically correct (though I have to agree with Rhett Butler here: Frankly, [...] I don't give a damn!).

So, it would seem that at base the difference between the complex and the complicated lies in the simple fact that if we've had our fingers in it, it's complicated; otherwise it's probably complex. It's as simple as that, for in the end, life is a rather simple affair. We (choose to) make it complicated.

Propaganda

Picking up on the theme of my last post, it occurred to me today that a very important word is both losing favor -- most often simply through misuse -- and is also shifting it's meaning. This time the shift is not toward another word in the same domain, if you will, rather it is sliding into a separate domain and will be overwhelmed by the current standard term there. That word, of course, is "propaganda". We should keep it around, I think. It's a good word, and it actually communicates quite a bit. But, what is propaganda anyway?

If we stop to reflect for a minute, we see it is a form of communication. It's primary purpose is to influence its listeners (or readers or viewers, depending upon the media). The influence should be in a particular way, of course, that is, in favor of the position or assertions being made by the issuer, most commonly but now hardly ever known as the propagandist. The influencing is accomplished by presenting facts selectively. That doesn't mean it's an outright lie, rather, the selection allows the stater to simply leave things out in order to encourage the listener to draw particular conclusions. What is more, propaganda is generally presented emotionally. Emotion, not reason, should be directing the decision-making processes of the listener. That's how we generally understand the term these days.

Granted, this was a political term for the longest of times, but I don't hear it so much in that domain of discourse any more. I do see exactly that happening on a daily basis, and that is my cause for concern. We are all confronted with it day in and day out ... Americans and Brits more than, say, Germans or the French, but no one these days is immune to it. We know it as advertising.

Now before our marketing friends get all weird on me, stop and think about it for a minute. Advertising is a form of communication. It's primary purpose is to influence its listeners (or readers or viewers, depending upon the media). The influence should be in a particular way, of course, that is, in favor of the position or assertions being made by the advertiser. The influencing is accomplished by presenting facts seletively, also in order to encourage the listener to draw particular conclusions. And I doubt that anyone would disagree that it is presented emotionally. So where, I ask you, is the real difference?

I don't see one, so I'm sticking to my guns.

Generally, things like this wouldn't bother me all that much, but I am reminded of McLuhan's aphorism on the one side: the price of eternal vigilance is indifference (we simply get worn down by it all, throw in the towel, and end up with too big a car payment or a world war or whatever). On the other side, there aren't enough people these days educated enough to (a) know what propaganda really is or (b) have been taught or allowed to think critically enough to defend themselves. We can all do something about (a), but (b), well, that's a bigger problem ... and one that's bigger than I want address at the moment.

The next time you're being schlocked or enticed, or being amused to reach into your pocket for money, I'd suggest you stop and think. Of course, what works in marketing, well, that should be right and proper for politics now, shouldn't it. Think about it.

Say what you mean

What do you do when the words you've used all your life are no longer usable? Not that they're worn out, no, just that they don't mean what they used to. Some came along and changed them. Is that even possible? Well, truth be told it is.

It's not a new thing, really. Not two hundred years ago if you used the word "awful" it was a good thing. What you were experiencing, looking at, feeling, filled you with awe. Not Rumsfeldian awe, real awe ... wonder, admiration, the kinds of feelings many folks used to have toward G-d, when there was allowed to be One. Some "awesome" only had some awe, and not necessarily good awe ... pre-Rumsfeld, but more that kind of awe. In other words, it was a relatively negative term. Today though, they've switched places.

This is, I suppose, a natural process of language, but I missed the awful/awesome switch, and I can't say I'm sorry. But the one we're seeing now is a little more troubling to me.

I'm talking about very basic political orienting terms like "conservative" and "liberal". Growing up, I always thought that conservatives were people who wanted to conserve, keep, protect, hold on to something. And for the most part, that's what it looked like they were doing, even if I didn't particularly agree with them. On the other hand, the root of the word "liberal" is the Latin word for freedom, that is, liberals were the ones advocating change, more often than not in the sense of more individual and collective freedoms, even it I didn't agree with where they were going with some things. That's all changed now.

We may talk about neo-liberal economics, but the "neo-" prefix is a matrixian sleight-of-hand to make you think it's about the free flows of money or something. It's not, it's about restricting those flows to some unspecified club of folks who think that agreeing on bonus contracts is a more valuable skill than actually protecting people's savings. Of course, our friends at Faux News like to use it as an epithet to simply discredit anyone they don't want having any say. This is perhaps the most heinous usage, but it does seem to be the one that is catching on, so we have all of this "ilk" being tossed into the same pot for regular stirring.

