Thursday 10 October 2013

The Hidden Curriculum

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MSc Reading Notes


Based on:


And:


There is a history of the examination of the ‘hidden curriculum’ in education. It refers to those elements that are implicit or tacit to the formal goals of education. The hidden curriculum has been criticised for its role in reproducing the unequal relations of power in the social order. Students become socialised into a particular social order because they are hidden messages about what is available to them and what their education is for.


There is also a hidden curriculum in the coding of educational technologies that makes assumptions about learners and knowledge. The view is taken that this coding should be seen as an actor in the educational process, in the way that it enables and constrains learning. The coding and linking of data, and the way that decision making and reasoning are articulated in computer code makes things like search engines and e-assessment systems perform in particular ways, and makes them actors in the pedagogic process.


Educational technology cannot be seen as simply a tool by which the curriculum is delivered. Forms of classification and standardisation are important. We need to look at the standards and coding and their effects on the representation of information and knowledge, and the forms of teaching and learning that are made possible. This relates to the use of ed tech in the commodification of education, and the discourses of ‘efficiencies’ and standardisation, measurement etc. The semantic web means that data can be reused, shared and aggregated- as this happens the ‘pre-history’ of the data and the application of rules and standards applied to that classification disappears. Assumptions are coded into applications, including educational technology.


This emphasises the view that technology is never neutral. Quote from Rushkoff (Rushkoff, D. (2011). Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: O/R Books.) -


“...as technologies come to characterise the way that we live and work, so the people programming them become increasingly important in shaping our world and how it works.”


The coding and standardisation of the information infrastructures required by semantic web and ed tech also has an effect on the way in which people work - their work also becomes standardised to fit the applications that they are using to do their work and the way in which they teach and learn. Adopting particular standards for technology represents a statement on the part of the manufacturer. It could be argued that it is not the tech or the semantic web that is influencing the way that we do things, it is actually the coding and the standards behind it.


There is a strong rhetoric about computer software leading to efficiencies, institutional change, and professional competency. Teachers are expected to see the tech as a natural part of their work and that its use in the classroom should be seen as unremarkable.  The dominant metaphor is technology as a ‘tool’. Computers are seen as a kind of prosthesis, rather than as more complex assemblages within which the software is one element, and which involve users in a wide range of socio-material relationships. They preclude certain kinds of social and spatial relationships, they reconfigure absence-presence - see the stuff on movement and mobilities.


The standardisation required for data to be open, and for certain platforms (OERs etc) to be open means that data often ends up fitting into ‘flattened’ hegemonic categories.  Content reuse and interoperability requires standards - this means that information is affected by both human and non-human actants. There are multiple hidden translations that are incorporated into ed tech applications through codes, ontologies and metadata - it is layers upon layers of tacit assumptions about the way in which ed tech should work, and the way in which people and institutions should work. The problem is that trying to change this, and make different assumptions creates layers of a different kind. But perhaps layers that are predicated on what it actually means to be a learner, and on how people learn best, rather than trying to fit them into systems that see learning as commodified and individualistic. There is also the issue that even with ‘open’ and cooperative movements, there is still ‘benevolent concealment’ of of complexity by coders who have to balance the complexity of coding with usability.


But won’t this always be the case? There is no way to get around this unless everyone is a maker and coder, providing their own custom-built applications and software.


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Wednesday 2 October 2013

Minor Urbanism and Mobilities

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MSc Reading Notes

Based on:

Shepard points out that we think of the entanglement of life with ‘a range of mobile, embedded, networked and distributed media, communications and information technologies’ in terms of an overlay of data onto material fabric. This sees a duality, between information and physical fabric - or online and offline.

This leads us to view the technology in terms of the interface between the two, rather than the entanglement as a whole. The result is an ontology that retains the maintenance of the dichotomy. It presents a good argument against digital dualism.


I think that this has relevance for the mobilities paradigm of mobile and e-learning outlined by Enriquez. In her view there is a breakdown of defined spaces, the lines become blurred, they are created and interact with the people who use and inhabit them. There is a breakdown of the duality of spatial and social activity.


The Cloud and UbiComp as ‘messy’
‘The Cloud’ has become the dominant metaphor for describing the infrastructure that allows ubiquitous computing. The impression given is of a seamless interaction. The truth is that it is much more messy, with a ‘heterogeneous assembly of technologies’. This idea of seamlessness ignores the many social and cultural, political and economic forces at play. The ‘real world’ is composed of human and nonhuman actors, and has situations that are recursively performed and enacted. Again, there is a link here with the mobilities paradigm, as well as the obvious reference to ANT.


