[iDC] duplication theory of educational value

Tue Sep 20 03:53:57 UTC 2011

hi

On 17 September 2011 05:07, Margaret Morse <morse at ucsc.edu> wrote:

> Sent this just to Adrian by mistake--and saw that John and Alex responded
> in a similar vein.  Hope you don't feel piled upon, Adrian.  Your post was a
> strong catalyst.  MM
>
>
nah, glad that it has been productive as a prompt.

> Dear Adrian,
>
> I feel like I must step in here.  Your list of what is needed to be
> educated is lacking in some very important elements.  Also, why should we be
> thinking in terms of either DIY or a formal education?  I think we need both
> in our lives--I learned as much from the context of a university town--with
> its misfits, eccentrics and brilliant people ahead of their time, fomenting
> ideas and developing skills and experiences that grounded me in the school
> of life--as I did in my classes. The university and the town are overlapping
> communities that are like a catalyst and generator.  In my isolated past, I
> knew what it was like to be a autodidact without discourses to test and hone
> my ideas.  At university I had exposure to thinkers who were far more useful
> than experts, people I would not have anticipated studying with before I
> discovered them.  They were multi-generational and in touch with history.
>  Many were Jews in exile from fascism--I was lucky to catch the tail end of
> their careers.
>
>
The DIY versus formal was a distinction George Siemens asked about, wasn't
mine :-)

> In other words, your list doesn't include the matrix or culture in which
> ideas and practices grow and are exchanged and the cross-roads aspect of a
> university community with many discourses.  Perhaps such a scene can be
> duplicated, for instance, in a hub like Silicon Valley or New York.  I would
> wonder, in the first case, whether the matrix includes the breadth of
> historical and cultural knowledge and experience that helps create social as
> well as personal meaning and fulfillment in what one is creating.  As for
> New York, it IS a rich mixture of artists/intellects and scholars.  If you
> are thinking about the cost of education now and whether it pays for itself
> in careers, the statistics I overhear suggest it still does.  However, an
> education has intangible value that would not be utterly destroyed even if
> one did not achieve the specific goals and aims one expects to. Then the
> improvisation of DIY becomes extremely useful.  This is not to deny the
> suffering and deprivation that all the people without jobs endure.  Nor does
> it forget the stratification effects of our contemporary political and
> economic system.
>

Not going to disagree but am going to point out a couple of things:

1. As John Hopkins has indicated, here in Australia universities are now
more like corporations and while there remains what you describe this is not
that simple to create, maintain, nurture and foster. Universities are places
that matter, but they are also conservative institutions where we do tend to
stay in our silos inspite of all our rhetoric of engagement,
interdisciplinarity etc. I see this in most places. Interdisciplinary seems
to be routinely treated as a media scholar working with a literature
professor, or a sociologist with an ethnographer, which seems to me quite a
limited notion. However, to answer what you point out, I really think that
universities are like that if you want them to be, but I am not sure that
they 'make' you like that. They are vibrant institutions where you can learn
and experience and participate in an enormous amount, much like a city, but
having it available is not the same as actually engaging with it. Those of
us in the system who want to do this have the opportunity to do it, which is
much like any other club really, but what I'm interested in is how to get
those who don't think they want to engage to be a part of that experience.
Again this is where John's model of conversation and Otherness is
interesting.

2. The infrastructure here is quite different, though others experience it
differently. Our most significant universities are in major cities, there
are regional universities in small cities - in Australian english we have
quite a clear demarcation between city and town -  (but in Australia I think
you can claim 'city' status for something like a population of 15,000
people) where the university would be a major employer and cultural voice,
but in general the cultural experience is to go to university rather than
the experience of a university town like you can experience in western
Europe and the US. But I did think I was endorsing the view of the
intangible benefits of education, these are what I was describing as the
qualitative change a student experiences. My point was simply that this is a
fundamentally different thing to 'content', to learning about something, and
is closer to Stephen Downes observation that university through the things
you describe offers the possibility to become.

> For whatever it is worth--
>
> quite a bit actually :-)

>
> On Sep 16, 2011, at 5:38 AM, Adrian Miles wrote:
>
> hi George, et al
>
> On 16 September 2011 03:25, George Siemens <gsiemens at elearnspace.org>wrote:
>
>> I'd be interested to hear comments from list members on where we find the
>> value point for education today...i.e. why go to university instead of a diy
>> approach?
>>
>> My thoughts are here:
>> http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/09/15/duplication-theory-of-educational-value/
>>
>> I am currently wondering similar questions, though in the specific context
> of media education and practice. I'm also writing a presentation that is
> going to be a bit of a riff on this idea for a conference in October here in
> Australia. But my answer is pretty simple. I'll stick to media as it makes
> my argument easier, but I think it translates pretty well (YMMV).
>
> 1. you once went to uni to get access to equipment that were otherwise
> scarce:
> i. video cameras/edit suites (very expensive, big, etc)
> ii. expertise in how to use such things
>
> 2. you once went to uni to get access to resources that were otherwise
> scarce:
> i. reference books
> ii. journals
> iii. a decent library that had books in your area of interest
>
> 3. you once went to uni to get access to expertise that was otherwise
> scarce:
> i. experts (academics)
> ii. content via these academics (lectures, classes)
>
> In this model (these are the reasons I had for going to university, and I
> was mature age, and largely self taught around cinema studies) quantity
> matters. How big is the library, how significant the academics, how good the
> cameras. You learnt, you didn't, but the 'experience' of going to uni was as
> much access to this stuff as it was about anything else. In other words
> access was what generated the quality of the experience, the institution in
> many ways didn't actually have to do a lot, except be.
>
> This model is now redundant for all the reasons that I think are obvious to
> us. So, if I don't need a university for access to equipment (I have a video
> camera in my pocket, my laptop is an edit suite, and I can distribute to the
> planet via the web), or for high quality commentary and knowledge (free
> journals, library access, MIT courseware, blogs, specialist online forums),
> and I can now email these very academics, practitioners or just listen to
> podcasts of very high quality content, why would I go to uni?
>
> Stephen Downes answered this very well recently, along the lines (I am
> paraphrasing) of "learning how to become". The scarcity model is gone, but
> it is still about quality and the quality is in enabling for students a
> shift in their understanding. Of themselves as thinker practitioners (or
> practitioner thinkers), of their discipline, of their relation to all this
> stuff out there, of their role in a knowledge economy where knowing how
> counts for more than knowing what.
>
> I've no idea how much sense that made, as I'm still distilling this. But
> increasingly I understand that the difference I have made that made a
> difference was never been about content, about teaching *more*, but in
> providing, mentoring, modelling a variety of things that are more abstract,
> and teaching myself how to help students to find and learn these things
> themselves. What Schön would characterise as some sort of reflective
> practice, the sort of 'back talk' that you do and need to learn to find and
> listen to to be a good theorist, maker, learner. So the qualitative change
> is not in them coming to learn more, that's a collateral outcome that's
> going to happen anyway. It is a qualitative change in their own
> understanding about something that will matter. Or, as I mention above,
> learning how to become.
>
> I could go on, but that's enough. However, I will finish by saying that the
> contemporary university is in general not like this, and to do this you more
> or less find an eddy for yourself in the university and do it because the
> university as an institution is stuck in about 1980 (on a good day) and as
> far as I can see still thinks my points 1 to 3 above are what matter.
>
> an appropriate closing
> Adrian Miles
> about.me/vogmae
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
>
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
>
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
>
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
>
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
>
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
>
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
>
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
>
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref
>

an appropriate closing
Adrian Miles
about.me/vogmae
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20110920/518c51c4/attachment-0001.htm 