Poststructuralism & Education

This book (Peters, M. (1998) Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education, Bergin & Garvey) is helping me appropriate the insights of poststructuralism for higher education, executive education and networked learning. I've found a (long) quote (pp.12-13) that summaries the broad categories of application that Micheal Peters attributes to the French reception (largely Deleuzian) of Nietzsche:

"These Nietzschean philosophemes (emphasis in original) serve as a reference point for education theorists in seeking both to understand and to appropriate the insights of poststructuralism. The also serve as an interpretive basis for detecting and tracing the influence of poststructuralism in much recent educational theorizing: the critique of the Enlightenment subject of both liberal and Marxist perspectives, with the attendant development of more complex notions of student and teacher subjectivities; the challenge to simple-minded accounts of automony and agency; the reappraisals of models of interpretations of texts andtheir relations to various contexts - social, cultural, institutional, pedagogical; the reassessment of and consequent richer notions of reading and writing, considered as social practices; the intimate connections between power and knowledge in, for instance, not only classroom settings but also constructions of educational policies and the development of new pedagogical practices; the greater attention paid to the discursive power of "the languages of education" - those of educational administration, economics, management, measurement, and policy - in the constitution of education in the broadest sense; the utilisation, in innovative ways, of forms of discourse analysis, deconstruction, archaeology, and genealogy as new means of analysis of educational institutions, practices, and policies; both an awareness and a political suspicion of the new communications and information technologies as, in part, the means for achieving globally what has been referred to as the information society, knowledge society, or information superhighway; the emphasis on notions and principles of becoming and process over questions of being and ontology in understanding educational practices; the critique of binary modes of thinking per se; the rehabilitation of desire as a set of cultural and educational forces; the acknowledgement of forces acting upon forces, indivduals, and groups within educational settings; and the investigation and acknowledgement of the notion of difference, in its various conceptual manifestations, operating as a set of complext sociocultural and educational principles."

Why SoM 2.0 and Networked Learning?

The Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) at Lancaster University define networked learning as:

"learning in which C&IT is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources. Some of the richest examples of networked learning involve interaction with on-line materials and with other people. But use of on-line materials is not a sufficient characteristic to define networked learning. The interactions between people in networked learning environments can be synchronous, asynchronous or both. The interactions can be through text, voice, graphics, video, shared workspaces or combinations of these forms. Consequently the space of possibilities for networked learning, and the space of potential student experiences, is vast."

This definition would appear to run the risk of diluting the very meaning of learning itself since it would seem that every learning instant is a product of every possible type of interaction a learner may make or encounter. However I believe this dilution is intentional. If it is widely adopted in SoM then it carries with it some important implications concerning how we define our purpose of education. I find a useful mode of unpacking of this belief in my poststructural reading of the definition and is the point of departure for my SoM 1.0/2.0 distinction. The objection (which is redolent of a SoM 1.0 perspective) itself posits learning as an isolated and singular event when, in fact, the CSALT definition deliberately blurs the distinction between (singluar, educationalised, specious) Learning and (dispersed, situated, contingent) learning. The objection saliently posits an individual learner as the locus of learning. The CSALT definition, for me, succeeds in troubling not only this dominant conception of self but also a selection of similarly cherished (modernist and SoM 1.0) notions regarding formal learning that ally with those notions of a singular self; namely, of the notion of proximity to a managed learning environment (either classroom, online or situated in the thick of experience); innocence surrounding the notions of a power over all the stakeholders within a specific learning context; and therefore, by implication, the cherished notion of the learning tutor.

SoM 2.0, by contrast champions a self that is defined and made real by the socius rather than by the psyche; values the basis of learning as the contingencies of desire and/or need (from a group or otherwise) rather than being based around a particular environment (learning or otherwise); positively discriminates the learner over the learnéd; and decentres the tutor (as individual or institution) in favour of the network - its processes and interstices.

Hyperlinked Socius

Just a little more on web 2.0: as Reilly says of the connection between web 2.0 and collective intelligence:

"hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users."

Namely, the metaphor of network (in the deliberately ambiguous lexical strategy of 'networked learning') engages in this translation to the web both with the actual networking of hyperlinks and synapses of the web, as well as with the people that post and lodge content with those links - together with the whelter of meaning-making that spreads like a virus across this hyperlinked socius as a result of this function. So here's one basic anchor of the web 2.0/som 2.0 conjunction: that we're talking about networks (technological & social) in a similarly ambiguous manner. That this has (slightly) less to do with the technical network infrastructure of the Internet per se and more to do with the human-ness of the connections of the world wide web, stems from my intention of redressing the imbalance I perceive there to be between the discourses of technology (or technical, in the case of management) education and educational technology within management education: tech-ed versus ed-tech. Another basic anchor is the 2.0 designation - namely an allusion to sequential progression. Whilst the two point zero trope is from the language of software upgrades and alludes to upgrade-fever in general, when applied as the commencement of a sequence, as it is here, it begs the question 'what was web 1.0?' This is the perfect foil for those wishing to condecend to the previous state of web affairs. So what was SoM 1.0?

If I said you had a beautiful theory would you hold it against me

As with a lot of comparisons, much is lost in the translation - so it is with SoM 2.0 and web 2.0. This hollow concept is, quite possibly, an architectural nothingness. However, as the tide of networked learning within SoM is rising and the tenor of debate about the topic maturing, I think it's worthwhile establishing some theoretical underpinning to our collective and diverse networked learning endeavours. For me personally the bulk of the grounding comes from the work of Vivien Hodgson, Professor of Networked Management Learning at Lancaster University Management School - she gave a lecture in SoM earlier this year about her research. Other strands of supporting thought, for me, come from the socilogist and philosopher of technology, Bruno Latour; from Steve Fox, postmodern appologist and social & management learning nut; from Pierre & Pillow, the unlikley sounding postfeminist duo of educators; and from a host of mostly poststructurally minded thinkers of the trendy left too numerous (or risqué) to mention here.

SoM 2.0 & Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a label coined by Dale Dougherty, and developed by Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Media to describe a new generation of web sites and services that use the web as a platform. Tim O'Reilly, the publishing company's founder, is developing this somewhat abstract concept further. So, SoM 2.0 draws from the same concept, for which I'm indebted to Dale & Tim. The above title link gives more detail.

I've set this blog up to explore the relevance of this concept for SoM and to provide a vehicle to share these thoughts with colleagues - please post your comments either to me directly or to this blog. Enjoy.