DISTANCE OR PROXIMAL LEARNING:
MEDIUM MATTERS
Mícheál Ó Dúill Logios.Org
logios.org@googlemail.com
Abstract: In distance education, communication technology supports an extant curriculum based on the text-book: a prior technology. Whilst we presume that language is at the heart of education, we rely on technology. But the word
‘technology’ is much misused and we lack any scientific understanding of our capacity for technology. As a consequence we are unable to challenge tradition. An answer to the question concerning technology that is consistent with the second law and evolutionary principles is outlined. The Turing machine, the conceptual basis of the new medium, defines its relationship to thought. The benefits of displacing the unsociable frigid flatland of the school-book by assistive Turing media are introduced.
Keywords: learning media, technicity, Turing machine, primary education, teaching method.
INTRODUCTION
In the nineteen twenties, my father gained his first degree by attending evening class and using correspondence courses. Modern e-learning has replaced print, postman and phone by a plethora of electronic origination and communication media. Yet, the foundation of education remains unchanged. We constantly refer to ‘technology’
but the meaning of the word is obscure: the term ICT (information and communication technology) might equally apply to pen and paper and e-learning to the use of wireless, television and telephone. Despite the fact that we deem language to be our highest cognitive capability, it seems more to obfusticate than illuminate thought in this realm. Moreover, despite the fact that our species is technology dependent, we have no idea how we came to have the capacity for technology. The first step is to give this capability a name: I have borrowed the term ‘technicity’
from the philosophy of Heidegger. The first chapter of this paper will outline a notion of the evolution of technicity that is consistent with evolutionary principles, hominine evolution, and, critically, with the second law of thermodynamics. With
this foundation in place, we are in a position to consider, in the second chapter, the new medium we are using at its conceptual level: the Turing machine. By this, we replace our terminological menagerie with a single conceptual term: Turing medium.
With a sound understanding of the relationship of technology (now well defined) to the mind, we are in a position, in the third chapter, critically to examine the modes of education and their associated media. This analysis suggests that, at an institutional level, the current approach to learning is not efficacious and in the primary phase abusive of children’s minds. Given the power of the tertiary phase of education, is it possible that the distance learning community, who needs must use Turing media, may begin to catalyse the process of change?
1. THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY
We laud language and ignore the technology that makes possible our world and lifestyle. The absence of any scientific explanation of the human capacity for technology leaves a chapter of psychology unwritten. Here I provide notes on a proposition that will form the basis for this missing chapter.The Mind’s Lie
We see a world coloured in a multitude of tints and shades. I was not so long ago that we came to realise that our brain paints the world in false colour. The visible spectrum, the rainbow, whatever the popular song might say, contains neither pink nor purple. Thanks to the work of David Hubel (1995) and colleagues, we now know that since the evolution of bony fishes some 500,000,000 years ago, all vertebrates have a neural mechanism that paints the world using a three dimensional colour space delimited by the opponent pairs: red/green, blue/yellow, and black/white. Only since science revealed the electromagnetic spectrum can we be aware that there are no pink photons and that pink and purple are constructs of our mind. But, our minds’ lies go deeper than this.
1.1.1 When is a Square not a Square?
Consider the two views in figure 1.
F i gure 1a, 1b. A view through a window; 1b is rotated by a one eighth turn
One item changes its name as the scene is rotated. The diamond motif becomes square. Geometrically they are the same. Why does our brain think they are different objects and name them differently?
1.2 Nobody Expects the 2nd Law
Figure 1 also illustrates a truth about technology: It is an order of magnitude simpler than nature. This poses a problem. A fundamental law of nature first described as the second law of thermodynamics, states that it is not possible to progress from the complex to the simple. How can a complex organism create simple technology?
How do humans conceive a perfect square?
1.2.1 It’s in the Genes
The complexity issue may be solved at a genetic level. The information in DNA which determines the phenotype is simple. The mechanisms in the organism are an expression of this information; e.g. the Hubel colour-space space mechanism.
