Rupert Wegerif

I first encountered Greek when I tried to read philosophy as a teenager.  I would think that I was following the ideas until I was stopped in my tracks by words in an unfamiliar script, words like λόγος meaning ‘word’ but also, depending on context, ‘thought’, ‘speech’ or ‘reason’ or νοῦς meaning ‘mind’ or also, depending on context, ‘intelligence’ or ‘insight’.  Not understanding these signs projected me from insider to outsider status.  I had felt that I understood – that I was included within a shared space of meaning – one of the gang - and then I was unceremoniously ejected. Not knowing Greek, I found myself on the outside looking in, thinking what the %@*&! does that mean! 
 
My first time in a school as a trainee teacher involved similar experiences. At first the other teachers made me feel at home but then small incidents led me to feel like an outsider. I did not understand the significance of many unspoken differences that I could somehow sense were important without knowing quite why. And I do not just mean which chair to sit on in the staff room – although that was an issue – I also mean most aspects of the craft of teaching. Some teachers, for example, were expert at gaining respect and directing the attention of difficult students. At first I could not see how they were doing this. Later I learnt to recognise some ways of using voice, posture, and eye contact that they were using and that I needed to learn. It almost always takes a while to move from feeling like an outsider to becoming an insider: from seeing signs of what being a teacher means when looking at others to walking and talking the reality of being a teacher from within. 
 
We are all of us surely familiar with this switch from outside to inside  – at least I hope that this distinction makes sense to you.  (And if this does make sense to you, dear reader, then pause a while to consider what is happening when you read these signs, how are these patterns of external grey or black marks on a screen in front of you connecting with patterns in your experience, connecting with your answering words perhaps, to form a new internal space of meaning not just outside you as if trapped on the screen but also not completely inside you, closed off inside your head. Where is this place? This space where we meet? What is it exactly?) While most people seem to get the difference between being an insider in a social situation and being an outsider, the same people can seem to get very confused at what I think is the closely related distinction between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ or between ‘consciousness’ and ‘matter’. 
 
In notebooks published after his untimely death the French philosopher of perception, and my first intellectual crush, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, describes an incident on a visit to Manchester when, perhaps thrown by the local accent, he could not make out what the taxi driver was saying. He writes that it was only when he did not understand that he thought to himself ‘those are words there’. His perception shifted. Normally if a taxi driver says something like: ‘it is a lovely day today’ we grasp the meaning immediately and are ready to respond. Normally hearing words means moving directly into a world of shared meaning. But this time he heard the words only as external sounds in the air. Objective, material facts. That is how things often appear when you are an outsider – closed off, cold, dead. But as an insider, you understand the words and you enter into a shared space, what I like to call a dialogic space. It is dialogic – meaning ‘like a dialogue’ – because all the voices and words in this space are not static and fixed objects anymore but they influence each other dynamically, moving and changing – dancing around each other in real time. 
 
I think that what might lie behind binary accounts of objectivity versus subjectivity is an extrapolation of ideas out from the everyday experience of having an inside point of view, talking to a taxi driver for example, or taking an outside point of view, watching someone else talking to a taxi driver for example or perhaps imagining Merleau-Ponty talking to a taxi driver in Manchester. On the one hand people have projected the idea of an inside without an outside: the subjective world; a mysterious realm sometimes referred to as ‘consciousness’ inhabited by vague ghosts labelled as ‘souls’ or ‘selves’ surrounded by buzzing clouds of ‘thoughts’, ‘values’ or ‘memories’. On the other hand people have projected an equally odd, equally extreme idea of an outside without an inside: the ‘objective’ real world; a world of solid fixed things, matter made of atoms like little hard ball bearings bouncing around or fields of time and space like a four dimensional shoe box that contains us within it. But if you return from these culturally constructed fantasies to the reality of experience you will I hope realise with me, that inside and outside are always entangled up together - it is simply not possible to have an outside without an inside or to have an inside without an outside. What we have is not a choice between subjectivity or objectivity, consciousness or matter, but more a kind of dialogue or a kind of dance: sometimes I see myself as an object, defined by the gaze of others, sometimes I am on the inside looking outwards and defining them, sometimes the objects I see before me are just that, closed dead things to be probed and measured, and at other times they come alive and draw me into new worlds of experience. 
 
Modelling the outside becoming inside 

Picture 1: Mobius strip with ants crawling on it by Escher

An ant walking forwards on the surface of a mobius strip would find itself moving from the outside of the strip to the inside. This could be an analogy for what happens in education: at first the strange Greek words like λόγος are alien, outside my experience, but after a while, with the help of a guide, I find that I can use them creatively to make sense of things. From being an object in the apparently external world they become lights in the more internal world of my understanding. From being an outsider I become an insider just by walking forwards on the path of education. 
 
