Excellent, some are beginning to blog about stuff. Just stuff. Louisa on saluting the sun. Georgina worrying about identity. Not a fan of ‘authenticity’ in the naive sense of a single centred thing, crazy talk. So what if we imagine ourselves as plural? Me, I’m a teacher, student, writer, media maker, father, uncle, cousin, brother, son, husband, friend. Each one is sorta different, why think I’m ‘one’ of them, and what happens if I’m all? Memphsis on the blog, the question, how do we make a blog ‘come alive’? And Edward worries about online identity. In this culture authenticity matters, blogs that are valued all exhibit some sort of integrity. Of concept, view, thought, and so on. As soon as that is compromised, things crumble. They are trust networks. So being nice is less important than a reasonable sort of honesty. Danielle likes the safety the boat suggests (yes, in the speculative description there is no implication of threat, no risk of drowning – unless you wilfully do something – the change is getting used to bobbing around out there). And Denham notes “more about the journey to find knowledge rather than the end results, as there “is no shore” in sight”. Good observation, think road trip, and yes, some of you will enjoy it, some will be OK with it, and some will just not get it (you’re the sort of traveller that has a pretty sorted itinerary before you leave home). None is right or wrong, though in the context of the networked practice some are better than others, but even if you don’t like it, you need to recognise that even the best laid plans don’t work out, so here we are learning how to deal with the unexpected, both good and bad.
Speculative, (More)
Daniel has some excellent notes about speculative writing, and the idea of the invitation that speculative writing makes of you. And from a week ago Sharon has notes, Chantelle thinks model II is about coming up with own ideas (it is, but more importantly it is seeing your assumptions that inform your ideas in the first place), and Olivia works out that the reading is not about networked media but ideas to learn throughout your education (and your education does not begin when you finish university, and from my point of view I think your education beyond being told how to answer the essay question on a VCE exam that has incredibly strict assessment parameters is just beginning). Olivia reads my essay on blogs and media education, and note, she started a blog already and that let to internships. Notice the order there which I’ve talked about twice now. You do, they come. This is the reverse of industrial media where you try to get in their door way first. You have enormous capacity and agency to show your abilities now, and they will come to you, not the other way round. Get on, or watch the bus fly past.
Noticed
This is a great description of the value of a notebook, a blog, and the importance of noticing. Thanks Jackie.
Friday Night
Footy on the TV, glass of wine, spent a lot of today reading blog posts. Day started at nearly 300 unread, halved it. Some angst bout the ‘unlecture’ and so on. Let’s see, model I, defensive responses, unwilling to revisit ‘governing variables’? Familiar ring to it. When we’re challenged, made uncomfortable, our mental map, and our reptilian brain, responds with fight or flight. Fight is to not wonder why but to decide it’s broken. Flight is to run away (i.e. not come). Either is a small way to respond where while you think you’re asserting agency it is in fact the instinctual opposite.
Thanks to Ajeet
This is a good post, long yeah, but while for local students the description of Malaysian education might seem like “we don’t do that here” (hello, mode 1) it makes visible the differences that we are striving to make visible. The internet is a medium that allows for action and agency in individual and group ways that are unprecedented. It is what is known as lean forward, rather than lean back, media (you click write follow, versus watch). As media students, you are to be involved in this space. Just as you imagine wanting to be involved in TV, radio and so on.
Springboards
Courtney writes a view about take away ideas as “a springboard for your own thoughts and ideas”. Yes. The things we read are not there to just tell. They are there to do, they are where someone else has done their own thinking. Approach them as invitations to join in with that thinking. They are a dance. When someone invites you to dance you can say “no”, and just miss out. You can say “yes”, even when you know you don’t know all the steps. So it is with learning how to read ideas.
