When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?

This is how Gopnik describes Clay Shirky:

… the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident. “Seemingly,” because there is an element of overdone provocation in his stuff (So people aren’t reading Tolstoy? Well, Tolstoy sucks) that suggests something a little nervous going on underneath.

I think this attitude (Tolstoy sucks) is something that has bothered me greatly. Do we have to demean Tolstoy in order to prove the superiority of our new toys? I recently, during a trip to France, re-read (after 30 years or so) Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It took me a while to get used to the rhythms of the language, but once I did, it was a wonderful experience, and brought home to me the beauty of a delicately crafted complex sentence, something I think we may have lost to a certain extent today. Again, just to make it clear, I am not making a Nicholas Carr, “technology is making us shallow” argument here, not the least because I read the book mostly on my iPad / iPhone and I doubt I would have read it otherwise.

Incidentally, Gopnik is as critical of the nay-sayers of today’s technologies. Writers like like Nicholas Carr, William Powers and Sherry Turkle receive their fair share of scorn (though I am not including any more quotes here).

Finally I would like to end with Gopnik’s commentary on how we often see new technologies as both the greatest and the worst things to have happened to us (at least till the next technology comes along).

… at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

Read the entire essay: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us.

The almost perfect pentagon that showed up on the surface
of the boiling lentils!

How cool is that. And does it mean something that five is a magical number (see this, this and this). As this page on numerology says

Five is the symbol of human microcosm. The number of the human being. Human forms—the pentagon when arms and legs are out stretched. The pentagon is endless —sharing the symbolism of perfection and power of the circle. Five is a circular number as it produces itself in its last digit when raised to its own power. The pentacle, like the circle symbolizes whole, the quincunx being the number of its center and the meeting point of heaven, earth, and the four cardinal points plus the center point.

Five is also representative of the Godhead – Central Creator of the four fours plus itself equalling five. Five is the marriage of the hieros gamos as combination of feminine and the masculine. Feminine being even, as 2, in frequency and masculine being odd as 3 in frequency = 5.

The number five symbolizes meditation; religion; versatility. It represents the five senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing) everywhere except in the East. In the East there are six—the extra being Mind. We find meanings to five in the five petaled flower, five pointed leaves–especially the ROSE. The Rose has much symbolism, but also the lily, vine, all of which represent the microcosm.

The five pointed star depicts individuality and spiritual aspiration, and education when it points upward. The five pointed star pointing downward represents witchcraft, and it is used in black magic. Noted: There is a very broad difference between witchcraft and black magic.

The number five formed the first counting process from which all else came.

Hmm… so what does this magical appearance of the pentagon mean?

If we believe that every pattern has some underlying explanation, can there be a more mundane explanation? I have a possible hypothesis of what lies behind this phenomena… but what do you think? Where did this pattern come from?

The cartoon is given above.

Olivia Judson makes a very important point about how our perceptual systems prevent us from seeing the world “as is.” For instance, as it turns out what we “see” when we see a cuckoo’s egg is very different from what the bird sees. As one of the articles say:

In the past, this kind of analysis was tackled by humans comparing eggs by eye, but human vision differs hugely from that of a bird. Birds can see ultraviolet light and because they have four types of cone in their eyes, compared with three in humans, they see a greater diversity of colour and pattern.

What this means is that over evolutionary time, cuckoos and the host birds are engaged in an arms-race to develop better and better deception (on the cuckoo’s part) and detection (on the part of the host birds) mechanisms. As a consequence one of the host birds studied:

… lay probably the most diverse range of eggs of any bird in the world, and this is likely to be an outcome of the long co-evolutionary battle with the Cuckoo Finch.

The eggs are analogous to a bank note, in terms of the variety and complexity of markings, perhaps to make them very hard to forge by the parasite.

So the same techniques used by currency designers to reduce forgery (the intricate markings that are the defining characteristics of today’s currency notes) is used by the host birds as well. Of course forgers keep coming up with better techniques to trick us, as do the cuckoo birds… all this of course leading to a runaway race where every innovation by the forgers (read cuckoo birds) has to be matched by the police (read host birds).