Minor Urbanism and its relevance to e-learning
Shepard uses the example of parkour - a form of movement through an urban space using athleticism and gymnastics. They move through the city using paths that are outside of those designated by urban planners. In doing so they disrupt the patterns of movement within an urban space. Shepard points out that these types of movements - seen metaphorically as well as physically via parkour - reside ‘beneath and between the smooth and seamless landscapes of the neoliberal city’. If we substitute ‘city’ for ‘space’ we can see how such an approach to learning can undermine the neoliberal discourse prevalent in education. Acts that slip beneath the surface, and between the gaps and can shape a different collective experience of learning. They could reconfigure, recircuit and redirect normative systems and infrastructures ‘and open them up to alternate social and political dynamics’.


What type of learning are we looking at though? What types of activity? I think that an educational/technological version of ‘minor urbanism’ would be a useful way of envisioning an alternative to the pervasive discourses around education at the moment.


This type of minor urbanism can move us towards an alternate ontology than that ‘posited by the cloud for describing the relations between people, technology and space’. It puts actors - human and nonhuman into the foreground of the production of space and data. Again, another link with the mobilities paradigm and the creation of spaces.


Final point - futurology
Shepard, talking about ‘design fiction’, says that ‘designing implications involves imagining not just new products but also the social and cultural contexts within which they are situated.’ While this enables us to look at things (or technology) in terms of how it interacts social and cultural conditions, it also makes the point that futurology needs to be able to look at future social and economic conditions when making predictions about technology, if it is to be a useful practice. Otherwise it is simply the description of ‘cool stuff’ that might exist in the future.

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What mobilities means for mobile and e-learning

Love Is On The Move MSc Reading Notes

From:

Would a focus on bodies change how you currently think about e-learning? Why or why not?

How do I currently think about e-learning? I think of it as learning traditional topics/courses/content etc but mediated by technology. So the technology allows different ways to interact with the material, and with each other. It allows the use of different modalities to present material. The tech allows the building of communities outside of the formal community of the classroom/course.

I think that e-learning, as an online activity shifts the sense of identity and self (even if unknowingly). It disembodies the self, and enables it to shift around different places and spaces, and allows the forging new new aspects of the self.

So, I have thought about e-learning in the traditional sense of minds meeting minds - in the sense of an ‘encounter of intellects mediated by tools’.

The focus on bodies as inhabiting created spaces changes that view. The use of mobile tech to access learning materials also means that the space of learning changes depending on the place the learner is at physically - this space may have to be negotiated with others, differently to the negotiation of space that takes place in a traditional lecture theatre or classroom. There isn’t the segregation of space and social interaction, but the lines are blurred, and the space can be reinterpreted or recreated - the flow of information is altered in online spaces.


‘Learning is not just an encounter of intellects mediated by tools, but is a bumping into of bodies in spaces as part of ways of knowing in motion.’

This enables a more ontological relationship with technology, rather than one that considers learning from an epistemological point of view. Learning becomes intrinsically linked with the space of learning, the mobile device that is being used, or the computer that is being used. The sense of self and identity of the learner is therefore re-written contextually - their identity is one of a learner in a particular space or set of spaces, interacting with other learners, and course content.


The self is made mobile as a series of traces in mediated spaces.’

In this sense the standpoint of mobilities is a phenomenological one - it considers learning and the relationships of learners from the point of view of how they see and interact with the world, their emotions and feelings. This phenomenology is different to that of the student in the classroom or the lecture theatre. It is a different type of relationship to learning.

Looking at the body rather than just the technology, or the outputs of technology forces us to consider people as placed in a culture and society - they have their own history and narratives, and memory, and bring that to their learning. It is a more holistic approach, and less deterministic. They are not simply led by technology, or applications or software, or content, but form a part of the learning experience - they become signified by the technology, as well as having their activity mediated by it.

Currently when we talk about mobile learning, what we talk about is devices - it is very device-centric. There is discussion of mobile pedagogy, and of design for mobile learning, but even then it is in terms of the devices and how they work, and where they can be used. They are still thought of in terms of ‘the encounter of intellects mediated by tools’ rather than bodies in spaces.
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