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.

More resurrection - process

There is a lot of talk about process these days. It seems that every moving target is a process. Maybe it is. But do we understand process? Do we really know how it works? I would think no. One person has done a lot of thinking about process, however. Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter and thinker par excellence. Though appearing at first rather complicated and technical, his process model provides us with an excellent analytic tool for looking at process in general, and anything we consider to be a process in particular. A few notions need to be in hand when approaching his model. His seven-stage arc covers three descending stages, if you will, a turnaround, and three ascending stages. As such it encompasses four levels, which parallel, if not explain, Aristotle's four causes (a topic, which if you haven't already dealt with, is highly recommended). These causes/levels are explained in terms of two related notions: freedom and constraint. Level I starts with 3 degrees of freedom and 0 degrees of constraint, and each successive level becomes less free and more constrained. Movement through the ascending part of the arc, of course, indicates increasing freedom and less constraint. Think about it: process is liberating. Put those two ideas into your consciousness and let them simply share some awareness space for a while. You'll be surprised where it might lead you. Today I'm not here to explain all of this to you, rather I just want to whet your appetite for something that can be a real eye-opener, if you let it. If you have to deal with processes, no matter what kind in which contexts, this can be a very helpful tool. Check it out.

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.