Now, it turns out that a couple of engineers have take this a step further, utilizing the idea of this evolutionary war to develop a better search algorithm! So what we have here is an interesting confluence of evolutionary forces and the manner in which scientists have tried to understand how these forces work and leading to the development of new technologies and techniques for solving engineering problems. How very cool is that!

All this is interesting in and of itself, but there is a deeper point about perception being made here that I would like to highlight. Olivia Judson says it much more eloquently than I ever could, so I quote:

Which makes me wonder: what are we missing? Like the birds — like any organism — our sensory system defines the way we perceive and interact with the world, and it is limited in important ways…

And in a more metaphorical way, the sight of the cuckoo chick makes me wonder what we miss by our routine habits of thought. To what extent do our preconceived notions narrow our perception of the planet, and ourselves?

What a great question? What are we not seeing? How do we learn to see?

Followers of this blog (and people who have seen my presentations on creativity) know that this idea of “learning to see,” is in my opinion, the most critical first step towards being creative. I have talked of this in terms of “recognition v.s. perception” and it underlies my arguments for repurposing technology (that I go on and on about, most recently here). I think it is important that we continually ask ourselves this question that Olivia Judson leaves us with:

To what extent do our preconceived notions narrow our perception of the planet, and ourselves?

In other words, what are we not seeing?

(H/T Ken Friedman for the first and third links and Google for the third).

I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote:

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created.

In another section he speaks of the page that results when you do a Google search for the word “journalism.”

Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

What is the relationship of information technology and cognition? What about human creativity? What role does technology play, if any, in getting us to be less or more creative?

One aspect of creativity that is often discussed with reference to technology is that we live in a culture of remixing. This was brought home to me recently while reading an article in the NYTimes titled Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism, where Helene Hegemann’s award willing bestseller (Axolotl Roadkill) was shown to be plagiarized from other books and blogs. What was interesting was what the author had to say about this. After apologizing for not being more forthcoming about the sources of her ideas, Hegemann defended herself as being

… the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

Incidentally, I took this quote from Hagemann and made if my Facebook update. It was interesting to see just how many people agreed with it (either by pushing the “Like” button, or by actually commenting on my status), and that bothered me somewhat – because I wasn’t sure I totally agreed with it. As an academic I make a living through my ideas – and their value comes from other people quoting and citing me. No citations, no tenure, if you know what I mean! I have also taken a very public stand against plagiarism on this very blog by catching and publicly humiliating a plagiarist. (An overview of that entire saga can be found here).

On the other hand I have also indulged in the pleasures of remixing. See this spoof of Harry Potter (Hari Puttar & the Magic Wand on Youtube) that I had created with my kids a couple of years ago. I have also written positively about initiatives that allow students to “cheat” (by using the Web) during exams. I would be the last person to claim that there is something like true creativity – as in an idea that never existed before. I have read enough of the creativity research (psychological and historical) to know that ideas always emerge from older ideas, that have been remixed together. In that sense our brain is the ultimate “remixer.”

That said, we have to agree that actual physical remixing (as opposed to the “in brain remixing”) has become vastly easier with the advent of digital technologies. In that sense, Hagemann is right, we live in a remix culture – a culture where mixing and matching from diverse sources leads to creative products. And creating such remixes is becoming easier by the day.

And living in the remix culture has consequences of how we think about authorship, and creativity.

But I think there is more to it than just the ability to “cut and paste” from existing media (be it print or music or video). The kinds of tools we have today can take us one step further – towards computers becoming partners in the creative activity itself. For instance read this post Exploring visual space with mathematics where I argue that “a designer with a good visual sense AND a knowledge of programming and mathematics is going to be much more efficient and generative (in terms of total ideas) than one with just the former.”

All of these issues came to a head (in my mind at least) when I read this absolutely fascinating article Triumph of the Cyborg Composer which profiles composer David Cope and his experiments with writing computer programs that create original music. This article is a must-read for anybody interested in issues of creativity and technology, so go ahead, click on the link above, and come back here when you are done. More relevant to the argument being made here is what David Cope says about what his experiments with digital creativity had led him to believe about all creativity. As the article says,

In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination…

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

So who makes the music? This is what Cope says in answer to that question:

He just thinks of her as a tool. Everything Emmy created, she created because of software he devised. If Cope had infinite time, he could have written 5,000 Bach-style chorales. The program just did it much faster.

