Judy, Bruce, Gordon.....
Many thanks for your responses, which I am finding very valuable.
I do not intend to conceal the subject-object relationship. My feeling about
your responses is that they seem to assume that knowledge exists
independently of the knower, and that educational institutions act as
mediating tools to enable the learners to find their way to some idealised
truth.
What my previous posts were suggesting was that this is increasingly not the
case. When schools as we know them developed their form (essentially
unmodified for two centuries now), there were three stable and closely
coupled systems that held almost exclusive sway over the processes by which
the knowers came to know. Church, family, school (the latter only for some).
In cultural-historical terms they were a highly unitary context.
The past hundred years or so has seen two trends. The unitary tripartite
system that mediated the activity of coming to know for most people broke
down, and the sources of information that are made sense of while coming to
know became diverse and increasingly widely accessible. My use of the term
'democratization of knowledge' is here intended to mean that there are now
many knowings and ways of knowing - not that there is universal access to
some objective truths.
Thus the student who passed through the school gate 150 years ago did not
thereby pass from one ZPD context to another, but instead scarcely noticed
any change in the mediational means by which s/he came to know. But now the
educational institution is not only just one of many very varied information
generating and knowledge building contexts through which the person passes
during any day, with student just one of the socially defined roles s/he
plays, but the educational institutions themselves are often not unitary
within their own walls.
Thus the experience of most people moves from filtered information leading
to knowing towards unfliltered information and many knowings. In
discriminating between these contexts and ways of knowing the individual has
multiple objects, none of which are necessarily amongst those that the
educational institution understands to be the object of the activities that
it mediates.
Thus to the point I was trying to articulate. The school as a mediational
means (with or without advanced electronic information technologies) still
bear the cultural historical imprint of a context and objects that no longer
exist or, rather, no longer have a socially privileged existance. My
critique is that educational systems try to shoehorn students whose
experience of knowing and the contexts of knowing is diverse into sets of
practices that were originally designed for students who essentially had
only one experience of knowing and one context in which they came to know.
Instead, in my view, education systems should be reflecting on the
fundamental contradictions of such a position, and what those contradictions
suggest about their current practices. In doing so, of course, they find
themselves confronted with the conundrum of what their object actually is in
a world of such an archipelago of knowings, and funded by the state which -
to what object? - compels people to attend them.
Phillip Capper,
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
Level 13
114 The Terrace
(PO Box 2855)
WELLINGTON
New Zealand
Ph: +64 4 499 8140
Fx: +64 4 499 8395
Mb: +64 021 519 741
-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Diamondstone [mailto:judith.diamondstone@verizon.net]
Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2002 2:23 a.m.
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
Phillip, Bruce, et al,
I've also been following this thread with some interest. Although I also
wondered what ' maintaining the machine to keep business going so that we
can keep our jobs ' had to do with wisdom (okay, a certain practical wisdom
is implied...
But as Bruce explained in semiotic terms, where's the subject in this
explanation of knowing well? Not only is the subject-object relation hidden,
but so is the subject's relation to other subjects who are also in relation
to some object...
STILL, I also very much appreciate the argument that the mediational means
must change, must be more responsive to subjects (here's the subject) who
use the knowledge -- or as Bernstein might say, this is an argument for weak
classification & framing (free access to 'democratized' knowledge, in
idealized terms) with all the attendent consequences for those who don't
bring to the task [open to definition] requisite resources... OTHERS must
mediate. Not necessarily in the role of teachers, but in some ideal
environment as colleagues & co-learners. (Old wine...)
Identity, now, is a different ball of wax, to weakly classify the terms of
my metaphors :-\
Judy
(bruce wrote)
Phillip,
You rely here on the traditional data-information-knowledge distinction that
has been prevalent in computer science / information systems. I agree with
Gordon that it is highly problematic in that it defines what should be a
subject-object relationship purely in terms of the message independently of
the receiver. I think this is one point where concepts from CHAT (e.g.
internalisation, ZPD) have a major contribution to make to a critical
understanding of information systems.
