Do you remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico? A film about this disaster came out in 2016 starring Mark Wahlberg. The deepwater oil rig blew up in April 2010 and was not fixed until September. Meanwhile experts from around the world kept trying different ideas to fix it, each different attempt playing out in a very public way on the news.

It struck me that perhaps, and I do not know this for sure of course, one factor behind this disaster might have been that none of these experts will have had much education in how to work together with others online to solve problems. Existing education systems  focus almost exclusively on developing individual knowledge and indivdiual ability to perform well in examinations, they do not spend much effort if any on developing collective intelligence. Deepwater Horizon was an extreme event but having to work together with geographically distant others online to solve problems is now an aspect of every professional job. 
 
Learning to Learn Together Online (L2L2O) is becoming essential in every area of life. Our recent experience of scientists and policy makers from every country around the world collaborating to defend the human race against the COVID 19 pandemic is a striking example. The recent successful global collaboration against the threat of a hole in the ozone layer and the need now for collaboration to counter the challenge of global warming indicate that education for collective intelligence is not just something useful for small teams, it may be essential for all of us now if we - the human race as a whole - are to survive and continue to thrive. 

What is 'Collective Intelligence'? 

A lot of work on measuring individual human intelligence in psychology has led to a focus on 'g factor', described as the overlap between ability on a range of tests. In other words intelligence is understood as general thinking ability, not just being good at one task but being generally good at learning new things and solving new problems in a range of different contexts. This is interesting because, if we follow this definition, it is clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still just a fantasy. We have clever tools built to do specific tasks efficiently but as yet no software that shows an ability to think well generally across a range of domains and tasks. On the other hand we do have evidence of general intelligence for groups. Instead of focussing so much energy on the fantasy of autonomous AI machines we might do better to focus our efforts on the much more real and effective intelligence that we know we can achieve through combining smart technology with human groups. 
 
Anita Woolley and a team at MIT investigated lots of different groups doing lots of different kinds of tasks and came up with what they claimed to be a robust measure of group intelligence which they called 'c': 

​What was perhaps most interesting about this study is that the group intelligence did not correlate with the individual IQ scores of group members but it did correlate with a measure of individual 'social sensitivity'. In other words optimising group intelligence shifts the focus onto the value of so called 'soft skills' or social and emotional skills that make people good at understanding each other and good at working together in a team. 
 
 
Teaching for group intelligence 
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For many years now I have been working with colleagues to develop and evaluate ways of teaching for collective intelligence. The Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group (CEDIR) and the Cambridge Oracy Centre have many tried and tested resources to promote effective group 'thinking together'  (try https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/) and some of these resources are also available in Spanish and in Mandarin Chinese (email CEDIR from their website).
 
Here are a couple of books that give guidance on how to teach for collective intelligence: 

What we call 'thinking together' is a form of collective intelligence. We measured the impact of our pedagogy using non-verbal reasoning tests of a kind that get results correlating well with general IQ. After ten weeks of lessons on how to talk together effectively for thinking together groups did much better on that reasoning test

​ 
A recent study of group intelligence with adults 

Most of our research has been with children but the approach to measuring collective intelligence also works with adults. Marcelo Pizarro in Chile is an expert on measuring intelligence. Recently, working with me, he compared groups and individuals on standard IQ tests. The sample size was 48 adult students. 2 equivalent standard IQ tests were used, FIXA and FIXB. In the collaborative condition groups of three students worked together online using zoom.
 
These groups of three did better than individuals with an effect size of 0.933 which is large.
 
While groups generally did better than individuals, some groups did much better than other groups. Looking at the videos of the interactions we could see that good humor played an important part. Marcelo's hypothesis is that good humor helps groups to manage cognitive conflict. It is difficult for us to challenge the views of people we do not know very well. It is embarrassing. But where there is a good group feeling the danger of this kind of conflict between ideas can be contained. This perhaps explains why, when there is joking and laughter groups can think together better.
 
Marcelo writes that:

​How successful groups think better

Our continuing research into what makes for successful group intelligence confirm Marcelo's claims about humour:

•  Encouraging each other, for example responding to suggestions with ‘could be …’
• Expressions of humility, for example ‘I do not understand this.’
• Giving clear elaborated explanations, for example ‘the triangle here is removed and here it turns around by 90 degrees’
• Equal participation with everyone in the group actively involved in each problem.
• Humour with jokes and shared laughter.
• Willingness to express intuitions, for example, ‘I am not sure but I have a feeling it is that one’
• Indications of mutual respect in tone and responses.
• Taking time over solving problems seen in accepting pauses and giving elaborated explanations when asked. 

(Wegerif et al, 2017)

Augmenting Collective Intelligence with smart tools 

Thinking together in small groups is a good start but it is not enough. For many problems we also need to get larger groups thinking together. This is where smart tools might be of particular benefit. 
 
If you think about it, we have always had technology supported collective intelligence. Both literacy and mathematics are technologies that have supported large scale collective thinking. Writing thing down enables ideas to be shared across space and it also enables collaboration in thinking over time. Collective Intelligence supported by technology has been behind all of our successes in science and technology as well as in art and philosophy. However, much of this collective intelligence has emerged in an apparently random or spontaneous way.  The question is, 'is it possible to design for collective intelligence?' More pertinently, 'is it possible to design education plus communications technologies to be better at supporting both small group thinking and larger scale collective thinking?'

​Below I offer a few examples of how smart technology has been used to support collective intelligence before going on to show how smart technology can be used to support education for collective intelligence.
 
Swarm-AI and Pol.is - bringing people together 
​
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter seem to reward the more extreme views and so are said to lead to polarisation. Several software systems have now been developed to do the opposite, bringing people back together. 
 
Swarm AI is one example. Swarm intelligence algorithms moderate the interaction of a group of individuals who are deciding between a set number of options. Individuals connect with each other and AI agents to form a closed-loop system where both the machine and individuals can react based on the behaviour displayed by others to change or maintain their preference. This collective 'thinking together' approach, modelled on the way that some animals 'swarm' together, has been shown to improve decision making in a range of areas.
 
(https://www.nesta.org.uk/feature/ai-and-collective-intelligence-case-studies/swarm-ai/)
 
Pol.is is another AI supported online debate and decision-making system that already has many examples of success. 
 
Pol.is produces a map of where people are in any dialogue. As a result they can see if they share opinions or if they are at an extreme. The result is to encourage people to find common ground and converge on a shared solution through dialogue that involves deepening their understanding of key divisive issues and seeking creative emergent solutions that as many as possible can buy into. 

Here is an example of polis in action taken from https://www.geekwire.com/2014/startup-spotlight-polis/
 
Pol.is has been used in many contexts now including to support improved democratic decision making in Taiwan where it was introduced by digital minister, Audrey Tang. (https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/10/how-taiwan-is-using-technology-to-foster-democracy-with-digital-minister-audrey-tang)
 
How Pol.is really works is I think closely related to how dialogic identity expansion works. When an individual writes an opinion in a Pol.is debate that individual is naturally focused on what they think coming out of their experience. However, stepping back and looking at the map that situates their input in relation to all the others, they naturally then are forced to take on the perspective of the dialogue as a whole. What develops from this is a more dialogic identity, both my voice on the inside talking outwards but also seeing or hearing  the perspective of the dialogue as a whole, as if from the outside looking inwards to define and locate my voice as just one voice amongst others. In this process the individual does not lose their identity in the collective but they expand their sense of identity to take into account the point of view of the collective. They become more dialogic selves - double-voiced -  where self now is not a 'thing' but  a continuous dialogue between inside and outside points of view. Shifting from either ego based identity (I need to win the argument) or collective based identity (group harmony must not be disturbed) into a more dialogic identity (I can see both sides) is a key aspect of successful group thinking.
(see https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/what-is-a-dialogic-self)
 
Edubots, guiding and focussing the dialogue
 
Edubots, artificial conversational agents used as tutors, have been shown to have a useful role in supporting online learning dialogues. Bots can be used to welcome people, invite them together into groups, tell bad bot jokes to warm them up, challenge them to think more clearly, invite quiet participants to speak more and generally police and improve the educational quality of interactions. Edubots might be a valuable support for collaborative learning in MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses (see review in Tegos, S., Mavridis, A., & Demetriadis, S. (2021). Agent-Supported Peer Collaboration in MOOCs. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 4 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2021.710856/full)
 
Metafora: Learning to learn together

As part of the large EU funded Metafora project I led a team based at Exeter University developing what we called a Visual Language for Orchestrating Group Learning. This was a planning and reflection map that groups could use to plan their shared inquiry. Science teachers found it particularly useful as a support to help students think more about how scientific investigations work the importance of literature review, building models, testing models etc. The overall system integrated use of this visual language with a more free-form dialogue area and also with microworlds where ideas could be tested out. Imagine, for example, a simulation of climate change and students working together to develop and test out different potential solutions.      
​(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289619416_The_metafora_tool_Supporting_learning_to_learn_together)

Argunaut: An Intelligent Guide to Support Productive Online Dialogue 

In Argunaut, another EU project, we developed systems to enhance e-moderation of small groups online. This combined the development of a moderator’s dashboard with the automatic monitoring of the quality of dialogue in small groups online in order to provide feedback to the moderators and to the groups. From the dashboard the moderator could see indicators of the quality of talk in each group, whether the participation was even and what kinds of things were being said. Rather more excitingly we were able to analyse the quality of the small group interaction and use this as a basis for feedback to the groups. 
 
We coded the quality of dialogue in our dynamic concept mapping environjent (Digalo) as follows:

1. critical thinking with its focus on claims, counterclaims and reasons (D1) 
2. creative reasoning understood as a sort of dance of perspectives (D2) 
3. dialogic engagement which includes not only addressivity and expressions of empathy but also expressions of doubt, changes of mind, ventriloquation (the presence of another voice within an utterance) and elicitation of the views of others (D3). 
4. moderation through encouragement and the scaffolding support of recapitulations, reformulations and evaluations (D4). 

 
Using data-mining techniques including natural language processing we were able to get robust automatic coding of both reasoning and creativity (Work led by Bruce McLaren of Carnegie Mellon). In the shallow loop of Argunaut the moderators could see quality indicators and intervene with a series of comments. The idea of the deep loop of Argunaut was that the quality indicators were constantly being evaluated and improved as were the guiding comments. This would have depended on a large community of users and we did not get beyond basic proof of concept but the idea is exciting. 
 
Imagine you are an online teacher with 20 or 100 groups of 5 to 8 students. You have a dashboard that enables you to visit each group and make suggestions. Natural language processing datamining (AI) tells you indicators that might relate to the quality of interaction occurring in each group and suggests a prompt into the room eg ‘could you see this differently?’ or ‘what do you think, John?’. You could look in more detail at the group before deciding or not to intervene with a comment or you could let the machine decide for you. The impact of each such intervention is monitored by AI and fed back to constantly improve the overall performance of the system.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228479459_Facilitate_the_facilitator_Awareness_tools_to_support_the_moderator_to_facilitate_online_discussions_for_networked_learning
 
Research agenda 

Most of the research referred to as ‘AI in education’ is about accelerating individual learning using data-analytics and data-mining techniques to provide adaptive personalized learning trajectories. That has been done. What we need to do now is research how to use similar smart technologies to support collaborative learning and to teach for collective intelligence. 
 
The examples I have given in this blog show the huge potential of technology to support better collective thinking and to support education for better collective thinking. But they barely scratch the surface of the research and development that is needed.
 
The following are just a few ideas for research projects in increasing magnitude, it is not meant to be exhaustive, do please send me further ideas as comments to this blog. I am suggesting this as part of the research agenda for the new Digital Education Futures Institute at Hughes Hall, Cambridge https://www.deficambridge.org/

1. We need a thorough scoping review of digital technology used to support collective intelligence in education. More than a review, also finding the areas of cutting edge development and interviewing projects leaders. Both horizon scanning and beyond the horizon scanning. 
2. We could use Educational Design-Based Research (EDBR) on teaching thinking together off-line combined with moderated small group learning of specific concepts in areas of the curriculum online. I am thinking Edubots facilitating learning dialogues in small groups possibly with some content knowledge to help select examples and some learning to constantly improve dialogues. Measures could be specific conceptual learning and also communication and dialogue skills 
3. Develop the Argunaut deep-loop idea to improve machine awareness of and teaching for the educational quality of talk in small groups online.  
4. Using tools like the Metafora visual language, in combination with teaching thinking together, to support challenge-based learning using challenges such global warming. The aim would be to raise awareness as well as to teach how to work in teams to solve problems and how to think like a scientist. If groups were selected from different regions a further aim would be global citizenship. 
5. Develop a global platform to support education for developing our planetary collective intelligence. An education platform that anyone, anywhere with a smart phone could join, learn basic dialogue skills in small groups online or offline and then be led to join others in inquiring together into those challenges that most interest them. Every challenge would be supported by Open Education Resources with content knowledge. This would be a way to explore the possibility and potential of a different kind of education system, a global education system oriented towards preparing students to participate in designing the future.  

