[Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?

Wed May 20 11:09:03 PDT 2020

Mike, I couldn't agree more. But to me that is not something new that I 
have learned - I already knew that was possible :-)

Rob

On 2020-05-20 19:00, mike cole wrote:
> Rob--
> 
> The unusual success we just experienced in a "re-generating chat"
> course via School of Ed at Berkeley, Colorado,
> Oslo, Barcelona, MAnchester, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Knoxville, ...
> serves for me as an existence proof that new,
> collective, forms of inquiry and educationally relevant practice CAN
> be created, if not sustained, by people who get into
> it because it enhances their capacities as researchers and thinkers.
> The issue, as always, is how to move beyond "one off"
> demonstrations, fire-flies, to enduring institutional change.
> 
> Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
> mike
> 
> On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 10:01 AM <robsub@ariadne.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>> My first thought when I read the OP was that this crisis is unlikely
>> to
>> teach us anything about remote and online learning per se. There has
>> 
>> been a mass of research over the last thirty years and more about
>> how it
>> is best done, what effects it has, how it can best be deployed in
>> different circumstances, including in the poorest places (Sugata
>> Mitra
>> is particularly powerful on this), including the possibilities and
>> the
>> effects in the developing world.*
>> 
>> My second thought was that I was perhaps being a bit unjust because
>> I
>> suspect I had lost sight of how new online learning still is to a
>> very
>> large proportion of professional educators who ought to know it by
>> now.
>> I am basing that partly on a regular output of articles in the
>> Guardian,
>> and also a few I have spotted in the liberal American press, about
>> how
>> rushing to put everything online doesn't solve all your problems. As
>> if
>> we needed to be told – but clearly some people do still need to be
>> told
>> that teaching and learning online is an entirely different animal to
>> 
>> doing it face to face.
>> 
>> But then I reverted again to my original position – I doubt that
>> we will
>> learn anything from this about online learning per se that we do not
>> 
>> already know. But it has struck me that a different lesson is
>> waiting to
>> be learned if we are willing to learn it. That lesson is not about
>> remote learning or about inequality or about the uses of different
>> tools. It is about the reinsertion of the family into educational
>> practice, flying in the face of a hundred years or more of
>> capitalist
>> industrialist educational policy.
>> 
>> To be honest, I doubt that it will stick, just as I doubt that much
>> of
>> what we are doing and learning will stick. Together with colleagues,
>> I
>> will be working my hardest to maintain the good things of this
>> situation, and to undo the bad things that we left behind. But we
>> will
>> be up against very powerful forces in the capitalist industrial (and
>> 
>> technological) monolith which will be working equally hard and much
>> more
>> powerfully to return us to the world pre-covid, because they
>> benefitted
>> from it.
>> 
>> I will be happy if we can nudge the world a little bit in our
>> direction,
>> particularly towards greener policies. But I am not holding my
>> breath.
>> 
>> Rob
>> 
>> *The asterisk is for an anecdote. I was tangentially involved in a
>> project to start up internet based learning for midwives in the
>> north of
>> Nigeria, where there is no infrastructure, no electricity, etc etc.
>> They
>> equipped a school room with solar powered laptops and screens, and a
>> 
>> solar powered router to connect to online learning materials. We
>> have a
>> photograph of the first few days of the class, which we cannot use.
>> It
>> shows the room from the back with a midwife at every screen. The
>> instructor is standing at the back of the class with his head in his
>> 
>> hands. He looks as if he is crying. He told us that he had his head
>> in
>> his hands because he could not believe the beauty of the scene in
>> front
>> of him.
>> 
>> On 2020-05-20 14:31, Tom Richardson wrote:
>>> Hello Annalisa
>>> Thank you for your reactions to the Klein article. I agree with
>> almost
>>> none of your opinions about the content nor the form. About the
>>> capacity of human nature for both heroic altruism and lethal
>>> self-interested behaviour acted out by the same person, I have no
>>> doubts.
>>> 
>>> * What I really wanted an answer to was: 'What will the
>> environment
>>> created for this new online learning actually consist of, in the
>>> widest sense of the situation for the learner and the context in
>> which
>>> such learning takes place?'.
>>> * What can be confidently forecast about the nature of these
>> changes
>>> for the _perezhivanie  _of the learner, which shapes her social
>> being
>>> and that which she perceives as being 'normal/abnormal',
>>> 'acceptable/unacceptable' and 'changeable/unchangeable' in her
>>> society?
>>> 
>>> Since little practical detail is given in Klein's piece and I
>> haven't
>>> yet listened to the complete video from the ECNY meeting, I cannot
>>> grasp what is intended/visualised by the AI/digital experts.