“All the computer is is just an extension of me,” Cope says. “They’re nothing but wonderfully organized shovels. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for digging the hole. Would you?”

As it turns out, Cope in a while got tired of his first program, successful though it was in composing pieces in the style of several composers (including himself). He felt that these compositions were not “special” enough. So he deleted the software and the databases he had generated… and began experimenting with a different kind of virtual composer. This time he wanted to build something “with its own personality.” This program

… would write music in an odd sort of way. Instead of spitting out a full score, it converses with Cope through the keyboard and mouse. He asks it a musical question, feeding in some compositions or a musical phrase. The program responds with its own musical statement. He says “yes” or “no,” and he’ll send it more information and then look at the output. The program builds what’s called an association network — certain musical statements and relationships between notes are weighted as “good,” others as “bad.” Eventually, the exchange produces a score, either in sections or as one long piece…

He compares the process to a sculptor who chops raw shapes out of a block of marble before he teases out the details. Using quick-and-dirty programs as an extension of his brain has made him extraordinarily prolific. It’s a process close to what he was hoping for back when he first started working on software to save him from composer’s block.

These partnerships, to me herald a new form of human-computer partnership. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the future.

I would like to end with an example (far simpler than David Cope’s programs) that I have been involved with. A few years ago my partner in crime, Matt Koehler and I wrote a computer program, called Inverso, to create Haikus. Essentially, Inverso was a simple (almost trivial) computer program that created haiku-like poems by randomly combining pre-existing lines of poetry and presenting them dynamically in different fonts and layouts (again randomly selected from a range of possible fonts and layouts). Being academics we also wrote a journal article about it in which we situated Inverso in a historical frame that looked at the role of randomness in creative works and questioned how it problematized issues of authorship and creativity. You can read the article here:

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P. (2002). Art from randomness. How Inverso uses chance, to create haiku. Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced Learning. Note: You will need the ADOBE Shockwave plugin to view Inverso, which you can get as a free download from here.

Students in my Learning Technology by Design seminar read this article and are asked to discuss the following question (paraphrased slightly for this posting):

Inverso writes poetry by reordering words and as Douglas Crimp says in his book On the Museum’s Ruins (1993, p. 71), “the artist invents nothing. He or she only uses, manipulates, displaces, reformulates, repositions what history has provided.” Are we creating something new when we design existing knowledge in a new way, or just using standard design conventions to organize and present? Who would you credit with authorship of a poem created through Inverso? And finally, how does this affect the way you might view yourself as the author of your project web sites (or your lesson plans)? What does this mean for your role as a designer of learning?

Often when we speak of art we describe it as “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.” What we mean by this is that the the piece of music is more than merely placing individual notes and pauses one after the other.  There is a certain integrity and completeness to a creative work that goes beyond the mechanical – that we often consider as being mystical or beyond reason. However, it appears that our view of the mechanical as being dull or uncreative may not be the entirely correct. Maybe the what we need to be asking (taking an idea from Douglas Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) is whether “the soul is greater than the hum of its parts?”

I think as we continue to work with (and co-evolve) with our machines, these questions regarding originality and authenticity will continue to trouble us. They will also provide insights into the very nature of creativity – even while, maybe, revealing its mechanical nature. I will let Cope have the last word:

“The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”

Hmm…

• “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh…
• Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education

For the record, here are a couple of his papers as PDF downloads (I recommend the first, though it may be a bit academic at first glance).

• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence
• Nature’s Powerful Tutors: The Educative Functions of Free Play and Exploration

And finally here is a video of a presentation he made at the Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University.

Peter Gray: The Human Ancestral Environment for Education, and Its Relevance for Education Today from EvoS on Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine – but again he is bigger and stronger than me so I don’t often do that, at least not any more.) We are also huge fans of Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which consists of 4 books, something that makes perfect sense if you have ever read Adams). Anyway, a bunch of years ago we decided that we needed to act on our love for this man, and his writings, by citing him in an academic paper. To our great pride, we did it! In fact we started the article with a citation to Adams.