Our current mainstream approach to education is not producing the collective intelligence that we need to solve the challenges of the future. The curriculum in most schools seems to me to be a bit like a person walking backwards into the future barely able to see the threats and opportunities ahead of them because their attention is focused firmly on the past. Each bit of knowledge and each discrete skill transmitted in the curriculum must have been useful to somebody once or it would not be there but that is no guarantee that this bit of knowledge or this particular skill will continue to be useful.

Is it possible to turn this system around to face forwards, inducting students from the beginning of their lives into dialogues about the future and equipping them with the skills and the knowledge that they need to participate constructively in building that future?

This is what designing education for collective intelligence means. We have some good ideas about how to start to do this but we cannot be sure what will work or what might be the unintended side-effects of new approaches. What we need now are careful design experiments, trying out new approaches to education supported by smart tools and seeing how they work out. That is what @defi_Cambridge is trying to do. Do let us know if you think you can help.

Some references 

Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and instruction, 9(6), 493-516.

Wegerif, R., Fujita, T., Doney, J., Linares, J. P., Richards, A., & Van Rhyn, C. (2017). Developing and trialing a measure of group thinking. Learning and Instruction, 48, 40-50.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. science, 330(6004), 686-688.

Hogan, M. (2020). Collective Intelligence in Medias Res: Mulgan, Warfield, and the Collective Intelligence Network Support Unit (CINSU).
​
Tegos, S., Mavridis, A., & Demetriadis, S. (2021). Agent-Supported Peer Collaboration in MOOCs. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 4.

https://www.deficambridge.org/
​

Martin Robinson (@Trivium21c) recently shared on Twitter a report by the National Secular Society (https://www.secularism.org.uk/opinion/2021/08/its-time-to-move-on-from-religious-education). Martin asked the question: ‘Is it time to ditch Religious Education?”. Having trained as an RE teacher (Bristol, 1990-91) I felt challenged enough to reply. I wrote that we seem to need ‘a shared frame’ so maybe we should revise RE rather than scrapping it altogether. In this blog I unpack what I meant by this and put forward a suggestion for the future of RE.

Why we need ‘religion’

Tipassa, Phoenician and Roman ruins in Algeria, where Camus had his ‘invincible summer’ experience in 1948
 
I was not brought up in a religion and I did not think of my experience as meeting God. However, I can easily understand why others might have interpreted such an experience that way. The feeling of joy had bundled up with it a kind of emotional warmth, as if I was not alone, as if I was loved and had always already been loved. In return I felt love also for everything in my odd life, even the dark night and the pouring rain. ‘Born again’ Christians tend to use similar words to describe their conversion. They hit rock bottom, then they are ‘surprised by joy’. ‘Surprised by Joy’ is the title C S Lewis gives to his autobiography, words borrowed from a poem by Wordsworth which could also apply to my experience or to that of Camus.
 
If you do the research you will find that ‘religious experience’ of this kind is common in people of all faiths and none. Camus was mostly counted as an atheist. (Although he did once say, ‘I do not believe in God, but I am not an atheist nonetheless’). Nietzsche went as far as to write a whole book called ‘the Antichrist’ and yet he clearly knew about the kind of experience that Camus describes, writing: 
 
“Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill” (in Twilight of the Idols)

I tend to agree with Nietzsche – modernity made me ill. I was good at school but it was not good for me. I left school with qualifications and a feeling of desperate emptiness. The meaning I was offered at school and that I gleaned from the TV growing up in the UK felt like very thin gruel: Insipid, anaemic, bloodless stuff. The secret of my eventual stability and relative usefulness was the discovery that I made on that cold wet sleepless night in Spain. That I am part of something much larger than myself that sustains me and flows through me, that is me, as I am it, even though I do not fully understand how or why. Not a verbal meaning, not a creedal faith but a gut meaning, something we should perhaps investigate through physiology more than through philosophy.
​
The biggest cause of death of young people in the UK is suicide. But a far greater number suffer from so called ‘mental illnesses’ such as addiction to drugs, self-harm and depression. I say ‘so-called’ mental illnesses because the symptoms look to me suspiciously like what you would expect of anyone who has no deep sense of meaning in their life. 
 
This experience in a field in Spain was the opening of a source of rich nourishment for me. Nourishment that, after that night, I found that I could always regain when I really needed it using simple meditation-like techniques such as listening to my breath. All I have to do is to put myself on hold as it were, wait hopefully, and this other thing, this energy that is not me, comes in and revives me.
 
Now you might say that this is not religion but ‘spirituality’. Maybe so. Spirit is a good word. I associate it with a kind of dialogue – or perhaps a kind of lightning – a relationship or connection between the ultimate context of our lives and the here and now. When all the everyday ways of framing experience fall away then that which we call ‘spirit’ enters into play.  
 
But for me religion is also not a bad word. Re-ligare – to tie again – to reconnect. Rituals like Muslim prayer or Buddhist meditation are meant to be a remembering of what is most important. With religion the spirituality, which might be thought as purely personal moments, takes on form and becomes cultural and collective. A kind of guidance, an educational technology perhaps. 
 
In my opinion, religious faith is not about, or should not be about, propositional knowledge. It is more fundamentally, a relationship. A relationship of trust. Trust in the world. Trust in life. 
 
Reinventing ‘Religious education’
 
I was disappointed by the practice of Religious Education that I experienced in the UK. There was no actual teaching of religion. In place of the real stuff there was mostly teaching about religion.  I had to get children to list facts like what Jews put on the table at the Passover or what Sikh’s wear and why. Vaguely interesting in a pop quiz kind of way perhaps, but not something  that will open a channel of nourishment for young people. 
 
Given this experience I am not surprised that the National Secular Society write that: ‘It is time to move on from RE and ensure that the established curriculum requirements, especially citizenship education, are enhanced to provide children with a secular schooling which prepares them to consider and understand their future rights and obligations as citizens’. 
 
The report offers arguments as to why RE has become unnecessary. The main one is that, in a diverse society, RE has no longer any raison d’etre: 
 
‘RE in the 1940s essentially said to children "you must accept the Christian worldview because it is the only truth", but in the 2020s RE says almost the exact opposite, telling children "you must respect each person's different worldview because it is true for them"’. 
 
They do have a point here of course but from my experience and that of many, we still need religion. The ‘secular’ worldview of rational autonomous individuals interacting in regulated markets with rights and obligations, pretends to be free of religion but it is, in fact, I suspect, just another world view or way of life and probably not the last one or the only one that we need. Maintaining the kind of individual identities required for secular rationalism, selves separate from each other, separate from the tribe and separate from the cosmos, does not come easy for many of us and seems to make a lot of young people anxious and sometimes very ill. 
 
In re-inventing RE for the Internet Age I think that it is possible that we have something to learn from indigenous oral societies.  If I may generalize from many cases, the induction of young people into the shared way of life in indigenous cultures often involves rituals that help them step aside from their individual physical selves and acquire a more collective spiritual sense of self. In a visit to Waikato, to give one example, I learnt from a Maori woman, a religious educator, about how the elders guided her through rituals to the point when she could hear for herself the voice of the main ancestor of the iwi or tribe speaking to her, walking with her and guiding her. Her presentation of this story was more than just verbal, the emotion and security that she felt now that she was not alone but always guided by an ancestor was evident in her glowing eyes. There was love in her eyes as she spoke about her experience of religious education.
 
Successful induction into a single cultural tradition is increasingly difficult to achieve. Children are exposed to many voices on the Internet. It seems as if there is no shared worldview or way of life to induct people into such that they could have a rich experience of belonging of the kind the Maori religious educator described. On the one hand that is a problem that we all face, the unsettling challenge of the death of God, precisely as Nietzsche described it, but on the other hand, maybe this is an opportunity for us to create something new together, something that has not been seen before, a genuinely nourishing religion that has no cultural boundaries.
 
Instead of a single curriculum document we could have a living dialogue. A carefully designed and moderated platform for all those in the world who have something to share about what gives life meaning for them. Of course, this must include the secularists, the rationalists, the humanists, the communists as well as the more obviously ‘religious’ voices. It should include ordinary people, living ordinary lives who are willing to share with others what they have found that gives their life meaning and enables them to get up in the morning, carry on and maybe even feel joy in the midst of anxieties and tears. As well as a willingness to share, the other condition of participation would be a willingness to listen to others and to be open to the possibility of learning from them. Benevolence would be expected and ruthlessly enforced!
 
In RE classes young people could be invited to participate in facilitated dialogues with others from the locality as well as from around the world asking and answering the question ‘what gives life meaning for you?’. The aim of the course would not be propositional knowledge, it would not end with an exam, it would seek to facilitate each child in the personal development of their own meaning of  life, their own inner guiding voice. If that proves too ambitious for some then at the very least having a better understanding of the different ways that people seek to make sense of their lives will be valuable for anyone and everyone. Imagine how useful such awareness might be for the head of sales in any multi-national for example. 
 
My simple proposal then is that we reinvent RE as a social media platform supporting a guided global dialogue about what gives life meaning. This would not only be a journey of discovery for individual students carefully supported into joining the dialogue. It could also potentially be a useful journey of discovery for all involved, perhaps all of us. Is there a shared basis for values?  Is a shared ‘religion’ possible with a real sense of community and perhaps even shared rituals and initiation ceremonies? The best way to find out is to start a global dialogue inquiry into what gives life meaning. And maybe that shared experience of going on a journey together, of seeking to understand each other without abandoning cultural differences, will prove to be, in itself, all the answer that is needed.  

[Picture from CEDiR website: https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/groups/cedir/]
​

​One of the aims of dialogic education is to produce students who are more dialogic or who have a more dialogic self-identity. But what exactly does that mean?
 
Research has shown that groups of students can be taught to talk together better and that this can improve group learning and also group performance on reasoning tests. 'Talking together better' is about being more dialogic - being able to listen, share ideas, change minds and so on. There is also evidence that teaching groups to talk together better is a good way to teach individuals to think better when they are on their own.
 
It is not difficult to understand how this transition from group thinking to better individual thinking  works. In an experimental study I ran, one boy got a very low score on the pre-test by rushing through a multiple choice reasoning test ticking answers almost at random. After ten sessions of group work, he was given the same test again and did much better. Observing closely and talking to him it was possible to see that he had learnt to slow down and talk to himself more, asking himself the same kind of questions the group had asked when they worked on problems together, questions like 'why do you think it is that one?', 'have you checked all the other possible options?' and of course, crucially, before clicking the button to submit the answer 'do we all agree?'. In the individual condition checking 'do we all agree' translated as him asking himself  'are you sure? and again 'are you sure that you're sure?'
 
Recent research by Ethan Kross and colleagues shows that talking to yourself better can help with depression and other problems. The issue seems to be that people get trapped in their first person 'I' and 'me' perspectives. Guiding them to step out of this and take the perspective of an outsider, addressing themselves by their own first name and asking questions like 'have you looked at all the options' can really help.

This exercise, self-distancing or talking to yourself as if from the outside, is similar to the way some teachers teach the first stage of our 'thinking together' dialogic education programme. First, they get the class to work in small groups on a task, any task will do, and they video-tape them. Then they show clips of the video and discuss with the class what worked well and what did not. This is scary but powerful. The child who dominates the talk and refuses to listen to others has to look at their own behaviour now on the screen and, simply by seeing themselves as if they were another person, they see that the way they were behaving is not helpful and they change, usually without needing to be told.  
 
It is interesting to think about what is happening here when someone takes both sides, both talking and also listening to themselves talk. I think that this being on both sides at once is what it means to be a more dialogic self. You do not simply talk but you hear yourself talking as if from the point of the view of the other and correct yourself in order to try to communicate better. This is identifying not only with yourself talking but also with the other listening. The 'other' here might be a specific other that you listen to closely but as we can see from the example of having a distanced conversation with yourself, 'as if one was an other', it is also more than that. In any dialogue there is not just a specific other or specific others, but the real dialogue is often more with a kind of witness position. You can’t really take on the position of the other person and hear your words as they hear them, but you still hear yourself speaking as a witness to your own words and you can tell if they make sense or not.
 