>>> I would welcome some approach to answers to those questions if
>> that is
>>> within your area of expertise; if not, I am content to let it
>> rest.
>>> 
>>> Kind regards
>>> Tom
>>> 
>>> On Tue, 19 May 2020 at 22:07, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hello Tom,
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you for posting the link.
>>>> 
>>>> I did finally get around to reading the Klein article, and it is
>>>> fairly dismal the manner that she outlines the intentions of Mr.
>>>> Schmidt. That is not to say that she is far from the mark, but we
>>>> are not just unthinking pods in the matrix, powerless to
>> articulate
>>>> the way technology is distended into our lives.
>>>> 
>>>> I think what bothers me most about the Klein article is the tone.
>>>> It reinforces through negation a fallacy that technology is
>>>> inevitable (and resistance is futile). I say this because she
>>>> presumes this narrative has become the hegemony upon which she
>>>> reacts. It is far too doomsday.
>>>> 
>>>> At the same time, a lot of her concerns are valid. The trawling
>> for
>>>> power in Washington by Silicon Valley is not unknown to us.
>>>> 
>>>> Yet, I also had a real hard time with her juxatposing Schmidt
>> with
>>>> Bill Gates. Gates is working to do actual good in the world by
>>>> projects such as the humble toilet in geographic locations
>> without
>>>> waste treatment facilities, or low water infrastructure (and we
>>>> might as well include Warren Buffet in that equation, because the
>>>> lionshare of the funding flowing into the Gates Foundation is
>> from
>>>> him. Buffet did not make his billions through technology, unless
>> you
>>>> want to include the telephone).
>>>> 
>>>> I happen to know that the Gates Foundation is funding efforts to
>>>> encourage agricultural developments in places like Columbia to
>> grow
>>>> coffee to replace illicit crops, in order to scale down the
>> violence
>>>> that coincides with the drug wars. These efforts are working.
>>>> 
>>>> Why does she leave this out of the discussion? That's the general
>>>> problem I find with Naomi Klein, is the
>>>> chicken-little-sky-is-falling perspective.
>>>> 
>>>> She seems to be similar to those trumpsters who blame the genesis
>>>> of COVID (if not upon China) upon Gates, as some strange
>> mastermind
>>>> move to control the world.
>>>> 
>>>> Tom, I think it is right and human that you responded to the
>>>> bleakness of the tone, but that doesn't mean this worldview is
>>>> correct or accurate. Technology will always be a tool for use. It
>> is
>>>> not monolithic. There is the off button. We do still have a
>>>> democracy and processes in place to deliberate the way forward.
>>>> 
>>>> As long as humans desire freedom there will always be resistance
>> to
>>>> control systems, generating a constant search for the chinks in
>> the
>>>> armor, or other loopholes to squeeze through. People will always
>> use
>>>> technology in ways that were not anticipated, but just as that
>> can
>>>> be assertion can be construed as dismal, it can also mean good
>> news,
>>>> that we always have agency to decide how to use our tools.
>>>> 
>>>> Also, one stick in the spokes that was glaring for me is that Mr.
>>>> Schmidt will never be able to address the laws for mandatory
>>>> education for disabled children with his goals for flattening the
>>>> classroom into two-dimensional online learning screens. He will
>>>> never be able to walk around that law.
>>>> 
>>>> So there are many ways this "technology is inevitable" narrative
>>>> simply does not hold water for me.
>>>> 
>>>> I hope this might be a little encouraging.
>>>> 
>>>> Kind regards,
>>>> 
>>>> Annalisa
>>>> 
>>>> -------------------------
>>>> 
>>>> FROM: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu
>>>> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of mike cole
>>>> <mcole@ucsd.edu>
>>>> SENT: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 10:46 AM
>>>> TO: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>>>> SUBJECT: [Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?
>>>> 
>>>> [EXTERNAL]
>>>> 
>>>> Hello Tom Richardson
>>>> This topic has been the front and center in the "Re-generating
>>>> Chat Project" that has just finished its
>>>> planned two year efforts that focused on the challenges to human
>>>> development, and theories of "Development
>>>> in the Anthropcene.  Two months ago, the word Anthropocene was
>>>> replaced by the code word, covid-19, a pandemic.
>>>> Both crises pose huge challenges to theories of development as
>> well
>>>> as to actual development of huge numbers of people around the
>>>> world.
>>>> The MCA-linked website, CulturalPraxis currently has a number
>>>> of essays on the challenges of this historical moment, and the
>>>> opportunities.
