eLearning & Deliberative Moments

I'm just bookmarking a list of all the papers, posters and seminars at 2008 International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS) held June 23-28 at Utrecht NL. PDFs are available for all except the two you really want. Also keynote slideshares. Some good, up-to-date material about collaborative learning in there.

Posted by rlubensky at 3:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

Mark Federman teases apart the concepts of teamwork and collaboration in an organisational context.

True collaboration involves admitting that there are aspects of the situation that you don’t know that you don’t know; that non-obvious others can make a contribution in unanticipated ways; and that you are willing to reveal what otherwise might be considered a lack of competence in a public forum through the act of reaching out. Teamwork, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that information in a bureaucracy is fragmented among its component roles, and that the way to ensure complete information is to identify and bring together the necessary components.

In other words, teamwork puts high responsibility on autonomous individuals for complete and accurate input. Collaboration demands less about independent, competent input but rather a commitment to the emergence of a collective output. Collaboration acknowledges complexity and unpredictability. It also recognises that contributors are fallible humans who draw on all life aspects rather than bureaucratic automatons only concerned with economics and rationality.

The distinction is political.

Via Harold Jarche.

Posted by rlubensky at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments

P Clint Rogers eulogises recently deceased academic and mentor Dr. Dillon K. Inouye. They share the view, so eloquently expressed in this 2005 article, that the discipline of instructional design technology (IDT) is primarily an ethical concern.

Too often, our universities and funding bodies push us into research about IDT to reveal universal "scientific" truths, as an engineering design practice, or as economic innovation.

This aligns well with this framework (pdf) by Orrill, Hannafin and Glazier (1999) that categorises educational technology research depending on whether or not it seeks fundamental understanding or it considers usage. Their quadrant includes basic foundational research, use-inspired (theory-building) research and applied research.

Inouye suggested that we take an Aristotelian view of IDT, and research about it, as an ethical pursuit. It is primarily a response to what we ought to do to help people learn and act. The other research approaches are valuable, of course. But if we prioritise our endeavour with the emancipatory at the top, then the research agenda that emerges takes a distinctive shape. Inouye suggested that our focus should be subjective and contextual rather than objective and universal. He advocated methods like naturalistic inquiry and participatory action research where the output of the research endeavour is assistive rather than merely academic.

The ethical underpinning of learning designs is usually taken for granted. This is obscured further when instruction reinforces a closed, absolutist worldview in authorising what "you must" do rather than helping you explore what "you ought" to do.

As Inouye cited of Aristotle, “No one deliberates about the unvarying”.

Posted by rlubensky at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments

On the plane coming back from a project meeting in Sydney, I sat next to a woman who immediately engaged me in conversation. Tania noticed my textbook reading about research methods in political science and wondered what I did. She asked me a dozen knowledgeable questions allowing me to provide a broad explanation about what deliberative processes are all about. I spoke passionately about my endeavour.

Then Tania told me that she is a volunteer for (and I would venture to say, disciple of) the Art of Living movement. They are led by an Indian swami and believe that political and social change can occur through personal transformation. The Art of Living is an NGO that performs community development work. She made no secret that the organisation raises funds through courses about meditative practice. I was being tugged by a very loyal and skilled recruiter.

I learned from Tania that their meditative practice is intended to generate similar ideals to deliberative process: mutual respect, reciprocity, openness and commitment to the search for common ground. But they're approach is entirely prescriptive--it starts with a commitment to their personal way of thinking, literally. In providing aid to communities, they begin by delivering their course to them.

This led me to wonder about my own evangelistic zeal about deliberation. The ideals about civil conduct are little different, only the Art of Living prescribes personal transformation while deliberative practitioners seek social transformation through the uptake of productive conversation formats. Of course, they are related. But the approaches are differentiated by the locality and granularity of their intervention.

In pulling citizens into a conversation bubble that precludes competitive behaviour, are deliberationists just as prescriptive? How different is my repulse of the tug of psychological recruitment to the repulse of conservative pluralists to any group activity, which they may believe to be inherently coercive?

This returns me to my ongoing dilemma of finding a way to respect the autonomous individual perspective AND having them willingly include themselves in constructive, collaborative conversation.

Posted by rlubensky at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments

Posted by rlubensky at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments

my dome piece from cloois on Vimeo.

A couple of weeks ago I read an article entitled Does Our Brain Impair Our Political Perspective? It referred enthusiastically to a report about an experiment with an MRI machine that "found" that people did not register brain activity when presented with evidence that their preferred political candidates were lying or being contradictory. The conclusion by the brain scientists was that political polarisation inhibits learning. I left this comment:

I am sceptical of positivist science that presumes an objective Truth external to our personal and social context. Yet the study findings are an interpretation of interpretations by subjects. This hand-waving is hardly validated by the use of an MRI machine.

If I am an expert at something, I will go more directly to a response apparently without thought. Similarly, social, political and even technocratic beliefs unconsciously guide everything I do and filter my perception. I don’t need an MRI to “prove” this.

