Technology and Consequences

Technological advances often come with unintended issues.  Marie Curie’s work with radiation likely led to her death from aplastic anemia.  Use of nuclear reactors has given us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Fukushima disasters.  This leads to concerns about technology and its advancements going in directions we cannot control.  What is ironic about this state of mind, is that even when people get what they want it may not work out the way they desire.

 

Feenberg, in his Critical Theory of Technology, speaks of fixing the problems with technology by: “a profound democratic transformation of industrial civilization.”  It is my contention that this is going on current trends in data mining and social media.  What companies seem to be doing today is releasing a product that is still in the prototype stage and allowing the consumer to “finish the design” so to speak.  The results have not been exactly positive.  Reviews of recent news articles from CNN show that concerns over data mining and data protection are up. 

 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/living/buzzfeed-data-mining/

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/07/opinion/harris-data-mining-privacy/

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/07/politics/nsa-data-court/

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/07/politics/data-mining-after-9-11/

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/02/tech/mobile/mobile-car-hacking/

 

This means to me that the public, or at least the media which is suppose represent the voice of the public, has concerns over what data is being gathered on them.  Orwellian ideas and big brother and concerns over privacy war with product improvement driven by the masses instead of elites.  Feenberg, or at least the reading provided, does not address the issue of privacy warring with technological democratization; it is possible he never considered the issue.  This shows a clear difference of intent versus results in a technological development.  The intent was to give more feedback to producers so they could target customers with what they wanted.  The result is databases being used to track everything you do and everything you are.  In short be careful what you wish for; you may just get it.

Short thoughts on Chaos Theory as Alternate ID

Alternative Instructional Design is an attempt to come up with new methods of designing instruction that avoids the pitfalls of more traditional methods. Like all plans for new ideas it has a tendency to fall in to all new traps. As it is intended to be a progressive system the field also has a disturbing tendency to fall into the trap of new is always better. A good example of this is Yeongmahm You’s attempt to use chaos theory for instructional design. At the time of You’s publication Chaos theory was a buzzword making the rounds of all areas; it is natural then that it would find its way into Alternate ID. The problem is most of the people trying to apply chaos theory, in this case you included, did not really understand chaos theory, or what it was saying. The truly disturbing thing is that You mentions this explicitly in the article “What Can We Learn from Chaos Theory?” In the section on theoretical framework of chaos theory You quotes Chieuw’s 1991 publication as: “A stable global pattern is a hidden pattern with infinitely varying structure exhibiting self-similarity across scale.” What this mouthful really means is while you cannot predict individual performance you can predict the performance as a whole, further you can expect certain patterns to repeat from the global measure no matter how small a group you examine. In its own way this justifies traditional design as it is predicated on predicting the whole not individuals. As chaos theory is about showing how the whole is still predicable even if the specifics are not, this would tend to validate design for the whole.

You does have some very good points about what chaos theory should bring to ID. The reminder from Chaos Theory that small upsets at the beginning can lead to big changes down the road is something that is very important for designers to keep in mind. You should, or rather must, know where a person or class is before attempting to continue teaching. Traditional techniques rely too heavily on after instruction testing and assume if you have completed a set course of study you will have a set of skills at a set level. This may or may not be the case, and time passage can erode these skills. A good designer will correct for these problems when they can.

Possible Future of Education and Parenting

The above video is short but does serve to given a possible path education may take. If you care to read low quality science fiction, Neal Stephenson’s book “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” explores a similar concept.

“The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” follows the growth of Nell. Nell is a young girl, child of a drug using whore and sister of a petty thug. Her brother provides her with one major service when he steals and presents to her a pirate copy of “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. The primer is an interactive toy/learning device originally created for the princess of the neo-victorian sect. In Nell’s hands it becomes a salvation from the life of poverty and the downward spiral facing her.

While to book itself does make some assumptions that are unsustainable it does give a look at what makes up education and parenting and what might become education in the future. One of the major problems facing educators who intend to follow a student-guided education, and parents in general, is the need to answer Why?. A naturally curious child will ask this question constantly, and in order to keep their interest in learning the instructor or parent must have a satisfactory, preferably correct, answer ready. The Primer and the Nanopedia shown above side step this by having an AI respond to the child. As the AI never gets bored, never loses focus and is rarely if ever at a loss for an answer it can be surmised to be the perfect teaching tool for a child.

Of course the next question raised then is who is this child’s parent. In Stephenson’s book AIs are not advanced enough to fool humans, thus “Reactors”-actors who preform many parts as needed to provided the correct human nuances for AIs-are contracted to read as needed for the Primer. In Nell’s case a single reactor ends up preforming the majority of Nell’s work, even re-arranging her life to better fit Nell’s schedule. So the question of who is Nell’s mother becomes quite involved. Is it the woman who gave birth to Nell, and in whose space Nell resides or is it the person behind the voice of an electronic device who Nell never even sees until she is fully grown? Which one of these is most responsible for her path in life is a given as she barely interacts with the woman whom she lives with, and the other is with her most of the hours of the day.

Thoughts on IT and Education

If we define technology as tools to enhance natural abilities, then Information Technology (IT) is one of the few pieces to augment the human brain. In fact combined with always connected devices like smart phones, information technology can become as fundamental to human learning as writing. The issue is how information technology should be integrated into the learning experience for best results.

At the bottom the argument of different teaching philosophies is which more important, the ability to memorize and recite discrete facts or the ability to creatively use facts to create a new view of the world. IT seemingly ends this argument on the side of constructivism. The problem with this rather grand view is simple. While true that, in theory, IT places the whole of human information at person’s fingertips, this is also its major downside. To put it another way the primary advantage of IT is that it provides immediate access to the whole of human information. The primary disadvantage of IT is that it provides immediate access to the whole of human information.

Think about this for little. “[The] Hubble Telescope transmits roughly 120 gigabytes of science data each week” (source: www.http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/quick_facts.php). This alone is likely more information than anyone person can sort through in that same week. Add in all other sources of data coming in and the noise level can drown out all relevant data from information overload.

The answer is to have an automatic and reflexive ability to sort, categorize and evaluate data as they are found. The best system to teach such abilities lies with behaviorism. Admittedly behaviorism normally concerns itself with specific facts instead of learning a process, but constructivism would abhor allowing a process to fade into the subconscious mind. As a final point of irony, we really are only concerned with the process, the facts involved are meaningless as we can access them pretty much at will. This is a complete contradiction of behaviorism.

A lovely paradox which simultaneously completely validates and invalidates both foundations of learning theory. Clearly new thought are needed on this subject