I hope that you agree with me that this 'turning the outside inside' idea helps to describe learning Greek philosophy perhaps or learning to be a teacher but I would also like to take it further. I think that this idea sums up what is most essential to education and it locates education as a part of what might be a much larger process of growth through which the whole external apparently ‘objective’ world or universe is slowly internalising in order to understand itself and express itself through us. Perhaps we are the universe on the inside? After all the scientists who explore the universe and discover new things work in institutions of education, their research is combined with teaching, and the same is true of scholars and researchers who explore and expand the world of human experience through history and the arts. At its best education does not just reproduce what is already there, it inducts new apprentices to participate in the endless job of the creation and recreation of the world. 
 
I got this big idea – the idea that education as about turning outside inside in order to be able to turn inside outside again in expression – after reading James Joyce’s  autobiographical first novel ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. I was struck by how he starts the novel with himself, the author, as a passive part of the external world. The opening words of the novel are:

​We are to imagine Joyce – referred to as Stephen Daedalus in the novel – lying passively as a baby in a cot while his father leans over and tells him a story. He is ‘baby tuckoo’ and the words float down to him from outside and invite themselves in to meet him. At the beginning this baby, any baby, is not yet a fully formed ‘inside’, it has the potential to be an inside of course, much like an acorn found on the ground has the potential to grow into a giant tree. The novel describes a full education: how the author gradually learns the language, culture, and history of his context in Ireland and acquires his own voice until he is ready to leave Ireland and to become a writer. There is a gradual shift from being part of an outside to becoming an inside. From the unspecified past time of dreams (‘once upon a time’) at the beginning of the novel we arrive, by the end of the novel, at the present moment of action: from the third person we move to the first person. The last words of the book are:

Picture 2: The name Daedalus, given to Joyce’s protagonist, refers to the myth of a great craftsman who makes wings so that he can escape an island prison – the labyrinth. 

Making sense of the role of ChatGPT in education 
Although I first came across this idea of education – education as turning outside inside – in Joyce’s novel, I later found the same sort of idea in different forms within educational theory. The ‘Situated Learning’ theory of Lave and Wenger, for example, describes how outsiders join communities of practice moving from ‘peripheral legitimate participation’ (doing small jobs, sweeping the hair in a hairdressers shop for example)  until they become central players, old-timers whom others turn to for mentoring and advice. The Russian educational psychologist Vygotsky articulated a related theory of education as ‘internalisation’ using the Russian word vrashchivanie which also means ‘ingrowing’. His basic idea is that everything we think of as mind, not only being able to think but also being able to be conscious of thinking, is first encountered externally in social interactions and cultural practices and then internalised. Through education children are actively taught their culture so as to be able to think with it. This means that when we look out and think things as if we are individuals we are actually the collective culture on the inside albeit expressing itself in an always unique new way. This idea that the collective becomes the individual so that the individual is the collective on the inside is also suggested by Joyce when he writes about becoming the ‘conscience of my race’. 
 
But Joyce’s model of education offered in his ‘Portrait of the Artist’ is perhaps a bit too heroic and individualistic. He refers to forging his new conscience in ‘the smithy of my soul’ as if his soul was like a separate space cut off from the world. Another way of looking at this same process might be as him finding his voice in the larger dialogue of culture, a dialogue that includes multitudes. ChatGPT and other AI agents based on large language models (LLMs), offer what is, I think, a much clearer model, of how education can be seen as a circling of the collective outside around an individual inside and then outside again in expression. ChatGPT begins with a collective outside – it  trawls the internet to collect externalised language or words that have already been spoken. It does not read these words as words but finds statistical patterns in them. When you ask ChatGPT a question to help with learning any subject – perhaps key words in Greek philosophy, or how best to engage difficult students – it draws on this vast background of collective knowledge to express an answer. This answer has meaning for you only because it is internal to the specific and unique educational dialogue that you are having at that moment. ChatGPT is not conscious and does not understand anything. Its words circle from the collective outside of (potentially) all recorded language use on the internet to the unique and specific inside experience of you the user finding that the words ChatGPT gives you have meaning for a task that you are facing here and now. The meaning element, the educational purpose, is only possible because of the human in the loop, you who are asking the question and contextualising the answer. The AI and human students form together an interesting new kind of global organism: words and other meanings expressed by unique individuals understanding things and solving problems in a context go to make up part of the collective external treasury of signs that will then be trawled and processed by the AI to be fed back to new students asking new questions in new contexts. A collective unconscious outside revolves around and is constantly expanded and recreated by many unique conscious individual insides. I think that this is a good way of understanding what is really happening in education when it works well. The collective culture turns inwards and is reborn in each individual student as their ability to think creatively and express themselves outwards in ways that contribute back to the collective culture.
 
