All entries for Monday 18 July 2011

July 18, 2011

Draft intoduction for the Handbook of Open–space Learning Technology

When finished, the handbook will appear on the Open-space Learning web site here.

Welcome to the Handbook of Open-space Learning Technology - a handbook that is, exactly as it states "on the tin": a set of handy tools that act as a guide to choosing (or creating) technologies for working and learning within a holistic, integrative, critical, real-world learning ecology.

As a guide it will not necessarily tell you which technologies to use. Given the rate of new technological, pedagogical and educational developments that would be futile. It will help you to understand how to choose from the rapidly growing range of options.

Perhaps the title already makes complete sense to you? Or perhaps it's all a bit blurry and new? Or maybe you've never come across Open-space Learning (OSL) before, and you are more interested in the generic question of how you can use technology to improve how you work and how you learn. No matter, this handbook is for you. It's also explicitly for anyone whose role officially or unofficially involves giving advice to others: [e]learning advisors, technology integrators, departmental IT champions, IT service professionals, friends, neighbours, web acquaintances etc. The tools that are provided in the handbook have been designed and used (and redesigned) as part of an award winning learning technology advisory service. Tested, broken, and improved through several iterations by people whose daily work is to bravely give advice and leadership.

If you're lucky, you already have one of these exciting new pedagogies (or as we shall soon start calling it, a learning ecology). Maybe you are curious as to what new technologies might add, but at the same time feel worried that they might upset your carefully cultured craft. Then read on. My promise is this - the approach outlined in this book will help you (and your students) to find, adapt and adopt new technologies that work with and within, not against, your good practices. For example, we have discovered the importance of choosing exactly the right video editing tool to fit within performance experiments - the result being Carol Rutter's impressive series of Unpinning Desdemona videos. This has also suggested possible new technologies and arrangements of technologies to support the multi-perspectival "live archiving" and "live editing" of academic-performative experiments, so as to give a more democratic and collective ability to re-wind, re-play, re-vitalise, re-configure and re-edit.

Or perhaps you are not quite there yet - maybe you are experiencing institutional (or even student) resistance, or perhaps simply struggling with a transition. Then it might be even more important for you to stand back, look at the technology choices that you have made (consciously) or just accepted (unconsciously), and critically redesign your practices. Again, the methodology outlined in this book will work for you. If you find at least one new technology that inspires and enables you, your students and your colleagues to escape the limits of tradition, then it's a success.

It is of course possible, albeit unlikely given the title of the book, that you have no conscious interest in "technology". I still insist that this is the book for you. We all have an "interest" in technology, in the sense that technologies of all kinds shape our worlds and minds - and if you are a teacher, consider how your students will have grown up immersed in IT systems that would have been figments of science fiction when you were a child. They may be seamingly simple, immediate tools. Or they may be sophisticated mediators, potentially capable or modifying events without human direction. Technology is pervasive. It's affordances and constraints can be both emancipatory and repressive, adding to our well-being and growth or conversely making us sick and retrogressive.

Conversely, you might be a technologist (or geek) for whom the words "pedagogy" and "open-space" have a somewhat alien intonation. I was just such a geek. But having worked for two years with some of the best of OSL practitioners, I can see how valuable OSL is as an approach to developing technology and our use of it - especially in understanding the gap between technologists (computer programmers, IT support professionals etc) and those who we expect to use the technologies. The role of habit, the habitual and habitat is key to this. Let me explain...

As the philosopher Martin Heidegger argued, the important thing is to bring technology and technologies into question:

"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this Conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology." CITATION NEEDED

And that means taking an unfashionably critical stance. How unfashionable? Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Rosabeth Moss Kanter neatly expressed a commonly-held belief in technology as emancipatory:

"Each technology wave produces tools that are more accessible, user-friendly, and democratizing than their predecessors, blurring the line between amateurs and professionals; think of real-time street videos of news events." (Kanter, 2011)

In the world-view of techno-utopians, the battle lines are drawn between emancipatory new technology and repressive conservative institutions:

"...some establishments can be remarkably impervious to bottom-up disruption because of their organizational structures... In education and health care, numerous demonstrations show the transformational power of technology, but the overall systems change slowly and haven’t reached a tipping point." (ibid)

But what if those top-down structures exist and hold power as a result of an un-critical acceptance of technology? - a willingness to hand over control and responsibility? - a resignation to the "network effect"? What if organizational structures are in fact built unconsciously out of habitual, uncritical, unthinking acts repeated many times? For example, perhaps the institution has become more impersonal because of the way in which its members habitually use email for all kinds of activity for which it is not suited. Perhaps future institutions are right now being constructed within a "dialogue" of 140 character long fragments? Furthermore, the habitual use of technologies combines with habitual thinking and language to reinforce the stratifications, to sediment the walls of our habitat. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari described how, as a reaction to an over-abundance of connectivity, systems become habitual, sedimented, un-critical and anti-creative - the tyranny of habit:

"We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 108)

It is true that habits and habitats are essential. We don't want to have to think about our technologies all of the time - for the same reason that one can't live with deconstruction as tool for doing the grocery shopping. Even the most nomadic of tribes have take their habits with them on their wanderings. As the cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued, the ability to "offload" cognitive work into our environment is what makes human intelligence so effective. CITATION NEEDED Habit is therefore both good and bad. The important thing is to take a reflective and critical stance on habit.

And this is where the connection between Open-space Learning, technology and the methodology described in this book becomes particularly exciting.

The "open-space" in Open-space Learning has a double meaning. The space of learning is opened-up to unforeseen possibilities, creativity, innovation. New products are possible, but also new ways of doing things, new collaborations and new values. Good. That's what we are after. But there's a second more challenging meaning, drawn from its roots in performance studies. The open-space is the space into which things are brought into the open, exposed, challenged, critiqued.

In the summer of 2011, I interviewed a broad sample of third-year students from Warwick's English and Comparative Literature courses. They had all taken variations of the compulsory Shakespeare and his Contemporaries module. Some had opted for a "without chairs" version (open-space with Carol Rutter). Others had opted for a traditional approach. Although my findings can only be anecdotal and unscientific, I am personally convinced of this: the "without chairs" experience is significantly more intensive, demanding, intellectually and experientially rich because of the inescapably exposed environment in which it takes place. In contrast to the "traditional" seminar approach, the students reported that the open-space approach put their existing habits under scrutiny, and sharply contrasted them with the new intellectual and physical habits practiced in each session (often quite starkly in contrast to more comfortable practices). The theatrical rehearsal room in which the sessions were held constituted a different habitat to that of conventional study (the seminar room), but also acted as a stage upon which habits and their props were brought into critical consciousness.

Open-space learning therefore puts habits onto a stage. Habits and habitats become objects for critique and experimentation. The playwright-philosopher Samuel Beckett had perhaps the keenest grasp of the power of "staging" the habitual. In his essay on Proust, Beckett wrote that:

"Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities..." CITATION NEEDED

Beckett's characters are often imprisoned by their habits and their habitats, like animals. His plays show a slowly unfolding ecology, with behaviours that are absurd from the long-view but entirely rational in close-up: a temporary ecological compromise. In just the same way, habitual behaviours with technology may seem to make sense in close-up. Technology users may even develop an emotional attachment to their technologies. But ecologies are unstable, subject to morbidity, or uncontrolled growth leading to collapse and extinction. For the sake of our own development, we need to be able to step back, detach ourselves to some degree and imagine different ways of being. Be like an ecologist studying the habits and habitats of creatures and their machines. At the individual level it is a necessary requirement for living in this world of hyper-connectivity and rapid change. But it's even more important than that. Writing in the late 60's, Deleuze and Guattari, following Beckett (their inspiration), realised the devastating effects that habitual technologies can have on the world (described in the first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which Michel Foucault described as a "guide to anti-fascist living" CITATION NEEDED). By the time they penned the line quoted above ('94, just at the birth of the World Wide Web) things had got worse - hence the need to find new ways to "resist the present". Open-space Learning gives us a new way to resist - not against technology, but with technology.

This then is a handbook for resisting the dangers of the habitual with technology.