Here is a citation to the article…

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P., Hershey, K., & Peruski, L. (2004). With a little help from your students: A new model for faculty development and online course design. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 12(1), 25-55.

… and this is how the article began!

The late Douglas Adams (1997), author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, uncovered an important principle relevant to educational technology—The Someone Else’s Problem (SEP) field. The SEP is a fictional technology that can make something “virtually invisible” because we think it is somebody else’s problem. It is not that the object in question really vanishes. It does not. It may in fact even catch you by surprise out of the corner of your eye. The idea of the SEP is that once we consider something as being outside of the arena of our concerns, that something, for all practical purposes, ceases to exist.

Douglas Adams, image credit National Library Board, Singapore

How cool is that! Now, it turns out that our connections with Adams are even deeper than we knew. Recently we wrote another article…

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for School? No Way! Learning & Leading with Technology, (36)7. 14-18. [PDF download].

… where we wrote the following:

Someone once suggested that technology is all the new stuff that appeared after we were born! The stuff that was around before we arrived on the planet we often take as a given. For instance, to most of us a car is not really a technology, while a website is. To children born in the 1990’s neither cars nor websites are examples of technology, iPods and Wii gaming systems are.

Image credit, from littledan77

Now I remember writing this sentence (or do remember first reading it in Matt’s draft?). The point is that when we wrote “Someone once suggested…” we didn’t really think that someone had suggested it. That was just a rhetorical move, a way of sounding credible and being modest all at the same time. But guess what? Douglas Adams did say something exactly like this – only better. In his last book…

Adams, D. (2002). The salmon of doubt: Hitchhiking the galaxy one last time. New York: Harmony Books.

… which is actually a collection of pieces he had written here and there I came across the following:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.  (p. 95).

Isn’t that just perfect! I now have another cool quote to use from Douglas Adams, and I don’t have to go the wimpy “Someone once suggested…” route.

The problem is that, I would still like Matt and me to take credit for this, I mean, so what if Douglas Adams wrote this years ago!, we came up with it independently (our weasel language notwithstanding).  My colleague Patrick Dickson has a phrase he uses that I think may help solve our problem. According to him, we deserve full credit for the idea, because Adams committed “anticipatory plagiarism.” Dickson defines Anticipatory Plagiarism as occuring “when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”

Somewhat appropriately, and for some strange reason, the Interwebs claim that this definition of “anticipatory plagiarism” was  first written by Robert Merton (for instance see this page). It is any surprise that Dickson is claiming anticipatory plagiarism by Merton!

President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National Security Council, administration officials and outside consultants confirmed.

As far as one can see Mr. Schmidt is well qualified for this position, having served both in industry and in the government in the past. However, one fact about his background caught my attention and prompted this note. In describing his qualifications Ambinder wrote

Schmidt has credentials unique to the job: he received his masters in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, a (fully accredited and esteem) mostly online university.

Apart from the typo on esteem, what struck me was this positive mention of the University of Phoenix, something I often do not see or hear. Over where I live and breathe, the good old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar university, the University of Phoenix is not regarded as having much esteem. I have argued here and elsewhere that this will soon change. That most of us at the “traditional” university have underestimated just how powerful the forces of change are. Online learning (and for profit universities) are here to stay and maybe even take over universities as we know them.

Reading about Mr. Schmidt’s credentials just reminded me just how quickly this change is happening.

What do you think of Norman’s ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss what it means for teaching with technology. Can innovation in teaching only happen when we put technology first? What about content? and pedagogy?