Taking these definitions as your starting point, it seems to me that you go
halfway with the idea that providing the information source is enough to
enable a transformation into knowledge to take place (an assumption of much
of the distance learning culture and one that provides the rationale for
using it as a means of cheapening education). It clearly isn't excluded that
learning can take place in this way but it depends on what the learner
brings with him/her. Institutions like the British Open University which has
a long (pre-home computer) record of success with distance learning have a
large infrastructure of support mechanisms and periodic classroom
reinforcement to back up the individual distance learner.
Perhaps partly for these reasons, I also feel uneasy with your notion that
wider access has 'democratised knowledge'.
Bruce Robinson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phillip Capper" <phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: 08 July 2002 07:32
Subject: RE: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
> Thankyou Gordon,
>
> Given my earlier posting, perhaps first I should clarify my use of terms.
In
> quick and dirty metaphorical mode here is my hierarchy:
>
> Data. Epistemic packages aobut the world. = This is a nut. This is a bolt.
> This is a spanner
>
> Information. Add context = The nut screws on to the bolt. the spanner is
> used to tighten it.
>
> Knowledge. Add the environment and systemic relations = You must tighten
the
> nuts regularly or the machine will shake to pieces.
>
> Wisdom. Add purpose and values and ethics = if we don't maintain the
> machines the business will fail and we'll lose our jobs.
>
> I fully agree with your caveats about the need to transform information
into
> knowledge. But my point is that this is increasingly happening without the
> intercession of the shaman/teacher. If this intercession is lost then what
> is 'known' becomes dispersed and fragemented, and most likely culturally
> decontestualised, or at least recontextualised. This is the dark side of
> democratised knowledge.
>
> If this is so we begin to find that new knowledge is rarely integrated
well
> into pre-exisitng knowledge, we cease to be able to define, identify or
> recognise accomplishment, and we lose our capacity to develop a collective
> ownership of knowledge.
>
> My conclusion is that the education system must not face these trends by
> throwing up its hands and abrogating. It must reinvent itself such that it
> can once again perform its function of assisting in sense making. But if
it
> can no longer do this by controlling, or partly controlling, the
> information base, then it must develop entirely new mediational
strategies.
> It must also recognise that it is no longer the sole arbiter of what
> constitutes knowledge. This must become a negotiated process, not a
> transmitted one.
>
> I am not suggesting that this is new. All that the Internet does is take
us
> on to a new level in a shift that began in the 1920's. But a school is a
> technology that was developed in the 1780's (or even earlier) when
> information and its transformation into knowledge was almost entirely
vested
> in its control. It is an inappropriate mediating tool for a world where
> access to information is broad, deep and wide throughout the community.
The
> activity of transforming information into knowledge requires a different
> process and different kinds of social relationships between 'teachers' and
> 'learners'.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gordon Wells [mailto:gwells@cats.ucsc.edu]
> Sent: Monday, 8 July 2002 4:53 p.m.
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
>
>
> Phillip,
>
> I appreciated your comments on epistemic cultures and your criticisms
> of the typical stance towards "knowledge" found in schools. However,
> I think it's important to distinguishg between "knowledge" and
> "information". When what is"'knowledge" for the expert is
> transmitted - as through teacher lecture or textbook - what is
> transmitted is received as "information". For it to become
> "knowledge", some form of transformation by the receiver is
> necessary: at minimum, assimilation into the receiver's "knowledge"
> systems or, very frequently, an accommodation of those structures to
> make sense of the new information. Even more effective is some action
> in which the information is put to the test: does it enable the
> receiver to act more effectively or to understand the relevant
> phenomena more deeply?
>
> Information obtained from the internet is no different. In itself,
> it does not constitute knowledge. As with information from any
> source, it has to be transformed by the receiver in order for it to
> contribute to the receiver's understanding of the world.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Gordon Wells
> --
> Gordon Wells
> UC Santa Cruz.
> gwells@cats.ucsc.edu http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/
>
>
>
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