On the other hand, I had to sit up and take notice when I read a recent article by the linguist George Lakoff, who rather poignantly pointed out that the upswell in alleged conservatism in the United States is anything but that. Instead, they are actually redefining and recasting a number of notions that I once thought I knew what they meant, like privacy, democracy, values, and basic human rights. Just when I thought I was beginning to understand the world and what people were saying, I find out -- once again -- I don't. Oh well, back to the dictionary, I guess.

Like I said, shifts in meaning are a natural part of language, and I actually believe that the awful/awesome switch was the result of a natural process. What is happening now, however, is quite a different story. I guess I have to be on my toes to find out what some people really mean. I wish they would just say what they mean ... and mean what they say. But maybe I'm not supposed to know.

The student voice

That's been the focus of my attention for the past couple of days. It's an interesting sentiment, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

One of the claims that was made was that all education is in effect learner-centered because it is all about getting students through the system in a meaningful way. This is to my mind a bit of a stretch. It makes too many assumptions, the most pernicious being that we (whoever that is) know in no uncertain terms what is best for the future. Unfortunately, the history of the world reveals to us we have precious little clue. No, this is system-centered instruction, at best.

Another assertion of learner-centeredness masquerades as technology-enhanced instruction. The use of technology, especially social-networking tools, promotes interaction amongst learners and helps them learn better. One group participating in this discussion maintains that all interaction promotes learning, another group claims that the technology itself is driving and promoting this. Unfortunately, this is technology-centered instruction, nothing more.

Another strain of thought (which tried my patience) is that giving the students themselves more say makes for learner-centered instruction. Given that I can remember how much I knew when I was 18 compared to how little I know today, I'd say this is little more than a cop-out. My experience has been that most young people rightfully want a lot, but don't really know what they really want, for you need a bit more (sometimes painful) experience to figure that all out. This is more a notion of self-centered instruction than anything else.

In my mind, learner-centered teaching/instruction/... must truly start with the learner, that is, the individual who wants to/must/should/will learn. This means, by default, that we must have a clear idea of what we understand learning to be. It's not clear to me that there is general agreement on what this is. My reading and experience has shown me that regardless of whether it is acquisition of knowledge, skill development, effective ordering of thought, problem-solving or even all of these, learning has one significant and outstanding characteristic: it is individual. No two people learn alike. No two individuals in any given learning situation will learn exactly the same thing. In other words, learner-centered instruction must, by nature, be individualized instruction.

Vocations and Professions

My initial reaction is that vocations have to do with being called; professions do the calling. Catchy, I suppose, but not very helpful.

I've been given a small but difficult task in a project in which I'm taking part: make clear the difference between vocational training and academic-based education in 25 lines or less. Seems to be a lot like an old contest from a cereal box. It isn't. European educational policy hangs in the balance. OK, not in the balance, but over my shoulder.

There are two fundamental oppositional pairs that I'm wrestling with: (1) training vs. education and (2) vocational vs. ???. The problem's pretty obvious: I'm missing the second element of the second pair. At the moment, I've classified it as a language problem.

Grow (1991) makes a sensible and simple distinction between training and education: the former, he contends, is "learning to do something well"; the latter, "becoming prepared for an uncertain life". It's a start. Granted, there are certain professions, like lawyers, doctors, teachers, and others, which are heavily engaged in training, and this training is to prepare the learner for functioning on the job. So, there is certainly an occupational component, at any rate. My hesitancy arises in placing profession opposite vocational, because I think this sends the wrong signal, especially in terms of the task I need to perform.

Leafing through Postman (1995), however, has provided me with a potential exit out of my dilemma. Though differentiating between schooling and education, he raises an interesting distinction that appears helpful to me: training, learning to do something well, enable us to make a living. Education, on the other hand, in preparing one for uncertainty, helps us to make a life for ourselves. The difference is simple, yet profound.

To participate in a professional field, of course, one starts with a basis in education, and then adds the training on top. Vocational training, for the most part, starts with the fundamentals (3 Rs, basic general knowledge, etc.) and then focuses primarily on the training part. Of course, highly skilled tradespeople are capable of functioning well in an uncertain world, but the focus of their skill development is not the uncertainty, but certainty: doing their trade well. Higher education, though, is supposed to prepare us for greater levels of uncertainty?