1.2.2 Hubel Information
The information that interfaces the organism to the environment, from which the organism constructs false but adaptive percepts, I call Hubel information. Visual Hubel information includes line length and angle, and direction of motion. Here, with colour, is the information necessary to devise the game of snooker or construct a telescope. The line/angle information is the source of the ideal square. Thus, in the brain there is a source of simplicity; provided the mind has access to it.
1.3 The Technicity Proposition
I have proposed that in the human, and only in the human, neurones from working memory interact with the sources of Hubel information (Ó Dúi l l 2012). This provides cognition a source of simplicity with which to construct objects impossible in nature. Once constructed, they are powerful Papertian objects (Papert & Harel 1991).
1.3.1 Naïve and Scientific Thought
Papertian objects are built from raw Hubel information. By the 2nd law, their simplicity gives them greater cognitive power. Their soundness is tested against the laws of physics, understanding of which they make possible. Thus, we were able to propose two opposing geometric representations of earth in the heavens: geocentric (consistent with perception) and heliocentric (physically correct). Resolution came only when technology enhanced our visual acuity. However, because language is linked directly to perception and only indirectly to technicity, there is ongoing conflict between naivety and science.
1.3.2 Development
Technicity, an evolved adaptation, comes on stream after language has developed.
Its first appearance is in the scribbles of infancy. Its genesis may traced by the increased capability of children in primary education to express something in mind
by drawing. The curriculum reflects the technicity adaptation in its core of literacy and numeracy.
2. ALAN TURING’S MACHINE
Turing (1950) considered the relationship of an electronic computer to the mind. His original (1937) paper, which he cites, described a computer in terms of someone working in a notebook. Reading symbols from the page, pencil/eraser in hand, the person scans the text with an objective in mind. Depending on the state of mind, symbols may be erased, written, or the reader may move on or back; which may lead to a change in state of mind. It is a simple and powerful model of learning from text.
2.1 Turing Media
We may now replace the plethora of technology-derived terms applied to our new educational medium with the single cognitive concept of Turing machine. Note: like the text it enhances, it is a powerful Papertian object.
3. MODES OF EDUCATION
With this foundation sketched in, we may now consider education itself. Three learning modes are used in teaching: talk, text, and Turing.
3.1 Talk
This is the verbal mode of Socratic discourse. It is open to any species that possesses language (which implies that it was used by our Neanderthal cousins). Its constraints come from linguistic diversity and the need for accurate recall. Its advantage is that no medium is required: we carry around with us the means of transmission and reception. Its disadvantage is the limitation imposed by personal memory capacity.
The fundamental cognitive constraint is that language is isolated from technicity.
Thus, in the absence of a supportive Paperian object learning is formulaic. A nice example is verbal learning of number facts and times-tables.
3.2 Text
The foundation of traditional learning, the text-book is prose with illustrations.
Language, shorn of its prosody, is encrypted in sequential symbols. Line is used both for these and the accompanying figures. Text, a product of technicity, is a Papertian object. It is permanent and open to public inspection. Thus, it circumvents the impermanence and memory demands of the spoken word. Based on drawing, it facilitates non-linguistic expression, e.g. geometric forms and numerals. In printed and now electronic form, the knowledge and thought encoded in text is widely accessible.
3.2.1 Frigid Flatland
The language diversity problem aside, text has significant issues. The information is not just preserved memory, it is a two dimensional frozen representation. This means that before the information may be retrieved, the reader must have learned to decrypt and animate. To demonstrate successful reanimation the learner must also be able to encrypt. Primary school is dominated by this process: the core skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. In this process the medium offers no assistance.
The only help a child receives is the occasional intervention of the teacher and much delayed red-pen feedback.
3.3 Turing
This medium, just over 65 years old, entered primary education as a teaching medium 30 years ago. Its capabilities caused consternation. Its use was proscribed for literacy and numeracy, where traditional method was prescribed, e.g. in England (DfES 2006). The problem was twofold: the capabilities of the medium in relation to teacher expertise; and the issue of assessment.