Dialogic self and community 

Dialogic education is about empowering children by giving them opportunities  to speak and to find their own voice. Yes, that is true, but it is also about creating communities of mutual trust. Students are not going to talk unless they first form a bond and trust each other. That is why we begin teaching thinking together by raising awareness of how the way we talk affects others and then by establishing shared ground rules which create an atmosphere of trust. But this 'thinking together' approach is not about forming closed friendship groups. We can also mix up the groups with others in the same class or in other classes that have also established shared thinking together ground rules and the dialogue still works. In other words children taught to think well together with others are better at forming a constructive dialogic community with strangers.
 
The ability to take a distanced position from yourself and hear yourself as if from the outside is very important to the ability to bond together with others in order to form a community within which to think things out together. Often this takes the form of a sense of humour, being able to laugh at your own pretensions and see the irony of things. Even when you have quite different interests, if you can see yourself as if from a distance, and the other person can see themselves as if from a distance, then bonding can occur.

Becoming more dialogic 

According to the 'dialogic self' movement in psychology selves are never unitary but always made up of a community of voices. So when in education we write about a self becoming more dialogic we are really talking about a change in self-identity. We can only know ourselves because we are in relationships with others and able to see ourselves as if from their point of view. So we are really dialogic anyway but somehow it seems easy to forget that and become trapped into experiencing oneself as closed off from others in a limited self-position. Using techniques like agreeing and acting on shared ground rules for talk can help children become more dialogic by realising that they are both the inside talking outwards and the outside listening inwards.

Education as expanding dialogic space 

The Russian philosopher of dialogue, Michael Bakhtin, once wrote that 'I hear voices in everything'. I agree. When spaceships explore parts of the solar system that have not been seen before I think that we are expanding collective dialogic space. Things that could not be talked about before because we did not know about them have now entered into the dialogue and can be referred to and discussed. Learning is not a piling up of facts but an expansion of dialogic space, each new voice adding a new perspective from which to experience and understand the world. The same 'expansion of dialogic space' process is true for each individual student drawn through a process of education to discover new vistas. Children might start their educational journey only talking to people in their immediate family and end up talking to Shakespeare, Confucius and NASA scientists.
 
It might sometimes seem that students are inducted into a narrow culture and led only to participate only in closed communities. But a certain unbounded openness to the possibility of learning new things is part of the ideal of education.     

The Greek word for everything, the whole world as we experience it, is cosmos. One aim of education is to induct students into global unbounded dialogues such that they become 'cosmopolitans' or citizens of the cosmos. But that does not mean that they lose their uniqueness or their embodiment and roots in a culture. It is only because we have a physical body that we have eyes to see the world around us. It is only because we come from somewhere that we have a language, a culture and a voice with which we can learn to engage in conversation with all the other voices that make up the cosmos for us. One can only know oneself out of reflection within relationships and so education into a dialogue with the many voices of the cosmos is also education that can deepen understanding of oneself, and one's unique history and culture.

Ethan Kross, in his book 'Chatter: the voices in our head' argues that promoting self-distanced conversations is a way to educate for wisdom. Wisdom, he claims, citing a considerable research literature:
 
involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the "big picture" in several senses: recognising the limits of one's knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people's viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives. (p57)
 
In other words wisdom can be learnt by talking to people to take on board the different ways in which things can be seen, understanding one's own inevitable ignorance and, most importantly, holding distanced conversations with oneself to see things as if from the outside to get a sense of perspective. It sounds from this description as if Kross thinks that perspectives can all be reconciled but it might also be that wisdom sometimes consists, as Bakhtin suggests, in a profound belly laugh.
 
The transmission of knowledge is important in education. Ultimately this means inducting student into participation in often quite focussed communities of practice in which concepts are discussed, developed and applied; the community exploring random numbers in mathematics for example, the community of hairdressers, boiler engineers, heart surgeons or nature poets. In addition to teaching knowledge by equipping students with all that they need to be able to join such specialised practices and dialogues, education also needs to teach the bigger picture by drawing students into dialogue with outside voices. This is about expanding the dialogue so that they can take up their place not only within a specialised community but also within the cosmos.
 
The importance of developing this kind of expanded dialogic self, a self in dialogue with the outside, is brought out well by a quote from Barack Obama which Kross includes in his book:
 
The biggest challenge, I think, is always maintaining your moral compass. Those are the conversations I'm having internally. I'm measuring my actions against that inner voice that for me at least is audible, is active, it tells me where I think I'm on track and where I think I'm off track
 
A dialogic self is a self that sees both sides, that can listen as well as talk and that finds it easy to form a community with others. Ultimately being dialogic is not just about being in dialogue with this or that other person or participating constructively within this or that specific community but it is also about seeing oneself from the outside and so, in a sense, being in dialogue with the cosmos.
 
Producing more dialogic selves would be a good idea. There is evidence from research on dialogic education that this is surprisingly doable.

References and further reading 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/platform-success/202108/how-have-better-conversations-yourself
 
Kross, E. (2021). Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. Random House.

https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/what-are-types-of-talk
 
https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/defining-dialogic-education
 
https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/dialogic-space-why-we-need-it
 
Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and instruction, 9(6), 493-516.
 
 

First, I want to apologise. In the past I have been guilty of not respecting Direct Teaching (also known as 'direct instruction'). When I started off in educational research, a long time ago now, my focus was on how to empower children to think for themselves: more specifically, how to teach children to think better together in small groups around computers, the topic of my PhD. Direct Teaching did not feature as a theory of education in the talks and seminars that I attended except as a kind of default, often referred to as the 'tradition' meaning roughly, 'what people without knowledge of educational theory tend to do'.  It is not surprising that at the time I failed to value Direct Teaching. I thought of Direct Teaching as the naive idea that education is the transmission of knowledge where knowledge is imagined as if it was some kind of object, the sort of thing that can be stored in the library, transferred to the head of a teacher, transmitted into the heads of students and then externalised under controlled conditions in exams. I now see that this characterisation of Direct Teaching is a 'strawman' or caricature.

The caricature of the transmissional teacher that was quite often mentioned in our conversations at that time I recall, was Gradgrind, a very unsympathetic character from Charles Dickens's novel 'Hard Tines' who said: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them". As usual in such cases this thin and inadequate representation of the 'other', is a product of what is often called 'my-side bias', the tendency to see others only in the light of one's own perspective as a shadow of it characterised by their deficits rather than by their strengths. Mea culpa.

​So what has changed? Some people claim that views about education should be evidence-based like medicine. I am keen to learn from research. But the evidence about Direct Teaching is equivocal at best. I have heard leading education researchers on both sides of what could be called the 'Direct Teaching' versus 'Active Learning' divide (trad vs prog) claim that all the evidence supports their side of the debate. This is simply not true. For every study apparently claiming that Direct Teaching leads to more learning gains there is a study apparently claiming the opposite. Here, for example, is a recent large and very well conducted study finding that Problem-Based Learning is the most effective way to teach knowledge at primary school  [https://mlpbl.open3d.science/techreport].
 
While I value the findings of empirical educational research I interpret them within the larger interdisciplinary debate about education. My problem is, frankly, that it is just too easy to fix education research results so that they say what you want them to say. Often education research suffers from petitio principii or circular argument: the conclusions are a product of the assumptions built into the methods. After all what exactly are we measuring when we measure 'learning gains'? Learning facts? Learning how to love? Learning how to think? And how exactly do we characterise Direct Teaching? or Active Learning? Does Direct Teaching mean no student initiated questions? Does Active Learning mean no transmission of knowledge by the teacher? Even if we manage to define our terms it is still possible to implement a potentially really good pedagogical approach in a way that gets poor results. The opposite is also true, weak pedagogical strategies such as just lecturing from the front, can be done in such a way that they get good results. I have noticed that teachers who are real thinkers somehow manage to communicate how to think to their students even when all they do is lecture. On the other hand, teachers who, for whatever reason, are terrified of not having the correct answers, can fail to teach thinking effectively even when they facilitate group inquiries with the use of thinking maps and multi-coloured hats.
 
The serious and, in the broad sense, 'scientific', research study which has most led me to change my attitude towards Direct Teaching is not another Randomised Control Trial but an article in Mind, a prestigious philosophy journal. It is titled 'Knowledge from vice: Deeply social epistemology' and it takes a historical and social anthropological approach to the question of how we come to know things.
 
Humans are hard-wired for Direct Teaching 

The message of the article is that if our ancestors had listened to injunctions such as 'think for yourself: do not follow blindly what you are told' then we would not be here.
 
Here is a striking example: when maize became a staple food crop in the USA in the 19th Century it brought with it many serious outbreaks of the disease pellagra caused by a lack of niacin. Amerindians who had eaten maize as a staple for thousands of years did not have this problem because they always cooked it with an alkali (ash from a certain wood) that made the maize release niacin. They did not know why they did this - they did it because the ancestors did it.
 
Another extraordinary illustration of this thesis is provided by Inuit clothing. Many clever people with lots of resources have tried to use a problem-solving approach to survive in the extreme cold of the arctic and failed.

The Inuit, manage to stay warm and comfortable by making clothing from caribou skin, which has better insulation properties than seal or polar bear fur. Not just any caribou skin will do: it has to be skin gathered at the right time of year, and then prepared with repeated stretching, scraping, and moistening. After this the hides have to be shaped in ways that maximize heat retention while also allowing moisture to escape. A ruff of wolverine fur, especially selected for length, is then added. Inuit footwear is equally specialized, consisting of five separate layers: three different layers of stockings, each with a different design, then two different kinds of boots.
 
The authors argue, from these and other examples, that what has been taken to be an epistemological vice, individuals not thinking critically for themselves but just accepting what they are told, is actually often an epistemological virtue. The main point is that knowledge and also 'intelligence' is primarily collective rather than individual. It is not just the Inuit who survive because of the accurate transmission of complex cultural knowledge, we all depend on this: that is what it means to be human and so it does not seem unreasonable to think of Direct Teaching as the first and most basic function of education.
 
Stanislaus Dehaene's account the brain science of learning confirms that humans are hard-wired for the transmission of knowledge. Eye contact from a parent or tutor puts young children instantly into what Dehaene calls a "pedagogical stance" that prepares them to learn from what they are being taught, interpreting the information imparted as a) important and b) generalisable. But we all know this really. Go into any primary school and you can see that children love to listen to stories told by teachers, and, also, that they tend to believe whatever they are told.
 
The problem with education as transmission of culture 

Dehaene points out that our species specific biological adaptation for education in the form of Direct Teaching does not only explain why people can so easily be taught useful cultural knowledge, it also explains why people can be convinced by cultish conspiracy theories and all sorts of dangerous nonsense. In the modern age, the Internet Age, this hard-wired mechanism for the uncritical transmission of cultural stories leads to many dangers. It needs to be balanced with the teaching of critical thinking.
 
Fast versus slow thinking 

The authors of the article on 'Knowledge from vice' revel in the paradox that we depend for our thinking on the apparent vice of uncritical cultural transmission. If the common exhortation to the young to think for themselves and question everything ever really succeeded then, they claim, we would all be in serious trouble. So why, the authors ask, do we still promote the value of critical thinking?
 
"It takes hard work to consider a range of hypotheses and to be open-minded. It takes hard work to think for oneself. We fail at these attempts at epistemic virtue routinely. If we’re right, these failures may be happy: if we succeeded very much more often, we would do less well epistemically. But that doesn’t entail that our successes are not themselves epistemically virtuous or expressive of cognitive agency: it is, perhaps, only by great effort that we achieve a cognitive sweet spot, where we follow the crowd and are close-minded just enough"
 
This mirrors the research findings described by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his best-selling book 'Thinking fast: thinking slow'. Fast thinking is the default, it is easy for us but full of biases. In order to correct these biases we need to step back, question our first impressions and engage in slow careful reflection and analysis. The problem is that this slow thinking takes up cognitive load. Most of the time we need to use fast thinking. While Kahneman implies that automatic 'fast thinking' is biologically hard-wired, the argument made by the 'Knowledge from vice' article is that much fast thinking has evolved within cultures and is not so much biological thinking as collective thinking.
 
Open versus closed society 

A contrast between closed and open cultures was first made by Bergson, elaborated by Popper and has more recently been applied to education by Hanan Alexander in his interesting book 'Reimagining Liberal Education'. Education is always the transmission of a culture, but cultures are not all the same. Closed cultures, cults, conspiracy theories, and pseudo sciences, refuse to learn from dialogue. Open cultures and open societies, on the other hand, are open to learning from external dialogue with other cultures and also, perhaps even more importantly, they are open to learning from internal dialogues. In open societies reflection and criticism is encouraged because this potentially leads to continuous improvement.
 