Perhaps. This is the thought I'll have to pursue. I'm still missing a word in for my pairs. Vocational/Professional is too sharp. Vocational/Academic seems too bookish. Vocational/Occupational is not sharp enough. The search continues.

----------
Grow, G. (1991) "Teaching Learners to be Self-Directed." Adult Education Quarterly, 41, 125-149

Postman, N. (1995) The End of Education, NY, Vintage Books

Indigestion

For the past couple of weeks I've been feeding my head ... not Gracie-Slick style, rather more traditionally. I've been doing a lot of reading, having lots and lots of words pass by my eyes. I'm starting to wonder what I got out of it. Everything's a little cloudy right now. My head feels like my stomach after too big a meal. Why is that?

Maybe it's because I've been stream-reading, you know: read one thing; stumble over a reference so you go off and read that; it reminds you of something else, so you pick that up and read some of it ... sort of like following definitions through the dictionary, but with big clumps of words instead of single entries. For example, start with Young's Geometry of Meaning, and his fourfoldness gets you to Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed. Both texts are short, to be sure, but dense ... very dense. Of course, Young also mentions The Cloud of Unknowing and Casteneda, and you find your nose in The Teachings of Don Juan again after 30+ years. But this is all after-hours stuff. My day job has me dealing with an elearning project that prompted me to do a little research to begin with, which is what got me to Young, then ... well, you know where I'm going with this.

What all of these particular texts have in common is that they describe something that most of us would rather not think about, but something that is there just the same. It's hard to put a label on it, and I'm fully aware that labels tend to unnecessarily reduce things anyway. So, for the sake of argument, let's just call it more. Yes, they all describe something 'more'. Young and Schumacher are convincing, that's the simplest way to put it ... very convincing, I might add. The anonymous author of The Cloud is, well, devoted and clearheaded, to say the least; Castenda is passionate. In a word, though they might not agree on the details, they are speaking with one voice at least in principle.

So what's my problem? It's acutally simple enough: who cares? In the hustle and bustle of corporate business, no one gives two hoots about 'more', unless it's money we're talking about. In the challenging world of academe, this 'more' is just not scientific enough, I mean, where's the proof? In the mundanity of everyday life, there are cars to fix and lawns to mow and bills to pay, and sabbaths become unavoidably shopping days ... hey, when else are you doing to do it?

I suppose what's really bothering me is the fact that without the 'more' we just keep getting less and less. No matter how much information we process, how much money we make, how many things we buy, we just end up with less in the end, because there's no 'more' in the more that we think we have. It seems so obvious that the 'more' I'm referring to is there, but not only does it get so little attention, there are many folks out there who will argue with you - vehemently - that it's not even there at all. There are none so blind as they who will not see.

All right, it's time for a digestive. A metaphysical one, of course, and just a small one ... less is more.

Resurrecting ideas whose time never came

Just because some ideas assert themselves and garner lots of attention doesn't mean their the best ideas around. It's not just my innate scepticism of markets that leads me to this conclusion. Ideas, concepts, and notions need to be understood, and some are simply a bit more difficult to grasp. This increased difficulty is, I'm sure, a contributor to their losing out in the race to the marketplace ... if that is in fact where everything is determined.

One such idea/concept/notion is erotetics.

No, please look again: there's an additional "et" shoved in there; we're not dealing with anything risque at all, but that doesn't mean it isn't an exciting concept. OK, exciting may be too strong a word, but interesting and meaningful still apply.

Stated most simply, erotetics is the science of questions. Some see it as branch of logic, namely the logic of questions and questioning, and as such was of interest in general to philosophers and in practice to lawyers. For others, it was a short-lived, and, in my estimation, too long overlooked branch of educational theory.

It's not that I think there is only one way to think about education, a term I use to encompass both teaching and learning. There is still a lot of debate about what teaching is, and the emphasis these days is certainly on the learner, though I'm not sure the teaching-learning dichotomy isn't a false one any way, but that's a topic for another time. I do believe, however, that the very notion of questions and questioning can be an excellent starting point for a number of things that matter. To me, questions and questioning - erotetics - is the hub of the wheel of consciousness, with language, perception, philosophy, education, science, politics, and a host of other "disciplines" acting as spokes. But, if it's as important as I think it is, then why has it been and is it so neglected?

