The purpose of the research
In 2005 I began to explore the consequences of combining a blog and a wiki. This project initially seemed to consist of two related problems: one conceptual and one technical. It soon became clear, however, that they were simply two approaches to the same problem. That problem could be stated as developing a path beyond the electronic portfolio.
The underlying issue concerned the question of how a portfolio and journal could best be digitised to take maximum advantage of the changed format. To this end I began a research project with myself as the subject.
My overall aim was to extend this argument to an analysis of the kind of software necessary for self-motivated, self-organised learning in the social and educational contexts described by George Siemens, Mark Prensky and others. My intention was to move beyond a written critique to an attempt to produce a proof of concept, in the form of an actual object that was an argument for its own existence.
The form of this thesis, and the web site that houses the thesis, is intended as an example of that object in use.
For a considerable time I doubted that I would be successful in attaining these goals since the more I pursued the idea of a memi the more it seemed to dissolve, rather than come together. I began to feel that, for many reasons it might not be possible to create a such an object. Finally, however, I realised that not only could a memi not exist in the way that I had originally envisaged it – it should not exist. Furthermore the very fact of its inevitable nonexistence made it a powerful, and possibly indispensible, tool for learning in a digital age.
The fact that this thesis is an example of a memi in operation is, in some ways then, an illusion; but it is an illusion with powerful pedagogical implications, particular where pedagogy is concerned with providing learning tools for geographically dispersed self-learners. It is, I will argue, precisely the kind of illusion that we should expect to find at the heart of epedagogy.
Cultural and technological precedents
The ideas that inspired the project to create the memi have three separate starting points.
The first strand is concerned with the nature of technology and its effects on society. Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea of the memex in 1948 in an article in Atlantic Monthly. In this he grappled with the concept of living in a world of limitless access to knowledge. He prophesied a personal learning tool, and the descriptions he created of this tool lie behind my initial thinking about the memi. (In fact the very name memi is a convoluted homage to the memex.)
The second strand begins with those thinkers in the 1960s who moved from an oppositional critique of the current education system to a series of practical proposals for humane alternatives. These included (but, it goes without saying, were not limited to) Paolo Friere, John Holt, Paul Goodman, and Ivan Illich.
The third strand draws the work of Buckminster Fuller and in particular his personal experiment with his chronofile. This is a practical example that draws together the first two strands while demonstrating their value during the course of a lifetime. It can also be seen as a demonstration of some of the underlying ideas behind Marshall McLuhan’s probes.
These were personalised through a fourth strand which related to my personal interest in, and use of, a pda since June 2003 when I purchased a Sony Clie. I had purchased this as a deliberate experiment in information handling, and I had subsequently used it to organise almost all aspects of my life. I had seen at first hand the advantages of extending my memory digitally, and I had seen the advantage of a single digital repository over a plethora of pieces of paper.
In 1917 Buckminster Fuller decided that he was “determined to make myself the guinea pig in a lifelong research project”. Part of that project involved documenting every aspect of his life, and he named this expanded diary and journal a chronofile. This was a self-conscious attempt, using paper and pen, to develop a medium that would be “an extension of man” providing a means to draw objective conclusions from the data of one’s life, and thus provide a solid basis for planning and future activity.
In this way he anticipated the technological analyses of Marshall McLuhan, while also providing a library of content suitable for inclusion in the memex, the theoretical machine that Vannevar Bush sketched out in an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945.
Bush saw the memex as a desk sized machine capable of reading data from microfilm and displaying it visually. In this scenario people consulted their own memex as they might consult their own bookshelves, and seeded it with new contain through obtaining additional microfilms. Clearly many of Bush’s suggestions need to be reconsidered or reworked in the networked world, where the instantaneous transmission and reception of information is axiomatic.
This work was later developed in startlingly original ways by Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext, and thus opened up whole areas of research and artistic exploration. Nelson was concerned much with the machinery, and even less with Bush’s rather patrician view of serious professionals engaged in serious business. Nelson’s concern was with computer lib, with the use of intuitive linking to enable everyone to do whatever they wanted with the world’s store of knowledge, including adding to it as they wished.
The invention of the database, and its by now key role in making information available dynamically on the web, need to be included in any updated scenario which posits the use of “memory extenders” as “an extension of man”.
The move from sites composed of static web pages to dynamic sites driven by content management systems is important in this context. The advent of blogs and wikis point towards strategies for collaborative knowledge building.
The long birth of the prosumer
During the twentieth century a movement slowly grew dedicated to the proposition that the process of learning had been industrialised with disastrous effects. This has never been more than a minority pursuit but its influence has become much larger than its membership.
In 1921 AS Neill had founded Summerhill School in Dresden as an international school, in the belief that “the function of a child is to live his own life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the educator who thinks he knows best”. In 1923 he moved it to Lyme Regis in southern England. From 1928 to the present day it has existed in buildings in Leiston, in Suffolk, England. In 1962 he published Summerhill – a radical approach to childhood which was a national number one non-fictional best seller in the USA.
In 1964 John Holt published How Children Fail, and in 1967 How Children Learn. He too was concerned with the problems of industrialised schools. He claimed that “the only difference between a good student and a bad student, is that the good student is careful not to forget what he studied until after the test”.
In 1972 Paolo Friere published Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Friere insisted that learning was a dialogic activity, and attacked what he called the “banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He insisted that dialogic learning necessarily involved respect, and should be seen as the reciprocal activity of a teacher-learner and a learner-teacher working together. In this he attempted in insert democracy not just as the goal of education but also as a cornerstone of its methodology.
In 1973 Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society in which he claimed that most schools teach students “to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value”.
In 1974, in Take Today, Marshall McLuhan suggested that the difference between producers and consumers would break down in the global village. Alvin Toffler codified this assertion in 1980 in his book The Third Wave when he coined the term prosumer. “As prosumers we have a new set of responsibilities, to educate ourselves. We are no longer a passive market upon which industry dumps consumer goods but a part of the process, pulling toward us the information and services that we design from our own imagination.”
What these all have in common is a belief that learning does not need to involve either a professional teacher or a specially designated teaching place. All seek tools to help learners, based on the essentially unique nature of each individual learner, and the possibilities of such learners coming together in mutually supportive learning networks.
In recent years this belief has, ironically, spread back to the very businesses who played a large part in the industrialisation of the information industry. Consultants such as Don Tapscott, as well as publication such as The Cluetrain Manifesto attempt to point out the benefits of re-imagining business as a process of working playfully with prosumers, rather than working seriously to sell to consumers.