>>>> In the United States, the crisis has deschooled society in
>>>> the most dramatic way one can imagine -- A way that literally
>> forced
>>>> 
>>>> a massive re-mediation of human life.  Education, the wheel house
>>>> of most members of this discussion over the years,
>>>> is now a family affair big time. Simulaneously, home-worksite
>>>> relations have been disassembled,  both modes and relations of
>>>> production are getting a shock that is crumbling institutions
>> (home,
>>>> school, work,).
>>>> 
>>>> We can really get the feel of Roy D'andrade's comment that doing
>>>> social science is like studying rocks in a rockslide.  This
>>>> rockslide moves a warp speed and its invisible.
>>>> 
>>>> Remediation of existing classroom structures is what we have been
>>>> about for 100 years.
>>>> Seems like there has never been a more appropriate time to start
>>>> providing working models of effective practices that do NOT
>>>> assume that things will return to Christmas, 2019.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks for asking.
>>>> mike
>>>> 
>>>> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 9:07 AM Tom Richardson
>>>> <tom.richardson3@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Greetings Xmca-ers
>>>>> I would   like to raise a question.
>>>>> In the article by Naomi Klein linked below, apart from all the
>>>>> major questions about  our futures  - personal freedom, health
>>>>> protection, democratic control and the power of Big Digital
>>>>> Tech_AI, international competition etc. that she raises, I
>>>>> wondered what from a Vygotskyan approach to child/human
>>>>> development/education can / should be a reply to these sentences
>>>>> on the 'home schooling' that has (or hasn't) been happening
>>>>> recently:
>>>>> 
>>>>> "Indeed, Schmidt has been relentless in pursuing this vision.
>> Two
>>>>> weeks after that article appeared, he described [1] the ad-hoc
>>>>> home schooling programming that teachers and families across the
>>>>> country had been forced to cobble together during this public
>>>>> health emergency as “a massive experiment in remote
>> learning”.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The goal of this experiment, he said, was “trying to find out:
>>>>> how do kids learn remotely? And with that data we should be able
>>>>> to build better remote and distance learning tools which, when
>>>>> combined with the teacher … will help kids learn better.” "
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic__;!!Mih3wA!S24LM1H7lowdPfDbMsEsQcUKNP8ezV7u2ZEpio1LRZEKkbPLR1GSaJgN9Ky9WaJNTPiOcg$
>> 
>>>>> [2]
>>>>> 
>>>>> Just asking
>>>>> Tom Richardson
>>>>> Middlesbrough UK
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> 
>>>> "How does newness come into the world?  How is it born?  Of what
>>>> fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?" Salman Rushdie
>>>> ---------------------------------------------------
>>>> For archival resources relevant to the research of lchc.ucsd.edu
>> [1]
>>>> [3].
>>>> For narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu [2] [4].
>>>> For new MCA-related website see: culturalpraxis.net [3] [5].
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Links:
>>> ------
>>> [1]
>>> 
>> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtAyGVuRQME__;!!Mih3wA!VRgkzssOuSyNvpVQWR2QH7dShhiXD5eWtYs2HahNwv_pKUU7G9GOQZMrzIpGsa_-KDBGFw$
>>> [2]
>>> 
>> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic__;!!Mih3wA!VRgkzssOuSyNvpVQWR2QH7dShhiXD5eWtYs2HahNwv_pKUU7G9GOQZMrzIpGsa-SnnFGDg$
>>> [3] http://lchc.ucsd.edu
>>> [4] http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu
>>> [5]
>>> 
>> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!V4rtgUKjjshdiOxbIML_kuerunhUbHYomcCKiRVA5FkPs1WJIJwbuavyFoG613bJeWFP-g$
> 
> --
> 
> "How does newness come into the world?  How is it born?  Of what
> fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?" Salman
> Rushdie---------------------------------------------------
> Cultural Praxis Website: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!S9qcap6TqjfdwVH4tKTDRcrmtOixsOIeAQtWQf5kbwZ1hKvamSkqTvFVQPvsiUJtT6ACYw$  [3]
> Re-generating CHAT Website: re-generatingchat.com [4]
> Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu [1].
> Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu [2].
> 
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://lchc.ucsd.edu
> [2] http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu
> [3]
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!QEj6dEIm3fWSx_ACQQ_MzmIB8BNHT4gbKPVvpNxP0RtC6hPwv8yewaCxK1CwE9ydttNsSA$
> [4]
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://re-generatingchat.com__;!!Mih3wA!QEj6dEIm3fWSx_ACQQ_MzmIB8BNHT4gbKPVvpNxP0RtC6hPwv8yewaCxK1CwE9wBp3v7eg$