Already every bank of any importance probably uses calculating machines. It is not likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process of having arithmetical calculations of any sort performed in the brains of clerks will survive the improvements of which these machines are capable. Account books, invoices, and all similar documents will doubtless be written by a convenient and compendious form of combined calculating machine and typewriter, which we may suppose to be called the numeroscriptor. … It will make any kind of calculation required. Even such operations as the weighing and measurement of goods will all be done by automatic machinery, capable of recording without any possibility of error the quantity and values of goods submitted to its operation.– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906

(H/T Futility Closet)

One who knows and knows he knows is a wise man, Follow Him
One who knows and knows not he knows is asleep, Awaken him
One who knows not and knows he knows not is a child, Teach him
One who knows not and knows not he knows not is a Fool, Avoid him.
– Attributed variously to Confucius, Socrates and others

I was reminded of this quote while reading an article by Ken Friedman titled, Design Science and Design Education and came across a section that described a view of learning. Friedman describes a framework on going from incompetence in a domain to mastery in the same domain. More specifically, Skoe talks of this process as having four key stages. These four stages are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. Here is Friedman:

In unconscious incompetence, the learner — that is, the neophyte or apprentice — doesn’t know that he [sic] doesn’t have the skills or knowledge he requires to address a task properly. Conscious incompetence is a valuable and important step. It entails the recognition of missing skills and the need to learn. Conscious competence moves through the long, and sometimes painful learning process, awkward at first, with increasing skill later, but requiring conscious effort at all stages. Skoe’s special contribution is the articulate recognition of the emotional factors that accompany the different stages of progress. He notes the danger points where awkwardness and frustration lead to reversals, those moments when students turn back to the comfort and security of earlier stages.

At every stage along the path from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, the task of teaching is the task of helping learners to identify and articulate the issues and tasks they face, intellectual and academic, personal and professional. That progress moves them from immaturity to maturity, from dependent engagement to independent knowledge. The special role of the teacher in this work is shaping the context for growth. This is the core of the teaching task. Individual research and personal expertise form a necessary background for teaching, but the activity of teaching itself primarily involves guiding the student along the road to knowledge.

Let me begin with one aspect that bothered me somewhat before going onto what I liked. My concern was with the last stage of the process, i.e. the idea of unconscious competence. Firstly, I wonder if anybody really ever reaches this stage? Secondly, and more importantly, whether it is even right to see this stage as being the ultimate goal. If something becomes unconscious, does that not mean that we have now ceased to learn (or at least to realize that there are things that we still need to learn). Now performance in any complex task (say teaching) requires many different kinds of knowledge. Some of them are skills oriented – and I can see this four stage process as being quite applicable to such skill based learning goals. However, being reflective (and thus conscious) is of critical importance in other areas of complex performance and this four stage process may not be appropriate for tasks that require different kinds of knowledge. For instance, knowing how to manage a classroom or how to use specific technologies can be seen as a skill based performance that would go through these stages. However, the performance of actually being in front of a group of students and conducting a lesson, though dependent on these skills requires more. It requires a sense of “being there” and also “watching yourself” which if far from unconscious.

I am reminded of my daughter describing a recent dance performance she was practicing for. She described this as having “two parts to her brain.” One part focuses on the moment, the music and the rhythm, and sort of goes with the flow. This part becomes automatic with practice – unconscious competence. The other part however, monitors and observes the first. It checks out the other dancers, their moves, and focuses on keeping track of what came next. This part is in some sense the opposite of unconscious – it is if anything, hyper-conscious. I have found that I have a similar bifurcation of experience when I am making presentations (particularly ones where slides are synched to my talking as in the SITE keynote). A part of me is going through the moves, because I have practiced them and the words flow effortlessly. There is another part though that is processing all this, looking at the next slide coming up, monitoring the audience, tweaking the sentence that is to come next to make it fit what comes next and what this specific audience seems to be responding to. I have found that the days I am tired (or unwell) the part that fails me is the second one. In such situations I end up giving a performance, that to me, is shallow and repetitive and uninteresting. On days I am in flow, I go beyond the structure I had planned, surprising often myself with what I say in the spur of the moment. This is not to say the structure is not required, in fact I argue it is the structure and practice, unconscious competence, that allows me to rise above the material as it were.

This criticism apart I loved the part in the second paragraph about the role of the teacher. The idea that the teacher shapes the context for growth by guiding the student along the path to knowledge! How apt and profound is that.

Finally I was impressed by Skoe’s identification of the first two stages, which led to the initial quote that lead this entry. The first two stages are unconscious incompetence and conscious incompetence. Both are incompetent but what a difference there is between the two. One is unaware of their deficits while the other is acutely aware of them. It is this difference, this awareness of ignorance that can be a key motivator, can position a learner to seek new experiences and knowledge.