Even though, in the Internet Age, we all increasingly participate in one world culture, this shared culture has many strands. While there are different cultural traditions being transmitted through education in schools in the UK and around the world the one thing which they all need to have in common, if we are to have a shared sustainable future on this relatively small planet, is openness to learning from dialogue. This requirement of openness and reflection has implications for how we teach. Knowledge needs to be taught in a way that makes it clear that it is not final and absolute, but is our best knowledge so far, always open to questioning and open to reformation. In open cultures students must to be equipped with the tools that they need to be able to question and develop the tradition that they are being inducted into.

Double Dialogic 

One way to resolve the apparent dichotomy between Direct Teaching and Active Learning, sometimes referred to as the war between so-called 'traditional' and so-called 'progressive' methods in education, is by acknowledging that, yes, education is all about inducting students into their shared cultural inheritance, but that, in an open culture, the cultural inheritance that is being transmitted through education includes a component dedicated to self-reflection and self-reformation. Thinking is always thinking about something. The teaching of shared inquiry and critical thinking always occurs within the larger context of transmitting a cultural tradition. The tools needed for thinking such as the language of questioning and 'ground rules for effective talk', are themselves forms of cultural knowledge that need to be transmitted through Direct Teaching.
 
Double dialogic is the recognition that dialogues do not only involve specific speakers, say a small group of children in a classroom, they also, at the same time, involve a dialogic interaction with the cultural context. A dialogue about a science question in a classroom is not only between the different views of the children, it also has to invoke and react to the slowly changing views of the relevant community of scientists. This concept of the double dialogic can enable us to understand how Direct Teaching is compatible with dialogic education. The first loop of dialogic education is induction of children into short term dialogues in the classroom. This teaches how to form good questions, how to listen well, and how to think both critically and creatively. The second loop is induction into the much longer-term dialogues of culture. Long term dialogues of culture such as history, maths, art and science, are strands in a single evolving unbounded dialogic space that Oakeshott referred to as 'the conversation of mankind'. While dialogic education is normally understood only in terms of the first loop, as teaching children how to think together in the classroom, it should also be understood in terms of the second loop, inducting children into participation in a cultural tradition understood as itself a kind of dialogue, a long-term collective dialogue. It is not possible to participate usefully in a long-term cultural dialogue without already knowing things. Induction of students into long-term dialogues requires Direct Teaching of the dialogue so far, the scientific canon for example or the best of what our ancestors have thought and said up to now. But this must not be taught as dead, fixed, final knowledge but as a living tradition that the students can themselves participate in and perhaps take further.
 
In any open, living, evolving, culture, education into how to question, reflect upon and reform knowledge, is as essential as the Direct Teaching of knowledge. The 'traditional' education method of telling stories and expecting children to listen and to learn is basic to the successful reproduction of all human cultures. More 'progressive' methods that teach children how to ask questions, to reflect and to create new knowledge, are also an essential component of education in all open cultures. Direct Teaching and Active Learning are not only compatible, they require each other.
 
Links and references

https://www.tes.com/news/why-you-have-got-direct-instruction-wrong
​
Alexander, H. (2015). Reimagining liberal education: Affiliation and inquiry in democratic schooling. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
 
Dehaene, S. (2020). How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain. Penguin UK.
 
Fernbach, P., & Sloman, S. (2017). The knowledge illusion. Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.
​
Henrich, J. (2017). The Secret of Our Success. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

Kirschner, P., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why unguided learning does not work: An analysis of the failure of discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning and inquiry-based learning. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.

Levy, N., & Alfano, M. (2020). Knowledge from vice: Deeply social epistemology. Mind, 129(515), 887-915.
 
Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Taylor & Francis.

Gavin Williamson, UK Secretary of State for Education, claimed in a speech last week, that there is a widespread snobbishness against vocational education with people often claiming that it is a good idea but only for 'other people's children' (https://feweek.co.uk/2020/07/09/gavin-williamsons-speech-on-fe-reform-the-full-text/). One reason for this is that vocational training is commonly opposed to academic education as if vocational means narrowing the mind whereas academic means broadening the mind. Many people seem to assume that learning something very abstract and obscure like algebra or post-modern literary theory must be more intelligent than learning something concrete and useful like cooking or computer programming. Research on how general thinking skills can be taught and learnt does not support this prejudice.
 
When the children of wealthy people all used to study Latin at school it was widely assumed that Latin must be generally good for mind. Rigorous research into this assumption by one of the first experimental educational psychologists, Edward Thorndike, found no such result (1923). Success in Latin did not translate into more general success in learning other subjects or measures of general thinking ability. The same results, or rather, a lack of result, have been found for maths, Logic programming, chess and any and all the other content areas put forward as offering a source for general thinking skills (Perkins and Salomon, 1992). Some have argued from this research that it is not possible to teach for general thinking skills at all. But that is the wrong conclusion. That is not what the research said. In fact, even the well cited Perkins and Salomon paper above pointed out that transfer of this kind is possible depending on the way that subjects are taught. Just teaching a logic programming language such as Logo in schools, for example, did not have an effect, but teaching this same content with dialogues bringing out the general thinking strategies involved and exploring how these bridge to help solve other problems in other areas of life does lead to transfer (Wegerif, 2002).  There is overwhelming evidence that it is possible to teach for general thinking skills such as critical thinking (Abrami et al 2008). And on the whole the evidence suggests that the teaching for general transferable thinking skills turns out to be not so much about what you teach as about the way that you teach it.
 
Despite the lack of hard evidence perhaps there was something behind the intuition people had that learning Latin was good for them. After all Randomised Control Studies are a very blunt instrument focussing on correlations and not always bringing out the impact of different ways of teaching and learning - or what could be called the causal mechanisms linking teaching to learning. In Thorndike's day those who argued in favour of Latin as a training for the mind focussed on the rigour of the grammar. This was shown to have no general impact but something else not looked at then might have had an impact - this was the way that Latin was sometimes taught with discussions around interesting ancient texts. Most people who study Classics in a traditional University, learn through talking together in small groups. They are not just taught facts and correct interpretations they are asked to question, to explore alternatives, to build on ideas, to challenge and to provide reasons for claims. This kind of 'dialogic' education in the Classics has a long tradition. Recent evidence suggests that it is precisely this kind of pedagogy that can help people learn to think in a way that transfers to support thinking in every area of life (Gorard et al 2015, Sun, Wang and Wegerif, 2020). By dialogic education I do not just mean education that transmits knowledge through the means of dialogue but, much more importantly, education that teaches students how to be better at dialogue, better at asking good questions, better at listening not just to what people say but also to what they might mean, better at comparing and better able to make creative leaps in order to see things as if through other's eyes (Wegerif 2017).
 
Research on teaching for thinking and creativity suggests strongly that general thinking skills, strategies and dispositions can indeed be taught and that the best way to teach them is by drawing students into dialogue in a structured way (Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke, 2015). This can be done in the way that you teach Classics or algebra, but it can also be done in the way that you teach almost anything at all. Design and technology (D&T) in schools, for example, could be taught in a very 'direct teaching' sort of way, showing students exactly how to make a functioning pencil case. Apparently this is still what happens in many D&T classrooms. It is this kind of teaching and learning that people seem to be thinking about when they assume that vocational education is somehow less intelligent than a more academic education. The alternative is that D&T could be approached in a more dialogic and creative way, drawing children into a participatory design process involving promoting empathy with users and collaborative creativity in order to solve real world challenges (e.g Bill Nicholl and Ian Hoskin's work on D&T here at Cambridge Faculty of Ed shown in a short clip here https://youtu.be/cW0OYpcE9tE see Nicholl et al 2013). 
 
Gavin Williamson claimed, in the speech referred to above, that we need a more 'German-style' model for vocational education. Superficially the German model does seem  better than the UK approach but this model also has its problems. It involves specifying occupations - 325 of them - many of which might be due for redundancy as growth in AI transforms the world of work (Seldon & Abidoye 2018). The way to overcome this challenge is to have a vocational education that focusses on general transferable skills such as learning to learn, team work, collaborative creativity and just, well, how to act intelligently both when alone and when working together with others. These kinds of skills, strategies and dispositions, now often referred to as 'future skills' teach how to thrive in a time of rapid change. They promote a culture of enterprise which is not only about fitting students into existing jobs but also about equipping them with the skills to see new opportunities and to create new jobs.
 
We are exploring ways to make this kind of vocational education work currently in a project funded by industry partners, BT and Huawei, to develop 'virtual internships' (https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/vip/). These Virtual Internships involve learners – initially in Year 7 or 8 from secondary schools in areas of low social mobility in England – working in small teams role-playing being ‘interns’. Students learn about the world of work while engaging in scenarios and activities designed to develop the kind of ‘complex competencies’ (or 'future skills') often emphasised as desirable by employers but also desirable for participation in citizenship and in lifelong learning. Specifically, they design and develop solutions that respond to real-world challenges proposed by the companies we are working with. Although currently we are just working with two companies, we think that this could offer a more general model for building bridges between schools and the world beyond school.
 
Teaching for creativity and general thinking skills can be done. I suspect that this has been done quite successfully in Universities like Cambridge for centuries. That was probably the real point of sitting around in seminars discussing different interpretations of passages from Herodotus or Horace. Now that we know that we can extract this way of conferring intellectual advantage from its location within the traditional class system, as a benefit only available for the children of the 'leisured class', and apply it more generally to provide an intellectual upgrade for all, including those studying vocational subjects that might more directly help us solve the many real world challenges that we face. The secret to teaching thinking lies in the way that subjects are taught and learnt and not in the content. This is not to say that content knowledge does not matter, you have to think about something and be creative within constraints (Phillipson & Wegerif, 2016). The point is that, in order to teach intelligence, it does not matter if you are discussing poetry or if you are discussing football, cordon-bleu cuisine or how to design a better Internet of Things, the secret lies in the quality of the dialogue.
 
 
 
 
 
 References
 
Abrami, P. C., Bernard, R. M., Borokhovski, E., Wade, A., Surkes, M. A., Tamim, R., & Zhang, D. (2008). Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: A stage 1 meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 1102-1134.

Gorard, S., Siddiqui, N., & See, B. H. (2018). Philosophy for Children: Evaluation report and executive summary. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/32011/1/EEF_Project_Report_PhilosophyForChildren.pdf

Nicholl, B., Flutter, J. A. E., Hosking, I. M., & Clarkson, P. J. (2013). Transforming practice in Design and Technology: evidence from a classroom-based research study of students' responses to an intervention on inclusive design. Curriculum Journal, 24(1), 86-102.

Perkins, D. N., & Salomon, G. (1992). Transfer of learning. International encyclopedia of education, 2, 6452-6457. Pergamon press. (PDF Online)

Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Taylor & Francis.

Resnick, L., Asterhan, C., & Clarke, S. (2015). Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. American Educational Research Association.

Seldon, A., & Abidoye, O. (2018). The fourth education revolution. Legend Press Ltd.

Sun, M, Wang, M., Wegerif, R. (2020) Effects of divergent thinking training on students’ scientific creativity: The impact of individual creative potential and domain knowledge. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 37 Online   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2020.100682

Thorndike, E. L. (1923). The influence of first-year Latin upon ability to read English. School and Society, 17, 165–168.

Wegerif, R. (2002). Literature review in thinking skills, technology and learning. Nesta Futurelab. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/1838/futl75.pdf

Wegerif, R. (2017) https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/defining-dialogic-education

This is an edited version of an interview with Tina Kullenberg recently published in the EARLI SIG 25 (Educational Theory) newsletter 4/2020 (https://earli.org/node/140). The interview ranged more widely. Here I focus in on how dialogic education addresses the question of meaning in life.

[We begin the interview with Tina asking about how I began being interested in educational theory and I describe my quite critical reaction to reading Vygotsky when I began my PhD in 1992]

Rupert: Vygotsky and Piaget both seemed to share an essentially monologic – or single-voiced - view of rationality. The dialogic alternative is that meaning is always a spark across difference so it always implies that there is more than one voice in play. The aim of education, for Vygotsky and Piaget, seemed to be to draw children up from participatory contextual meaning into more systematic conceptual meaning – from embodied participation, creativity and emotion within time and space on the one hand, to an abstract rationality that is anemic, predictable and ultimately outside of time and space, on the other. [The same critique also applies to other cognitive psychology theories of education]

My objection to the rationalism of the education theory that I encountered [as a graduate student] was perhaps rooted in my personal history. I felt that this rationalist approach had the potential to damage a sense of meaning in life. Finding meaning in life has always been an issue for me and I think it is an issue that education needs to address.

