Culture, Technology, and (Environments of) Learning

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The second day here at ICE 3 starts with a keynote by Gunther Kress. He begins by noting the brackets in his talk title, which for him symbolise the distinctions between some of the core and continuing aspects of learning, and the particular affordances of the learning environments in use at any one point. What stays the same, what changes, and why, then? Of course, we are embedded in cultures, and these do shift and change.

Gunther's talk, then, addresses issues of culture (including questions of power and society), technologies, learning, and environments. He begins by defining the technologies he will address - technologies of representation (investigating modes of representation), or production, and of dissemination (that is, the media used for dissemination). Modes and media are independently variable (which is an argument against the idea of multimedia, which conflates the two), if interrelated. The modes of speech and writing are clearly and importantly distinct, for example, and in each different kinds of representation are possible.

Speech, for example, is a temporally organised mode which describes a sequence of events in time; image, on the other hand, is closer to a representation of salient features in space (a snapshot, in other words, framing a specific moment in space). Some such modes have become habitualised over long centuries of practice, leading us to encounter the world already expecting particular modes of engagement. In academia, therefore, narrative-based modes of representation today tend to dominate.

There are a variety of logics available for representations, them - in the case of image vs. speech, for example, the logic of space is opposed to the logic of time, the logic of simultaneity opposed to the logic of sequence, the ontology of 'being' opposed to the ontology 'cause'; these are different epistemological commitments about how the world is which must be made by the user of these modes of representation. Different (and especially newer) media, in addition to this, may enable or privilege a variety of representational modes which further extend beyond the fundamental aspects of traditional speech and image representation.

Of course these modes also exist within specific cultural contexts, and many existing cultural conventions also enable us to work against the (culturally determinated) dominant logics within each mode of representation (to make speech describe space, or image describe temporal sequence). Additionally, the technologies of dissemination also influence this process, as different media offer different facilities of dissemination, embody different power structures, and tend to support different forms of authority, authorship, and knowledge. Recent changes within specific media forms, and recent new media forms, have changed the relations between authority, authorship, and knowledge. Even in print media, for example, temporal structuring has waned somewhat, at least in some fields; this is even more pronounced in online textual content, which affords visitors with a greater amount of control over how they encounter content, the order they visit it, and the knowledge they generate from doing so.

What about learning, then - here, too, we have seen the emergence of various extensions and alterations to traditional modes of learning (e-, m-, online, ubiquitous, life-long, life-wide, personalised, virtual learning). What is learning, then? Learning is an engagement with something which is framed by the learner's attention, and the learner's representation of what they learn reflects their principal representation of what the world is like - learning is the result of semiotic work. Learning could then be described variously as a change, a transformation, or an augmentation of the learner's 'inner resources'.

Gunther uses the example of kids' early attempts at writing here - what is framed by them, and by whom; whose attention and whose power does it reflect; whose work and whose agency is represented; what learning has taken place, and according to whose judgment? Such questions can also be asked of pedagogy, though: whose power is exerted, in what form, and in what domain (domains of learning have expanded very widely beyond traditional disciplines in recent times); whose agenda is represented, how is it presented or shaped (what modes and media are used), and whose design is used? Are we shifting from pedagogy to rhetoric, indeed?

Ultimately, what is to be learnt? Who decides this - whose attention, framing, and engagement is involved, and therefore what is the emerging new relationship between pedagogy and power? Questions of rhetoric move to the forefront, then, as do those of design. In an environment where the state's power has changed (placing the state as servant of the market in neo-liberal approaches), how does pedagogy change (how do authority, learning, and design change)? The world of representation and communication are also changing, in addition to this...

And what about contemporary environments of learning, many of which place the learner as consumer of education? At the same time, the learner is also author and producer of knowledge, and makes their own choices (increasingly also embracing life-long and life-wide learning) - perhaps a new habitus of learning is emerging. This is now the central dilemma of the school, in particular. To this we may also add questions of mobile learning (whatever this may actually mean - who and what is mobile in mobile learning, and why?), contributing to the increased curricularisation of the world, and the environments of social software, which further problematises notions of community, of the social, and of the power which inheres in them. Contemporary texts are now often dynamic, fluid, contingent, and multiply authored - they come with a characteristic sense of provisionality rather than finality.

Many questions to be considered here...

Technorati : ICE 3, education, learning, media, representation
Del.icio.us : ICE 3, education, learning, media, representation