Mess and Me
Tony worries about the mess. So what do you think the mess asks of you? Turn it around. I mean that seriously. I see someone who doesn’t speak Australian. Mate. To me, their language is a mess. Do I try to think what this ‘mess’ is asking of me, or do I tell them, loudly, they’re a mess, and learn Australian, mate. I see mess on the floor. Do I leave it for someone else to clean up (hey, it isn’t mine), or do I do something about it? I watch a film that I think is a mess, do I want to learn how to unravel and hear this mess, or just treat it as rubbish (there goes, let’s see, original responses to Godard, Marker, a lot of the French new wave, let alone literature with Joyce and Dickinson, and lets not forget the entire history of rock music).
Can We?
Kevin speculates about improvements. Blogroll of all students, done. Follow student blogs, that’s something you make happen yourselves in terms of whether you allow subscriptions or not, but there are more elegant ways (and all? At the moment there are over 120 posts a day…) Your own site stats, you control, so you can. Dashboard link, not supported I’m afraid, but we did auto populate that link in your blogroll for you. Feature most posts. No. Most doesn’t equal better, best. But the tag cloud on the homepage helps here. Get other staff involved. Noted.
My Double Loop Learning
Second lecture. Ask you to ask questions (in the language of the network this is called crowdsourcing). In the spirit of ‘model II’ learning and risk taking I invite those that didn’t ask a question to put up their hands. You did. I then told you why you’d been wrong to not ask a question.
That was me reverting to my mental map and not my espoused theory. My espoused theory includes things like “I will encourage and support students to contribute, to be peers in this learning, to experience trust, to take risks, that risks and errors will not automatically be criticised” and so on. My habits are that I am an academic, I have always questions, I always wonder about everything, and my golly goodness everyone else has to too since, well, isn’t that what has to happen? (You can see the mental model is just messy and full of assumptions – ‘governing variables’ – that collapse pretty quickly when made visible.)
The unlecture model is for all teachers to contribute and participate. I answered all questions and said everything. I never once stopped and asked the teaching staff, or you, what you thought. This is partly my narcissism (there’s a certain moment of self deprecation there but also some home truth), and again is my mental model. While I publicly advocate (and believe) in diversity and debate and getting a mix and variety of ideas in there to make things really rich, I default to the spectacle of me as academic expert. Mode I. It is easier for me, it is defensive, , it is trying to control things, and to ‘not lose’ rather than just hang out with the ideas.
I did the same thing in the tute too. So to change this takes an enormous effort on my behalf. Not physical or even intellectual, just to notice it, and then to let something else in. The double loop is to recognise the gap between my espoused theory and what I did this week in practice, and to then see that my ‘governing variables’ can be questioned. IN that moment I have the potential to become a better teacher, a better researcher, a better practitioner. By noticing, and having the know how of what to try and do next. Try to do next. A risk, another experiment. It might not work, again. But that is not a reason to not do it, is it?
Chris Argyris Reading
Action, double loop learning. Some of the things I take away from this. Key things. This connects to the reading from Mason on noticing as a key aspect of double loop learning is the specific attention you need to be able to apply to your own assumptions and practices (how you do things) If you don’t notice, then none of the double loop things are even possible. (On a related note, as Mason points out, excellence in professional work requires a heightened form of noticing, or to turn it the other way around, those who turn out to be very good at what they do ‘notice’ things and in ways that others who aren’t so good can’t do.)
We all have habits of how we go about solving problems, and going about doing things. These habits are ‘mental maps’. This is how we actually do things. Espoused theory is the story we tell ourselves and others about what we think we do, but usually is not what we actually do.
Imagine you’re reading something that is difficult to understand. Your ‘espoused theory’, what you think you do, is, perhaps something like:
- pause and keep rereading that sentence till you ‘get’ it (and if that doesn’t work, stop reading)
- skip a bit and come back to it later
- try to get a rough idea of what it might be about, and continue reading with it sort of in the back of your mind, in case something later helps you understand what it means
- keep reading, and just not worry about what didn’t make sense
However, for many the mental map is often different to what we say we do. So when we read something difficult we might think that, yes, we read it, and understood it, even though there was plenty in there we didn’t. And even that we read it, and didn’t understand it, but that isn’t because I needed to think differently about it, but that it was written in a way where it’s the writings fault that I couldn’t understand it, so if I can’t understand it reading it once, then, well, that’s sort of that really.
