Stephen Downes

In the latest issue of Innovate, Stephen Downes uses the Archbishop of Canterbury to pry open Facebook and explain what’s really going on. (Nobody but Downes would have tastes so catholic and insight so witty.) Among other things, the article shows how lively the Innovate journal can be;  Innovate has been around for a few years and its archive is full of fresh thinking and valuable research about tech and teaching – nothing is off-limits. My TESOL instructors fainted at the mention of technology more modern than a cassette deck but Innovate keeps exploring clever stuff such as how cellphones might be used to teach. It’s about time they looked at Facebook and Downes offers perceptive insights.

Facebook is a frenzy, of course, and the attention becomes self-sustaining in different ways; big means money to the business writers; big means yesterday or tainted to the geeks. Downes slows things down and invests some time explaining exactly how the social network functions; he urges anyone designing an educational application to make the same serious effort to understand Facebook. And goes a step further:

“…the nature and popularity of Facebook itself challenges the idea of what an educational application should look like.”

The challenge is usually missed, even by the sharp guys and girls. Andy Carvin at PBS Teachers recently wrote about his own Facebook life and demonstarted genuine familiarity with the network and all the new applications that have been recently added:

…on my Facebook page I use apps that import summaries of my blog posts, my latest videos, text messages I’ve sent using Twitter, and my latest photos from Flickr.

For us Twitter-virgins, that sounds pretty wild.

Carvin covers some of the 4,000 new applications that ride on top of Facebook – it’s these apps, and the fact that membership is now open to everybody and not just university kids, that caused Facebook to become one of the most popular sites on the web. But Carvin complains with among the thousands and thousands of software gizmos, there are no real education apps. He doesn’t want to give up:

“There may be some hope, though. This fall, Stanford is offering a course on Facebook apps…”

Downes may not be among those who are shouting ‘hooray!’ because he believes Facebook is based on a different idea. In describing the social network, he shows clearly that Facebook was originally designed, not to carry content, but to connect college students into networks of friends. The new ‘open-to-everyone’ Facebook is still set up that way: networking first, content second – and second, in this case, can mean very trivial.

This is the point where Downes brings in the good Archbishop, Rowan Williams. Last year Williams was speaking in China about the nature of college life and he made the point that there is, in every society, a group of people who run things. In order to do so, they need to understand a wide set of interests and one of the efficient ways of doing this is to have networks of friends. The powerful need to learn how to make these networks. Williams is trying to be frank about what he calls the “profoundly political element in the university” (something his Chinese audience would know already) but, I think its fair to say, he sugar-coats it in a British mum/Anglican archbishop way; he calls what happens at college a “culture of converstaion” – kinda like university is one long afternoon of tea with the don.

Downes uses Williams’ notion of university life to reveal something cardinal about Facebook: FB is a social network in the same way that a university is a place where certain people learn to network. If that is true then Facebook is not failing to bring educational content to the world; rather, Facebook is succeeding at being the essence of the university: a place where (and here the cliché seems apt) who you know is more important than what you know.

It’s important to follow through, of course, because if you stop at ‘who you know’, it becomes a very cynical view. Downes has always been a believer in the notion that ‘education’ takes place as much outside the classroom as within it – perhaps even more outside. This is especially true, Downes has argued, when we communicate using various technologies, hard and soft. This seems accurate to me; I’ve always learned more arguing with fellow students than listening to lectures. So it might be more accurate to say that who you know is a critically important variable in determining what you know.

What Downes accomplishes in the Innovate article is to properly position Facebook historically and ideologically in the university, a place where privileged people learn to connect. FB was successful within the university setting because it facilitated those connections, facilitated learning how to network. It became a kind of new school for the old boys’ network: the zone of privileged development (with apologies to Vygotsky).

