why we learn

I haven’t written in a while and so I feel the need to write something. I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the course of the past couple of weeks working on family items. I’ve migrated from using LightRoom to Aperture now that I have a new computer that is able to provide the processing power that Aperture requires. Classes start again rather soon, in a week or two.

I’m a little unsettled now as to what direction I’ll head in terms of my dissertation. Some other students, Dr. Ingram, and myself had a real nice and interesting conversation related to the potential use of a “studio model” in an online classroom setting. I dedicated a significant amount of time prior to that meeting looking at how researchers go about organizing their data, and subsequently sifting through that information as they progress through their own idiosyncratic writing process. And long ago (it seems) I began by focusing on cognitive load, motivation, and ways of manufacturing time for teachers and students to meet one-on-one for brief periods of time.

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I came away from BLC 2008 with two notions of interest. One applies to procedural or systematic change and the other is more personal in nature. As I’ve stated in my previous posts, it seems that the presenters at this conference were a more progressive bunch as a whole, compared to those that I saw at ETech. It was also my sense that the overall level of knowledge was a little higher, and in general, the content was more theoretical in nature. My first take away is the idea that incremental change can be harmful. This wasn’t explicitly stated by any of the presenters, rather it sort of emerged from a synthesis of their disparate presentations. It seems that one of themes running through what I saw was the idea that technology should be viewed as a tool or a support for a new paradigm, new pedagogy if you will. My summation is that incremental change lends itself to assimilation and/or accommodation rather than transformation. That is to say that if we try to change our school “one step at a time” we may well end up with teachers using new technology as a replacement for old technology. More profound is the notion that at the end of this process we will have lost an opportunity to create real change. I think if you look at school reforms of the day, and the ways in which most new technology is used, you will find data that supports this postulate.

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Maxine Greene’s piece¹ is one of the more challenging essays, in terms of verbosity and ideas, that I’ve read. Typically, when I consume something this dense, I spend a day or two away from it before I once more review the contents and begin to pull together something that resembles coherent thought. I have done so with this piece. I take a risk here, as it would be safer to acquiesce, but I cannot.

So much of what the author advances resonates, as she meanders through history, tracing philosophical approaches to knowledge, and its pursuit. I subscribe to her underlying postulate regarding the nature of “truth”, specifically the interpretability and relative nature of truth. Moreover, the way in which Greene elucidates these intrinsic qualities, citing the preeminent philosophers of of the past, is particularly helpful. Finally, the way in which she, after what I describe below as a bit of a diatribe, comes back to the terms “imagination” and “metaphor”, relieves a modicum of tension. More importantly, this return to the center also provides the reader with some direction in terms of what might be a way to bridge the divide the author seems set on exacerbating throughout much of this work.

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