Tina: Meaning in life? What, then, defines such a meaning for you?

Rupert: By meaning I suppose you could say that I mean ‘existential’ meaning but it is not a complicated idea. I mean simply the kind of meaning needed to be able to get out of bed in the morning and face the day. [Ikigai in Japanese] Although this might sound like a personal issue it is also quite general. Young people today, if anything, seem to have an even greater problem with lack of meaning than I found back in the 1970s.
​
Tina: I see, and how does this kind of existential meaning relate to educational theory?

Rupert: I put some of the blame for the lack of meaning that I experienced as a young man on my education. Like almost all children I began life with a rich experience of participatory meaning. I enjoyed life. I played unselfconsciously with other children. I was in love with my mother who in turn loved me and brought me up. Then compulsory state education in the UK intervened and I learnt to be depressed. I remember asking my mother why I had to go to school and she told me that if I did not the police would come round. It turned out that I was good at learning curriculum knowledge and doing well in exams but I had a problem understanding what the point of any of it was. The content of the education I received actively downplayed the idea that anything I learnt had any real meaning. In science they emphasised the mystery of how random soulless processes might produce life. In literature I was warned against ‘the pathetic fallacy’ of projecting meaning and emotion onto nature.  In history I was told there are no big patterns, no purpose, just things happening. When they taught me how to tie a tie in school I realised that the adults teaching me saw the purpose of my education as for me to get a job, earn money, buy stuff and so contribute to society. I was not convinced.

This personal story perhaps explains why I was disappointed when I found that the newly discovered intellectual hero everyone was quoting, Vygotsky, referred to ‘participatory’ thinking – the kind of thinking he said was shared by children, and, his words, 'primitives and schizophrenics' – as something to be overcome in education in order to teach conceptual thinking. For me participation is essential for meaning and the participatory bond between children and their worlds should not be broken.

Tina: You are right. I think this concern is very important to address. Vygotskian thinkers would perhaps counter with the argument that principles as ‘higher mental thinking’ imply advanced and situated conceptual knowledge that provides existential meaning-making as well, but I somehow doubt it. Although conceptual thinking for sure offers some kind of meaning in life, this tradition seems still too focused on mental development, from what I know…
I know you believe in the role of educational dialogues. How do you think dialogic education offers meaning for young people?

Rupert: In the late 1990s Jim Wertsch’s synthesis of Vygotsky and Bakhtin was very popular. In essence Vygotsky’s account of how children learn by ‘internalising’ or ‘appropriating’ cultural tools was being augmented by Wertsch with a Bakhtinian account of learning by internalising or appropriating cultural voices. This led me to read Bakhtin and, because I had already read Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida and others I realised that Bakhtin was a very different thinker from Vygotsky. Whereas Vygotsky seemed to me to be a rationalist of a Hegelian-Marxist kind, Bakhtin was working with a new ontology closer to what has become called 'post-structuralism' – this is an ontology of difference or what could also be called a relational ontology or even a dialogic ontology.  According to this ontology all meaning is a product of dialogue. So, for example, Bakhtin pointed out that the flow of meaning in a dialogue requires that there are different perspectives, if the difference between voices were ever overcome to reach unanimity then the dialogue, and therefore also the meaning, would reach an end. Meaning requires difference and without difference there is no meaning.

Tina: OK but that is quite theoretical. How does all this help young people find meaning?

Rupert: Well, meaning comes from relationship and participation. For the newborn child the face of their mother is experienced as everything, as the meaning of the universe. Later the child will learn that their mother is just one person amongst other people but early on the face of the mother is not just an individual but also represents otherness in general. This relationship to otherness in general - what Levinas refers to as the 'Infinite Other', is present behind all the others we engage with in education and in life, including, I think, the environment and natural beings. For the depressed person there is a loss of faith not only in this or that other but in life as a whole. A relationship of trust or faith with life as a whole is natural to childhood and is something education should work hard to enhance, not to destroy.

Tina: Yes, I think experiences of trust, faith and meaning are relational phenomena, ultimately, and should be treated so also in educational contexts.
Speaking about voices, Bakhtin also stressed the person’s – the speaker’s – own voice, which means finding and expressing individual opinions within bigger dialogues and polyphonic contexts. What do you say about this?

Rupert: I think the question of meaning for young people is also the question of how you find your own voice. Let us consider a limited example at first to understand the general process. A schematised and simplified version of my own experience. How does a young researcher find their voice in the field of educational theory? First they might read Vygotsky, because they are told to by their supervisor, and then they find themselves talking about mediated action all the time. They lose themselves in Vygotskian theory – they are possessed by that voice. But then secondly they also read Bakhtin and others and stand back from the field in critical mode comparing and contrasting all the different voices. Thirdly they find themselves called by the dialogic field to make a contribution, to say what needs to be said emerging out of the gaps they find between what Bakhtin says and what Vygotsky says in relation to the challenge of the time. If they have said something useful for the dialogue as a whole going forwards then they will find themselves being cited by others and – hey presto - there it is - they have found their own voice! Finding a voice then requires forming a relationship not just with this voice or with that voice but with a field of dialogue or what I often refer to as a dialogic space. 
​
This is true in any bounded field of dialogue like educational theory or, say, designing a new product in a manufacturing company, or engaging with a local political issue, but it is also true to what it means to find your own voice in general. Gert Biesta is very interesting on the important role of education in allowing students to find themselves, to become, as he puts it ‘subjects’. He writes that education has three purposes, socialization, qualification and also ‘subjectification’. I agree with him about the importance of becoming a self but I think that the process is dialogic and involves relationship with a field of dialogue. The self is always double-voiced, as Bakhtin put it, meaning it is always on both sides of the dialogue at once. This means that you can only find yourself by first losing yourself in participation. First you take on the field of dialogue as a whole, which is an open and unbounded field, you allow yourself to play, to be possessed by the voices and then you find that you are called upon to speak and –mysteriously – you hear yourself respond. In true speech it feels as if the field flows back to itself through you saying what needs to be said. That is what gives authority to your voice and is why others sometimes lend authority to your voice by listening to you and allowing what you say to guide them. It is not because of you it is because they hear in what you are saying something of what they also intuitively know needs to be said and they know this because of their participation in the same dialogic space as you. The authority of a voice in the dialogue comes from shared participation. But that does not mean that you lose yourself in the dialogic space. You are likely to experience yourself as at your most individual only when you find yourself speaking for the dialogic space as a whole.

This is why Bakhtin loved Dostoevsky so much. He claimed that he found Dostoevsky open to all the cultural voices of his time and yet able to express them in a uniquely personal way. No one could say that Dostoevsky did not have a personality but his personality somehow included all the voices and allowed them all to speak through him.

Tina: A lot to think about, really. Can you just outline the theory of education that all this leads to?

Rupert: Well I think that we can use these ideas from Bakhtin and others to develop quite a simple and straightforward dialogic theory of education that preserves the importance of participatory meaning while extending cognition. New voices are called into being by others, by specific others such as mothers or fathers, by cultural voices such as the voice of Mathematics or History mediated by teachers and also by the Infinite Other. This offers a theory of education as being about education into life as whole. It is about the whole person in relation to the whole cosmos. Cognitive development is now understood as just one aspect of this larger movement of being drawn out of oneself and into dialogue - a movement in which the dialogic space opened up is constantly expanding and deepening. At each stage of education meaning comes from participation and relationship. The initial participation and relationship natural to childhood is maintained throughout. The meaning, for example, of a child’s encounter with a tree does not need to be broken or lost by the child also being drawn into the long term global cultural dialogue of science about trees. Science can tell them more about how the tree draws sustenance from the sun and from the soil in a way that enhances the child’s experience of relationship with the tree, not in a way that destroys this.  

Much of the role of formal education can be understood as drawing children and newcomers into participation in long term cultural dialogues. This fits well with the claim that there is 'powerful knowledge' which has to be taught and learnt. It is just that this 'knowledge' is now understood as a long-term cultural dialogue and the aim of education is not to teach inert knowledge but to induct children into participation in these powerful dialogues in such a way that they can find their own voice within these dialogues. This also fits well with Michael Oakeshott's idea of education as joining 'the conversation of mankind'. However, Oakeshott saw this dialogue as limited to humans, probably mainly European humans in fact, and focused mainly on entering into a dialogue with the voices of the past. But science and technology are part of this dialogue and involve us in taking seriously non-human voices, the voices of things and of nature. In science there is not just induction into a cultural dialogue but also into a dialogue with voices that speak to us from beyond culture. The idea of dialogue with the Infinite Other is another way of saying that entering into science (science means ‘knowledge’ for me so refers not just to natural science but to any shared inquiry) through which we engage in dialogue with the realm of the as yet unknown is also very much a part of education. It is understandable that education in the Print Age focussed on transmission of past knowledge and some dialogue with voices of the past. The Internet Age offers a new possibility of inducting students directly into the living global dialogues that advance knowledge and technology in every area. The larger dialogue that children and newcomers can join, if we develop an effective global education system for the future, is a dynamic real-time shared inquiry through which we understand ourselves and the world and through which we can design and build our shared future together.

One implication of the idea of the Infinite Other is that the context of meaning, the ‘meaning of meaning’, is not something far away from us but is also to be found at the heart of each present moment. Dialogue with the Infinite Other is the idea, therefore, of a kind of creative experience that can be found by stepping back from the divisions that always already define our situation, divisions such as self/other, here/there, now/then, culture/nature in order to participate in the dialogic space of potential meaning that precedes and exceeds these divisions.

I would like to see an education that helps those who feel lost realise the true nature of their individual identity as being dialogic interconnectedness. In fact, following Levinas, it is possible that identity is not a separation but a kind of singularity in space and time or a point where the cosmos as a whole turns around and looks back upon itself making each person unique because they are unbounded – each of us is ‘everywhere and forever only by virtue of being here and now’ as Merleau-Ponty once put it. That phrase might sound a bit esoteric to some people but Merleau-Ponty's point is a simple one. We can look out and see space and think about many further spaces in the past and in the future only because we have eyes located in a body that is situated here and now so it is really just a statement of the obvious reality of our situation to say that we are  'everywhere and forever only by virtue of being here and now'.

Finding existential meaning for me was about being drawn, through various encounters, into relationship not just with this or that person or idea but into a deeper realisation of my pre-existing participation in the whole of life. This involved a shift in personal identification from feeling trapped by a bounded image of the ego to identifying more with the pre-thematic or pre-individual potential for meaning which is always there before the self-other split. I think that this relates to the educational goal, which we have found through research on successful group thinking, of identification with the dialogue which means identifying with the creative flow of emergent meaning making.

Perhaps our interconnectedness with the whole of life is obvious but it nonetheless seems that it is also something that it is always possible for people to forget and indeed, it seems, for whole cultures to forget. I hope that this dialogic educational theory and the dialogic educational practice linked to it, might be able to help people who are struggling with the question of meaning as I once struggled.

Tina: Thanks for sharing your own life experiences, it helps me to better understand your well-known dialogic visions in educational matters.
 
References
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R. and Major, L. The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. Routledge.

The dissertation on our Master's in Psychology and Education here in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge had to be based on empirical research. With the corona crisis many schools closed and access to empirical data became uncertain. In response the examiners said students could do a 'desk-based' research dissertation if they wanted. Many students who had been preparing an empirical research dissertation now had to face the uncertainty of a new way of writing. Empirical research writing in psychology has very specific guidelines drawn up by the American Psychology Association (APA)[i]. 'Desk-based' research, by contrast, is an open space. Since I sometimes write articles that are not obviously empirical, they turned to me asking for advice. I did my best at short notice. I hope what I produced, and re-produce here in edited form, is useful.

Why 'Desk-based' research?
 
The trouble with a strong guide on the correct way to write reports is that it tends to limit the vision. Perhaps that is OK when we think we have a good frame and there is much of value to be learnt incrementally. But I am not at all convinced that education is a field where we can afford to limit the frame in this way. Progress in any and every science requires not just findings from empirical studies but reflection on the significance of findings from empirical studies. This means we need articles that 'rise above'[viii] the narrow framing to compare, contrast, refine and reflect. Desk-based research writing is not the opposite of empirical research research writing: it is an essential component of empirical research.
 
I will argue, from the evidence, that there is much less difference between empirical research papers and conceptual research papers than people often think. Both require careful argumentation in order to ground claims on reasoning and evidence. In empirical dissertations the argumentation is used to justify the methodological choices and the interpretation of the data. In conceptual dissertations the argumentation is used to justify the theories employed and the interpretation offered of other studies. The greater freedom of desk-based research can bring with it the reward of exploring the bigger patterns that can be found emerging from numerous more narrowly focussed empirical studies.