Downes’ subtle probe of Facebook brings a couple of questions to mind:

1. What happens now that FB has grown beyond the zone of privilieged development? It began life as a kind of training school for no-risk networking but it’s now out here in the real world with us non-Eloi. We don’t have plans to run the world but we still want to network – at least we want to make friends and do interesting things. Perhaps being friends with other Morlocks is inherently dull and the ‘browse and snooze’ factor will fade Facebook’s glossy lustre. Or, conversely, perhaps low-power networking has its own virtues and vitalities. I think the issue for Facebook’s future is not what apps are most popular but what networks are most interesting. And why. More research required.

2. For those of us interested in using Facebook to support a learning environment, the key question is this: How can we fuse interesting content into the networking process? If FB is a ‘zone of privileged development’, then I am far more interested in the possible development than in the much ballyhooed privilege. A few demos of Facebook-life that make interesting content shine because real people are turning the crank seems to me to fit the notion of development and provide the antidote to ‘browse and snooze’.

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My mother was in love with Wilder Penfield. They didn’t know each other so it was a one-way affair. Dr. Penfield was a pioneer brain surgeon, a famous doctor in Montreal during the ‘50s. For people like my Mum – people who had more or less given up on God and who believed that only education and understanding could save us – anyone like Dr. Penfield, who could understand the mind, was scientist and shaman all rolled together in one irresistible package. The fact that most of Penfield’s theories of how the structure of the brain might influence our behaviour have been disproved several times over no longer matters to my Mum: she’s dead. And so is he.

I raise the subject of Penfield’s work as neurosurgeon and brain explorer because in many ways his dated investigations and the latest studies in the field are more similar than we might expect. That’s because, although the science has improved, the fact remains that whatever the most recent study of the brain shows, the rest of us jump to believe it is true and we rush to attach as many other ideas and conjectures to it as we can. The brain for us has become something like the heart was for earlier romantics except that the warm and fuzzy feeling is now a warm and fuzzy thinking.

Language has, of course, been one of the main battlegrounds for theories of the brain: how we learn to understand, speak, read and write our mother tongue as well as any other languages we might pick up later. Skinner and the behaviourists liked the image of the brain as a black box because they believed it best captured our profound uncertainty about what happened inside it. But the concept was crushed when Chomsky opened up the entire field of linguistics by brilliantly focusing on the mind’s creativity; there was, Chomsky said, a universal grammar pre-programmed into the brain which made it possible for a 3-year old to almost perfectly understand his parents and speak their language long before being able to tie her shoes!

Hidden in Chomsky’s model of language acquisition, however, was a container that, if not quite black, was definitely opaque. Although supportive scientists prodded the brain and found certain areas to be more active when language was being used, it was very difficult to prove any baby was actually born with the almost magical skill and just as tough to prove how the universal grammar might function. People keep prodding and, with today’s refined technology, they keep finding grey matter that glows when we speak or listen or read or write.

But, as a number of researchers and scientists have pointed out, the Chomskian model has, in addition to operational testing problems, some theoretical issues as well. It implies an isomorphic relationship between the model of language in our minds and the language we confront in the world. Isomorphic basically means ‘matching’; there is a one-to one (iso) matching of forms (morph). This matching has been and probably will be impossible to prove. In a powerful presentation published on his website in 2006, Stephen Downes first goes for some back-up from brain science and then carries the implications forward to the way we know and the way we teach:

…consider Randall O’Reilly on how the brain represents conceptual structures, as described in Modeling Integration and Dissociation in Brain and Cognitive Development. He explicitly rejects the ‘isomorphic’ view of mental contents, and instead describes a network of distributed representations. “Instead of viewing brain areas as being specialized for specific representational content (e.g., color, shape, location, etc), areas are specialized for specific computational functions by virtue of having different neural parameters…

“This ‘functionalist’ perspective has been instantiated in a number of neural network models of different brain areas, including posterior (perceptual) neocortex, hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex/basal ganglia system… many aspects of these areas work in the same way (and on the same representational content), and in many respects the system can be considered to function as one big undifferentiated whole. For example, any given memory is encoded in synapses distributed throughout the entire system, and all areas participate in some way in representing most memories.”
…

If, as asserted above, what counts as knowledge of even basic things like the meanings of words and the cause of events is sensitive to context, then it seems clear that such knowledge is not a stand-alone symbolic representation of that knowledge, since representations would not be, could not be, context sensitive. Rather, what is happening is that each person is experiencing a mental state that is at best seen as an approximation of what it is that is being said in words or experienced in nature, an approximation that is framed and indeed comprehensible only from which the rich set of world views, previous experiences and frames in which it embedded.

