Deliberations

This week Stephen Downes has written a paper for the long-running Instructional Technology Forum. It's a place of dialogue, where academics can put up ideas that invite further elaboration. Here are links to an html version and a PDF version of Downes' paper. It is rambling and hand-waving. The main thrust of the paper is his growing certainty that an epistemology about learning and knowledge should start by considering them as embedded in our social networks. Nice quote: "I store my knowledge in my friends". I won't expand further on that, read the article if you are interested.

As part of my Masters degree programme, I'm in the middle of an interesting subject in which we consider learning from a systems and process perspective, and part of the study is about system dynamics and modelling.

Near the end of the paper Downes implies that learning is a complex process, which is the natural conclusion if one starts with knowledge and learning as distributed, dynamic, emergent phenomena. In such environments,

holding one variable constant, for example, impacts the variable you are trying to measure. This is because you are not merely screening the impact of the second variable, you are screening the impact of the first variable on itself (as transferred through the second variable). This means you are incorrectly measuring the first variable.

He recommends giving up on the typical sort of empirical educational research (not that there is a lot of it). Instead learning science should be

based on modeling and simulation, pattern recognition and interpretation, projection and uncertainty.

He concludes by saying

learning theorists will no longer be able to study learning from the detached pose of the empirical scientist. The days of the controlled study involving 24 students ought to end. Theorists will have to, like students, immerse themselves in their field, to encounter and engage in a myriad of connections, to immerse themselves, as McLuhan would say, as though in a warm bath. But it’s a new world in here, and the water’s fine.

Whether you agree or not with Downes' epistemology, he is widely read and revered by (e)learning practitioners. I suggest that his views on learning as a complex system will gain some traction, especially if he continues to promote the idea. If it transpires as such, this is precisely the networked assimilation of knowledge that Downes describes.

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