The term 'desk-based' research sounds a bit dismissive. Calling it conceptual research might be better. Concepts are the essential units of the global dialogue of science. Developing, questioning and refining concepts in the light of reason and evidence is what the long-term cultural dialogue of science is all about. However, it would be a mistake to think of research in education as ever purely conceptual or purely empirical. Both need to go together -  it is common to separate them in different journals but  they can fruitfully be combined in a single article.
 
Everything is  rhetoric
 
Some people contrast 'rhetoric' to communicating the facts. This is nonsense. Rhetoric is the art of writing well and persuasively. This is as relevant to empirical as to conceptual articles. Every article has to establish trust in the methods used and in the interpretations of the findings. This can only be done through argumentation employing rhetorical devices. Imagine yourself justifying your research to a group of critically minded peers. You cannot tell them everything, there is never enough space, so you have to select. What is relevant and what is not relevant is not fixed in advance by the APA but depends on the questions the readers ask and this will, in turn, depend on the details of each study and also on the changing cultural context. If you have in fact done great research but you are unable to communicate this effectively to the audience then you will fail to get published or - in the case that prompted this writing - fail to get a good mark for your master's thesis.
 
'Though some practicing social scientists might wish to escape the uncertainties of human discourse by embracing a single, correct, and absolute way of writing science, any model of scientific writing embeds rhetorical assumptions.' (Bazerman, 1987)
 
Creating a Research Space (CARS)
 
I think of science as a dialogue, not a local face-to-face kind of dialogue but more a long-term cultural dialogue that is global in reach and supported by communications media like print journals and the Internet. Research on the structure of academic articles supports this. John Swales looked at a wide range of academic articles and found a general two-way funnel structure. First, in the introduction, they refer to field of debate in order to establish the relevance of their study. Then they do the particular research that adds a specific finding. Finally, in the discussion and the conclusion, they move back out to the field in order to claim significance for their finding. (Figure 1a and Figure 1b) 

​Figure 1a: Swales IMRD double funnel.     Figure 1b: the desk-based double funnel

In 1999 I ran a pilot course in academic writing to test out a new model of online peer-to-peer learning. To provide materials for this design-based research project I worked with Caroline Coffin, a systemic functional linguist, to analyse the structure of successful papers in educational research journals. We used this evidence to write a short guide to standard research articles with lots of detailed moves that you might find useful (https://education.exeter.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/inspire/pages/view/research_article).

Interestingly most of the moves we found are as relevant to desk-based research as they are to empirical research. Empirical research articles generally have an IMRD structure: Introduction (including lit review), Methods, Results and Discussion (including conclusion). Desk-based research replaces the Methods and Results sections with a main argumentation section but otherwise the pattern is the same.
 
You start off broad to hook the reader by explaining why the topic you are focussing on is important, then you focus in to describe the specific problem, your research design for tacking it and your claims, then you go out broad again to explain why what you have found from this research, your claimed contribution, is significant in the larger context of the field of research and perhaps to the larger context of cultural evolution.  
 
John Swales, another applied linguist, (Swales & Feak, 2004) refers to the funnel pattern of writing an introduction to a research article as 'creating a research space' or CARS. He found three main moves with associated smaller steps. These are described in detail with illustrative examples in Coffin and Wegerif (2000). Here is a summary of this approach as found on (https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/CARS):
 
Move 1: Establishing a territory

• Claiming significance -showing that the general research area is important, central, interesting or relevant by describing the research problem and providing evidence to support why the topic is important to study
• Reviewing literature -introducing and reviewing items of previous research in the area - providing statements about the current state of knowledge, consensus, practice or description of phenomena and also synthesizing prior research that further supports the need to study the research problem

Move 2: Establishing a niche (rationale)

• Counter-claiming - introduce an opposing viewpoint or perspective or identify a gap in prior research that you believe has weakened or undermined the prevailing argument;
• Indicating a gap - develop the research problem around a gap or area of the literature;
• Question-raising - presenting key questions about the consequences of gaps in prior research that will be addressed by your study.
• Continuing a stream of literature -extend prior research to expand upon or clarify a research problem. This is often signalled with logical connecting terminology, such as, “therefore,” or  “thus” or language that indicates a need. For example; “It follows these connections need to examined in more detail....” '

Move 3: Occupying the niche

• Outlining purposes  - answering the “So What?” question. Explain in clear language the objectives of your study.
• Announcing present research - describe the purpose of your study in terms of what the research is going to do or accomplish;
• Announcing principle findings/conclusions - present a brief, general summary of key findings, e.g “This study suggests that....”]
• Outlining article structure - describe how the remainder of your paper is organised]

 
Although these three moves refer specifically to the structure of an introduction section, they give a pretty clear indication of the argument structure of the paper as a whole. They are the same for both empirical and non-empirical dissertations. The main difference lies in the way that methods are described and the use of evidence. In desk-based research in the field of education the method and results section of the empirical research paper is replaced by argumentation. This argumentation often combines conceptual analysis with empirical evidence drawn from other studies. Sometimes the findings claimed by other studies are cited directly as evidence assuming trust in the validity of their methods.
 
This means that the introduction, the critical literature review, the discussion and the conclusion sections of the paper can remain pretty much the same as they would be in an empirical IMRD paper. In the discussion section you revisit the themes and the literature that you quoted in the introduction and you show how your new findings make a contribution by challenging some claims in the literature, adding to others or perhaps re-framing the debate in a potentially fruitful way. Descriptions of how to structure these sections in our 'writing a standard article' guide (above) might be useful (although this is a little old now and there are new guides to follow including, perhaps, the APA style guides) 
 
The 'research design' of a conceptual dissertation
 
There is plenty of scope for doing unconvincing desk-based research. As Jaakkola (2020) writes,  to be taken seriously any conceptual claims you make needs to be grounded in what she calls an appropriate research design. By research design Jaakola means the key components of your argumentation, the theories, concepts and streams of literature you draw upon to make your case and the way that you string them together into a narrative argument. In empirical papers it is necessary to justify your methods for the collection and analysis of data - in a conceptual paper it is similarly a good idea to justify your research design. Why and how are these theories, concepts and literature streams relevant? Why is the kind of argument you are advancing justified and appropriate in this context? This is not just about claims and evidence in support of claims it is also about their 'warrant' or establishing the trust of the reader in your methodology.  [ix]
 
It might help to formulate the central problem or question you wish to address at the beginning of your paper, and keep this in mind at all times. Make it clear what the problem is, and why it is a problem. Be sure that everything you write is relevant to that central problem or question or issue. In addition, be sure to say in each section of the paper why what you are including is relevant to your main argument and how this section takes it forward.
 
To decide how to structure a paper I usually start with the end, that is with the main contribution to knowledge (contribution to the dialogue) that I want to claim. Then I break this down into the range of smaller claims that need to be swallowed before the reader will be convinced by my big claim.
 
There are many possible research designs for desk-based or conceptual research dissertations. I recommend finding an article that you admire, breaking down its argumentation structure, and using that as a model. Jaakkola, writing in the context of conceptual studies in management, isolates a few types of conceptual paper that I think are equally relevant for education. I adapt and summarise Jaakkola in the following sections as this might give some ideas as to the kinds of dissertations that are possible:

Theory synthesis

A theory synthesis offers a new or enhanced view of a concept or a phenomenon by linking previously unconnected or incompatible bits of literature in a novel way. Often this does not so much develop a new theory as apply a theory drawn from one area to a new area, showing how it makes sense of things that previously seemed unconnected or in need of explanation.

This might look a bit like a critical lit review but there is a difference. While a well-crafted literature review takes stock of the field and can provide valuable insights into its development, scope, or future prospects, it remains within the existing conceptual or theoretical boundaries, describing existing knowledge rather than looking beyond it. In the case of a conceptual paper, the literature review is a necessary part of the study but the ultimate objective is a new way of seeing things. The synthesis paper is about revealing “big picture” patterns and connections rather than specific causal mechanisms

Examples of theory synthesis papers in educational research are:

Goldie, J. G. S. (2016). Connectivism: A knowledge learning theory for the digital age?. Medical teacher, 38(10), 1064-1069. Applies Siemens connectivist theory of learning to the field of medical education, showing its strengths and limitations

Wegerif, R. (2011). Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking skills and creativity, 6(3), 179-190. Draws together disparate literature streams to argue that thinking is dialogue and learning to think occurs through induction into dialogue.

Theory critique and adaptation

While empirical research may gradually extend some element of theory within a given context, theory-based adaptation attempts a more immediate shift of perspective. Theory critique and adaptation papers introduce an alternative frame of reference - a new way of seeing - through challenging and replacing an existing way of seeing.
 
For example, the authors might argue that certain empirical developments or insights from other streams of literature challenge an existing conceptualization such that a shift of perspective is needed to better align the concept or theory to its purpose.

Examples of theory critique and adaptation articles in educational research are:

Zambrano, J., Kirschner, P., Kirschner, F., & Sweller, J. (2018). From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. Builds on and adapts the now popular 'cognitive load theory' (no endorsement implied!)
 
Carr, W. (2007). Philosophy, methodology and action research. In The Quality of Practitioner Research (pp. 29-42). Brill Sense. Goes back to Aristotle to challenge and re-frame the whole idea of methodology in educational research.
 
Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347-361. Challenges the Vygotskian view of dialogue suggesting that a Bakhtinian view might be more fruitful.
 
Noorloos, R., Taylor, S. D., Bakker, A., & Derry, J. (2017). Inferentialism as an alternative to socioconstructivism in mathematics education. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 29(4), 437-453. Does what it says.
 
Typology

A typology paper offers a categorisation of a previously fragmented and confused area of discourse, offering a coherent and explanatory set of types. The researcher often accumulates knowledge of the focal topic and then organises it to capture the variability of particular characteristics of the concept or phenomenon.

Examples of typology articles in educational research are:

Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational researcher, 27(2), 4-13. Classic paper tackling the confused area of talk about learning and arguing it needs at least two main categorisations and cannot be reduced to either one.
 
Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64. Offers a three-part typology for understanding small group classroom talk.
 
Paavola, S., & Hakkarainen, K. (2005). The knowledge creation metaphor. Science and Education, 14(6), 234-255. Offers three metaphors for learning.
 
This is not an exhaustive set of types of conceptual paper, nor is each type exclusive. In selecting examples I found it quite hard to distinguish which papers are theory synthesis, adaption, or typology. In practice these types of conceptual paper can overlap a lot. Some synthesis papers offer a taxonomy and build on a critique of other approaches. Many papers are not purely conceptual but advance conceptual contributions through small case studies or re-evaluation of data presented in other papers.

Concluding words

Empirical research papers in educational psychology often have a very narrow focus, adding to knowledge only incrementally within a theoretical framework without being able to question that framing. Teaching students to slavishly follow models of good research and good writing such as those offered by the APA is not really education, it is training.  In the field of education there is no single correct method of research since almost every concept or way of framing problems can and should be questioned. Good quality conceptual research in education is not only possible, it is essential. Teaching education students how to write should be about helping them actively participate in the long-term dialogue about how best to promote human flourishing. Learning how to apply genre conventions in order to write up modest empirical studies certainly has a place in educational research courses. However, if we want to produce creative researchers who can take the field forward we need to also teach how to question framing assumptions, connect findings to 'big picture' visions and participate fully in those powerful dialogues through which we build a future together.
 
 
 References

Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. The rhetoric of the human sciences, 125-144. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter9.pdf
 
Coffin, C and Wegerif, R (2000) How to write a standard research article. https://education.exeter.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/inspire/pages/view/research_article
 
Jaakkola, E. (2020). Designing conceptual articles: four approaches. AMS Review, 1-9.
 
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2004). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
 
Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge.
 
Notes

[i] https://apastyle.apa.org/
[ii] Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge. http://www.rupertwegerif.name/uploads/4/3/2/7/43271253/deiaproofs24thoct12.pdf
[iii] https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/oakeshott-on-education-as-conversation
[iv] Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. The rhetoric of the human sciences, 125-144. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter9.pdf
[v] http://www.helga-nowotny.eu/downloads/helga_nowotny_b59.pdf
[vi] Lewens, T. (2016). The meaning of science: An introduction to the philosophy of science. Hachette UK.
[vii] Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.
[viii] https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/the-rise-above-button
[ix] Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The uses of argument. Cambridge university press. see eg  https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/toulmin.pdf
[x] Stronach, I. (2007). On promoting rigour in educational research: the example of the RAE. Journal of Education Policy, 22(3), 343-352.

