[Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?

[mike cole]

Annalisa --  I believe that Tom's point is that such promising innovations
are almost always
possible on the fringes of educational practice, but that they are
inevitably domesticated or
stomped on by pre-existing regimes of power.

That is what Adorno argued in the post-WWII. And many before and since.
mike

On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 2:29 PM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Hi Tom,
>
> May I, in turn, thank you for your civil disagreement? 🙂
>
> Online learning is one area of study in my educational background. We
> looked at Second Life (SL) and tried to create a learning space there,
> once. I think that there is always room for innovation, but there is always
> a transaction of what one forfeits for what one gains. I was underwhelmed
> by SL's prospects.
>
> In the heyday of SL, which as a platform is barely in a coma right now,
> I'd once heard that a medical school created a giant kidney sculpture, that
> students' avatars could walk around to investigate and discuss with one
> another how various kidney processes worked.  It was a virtual biological
> fountain in the town square. I'm not sure that this learning context would
> ever beat out a human anatomy class, but I found the solution interesting.
>
> Blackboard was another platform we used, which I detested. It was like
> looking at the teacher's chalkboard through a slice of swiss cheese.
> Perhaps it is more "evolved" now.
>
> What was interesting about SL is that one could project a sense of place,
> which we know is helpful for memory and retention. There was a lot of open
> space for play involved in SL, enough to make it interesting, but it was
> perhaps far too much work to create viable learning environments.
>
> I think what we have to accept (which I feel all experienced educators
> already know and feel) is that flattening all education to an online
> learning space of a 2D screen, as may be experienced with grade-schoolers
> during the pandemic today, is destructive to learning, *because* of
> associations of place with learning.
>
> In a way, online learning venues that we may enjoy as adults, such as the
> AUP conference on Psychology in Global Crises, is a bit like driving,
> drinking, and smoking. What I mean is that one must pass a certain age in
> order to decide if it is good for me or not, or that I have the hand-eye
> coordination to negotiate (as with driving). Consider recent ZOOMbombing
> abuses, which would make any parent want to unplug the computer and
> constrain learning to books.
>
> We live in a time where the classroom holds no sanctity whatsoever. We
> must put the sanctity back into teaching and learning.
>
> I still maintain that we are not powerless to debate the ways in which the
> situations and environments we determine are viable to create contexts of
> learning.
>
> I find the lack of detail in the Klein article is not by accident, but out
> of convenience. There has been plenty of online learning happening for
> quite sometime now. But this has largely been in adult or in college-aged
> learning venues . Not with grade school.
>
> I do think that there has been some online tutoring venues for
> grade-school kids, but I'm not certain how much that has been formally
> studied. I also wonder what answers homeschooling might contribute as well,
> although that venue for learning has a decidedly conservative sheen upon
> it, for all the homesteading mythologies those folk abide in. I would guess
> that this is form of learning is one that they would welcome, because
> parents would get to pick and choose what their children learn.
>
> I don't think this could ever be construed as a liberal arts education,
> nor would it deliver new generations of critical thinkers.
>
> What I feel may be a part of the pushback against these propositions is
> childcare, and how parents will require this to provide for their own
> families. I found this NY opinion piece insightful:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-parenting-burnout.html__;!!Mih3wA!RnRdGQWYFYHxAK38ym13_SVJ07gfBvADzdpt_v2fqpvjtY1AjFRdPxgCXwCy58n3O_LWvw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-parenting-burnout.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article__;!!Mih3wA!SZSEYLggVkbsFhK2-SLWJT1oidlnry4UU07CU8yscHieuVTRIi4U3vkjwqo1GLIpcTD9PA$>
>
> It may be we witness in a shakeout for free childcare that it is a right,
> not a privilege. That would be a huge boon for many. But the pandemic may
> also show us a new aspect of the validity of classroom education and why we
> must fight to preserve it. We use it or we lose it.
>
> It may usher in more critical discourse about the meaning of the classroom
> to the child's learning. if only for the attentional affordances that the
> classroom provides to a cluster of young minds and their teacher.
>
> Last, in reply to your, "I cannot grasp what is intended/visualized by the
> AI/digital experts," may I remind you that Thomas Edison believed that he
> could turn the classroom upside-down with the invention of film, and that
> education would be significantly transformed by watching movies. People
> then worried if that meant there would be no need to learn to read, etc. We
> see that what Edison visualized was simply not realistic. But is it the
> case that watching films in a classroom doesn't provide some facet of
> learning? Yes. But has it supplanted traditional forms of learning? No.
>
> If teachers discover there are legitimate technological additions to
> already successful evidence-based learning environments, that support
> well-known learning theory, technology can be welcomed if it can be
> integrated with existing models.
>
> If teachers do not find such technology useful, then it's just another way
> to enrich the pockets of Mr. Schmidt and other technophiles, where money
> will be spent but the products unused. That would be tragic and wasteful.
>
> One of the aspects I do not like about the idea of grade-school online
> learning environments is how it inures children to surveillance, which may
> also turn off a great many kids who would prefer wandering backyards, or
> riding bikes in the park, to play with friends. I don't think learning and
> surveillance is a constructive combination.
>
> There is a lot to consider, and perhaps this is where the alarm is more
> appropriately felt, because these are new challenges, and there are not yet
> words to describe what we find wrong with these problems, and so we must
> better ourselves by searching for the arguments and stances we can unite
> behind. Perhaps we feel alarmed because we must grapple with an unknown
> interloper. We are fatigued because our senses are already shredded from
> what is already difficult about living in a pandemic.
>
> This is why I do not feel Klein's tone is helpful to us. It stands upon a
> mythology that technology is inevitable. After much study and
> introspection, I will never accept that reality.
>
> To listen to Klein is to believe that a town crier were to some and say
> "They are coming take all our tools and all they will leave us are hammers
> and pins."
>
> I just do not believe this narrative.
>
> We cannot give up.
>
> Is there a fight ahead? Yes.
>
> Should we rally together to protect what needs protecting? Most
> definitely, yes.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Annalisa
> ------------------------------
> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of Tom Richardson <tom.richardson3@googlemail.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 20, 2020 7:31 AM
> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?
>
>
> *  [EXTERNAL]*
>
> 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
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtAyGVuRQME__;!!Mih3wA!VRgkzssOuSyNvpVQWR2QH7dShhiXD5eWtYs2HahNwv_pKUU7G9GOQZMrzIpGsa_-KDBGFw$> 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!RnRdGQWYFYHxAK38ym13_SVJ07gfBvADzdpt_v2fqpvjtY1AjFRdPxgCXwCy58nrie8MyA$ 
> <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$>
>
>
> Just asking
> Tom Richardson
> Middlesbrough UK
>
>
>
> --
>
> "How does newness come into the world?  How is it born?  Of what fusions,
> translations, conjoinings is it made?" Salman Rushdie
> ---------------------------------------------------
> For archival resources relevant to the research of lchc.ucsd.edu.
> For narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
> For new MCA-related website see: culturalpraxis.net
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!V4rtgUKjjshdiOxbIML_kuerunhUbHYomcCKiRVA5FkPs1WJIJwbuavyFoG613bJeWFP-g$>
> .
>
>
>

-- 

"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!RnRdGQWYFYHxAK38ym13_SVJ07gfBvADzdpt_v2fqpvjtY1AjFRdPxgCXwCy58nv0fJG_Q$ 
Re-generating CHAT Website: re-generatingchat.com
Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu.
Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
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