Now, even outside of the example of reading something, Argyris’ point (and I will ignore the mention of management of organisational learning, as what he says is as relevant to making media, and learning, as it is to organisations) is that if you can make your mental model explicit to yourself, you can then see what your assumptions are, and that often it is these that can be changed to understand a situation or problem differently. This is what he means by ‘governing variables’.
Why governing? Because they decide everything else. Why variable? Because they change, can be changed, and shift. For example, to paraphrase American literary critic Lionel Trilling, in relation to reading ‘difficult’ novels he said something along the lines of:
[They] have been involved with me for a long time – I invert the natural order not out of lack of modesty but taking the cue of W. H. Auden’s remark that a real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot’s poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate.
Note the shift in the ‘governing variables’. The novels aren’t there for him to read. They read him. This is a dramatic change, it inverts our expected understanding. So if he doesn’t ‘get’ it it is his problem, not the book’s or author’s. He is not ready yet, too young, they grew bored with him and sent him away. In other words the things he reads ask questions of him, and if he can’t answer those questions, the problem – in the first instance – is on his side. This is, for theoretical readings, my ‘governing variable’, that the work has something to say and that my role, in the first instance, is to be able to hear this. Then I can judge. But if I can’t first hear it, then I can’t judge it.
So, back to Argyris. Single loop learning we don’t question or recognise the ‘governing variables’ and as a result the goals, assumptions and so on are taken for granted. (I only do things in class that have marks attached, I write essays because they are academically relevant to me, a video is a linear, sequential matched bit of image and sound, a book is something linear and sequential, I learn by being told what the ideas are, I could make a better film if I had a better camera, and so on.) When these are questioned, or challenged, we become defensive. We also want things defined and this becomes how and why we do something (“what is a good blog post”, “how many do I have to do?”, “what will count as good?”). So, as he outlines, these are risk minimisation strategies, get it right by confirming it all first, meaning there is no wasted effort or mistakes made, that my environment, as a student and media user, needs to be known and controlled (by me, by the subject, by the teacher), and so on. Along side this are assumptions that all of this is normal, correct, and as it should be. In this model I there is little ability to test assumptions. We might argue about whether a good blog post is 100 or 200 words, and has 3 or 5 links out, but not what ‘good’ even means and why it might even matter.
Hence in model II control is shared (perhaps ‘good’ is then discussed and arrived at as a result of experience, context, and open conversation amongst those who are doing it?), there is a commitment to do it (in other words because it is worth doing, not because you get an explicit return for it), and it allows for common (that is a variety) of goals. Mine, the other staff, yours. This makes double loop learning more likely, simply because if there is an open discussion about, for example, ‘what a good blog post is’ then assumptions are then being recognised, and negotiated. It is the difference between being told that good equals this, versus developing a shared (and so mutually recognised) understanding of what matters. (At this point some will say that my job is to tell you want counts – model I, and I’ll say none of you will want to work in an organisation that does that to you, so let’s learn how this works now.)
To conclude. Traditional media is stuck in model I learning and systems. The internet is very much model II (just think about social media’s relationship model for ‘customers’ and companies and how it is ‘inverted’ the assumptions of corporate communication. Ten years ago I told my customers what our company did, what the products were and so on, through press releases and advertising. Now I have to spend as much time responding to what they tell me and each other, publicly, about my company and its products, and if I don’t listen, if I think my old model of saturation advertising (yelling louder), or doing nothing (letting it blow away because the media will move on to something else) will work, then I’m in trouble, because now we are the media).