​And what this tells us about learning

​Back in the 1980's Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter created a 'computer supported intentional learning environment' (CSILE) for a kind of learning that they called 'knowledge building'.  A more recent version of this software called called Knowledge Forum®, is being used all over the world. CEDIR (the Cambridge Educational Dialogue research group) are working with Carol Chan, Jan van Aalst, Cindy Tong and other members of the Knowledge Forum team in Hong Kong University (https://kbc2.edu.hku.hk/). This collaboration has reminded me of what a great idea Knowledge Forum is and how many of its features can be used to illustrate and exemplify dialogic learning. Marlene writes about this invention:
 ​
'The heart of CSILE/Knowledge Forum is a multimedia community knowledge space. In the form of notes, participants contribute theories, working models, plans, evidence, reference material, and so forth to this shared space. The software provides knowledge building supports both in the creation of these notes and in the ways they are displayed, linked, and made objects of further work. Revisions, elaborations, and reorganizations over time provide a record of group advances, like the accumulation of research advances in a scholarly discipline'. (https://www.ikit.org/fulltext/CSILE_KF.pdf)
 
Knowledge Forum is intended to be an educational version of science where science is understood to be a global networked shared inquiry or dialogue. Students work together in small groups to come up with questions and then inquire into these together by making hypotheses and supporting these with arguments and evidence. Although there are many face to face discussions the claims and evidence for them is uploaded in the form of 'notes' in the shared forum space.

Example of a Knowledge Forum map[1]
 
In building this shared knowledge map students are helped by guides or 'scaffolds' - the row of buttons on the left hand side of the screen. These can be customised depending on the topic and the age of the kids but are usually based around theories, evidence to support the theories and, of course, challenges with counter-evidence. What has always excited me about Knowledge Forum though is one special scaffold: the 'rise above' scaffold or button. Marlene writes about this button:
 
' ...the most constructive way of dealing with divergent or opposing ideas is not to decide on a winner or a compromise position but rather to create a new idea that preserves the value of the competing ideas while “rising above” their incompatibilities. In the simplest cases a rise-above may be simply a summary or distillation; in the most compelling cases, the rise-above presents a new idea that all the participants can recognize as an advance over their previous ideas.'
 
One aspect of rise above move is encapsulating an area of dialogue. Other contributions can be dragged and dropped into the rise above button such that it is seen to represent a whole network of nodes. This is useful to simplify an over complex map. But, much more than this, the 'rise above' button is used to express a new insight that integrates the debate so far by making sense of it.
 
CSILE/Knowledge Forum has been around for over 30 years and if you search you can find many examples of maps and 'rise above' moves online. The examples seem to be mostly about science topics with children exploring questions that they themselves ask such as 'why does it rain?' or 'why are leaves green?'. But this approach is not limited to stem areas. Recently in Hong Kong a class of high school students of 15 to 16 years old explored the question: 'what is design?'. This inquiry included dialogue, conducted within in the Knowledge Forum system, with design professionals and academics while these were physically located outside of the classroom. The students began focussing on the idea that design is about 'solving problems' but increasingly explored the overlap between design and self-expression through art. Their final 'rise-above' move was to recognise that good design combined both utilitarian problem solving and a more artistic expression of a point of view on reality realised in each of the little choices that were made in process of design itself.
 
Is 'rise above' pushed or pulled?
 
The idea that learning involves a 'rise above' move is not new. Piaget wrote about how learning involves the development of schemas or 'cognitive structures'. When the data do not fit with the existing schema this leads, he wrote, to 'disequilibrium' which is uncomfortable forcing a new more adequate schema to emerge. He called this process 'accommodation'. The problem with this account from Piaget is that he implies that 'rise above' is not creative but is necessary, pushed from below by logical contradiction. But his theory has not been well supported by the empirical evidence. We are all, apparently, quite capable of living with contradictions in different areas of our experience. The formation of more adequate schema does not happen automatically. It can happen, but only when these different areas are brought into conscious dialogue with each other.  Our capacity to rise above is not so much pushed from below by unconscious brain mechanisms as pulled from above by the promise of a new, more comprehensive vision that emerges only within dialogue.
 
So how does this work? In every dialogue there is not just my voice and your voice but there is also a third voice, the 'witness' which is the emergent perspective arising out of the dialogue as whole. When we 'rise above' we leave our initial position behind in order to inhabit a new more collective and more comprehensive perspective. Being able to rise above in this way is not just about logic it is also requires what could be called a virtue. To be able to rise above you have first to be able to listen to the voice of truth, or at least the voice of a perspective that is more true in the context.  
 
When I think of my own experiences of learning it is rise-above moments that come to mind. Moments when I was led to understand something after engaging in a shared enquiry with other points of view that challenged my original ideas and made me realise that I had been partial and limited and that there is a different way of seeing that makes much better sense of things. Understanding how the rise above move happens can give us insight into the essence of learning and so enable us to design educational encounters that can better support learning.
 
Rise above and science
 
Currently as I write, a great deal of collective learning is going on in response to the challenge of a global pandemic. This is a global shared inquiry mediated by the Internet. At the very end of last year the WHO spotted a new virus in Wuhan, China; by the end of January this year Chinese doctors had sequenced the whole genome of COVID19 and shared it on the Internet, by 16th March the first dose of a possible vaccine was developed and administered in the USA. Information and theories about how best to respond to the pandemic are being shared around the world. Most agree that we need to trust the science, including the science of crowd behaviour, but it is clear that science here is complex and uncertain, involving a debate between experts who have a range of views. What makes this debate 'science' is not just the reference to empirical evidence but also the motivation of the participants.  What defines science is never a fixed method, after all the appropriateness of any method also always needs to be argued for, but it is much more an  attitude - an orientation towards the truth which can best be seen when people change their minds and rise above egotism or tribalism to see the things in a new way, a way that better fits the arguments and the evidence.

As C. S. Pierce argued over 100 years ago, scientific truth is not a simple idea - it is an ideal - an ideal of the future - the ideal of what scientists will agree on after all the relevant research has been done and every possible avenue gone down. It is this future that calls to us when we find ourselves able to rise above.
 
Dialogic education with networked technology of the kind that is exemplified by Knowledge Forum® is not always the most efficient way to learn curriculum content. It can certainly do that but much more than that, it is a good way to teach children to have a passion for the truth. It is relevant that this essence of learning is not a brain mechanism or even a word, but a button on a screen enabling the creation of a new node in a shared network. Learning is not individual but collective, always indissolubly both human and machine. I wager that the perspective of the future will reveal that children learning how to use the rise above button is the kind of education that we need as a species if we are to survive and thrive in this complex, interconnected and highly unpredictable universe.
 
Some possible further reading
 
Chan, C., Tong, Y., & van Aalst, J. C. W. (2019). Progressive dialogue in computer-supported collaborative knowledge Building. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R and Major, L (Eds) The Routledge international handbook on research on dialogic education (pp. 469-484). Routledge.
 
Kemple, B. (2019) C. S. Peirce on Science and Belief
https://epochemagazine.org/c-s-peirce-on-science-and-belief-9e1283348c2
 
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R and Major, L (Eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education, (pp 14-26) Routledge 
(PDF online)

[1] Figure from  Milinovich, S and Ma, L (2018) Promoting Student Engagement and Well-being through Community Knowledge Advancement. Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count, 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329840876_Promoting_Student_Engagement_and_Well-being_through_Community_Knowledge_Advancement

Perez Linares, J. and Wegerif, R. (2019) Dialogar para pensar y aprender juntos en el aula. Mexico city: Porrua

Unfortunately, our face-to-face reading group about Stiegler scheduled at Cambridge for Monday 25th has had to be cancelled. The third and final face to face reading group on the 2nd December about Embodied Cognition is also cancelled. There is a strike. Tech-Cedir will look at these issues again next term.

In my previous blog in this thread towards-a-theory-of-ed-tech-introducing-simondon.html I proposed  developing a theory of educational technology together and introduced the first paper on Simondon. Today I am introducing this paper on Stiegler and explaining why I think that Stiegler might have something to offer our emerging new theory of Educational Technology.

The focus reading is: Roberts, Ben (2012) Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory. New Formations, 77 (1). pp. 8-20. ISSN 0950-2378 .
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57022/1/roberts-nf-prepress.pdf
 
But the discussion is looking Stiegler in general including, for example, his recent comments on the Internet http://www.samkinsley.com/2013/11/21/bernard-stiegler-the-net-blues/

Stiegler builds on from Simondon.
 
Firstly he takes Simondon's account of the distinctive logic of technical objects and their individuation and goes further to focus on the individuation of the network that unites them. Technical objects individuate with their milieus, as Simondon put it and that milieu can  include a network without which they could not exist. Cars require petrol stations, roads, supplies of spares and garage mechanics etc. Whereas Simondon wrote about machines Stiegler is more attuned to the Internet and the emerging Internet of Things. Does this network have its own logic? It seems to have. Something to do with universalising, connecting everything and everyone.
 
Secondly Stiegler points out that what we think of as human is always already bound up with technology such that human development has been and continues to be a co-evolution between the organic element of human and the technical element. Simondon said something similar but he referred to the human element required in the evolution of technology as being 'anticipation'. In the iterative cycles of innovation human intelligence is needed to read the cues and anticipate what is required next for the concretisation journey of the technical object.
 
Stiegler looks at human evolution and spends some time establishing that this 'anticipation' is of technical origin. Or rather it is undecidably human/technical or what/who. So, for example, the frontal cortex grew at the same time as, and in slow conjunction with, the anticipation required to make tools like flint chipped axes. Tool making led to human capacity to anticipate as much as other way around. Part of this story is also communication. Language is also more than biological  human individual. Words are jointly forged artefacts. Their use implies anticipation. Thinking how others will respond. So what we think of as a who question - who are we? - is also a what question. We are technology on the inside from the beginning.
 
[Note: Donald Merlin and Tomasello cover similar ground but focus on communication in a more obviously dialogic way. Merlin points to the splitting of the working memory into two in mimesis or gestural communication to see oneself from the the point of view of the other in communication. Tomasello writes of the need for 'dialogic representions' to handle the joint attention needed by apes to understand their increasingly complex social lives.]
 
These two moves by Stiegler going beyond Simondon are  interesting for a theory of educational technology.  To be human is to be technological. What we are educating is not just the biological individual but the biological plus the technical. 'Person plus' as David Perkins puts it. But more than that the individuation of specific humans seems to be part of the individuation journey of a socio-technical network. Education is not just about human desires it is following a larger than human logic. So we try to expand literacy without worrying too much whether non-literate cultures really want this 'gift' because we are already literacy on the inside (e.g millenium goals). Now there are moves to promote 21st Century skills or 'Future skills' that are the needs of the emerging network society on the inside. Skills such as how to work together with tools on the internet to get things done even when not co-located. This contrasts to the still common view that ed tech are tools to serve separate education goals - now the ed tech becomes the goal in the sense of teaching how to participate in the tech and with the tech. (Wegerif, 2015).
 
For Simondon and for Stiegler, transindividuation is carried by cultural tools. Education is not just about individuation it is about transindividuation. Transindividuation is an open-ended ongoing process with multiple facets.
 
One way to understand this is to take Oakeshott's claim that education is induction into 'the conversation of mankind' through which we become fully human and to push this a little further. Oakeshott ignored the tech required for his vision as literacy was naturalised for him. Clearly the conversation of mankind as taught at Cambridge in his day did not include the voices of non-literates - he did not see the problem with that. With new tech we have to see literacy as not naturalised but as just one technical system of communication amongst others. Education is induction into the dialogue of all things, not just all people, mediated by a range of technics, not just literacy.  Through education we move in the direction of becoming most fully ourselves by becoming participants in an ongoing journey of humanisation that is also transhumanisation. In small-scale oral societies education had an endpoint  - you knew when you were fully human - it was when the ancestors spoke to you and welcomed you in. With literacy, globalising empires and capitalism a new vision of the fully human emerged - the global citizen. But if we acknowledge the independent voices of technics and things, this humanism is no longer enough - education becomes induction into the ongoing journey towards universal dialogue - all matter, all animals, all peoples, all gods etc. I see this emerging new post-human vision of education as linked to science in the broad 'wissenschaft' sense where science is understood as open-minded shared inquiry.
 