If this is the case, then the concepts of what it is to know and what it is to teach are very different from the traditional theories that dominate distance education today. Because if learning is not the transfer of mental contents – if there is, indeed, no such mental content that exists to be transported – then we need to ask, what is it that we are attempting to do when we attempt to teach and learn.

I agree. Meanwhile the scientists keep burrowing into the brain. Here’s a sample of recent work:

» Brain cells work differently than we thought they did. link

» Human knowledge is based upon directed connectivity between brain areas link

» The size of Heschl’s Gyrus will help you learn a second langauge! link

Like Downes and others, I’ll continue to explore recent brain research; I want to hitch my language learning wagon to the latest version of what goes on in our mysterious minds.

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        Marshall McLuhan and Stephen Downes

Open. Connected. Diverse. Autonomous.

According to Stephen Downes, these are the characteristics that make a network ‘reliable’. Downes is, in my opinion, the most interesting explorer on the web today. On his website, with numerous slide presentations and on a never-ending trip around the physical world from his base in New Brunswick, Downes covers everything about technology that relates to learning – and vice versa. He does it with brevity and clarity; he knows what he likes and his test for anything that might be of use to a teacher or a learner is that it must be open, connected, diverse, autonomous. Downes is becoming to the web what McLuhan was to television: essential to understanding.

From his perch in heaven, McLuhan must be enjoying his current standing in the media – he’s both hero and has-been. Even for the hero-worshippers, it may be unclear what he actually said. A bunch of hard-to-read books recently tried to dress him up in digital. Before that the folks at Wired made McLuhan their saint for doing something he didn’t do: predict the web. But Wired deserves credit for rescuing him from the oblivion where he had been since his death in 1980.

McLuhan’s career from 1950 to 1980 was divided roughly in two: from 1950 until the publication of Understanding Media in 1964, McLuhan published two odd but brilliant books and numerous articles and he delivered lengthy monologues to his students at the University of Toronto. When Understanding Media was published in 1964, McLuhan became famous, more or less instantly. There has probably never been an intellectual ascension as fast as his. And deservedly so.

McLuhan said some wonderful things and many of the remarks are as enigmatic as they are enlightening. For example (and it’s a very long list):

“…the electronic age angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.”

McLuhan wanted his probes (as he called his remarks) to be odd and entertaining because he knew it was the only way to win the war for attention. His main thrust, however, was very clear. Any medium – books, television, the web – is made up of 3 things:

The material of the medium: paper, lines of regular print, a phosphor screen, a cathode ray, a CSS file, servers…
The content of the medium: novels, newspaper stories, news anchors, the Tonight Show, RSS feeds, MySpace…
The effect of the medium: linear thought, tribal engagement, ?

McLuhan’s ‘discovery’ was the effect. He believed that only by understanding the effect could we hope to have some control. But he said, time and time again, that he was not optimistic we would actually get hold of the levers. Why? Because we are immersed in the dominant media and asking us to understand it is like asking a fish’s opinion of water: “Water! What water?”

The obvious question for us in this era is ‘What is the effect of the web?’ (It seems to me that Downes is getting closest to telling us what that is – even if he hasn’t explicitly said so.) One ‘probe’ that McLuhan used was to look at how the new dominant medium was influencing the behaviour of the old one. We have certainly seen the effect of the web on television. As the internet started to have an influence in our lives, suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere came ‘reality TV’ - television that appears to be what? Open, diverse, connected and, even to some degree, autonomous.

It is, of course, just a warped pretence of those things but the old medium can only hope to fake it in order to gain our attention – at least our fake attention.

And where is our real attention? And how is it being expressed? What is the effect of the web? What is the effect on learning?

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