One of the issues involved is certainly that we don't have as strong a grip on the notion of questioning as we think we do. Having taken a closer look at the subject (see "A Question of Questions"), I'm much more aware of what a complex, yet extremely powerful, factor questions are. Even risking being over-simplistic, questioning is a unique - if not defining - human capability. The problem is, we don't understand just how they work and how they can be best employed, especially in education. Sure, we've all heard of the Socratic method, and we're all aware that questions play a significant role in teaching, but too many classroom questions deal with procedural, not learning, issues, and too many classroom questions that are related to learning activities are simply poor questions that don't live up to their potential.

As a result, I'm making a call for the resurrection of an idea whose time never really came, namely erotetics. It's time to start questioning questions again.

Anti-teaching ... really?

In my day job, I have to deal a lot with trying to get adult-education teachers and vocational trainers into the 21st century. In other words, I have been tasked with helping get our collective head around the latest information and communication technology (ICT). It's not an easy job, and it's not a pretty picture. This is not because this class of educator is particularly put off by new technology, it's more of case of them not seeing why it may be useful. After all, we've been talking at students and seminar participants for years now, and nobody's really complained, and they seem to be getting it, and their employers are generally satisfied ... so why all this new stuff?

I find the question particularly legitimate. Have we really shown that there is any advantage to ICT in any classroom. On the one hand, we have the fact that an increasing number of our learners are simply at home in the new technologies. In one of the EU projects in which I am involved (TeNeGEN: Connect the TEachers to reach and teach the NEt GENeration www.tenegen.eu), this was the starting point for developing materials and courses to help get our target group more up-to-speed with their students. Sure, we're making some progress, but there is a deeper issue involved, namely change.

It's not so much that our target group educators are anti-technology, for I'm convinced that most of them are not, rather, we need to think about new ways of structuring, organizing and facilitating instruction. As was mentioned in the last posting, involvement and interaction and doing and experience are especially important factors in the learning process. We've known this for a long time now, but only recently has enough momentum built that we can actually start acting upon this knowledge.

One of those whose blazing the trail into the areas of new learning is Mike Wesch at Kansas State University. If you haven't already, I can only recommend and encourage you to stop over and take a look at his "Brief Philosophy of Anti-Teaching" which was originally published on the Savage Minds blog. This is a great introduction to thinking differently about what we're doing in the classroom. And, for those of you who are more visual, there's a YouTube video from him that is worth a watch, too.

The heart of the matter

Everywhere I've been lately there's been a lot of talk about learning: elearning, formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning, professional learning. You name it, someone's found a way to tack "learning" on the end of it, as if this would clarify anything. It doesn't.

Most of my discussion partners really weren't talking about learning, they were talking about other things, like education, training, or schooling. I'm not convinced that any of these 3 last-named notions really have a lot to with learning per se. What is more, in most of those discussions, replacing the word "learning" with "teaching" would have made them at least more comprehensible and, more importantly, accurate. For some reason I get the very strong impression that most people think that others won't learn unless there's someone there to help them. I think that's putting the cart before the horse . We humans are capable of so very much, but there is one thing I found that we can't do in the least: we cannot not learn. We are constantly and continually intaking, assimilating, sorting, sifting, filtering, feeling, processing, remembering, and forgetting ... in other words, learning. Learning is what we do most, and what we do best, even if most of us like to doubt the quality of that learning when we see the results in others. Maybe that's why we so often get that urge to institute some kind of control system, like schools, colleges and universities, religious institutions, and other training providers.

Certainly we can learn on our own, and I would be the last to maintain that others can't or couldn't make a substantial contribution to our learning. What I'm skeptical of, though, is what I like to call the "teacher value-added". What most teachers do - at least in my experience - falls under lecturing, maybe audio-visual (at least since the advent of PowerPoint and the web), and in some cases some demonstration with the occasional discussion group thrown in for good measure. I know I'm being too hard on a lot of my colleagues, but just suggesting changes never brings them about. While it may not be a perfect model, the learning pyramid at least give us a frame of reference for thinking about teaching and learning. It would seem to make sense to place more emphasis where the expectations of the outcomes are the highest, at the bottom of the pyramid. More bang for the buck, as we used to say in defense.

To me, the best teacher of all is the one who gets out of the way and lets others learn. This is not to say that teachers should not be involved in learning. They should be. This is not to say that teachers are superfluous. They aren't. But teachers need a better understanding of their role in the process, as the catalyst of learning process, not primarily the assessor of learning outcomes.