And of course, who can forget the great Zen master and his ruminations on knowledge and ignorance. I speak of no other than Donald Rumsfeld former secretary of defense. One of his famous quotes is:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Watch the video as you ponder this question.

This is a question often asked of me, when I am conducting creativity workshops or talking about passionate teaching. In fact I was asked this just a couple of days ago when I was at the Dexter Schools talking about 21st Century Learning and Creativity. This issues comes up most when I am in India where the magnitude of the problems is just so large that scalability is always an issue.

My response to this typically has been quite straightforward. I say that I can’t think that big. I have a congenital defect that renders me incapable of thinking of projects on a large scale. I cannot comprehend states and nations. I can barely comprehend a district. What I am most comfortable with is one classroom. What this does is color my way of thinking about innovation, pushing me towards the position that change can be effected one classroom at a time. When I teach my summer courses as a part of the MAET program, I usually have 25 students, a number I can comprehend. My goal is to touch these 25, to connect with them, and to raise within them a passion for using technology to teach subject matter. If I manage to touch even a fifth of them and they go back to their classes inspired to do something new and better, hey I have succeeded.

This is not to say that policies don’t matter that social change can’t happen. Just that I am personally incapable of thinking in grand generalities. I have a feeling that my skepticism regarding large scale efforts comes from my deep suspicion that visions and plans mutate in often detrimental ways when they move out of the local. So I stay in the local, and frankly that is good enough for me.

Now Scott may think that this is a cop-out and not necessarily a response to his question, but sadly that is the best I can give. The Ron Clark Academy works well where it does. Just training a bunch of teachers in the techniques used there and asking them to implement it in their classrooms will not necessarily translate into better student achievement. For instance, I am not sure that the Ron Clark approach would work in India, a country with very different cultural and historical expectations of what teaching and learning could/should be. So I choose to withhold judgment and work harder with the people I know I can influence.

This is a topic of great interest to me and I spent a bit of time browsing through some of these presentations. There is a lot to learn here. One thing that stood out for me is just how influenced by technology and cultural/historical context the Ph.D. thesis / dissertation really is. Several of the presentations, make this point. In fact, the entire symposium series is predicated on some version of this idea.

One presentation that really stood out for me, particularly given some of the discussions that are going on in my department is by Prof. Carol Costley Institute for Work Based Learning, Middlesex University.. Below is a brief description of her presentation followed by a copy of her slides (sadly there is no audio track).

On the distinction (if any) between doctorates which are research qualifications and those which are qualifications in advanced practice.
Since the early 1990’s work based learning (WBL) has been developing in UK universities within subject disciplines and also outside disciplinary frameworks as a field of study in it own right. Both forms of WBL (as a mode of study and as a field of study), have developed pedagogies that have moved away from more traditional approaches. In some part this can be attributed to the mature adult community who are attracted to part-time courses that incorporate study into their work rather than a learning experience unrelated to working life. However, the developing pedagogies also relate to a wider, more transdisciplinary reflection of a knowledge-based society.

Following the successful institution of WBL ‘taught’ degrees at Bachelor and Master levels the natural progression was to introduce work-based doctorates. Professional doctorates had already started to increase in the UK and in the late 1990’s the Doctorate in Professional Studies sometimes called Professional Practice (DProf. sometimes called Prof D.) was introduced. The DProf is aimed at the actual work activities and circumstances of people engaged in high-level professional practice. Candidates already have considerable expertise in their work and their work-based research and development projects are likely to draw upon knowledge from a range of fields and also on tacit and professional knowledge. The Candidates’ situatedness outside the academic sphere brings about a balance of activity, focus and control between the academic and the professional environments.

Drawing mainly on the DProf., the presentation explores how postgraduate WBL works in higher education and there is some consideration of its academic underpinning (Costley and Stephenson 2008). There is discussion concerning generic assessment criteria; the structure of the doctoral programme; the kinds of research and development projects undertaken by the candidates; and the learning and teaching processes which are ‘essentially concerned with the individual and their own practice’ (Scott et al 2004).