Stiegler, technics and time
 
Steigler's account of the role of technics in time is interesting for an emerging theory of ed tech. Roberts, in the reading, outlines this very well:
 
'Husserl distinguishes between primary retention or memory and secondary retention or memory. Primary retention is the kind of memory that is necessary to perceive a temporal object such as a melody: in effect the melody will not exist as an object of perception unless the listener retains or remembers the notes that precede the one that is currently heard. Secondary retention is, as it were, the more traditional understanding of memory where, for example, I remember a melody I heard last week. There is also a third kind of memory, which Husserl calls ‘image consciousness’ and Stiegler calls ‘tertiary memory’ where an external object, such as a picture or photograph, reactivates a memory. Now for Husserl primary memory can be rigorously distinguished from secondary or tertiary memory because it belongs to the act of perception itself, whereas secondary or tertiary memory involve acts of imaginative selection. Secondary and tertiary memory are thus derivative from primary memory, secondary memory or our perception of the temporal object. ' Stiegler reverses that order. Our experience of time, he says,  requires and is mediated by technics.
 
To put this another way, the Internet is not just a repository of our experiences, it constitutes them. When I click on a music video I have a unique experience.
 
This is also an account of how come we experience things in time. Historical time, the past that we have not lived, is embodied in objects, texts, videos etc and our experience of time emerges in a kind of dialogue between primary time (the resonance of now) with this tertiary or historical time which is the time of technics. We have conscious awareness of time because of technics.
 
One way to investigate education technology is in relation to its role in inducting students into time (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/education-as-a-journey-into-time)
 
Alienation and ed tech
 
As we saw Simondon corrected Marx to say that the problem of alienation is not so much about ownership of machinery as about participation in the design of machinery. Workers or consumers who are not participating creatively in technology development have their individuation capped - they are truncated and unhappy - not part of the larger transindividuation flow process.
 
Stiegler refers to the Internet as a 'pharmakon' concept in this respect - pharmakon means both poison and remedy in Ancient Greek and was used by Plato to refer to writing in Socrate's dialogue with Phaedrus. Writing was offered by a god to the Greeks as a remedy curing their problems but Socrates saw it more as a poison destroying current  morality and education based on practices of face to face dialogue and memorisation. (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html) (http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis and also Bernard in a video https://youtu.be/SRNjImtIA0M Stiegler Keynote www2012 Lyons).
 
Anamnesis is 'calling to mind' without tech and hypomnesis is memory tech, photos, texts etc . The danger Stiegler sees is that of control of big data. The big data of the Internet is our collective life and our possibility of trans-individuation. Is the culture/data something experienced as opposed to us or experienced as something that we are part of? (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/who-are-we-really-a-blog-for-christmas)
 
This is about our experience of time. Some forms of education separate the hypomnesis from the anamnesis - historical/cultural time from everyday time. Other forms unite the moment with the history/culture - hypomnesis and  anamnesis can be united in dialogue creatively and dynamically. This is the idea of dialogic education from Freire where the dialogue has no limits but includes dialogue between the moment and the culture or between primary memory and Stiegler's tertiary memory. Ed tech has a crucial role in facilitating that dialogue.
 
Wikis and peer-to-peer learning communities enable not only access to collective knowledge but participation in producing it. Tools such as 'tinkerplots'  give interactive access to understanding and working with collective data. Citizen science projects on, e.g, global warming or exploring the interstellar debris of the big bang, give everyone access to live participation in collective inquiry into reality both producing and consuming shared understanding.
 
So the Internet could be reducing us to isolated passive individuals, dumbed down and distracted, at the mercy of manipulation by big companies - or perhaps it has the potential to facilitate the emergence of a collective intelligence that is much more than human. Stiegler shares his concern about the danger of the Internet shaping our brains in a limiting way http://www.samkinsley.com/2013/11/21/bernard-stiegler-the-net-blues/ But perhaps this depends to some extent on us, our foresight and our use of ed tech. We could use it as a tool to deliver fixed high status 'knowledge' - a framework that locates each present moment in its place and each person in their place - or we could use it as a way to engage each moment and each person more creatively in constructive dialogue with every other moment and every other person - participating in a collective movement of transindividuation that is also a transformation - a turning inside out - of reality.
 
For Stiegler this is an undecidable question or an aporia. He is side-stepping the potential charge of technological determinism and teleology. But - according to Simondon - our role as researchers is much like that of any other creative engineer - to read the cues and participate in a process of innovation that is more than just our intentions or the intentions of the machine but a kind of synergy. The emergent logic of what needs to be done to take things forward. One possible reading of our situation - a reading inspired by Stiegler's developments from Simondon - is that a coherent human/technical/natural planetary intelligence has the potential to emerge in the next hundred years or so and that the use of education technology can be defined by the role that it can play in facilitating that process. 
 
 
A glossary of terms:
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Stiegler%20glossary.pdf
 
References:
http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis
 
https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Summary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1
Dan Ross
 
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time: The fault of Epimetheus (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.
 
https://youtu.be/SRNjImtIA0M Stiegler Keynote www2012 Lyons
 
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Harvard University Press.
 
Tomasello, M., & Herrmann, E. (2010). Ape and human cognition: What's the difference?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 3-8.
 
Perkins, D. N. (1993). Person-plus: A distributed view of thinking and learning. Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations, 88-110.
 
Wegerif, R. (2015). Technology and teaching thinking: Why a dialogic approach is needed for the twenty-first century. In The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 451-464). Routledge.
 
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.
 

Some notes to introduce the Tech-CEDiR reading group sessions, especially the first one on Simondon.

Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 1) – 6th Nov 11:30-12:30 – DMB GS4
Simondon
Dumouchel, P. (1992). Gilbert Simondon's plea for a philosophy of technology. Inquiry, 35(3-4), 407-421.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291258917_Gilbert_Simondon's_Plea_for_a_Philosophy_of_Technology
​
Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 2) – 25th Nov 11:30-12:30 – DMB 1S3
Stiegler
Roberts, Ben (2012) Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory. New Formations, 77 (1). pp. 8-20. ISSN 0950-2378 .
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57022/1/roberts-nf-prepress.pdf


Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 3) – 2nd Dec 11:30-12:30 – DMB 2S4 RECS
Chimero, A (2013) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Review of General Psychology © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 17, No. 2, 145–15
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.400.9177&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Rationale for reading group

I think that we need a proper theory of educational technology and I hope that this Tech-CEDIR reading group will help us to develop it. The idea is that, thinking about these papers and responding in face to face meetings, via twitter and on this blog, we might together begin to emerge a theory of the nature and role of ed tech. Part of that discussion might be suggestions for further readings as well as if and how the group should continue.

The three initial readings, on Simondon, on Stiegler and on radical embodied cognition are meant to stimulate discussions on three possible elements of a theory of ed tech.

Firstly, from Simondon, that technical objects or artefacts do have an essence that is different both from natural objects and from humans. Key to this is his account of individuation which suggests we should look at technical objects from the point of view of how they become what they are in a process of 'ontogenesis' that is not simply determined by human intentions or by material properties.

Secondly, from Stiegler, that what we think of as human is always already bound up with technology such that human development has been and continues to be a co-evolution between the organic element of human and the technical element. This is interesting because it potentially gives a special role to education and to ed tech in making humans and in any future project to make humans differently. Steigler shifts attention to the individuation of the network within which technical objects exist along with humans.

Thirdly the perspective of radically embodied cognition suggests how our technology can be understood as part of cognition. It follows that an education for thinking that is not only about the thinking of the organic individual (the brain?) but also a thinking of the human-technology network. This again potentially offers a role for ed tech at the heart of education.

Bypassing Heidegger

Other initial readings could have been possible. Inquiry into the philosophy of technology often starts with Heidegger. Winograd and Flores' seminal book 'Understanding Computers and Cognition: A new foundation for design' show how Heideggers philosophy is relevant to ed tech. Heidegger's distinction between the 'present at hand' (stuff we see in front of us as if independent of us in the theoretical attitude) and the 'ready to hand' (stuff we are always already involved with in doing things in the world in a practical way) is fundamental. It can be approached using the common expression 'a man with a hammer is a man in search of a nail'. 'Breakdown' is when the ready to hand become present at hand - when the skype call freezes and we move from a dialogue to looking at an image on a screen. This implies that technology extends the human body. But Heidegger's vision of technology seemed to stop with the 'techne' of the ancient greeks which referred to crafts such as weaving. Heidegger did not like modern technology very much. He preferred to spend his time in a simple hut in the Black Forest. He saw modern tech as embodying rationalism in a way that inevitably 'enframed' people, cutting them off from Being and turning the environment into resources to be exploited. I think that Simondon is a better place to start because he loved technology and liked to play with machines and engage with the latest hard science like de Broglie's quantum theory. Levinas's essay on Gagarin contains an excellent dismissal of Heidegger's view of technology.

'Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions regarding place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity. Socrates prefers the town in which one meets people to the countryside and the trees.' (Levinas, 1990)

Here Levinas links Heidegger’s rejection of modern technology to his Nazi party involvement and his love of trees. Arguably Heidegger’s attitude to technology can still be found in Waldorf and Montessori schools and strands of the ecology movement. Human scale tech -good: big global networked tech - bad. But this attitude seems just not very relevant anymore and not very useful to help us forge a vision of education for the Internet Age so I suggest we just move on more rapidly leaving Heidegger grumbling in our wake.

Why Simondon is so interesting

Simondon was a Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne who engaged traditional theory with modern science and technology. Merleau-Ponty was on his PhD panel. He had a big influence on Deleuze and on Stiegler. The paper we are reading introduces his philosophy of technology. (See also Steven Shaviro blog on this http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=298) Simondon is also interesting for his related account of psychic and collective individuation (see Steven Shaviro blog on this http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=471)

Simondon opposes the opposition of technology to nature that sees technology as a tool for controlling nature.
1) Tools are not just passively used: they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use - this is the individuation of technical objects (consider design-based research on new ed tech tools - it is about iteration, resistance and contingency)

2) Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. Every technical object has some agency and every subject has some materiality.

All individuation,- natural forms eg crystals, organic life, technical objects, individual human selves and also trans-individual subjectivity - originates in the pre-individual. The pre-individual refers to the state of metastability that makes possible each individuation. Pure pre-individual actually exists ‘before’ any individuation – in an ‘anteriority’ that is not temporal, since time itself ‘develops out of the pre-individual just like the other dimensions according to which the process of individuation takes place’ (2005, p 34). Simondon’s inspiration for the pre-individual comes from thermodynamic metastability, and also from the famous wave-particle duality in quantum physics, in so far as this duality is ‘more than one’ and in so far as the particle is, strictly speaking, not an individual. (Barthelemy, 2012)

Simondon put forward an original theory of information as that which 'informs' - or has the capacity to inform - individuation. This is a bit like Bateson's idea of information as based on differences that make a difference. Transduction is one process whereby information can support individuation. Consider how a catalyst can lead to crystals forming rapidly in a super-saturated solution. Thought tends to work like that. Information technology has the potential to support the ontogenesis of transindividualities that are indissociably human and technical. Simondon wrote that the ‘value of the dialogue of the individual with the technical object’ is ‘to create a domain of the transindividual, which is different from the community’ (2005 p515).

This vision has inspired new form of Marxism (eg see Antonio Negri). Simondon's idea is that the alienation of the workers in industrialisation was not primarily about not owning the machines they worked on in factories - - but was more fundamentally about not being able to change those machines or to think creatively together with those machines. To be unalienated is to be creative and to be creative is not just to retreat to a hut in the Black Forest to write books and arrange flowers but is perhaps more fundamentally about being able to participate in transindividual collective activity which is supported by technological networks.

For Simondon technical objects always have a subjective as well as an objective side - they have a phenomenology. For example, think of the experience of using the internet which some refer to as being in cyberspace. Moving around cyberspace is not the same as moving around fibre-optic cable networks. Similarly using tools in education has a subjective side. We learn to understand at the same time as we learn to use our tools. Think of a slide-rule or an abacus. Now think of various software tools. This has become known as instrumentalization within ed tech (see impedevo et al 2017).

Before the next reading I will say something more about why Stiegler is interesting for our project, and then why radical embodied cognition might be interesting. Unless someone else volunteers to do this of course

Please post comments on the first reading in response to this blog or in response to a Twitter Chat that Genevieve Smith-Nunes will organise around the dates of the reading groups https://twitter.com/pegleggen




Barthélémy, J. H. (2012). Fifty key terms in the works of Gilbert Simondon. Gilbert Simondon: being and technology, 203-231.

Impedovo, M. A., Andreucci, C., & Ginestié, J. (2017). Mediation of artefacts, tools and technical objects: An international and French perspective. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 27(1), 19-30.

Levinas, E. (1990). Heidegger, Gagarin and Us, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism,

Winograd T, Flores F (1986) Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., Menlo Park
Simondon 2005 L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Jérôme Millon, coll. Krisis).