Today George Siemens points to a paper entitled The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Those researchers demonstrate that people claimed to be brain scientists tend to be believed regardless of what they say, without question.

But this video tells the important story that most often the levels of analysis are not rigorously aligned between the claims of brain science and learning or behaviour.

Posted by rlubensky at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is the kind of cockamamy claim that infuriates me. The author of this article in Wired Magazine is its editor, Chris Anderson, who also coined the term "long tail" as a contemporary business model. Wired has often published provocative articles, but I think it has long tailed out.

Chris' claim is that with petabyte storage (yes, that's lots), "we can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot." The patterns found are the emergent model, so this is just rubbish.

Chris clearly has not actually done academic research. If he had, then he would know that it is the research question that defines the methodology, not the subject or the capacity of your computer. There are already many approaches, especially in social studies where meaning is sought, which lead to qualitative methods of data collection (ie. they need human recorders) from which patterns are discerned. Grounded theory is a well-established methodology that generates explanations through a structured inductive process from focussed qualitative or quantitative data. Other research questions are precisely designed to validate theory, and thus lead to hypothesis-driven, experimental research designs that may only rely on quantitative data.

Unfortunately, many outside academia (and a few inside those walls) think only the latter is "proper research".

via Harold Jarche, who is editing OLDaily while Stephen Downes takes a long break.

Posted by rlubensky at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

Matt Leighninger, Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Senior Associate of Everyday Democracy and author of "The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - And Why Politics Will Never Be the Same", writes an impassioned blogpost ostensibly to attendees to the Personal Democracy Forum conference, but really to all of us who are interested in making politics more open and accessible to ordinary citizens. His words are certainly relevant to us developing the Australian Citizens’ Parliament project.

Are you democratic revolutionaries or just another interest group?

Making politics more “open” [through the medium of the Internet] is a terrific priority – but if that’s all you do, then you’ll just be making a space for yourselves at the political table and not welcoming in the people with less time, less education, less confidence, less faith in government and community, and/or a lower level of technological skills.

While most noise in America is focussed on the Presidential race, Matt suggests that citizens remain uninfluential, armchair commentators. Instead, he recommends that we work hard on instigating initiatives that really engage citizens in everyday political decision-making, especially at the local level where it can really count.

Posted by rlubensky at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

This image from Lewis Fry Richardson (1930), Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable of only Two Ideas, scanned (because I can) from The Analogy Between Mental Images and Sparks, Psychological Review, vol 37, no. 3, p. 222.

The lamps having been rested overnight, insertion of the plug K caused lamp Q to light while P remained extinct. Contact at x, applying the extra W of 12 volts for about a second, caused both lamps to flash, P more brightly than Q; and when contact at x was withdrawn, P remained alight but Q extinct, although the main voltage V was applied steadily all the time. Thus the lighting of P had inhibited Q. Again a temporary contact for about a second at y left Q alight but P extinct. And so on to and fro many times in succession.

Oscillating preferences, a great deal of resistance on the right, and much pent-up capacitance on the left. Looks like a good analogy to our polarised political landscape!

(I first came across this bit of fun in a TED talk by George Dyson about the birth of computing.)

Posted by rlubensky at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments

Over the past several months I have read dozens and dozens of academic papers. These have been primarily in the disciplines of communications, educational and political psychology. Many proclaimed to report on empirical research, but their method was nothing more than a few interviews and great deal of theory-rationalisation. There is surely a double standard. While senior academics can proffer stylised facts, PhD students like me are justifiably compelled to complete coursework about rigorous research methods.

[For me that's a story in itself. The PhD coordinator is demanding that I fly weekly to Sydney to attend every single class, which I am simply unable to do. Without special dispensation from the Dean, my candidacy is currently under a cloud.]

I have read all of these papers to find out how other researchers have collected data about deliberative and collaborative processes. Leaving aside the works that border on empirical pretence, much of what is left is experimentally and quantitatively derived. These studies start with hypotheses and then use survey or questionnaire to prove or disprove them. They are theory-driven, which means they find what they are looking for.

In the area of psychology, much of this data collection takes the form of personal inventory. These would include judgment statements like "I tend to make decisions on evidence rather than intuitively", on Likert scales ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. I'm reminded of the USA entry forms after 9/11--"Are you a member of a terrorist organisation?" Silly really.

There are various levels of falseness. First there is the invitation for flagrant deceit--people will tell you precisely what they think you want to know. Second, and for academic researchers in particular, you'll get made-up answers because subjects will not have consciously thought about it. James Fishkin, who developed Deliberative Polling, calls these phantom opinions. Lastly, and insidiously, you'll get what critical theorists call "false consciousness", a personal belief induced by hegemonic social pressure (eg. "autonomy is good").

I am interested in the willingness and capacity of citizens to participate in deliberative processes. As part of this investigation, I want to know what predispositions, traits or epistemological theories they bring to the table, regardless of validity. I'll be using qualitative methods to uncover these (eg interview, observation, subject narrative), and will probably have to break new ground in this methodological space considering the apparent paucity of giants to stand on. But I'll keep reading and maybe something will pop up....

Posted by rlubensky at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments