[Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?/anonymity and social media

[Greg Thompson]

Henry,
Can you share the link for the Haidt interview?
Thanks,
Greg

On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 1:13 PM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> David,
> Doesn’t Vygotsky make much the same case for learning and development that
> you do for evolution and devolution in society? Or is it that development
> requires an addittive process that is external to the child, followed by
> some kind of internalization that rearranges the structure of the child’s
> thinking. The hydrogen + oxygen —> Water process. If we are lucky. Like in
> South Korea, where a herd immunity to Covid-19 is developing. SK +
> Covid-19—> Herd Immunity. This —> like some kind of social perizhvanie.
> Biologically, Mr. Schmidt is the vector of social media, driven by
> financial gain and power, setting us up for more crisis.
>
> Back to physics and an analogy I heard the psychologist Jonathan Haidt say
> on a podcast today: Let’s say that the force of gravity suddenly doubled.
> That would do to our physical universe what the introduction of social
> media has done to our social universe. In that same podcast. Haidt said
> that the only thing that can save us from a complete meltdown is to make
> anonymous access to public spaces in social media impossible. I would be
> interested in responses to this. I think this is relevant to the subject
> line of on-line learning.
>
> Henry
>
> On May 20, 2020, at 5:16 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think that photography really replaced painting, nor do I think
> that television ever replaced printing. In both cases, there was some
> encroachment and then an "involution" (a die-off) where functions
> overlapped. For example, we no longer pay for expensive family portraits,
> and the number of people who watch Downton Abbey is probably a lot greater
> than the number that read Anthony Trollope. But where functions did not
> redound (e.g. abstraction in painting and forensics in photography,
> advertising in television vs. psychological prose) there was enrichment and
> evolution. Crises only become pathological when involution fails to occur,
> and when the transitional forms thrown up at critical times become
> permanent ones. We cannot make salads from the cotyledons of our lettuce
> greens.
>
> I think that pathological tendency is exactly what Mr. Schmidt and his
> colleagues are pushing with their attempt to make on-line learning
> economically sustainable even when it is not educationally so. Rebecca
> Schuman recently pointed out that the expense of online learning to
> universities is greater than classroom learning (because it requires you to
> pay faculty AND tech support). So you can only turn a profit if you make it
> permanent (You have to do what Chairman Mao used to do in the old Peasant
> Studies Institute in revolutionary Guangzhou:  "keep the blackboard and
> erase the students"). On-line learning in a way presents the OPPOSITE
> problem that  photograhy presented to painting and television presented to
> printing. Photography is better at "unmediated" presentation than painting,
> and television rewards attention rather than concentration. Like
> photography and TV, face to face conversation is just a whole lot better at
> these.
>
> Much the same may be said about Mr. Schmidt's response to China and South
> Korea's response, which is explicitly and avowedly pro-individualism and
> implicitly and covertly pro-US imperialist. But whether or not Mr. Schmidt
> agrees to it, the Anglo-American approach of preventative-but-not-public
> medicine is going to involute, and very quickly too. One example will
> suffice. Yesterday KCDC released a report on the "reinfection"
> phenomenon--the fact that people who recover will test positive again in a
> few months. The Koreans found that this was due to deactivated virus
> particles which persist in the body but which are detected by oversensitive
> testing. This is REALLY big news--it essentially means that humans as a
> species will eventually survive Covid 19 in more or less the way we
> prevailed over the Black Death and small pox. But the study was done
> here in Korea, and it was publisihed only in Korean; the rest of the world
> had to read the abstract.
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
> Outlines, Spring 2020
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv2Ms5puMg$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!TRjizV3Qo-rmLP8F-Hy7aO5AtWByRzlq1e7lAjC7euzs3e-_H0HlE9QKv9w1GQ5b_sFBew$>
>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv2FsIrBvA$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!TRjizV3Qo-rmLP8F-Hy7aO5AtWByRzlq1e7lAjC7euzs3e-_H0HlE9QKv9w1GQ6IvWMRiA$>
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 7:02 AM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi Mike,
>>
>> But then how is it that we even exist, having these conversations? If
>> this were all true?
>>
>> There is within each individual the freedom to choose, we are not all
>> automatons.
>>
>> I suppose what I mean to say is that if we say it's hopeless, then it is.
>>
>> So then why even bother?
>>
>> Why not just give up the ghost (and resignedly accept our
>> bourgeois-reality as the medicine we are spoonfed)? Are we talking about
>> the borg? Is resistance futile?
>>
>> To hell with that (narrative)!
>>
>> 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:* Wednesday, May 20, 2020 3:34 PM
>> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?
>>
>>
>> *  [EXTERNAL]*
>> 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!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv03J_2hCA$ 
>> <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!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv38y_Fj6A$ 
>> <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!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv2E1y4hfQ$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!RnRdGQWYFYHxAK38ym13_SVJ07gfBvADzdpt_v2fqpvjtY1AjFRdPxgCXwCy58nv0fJG_Q$>
>> Re-generating CHAT Website: re-generatingchat.com
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://re-generatingchat.com__;!!Mih3wA!RnRdGQWYFYHxAK38ym13_SVJ07gfBvADzdpt_v2fqpvjtY1AjFRdPxgCXwCy58nPZEuGiQ$>
>> Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu.
>> Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
>>
>>
>>
>>
> --
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://anthropology.byu.edu/greg-thompson__;!!Mih3wA!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv2do3J5VQ$ 
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson__;!!Mih3wA!SqpXCrlVzwAvHccknIK1ARpUWbeVmxxCFH3sXoqNTMK72o_iMSbz61KwbBRZQv2T--ST8g$ 
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