3.3.1 Action
The Turing medium is multimedia: not only may it present frigid graphic forms, as in this paper, but is capable of presenting movies with sound. However, the greatest concern in primary education, was the capability to animate text; notably mathematical notation. There was a presumption that, for instance, using a calculator before children had orally learned number facts and could do mental arithmetic was intellectually unsound. This implies that the ‘talk’ mode has primacy.
3.3.2 Assessment
It should be immediately obvious that this presumption is a function of the means of assessment. Where children are tested by verbal response, orally or on paper, memory and mastery of text (and the steps towards mastery that are a function of traditional method) will in large part measure success. If a child has learned using a calculator, these skills will be less developed and success deemed lower. The new medium is incompatible with traditional teaching method.
3.3.3 Assistance
When, however, the learner is considered, the Turing medium offers a great advantage: it has the capacity to assist. The young child is no longer faced with the flatland of the book with its frigid symbols demanding as yet undeveloped decrypting and animation skills. The same graphic forms now may be active and show how they work. It is possible to construct a curriculum and to devise teaching method that makes use of this assistive capability. With help from the medium and feedback that is immediate, the role of the teacher changes and the red pen may be retired.
4. ISSUES FOR TRANSITION
There is no doubt that, in the longer term, transition to Turing teaching must occur.
The road block is no longer the availability of the medium. It is an academic/political milieu that seeks to conserve its own traditions and capabilities.
The Cambridge Primary Review (Al exander 2010) assigned primacy to language and failed to see ‘the computer’ as a new medium. Gove, the current English Minister for Education, is imposing a primary curriculum that denies the existence of a new medium (DfE 2013). The language presumption is now dethroned by technicity. In this context, it is necessary to consider the efficacy of traditional method and matters of child development.
4.1 Arithmetic Method
Every time you buy something in a shop a calculator computes your bill (and feeds back information to stock control). Yet, in school we consider skill in mental arithmetic to be a measure of intellect. How good is traditional teaching method?
Recall: children begin with ten beads on a counting frame, Dienes apparatus, and use hundred squares. It is presumed that counting and working in groups of ten aids understanding, a preparation for carrying later. Children concurrently learn number words and facts; and rote-learn their times tables.
4.1.1 Counting and Computing
When we count, we group objects into bundles of ten and begin the count again at one. The language of number works differently: starting from nothing we count up to nine and then shift register on the decade. In English, we count to nine-teen and then increment the decade register on twenty, cf. a car odometer. The same is true of other languages. Language, as we saw with the diamond/square effect, is a window onto the working of the mind. Number language is congruent with our numeral system. Physical counting is not. To what extent does current method inhibit the development of computation in learners? If children were enabled to explore the numeral system with the assistance of a Turing machine, would their understanding of number be better or worse?
4.1.2 Computing and Constructing
It is a common complaint that children leaving school are unable to apply their knowledge in a real world setting. This is particularly so in mathematics. I have recently had the privilege of applying the Ilieva approach to using LEGO educationally in primary school (Il i e va 2010). One notable difficulty was an inability to apply the number facts that tripped of the children’s tongues to construction. LEGO has bricks of length 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, etc., there is no 5-brick. A gap of five studs posed a major problem. The number fact “2 plus 3 make 5” did not to come to mind. Was their number knowledge locked into the verbal domain and unavailable to constructional thought?
4.1.3 Using Graphic Information
We are used to examination candidates misreading the question. As a result of exploration in school, I have devised a small test of the ability to transform two dimensional graphic information into its three dimensional counterpart. Figure 2 shows two views of a small, simple LEGO house with no back. The subjects are supplied with exactly the bricks required to construct the house and five helpful hints,
F i gure 2. The two pictures of the house and the incorrect construction (centre)
None of the children in the primary school were able to construct the model from this information. They needed a ready-built three-dimensional model to replicate.
Adults varied in their capability. One notable outcome was produced by a university education professor and colleagues: their house looked correct but the bricks were not bonded on the corner (figure 2 centre). Yet, all the information required is in plain view and everyday observation of houses ought to have informed their strategy. The task is a simple application of number to shape and space. Not only does talk and text lock knowledge into the language domain but the frigid flatland of the book inhibits three dimensional thinking.
4.2 Mastering the Medium
Whilst children are systematically taught mastery of text as a medium, mastery of the Turing medium is not. In Bulgaria, Ilieva (a primary school teacher) devised a curriculum to teach mastery. Approved by the government as an elective subject, it is current (Il i e va and Do yl e 2013). She found that children, systematically taught all the capabilities of the medium through activities normal for the child’s age using a project oriented approach, produced work of a higher quality that that in their
exercise books. In the Turing medium, means of expression unavailable in the flatland of pencil and paper were open to them, offering a far richer learning environment.
4.2.1 No Application
Exercise of this mastery throughout the curriculum was systemically impossible.
Prescribed teaching materials were all books and assessment was based on performance with them, cf. the PISA tests. The use of Turing media remain within the audiovisual aid tradition. This will be so as long as education is controlled by the academic/political milieu who are wedded to traditional media and fearful that change will reduce the intellectual status of the skills by which they define their success.
4.3 Matters Neurological
The primary school years are critical in a child’s development. The connections made by prefrontal cortex, which provides the executive function for the perception action cycle and is the site of working memory, are made in this phase of education (Fust er 2008). Affective maturity is complete by its end and the cognitive largely mature. Experience contributes significantly to sculpting the connective matrix.
Thus, teaching method and medium mastery will have a major effect on the outcome.
4.3.1 Benefits and disbenefits
With two technological media on offer, text and Turing, we may question their relative benefits for affective and cognitive development. Success in surmounting the challenge of decrypting text unaided will be motivating. Conversely, failure will have negative affective consequences. But school is not a competitive sport. It aspires to maximise individual potential. It follows that the disbenefits, emotional and cognitive, of an obstructive medium are incompatible with this aim.
CONCLUSION
This paper has introduced two unfamiliar ideas. However uncomfortable the technicity proposition might be, it is consistent with the principles of evolution and fundamental physical laws, however unexpected these are in behavioural science.
The Turing medium notion provides a cognitive focus in a realm that has been technology dominated. Combined, these enable us to view education through the lens of the ‘technology’ deployed. Traditional text is seen to be obstructive of learning in the primary school years, engendering failure. The Turing media is mature, available and assistive. Not to begin the transition of teaching method to this medium is tantamount to building in failure, effectively condoning mental and emotional abuse. Primary education professionals are powerless to engender such change: they are subject to the academic/political milieu. They are trained to feed children an endless stream of symbols, treating them as Turing machines. Surely it is
time to change their role and for them to teach with the Turing medium to hand?
How to change the view of the academic/political milieu, where Govery* presides, there’s the rub.
REFERENCES
Al exander , R., (ed.), 2010: Children, their World, their Education, London, Routlege
DfES, 2006: Primary Strategy for literacy and mathematics. London, Department for Education and Skills
DfE, 2013: Draft national curriculum programmes of study, available at https://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/national curriculum2014/b00220600/draft-national-curriculum-programmes-of-study (accessed 10 July 2013)
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Il i e va , V., 2010: LEGO and LOGO in the Primary School – a simple way to learn through creation. In: Clayson, E.J., Kalaš, I, (eds) Proceedings of Constructionism 2010 – 12th European Logo Conference. Bratislava, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics Comenius University.
Il i e va , V., Do yl e , M., 2013: ICT in the Bulgarian Primary School. In: Reynolds, N., Webb, M. (eds.) Proceedings of WCCE 2013, 10th World Conference on Computers in Education, 2, pp. 1-8. Torun, Nicolas Copernicus University Press
Ó Dúill, M.: The Technicity Thesis: A constructionist proposition, available at http://etl.ppp.uoa.gr/constructionism2012dailly/constructionism2012_proceedin gs.zip (accessed 19 August 2012)
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* Note: the term “Govery,” which implies a blind faith in traditional values when change is imminent is named after the current English Minister of Education, Michael Gove.