Why this inside-outside distinction matters  
Some accounts of education seem to remain only on the outside without giving a role to the inside –  they are not taking seriously the needs of individuals and communities trying to understand the world and to find their place within it. We read for example in UK government documents that learning means changes in long term memory: the story seems to be that facts found first outside of students in books move inside into their brains and are then expressed outside again onto the exam page. If this really is education, then ChatGPT can do it better. Why not eliminate the middleman? It would be more efficient. ChatGPT can trawl for facts faster than human students and can then regurgitate these more accurately as well as weaving them together more coherently and persuasively into essays. 
 
Real education is education for understanding which means the expansion of consciousness and the transformation of identity. Real education is about bringing what we originally encounter as external to us into an internal space of meaning, a shared dialogic space enabling us to think and to act together with more insight and more wisdom. ChatGPT and other LLMs can support this kind of real education but only when working together with human students and human teachers.  To make this vision of education work we need to teach students how to dialogue with AI agents to construct answers to problems in contexts and we also need to teach them how to find together new and better questions to ask and new and better problems to pose. Education could potentially become a virtuous circle combining the collective information gathering of AIs with the individual questions and insights of students; students who are thereby engaged into a kind of game of leapfrog with this new technology using it to gain more knowledge and stimulate further insights.
 
Thinking about education through the lens of LLM-based AI we can see that it has always been the circling of a collective outside – the collective inheritance of a shared culture  - to form individual insides able to express outwards both to recreate culture and to create new culture. But now with AI able to handle most of the more external work needed for this cycle, trawling for, processing and reproducing collective data, the focus of teaching and learning can be much more on the inside part of the cycle, on growing unique individual minds able to participate creatively as voices in a shared dialogue or what some might poetically refer to as a growing collective mind – an ever expanding noosphere (from nous or νοῦς, the Greek for mind).  
 
Postscript  
I want to end with something rather cryptic and evocative that Vygotsky wrote in the context of articulating his theory of education as internalisation or ‘ingrowing’.

When Vygotsky refers to ‘a word’ here  he does not mean the external word, the brute fact of black marks in ink on a white page or pixels on a screen, but a transformed word, a word (λόγος in Greek) first turned outside in by education and then shining inside-out to become a light that illuminates the world. Vygotsky here refers to ‘human consciousness’ as if this is a sphere separate from the sphere of physics and the sphere of biology but in fact he thought of all these three spheres as evolving together in a larger historical process - neural development merging into education – natural history growing into human history. After all we know that Vygotsky’s favourite philosopher was Spinoza the philosopher who pointed out that mind and matter are always joined together as two sides of the same coin, or two modes of the same universe. 
 

[i] https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/Thinking-and-Speech.pdf page 284

I am just back from an extended visit to mainland China. I gave talks and met with academics, educational entrepreneurs and students in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Zhuhai. The air was much cleaner than when I last visited 12 years ago and the roads were full of new cars, many of them electric, Audis, Toyotas and Teslas as well as recent Chinese brands. The temples were also full. In the main Confucius temple in Beijing crowds thronged and donation troughs were brimming with notes from families perhaps hoping for success in exams. The main Buddhist temple in Guangzhou was alive with people chanting, studying and paying respects. 
 
Confucianism 
Despite claims of a falling population, I saw children everywhere: well behaved playful happy looking children in the main supervised by obviously caring families. Children of Chinese families, whether rich or poor, tend to do well in education systems all around the world. This much commented upon Chinese effect is often attributed to the Confucian focus on education as a path to self-improvement. Confucius set great store by education which, for him, partly meant memorising the classic texts of ancient China. Meritocratic exams for entry into government service were first introduced in the Sui dynasty about 600 CE. 
 
Taoism

Confucius, a real person from the 3rd Century BCE,  is reported as showing great respect for the older, perhaps more mythical, founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu, whose name,  老子, literally means ‘Old Master’. However much of the Tao te Ching, the book of wisdom, attributed to Lao Tzu could be read as a challenge to Confucianism. 
 
In verse 48 we read:
“In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped”.
[為學日益, 為道日損]
 
Similarly the Confucian focus on becoming benevolent (ren, 仁) and righteous (yi, 義) is laughed at in the Tao te Ching. In verse 19 we read:
“End benevolence; abandon righteousness.
The people return to piety and charity.”
​ [絕仁棄義, 民復孝慈]
 
However, Taoism can be interpreted as not so much opposing Confucianism as deepening it. It is not against the reality of knowledge and goodness but against attachment to ideas of knowledge and goodness. Seeking more knowledge and trying to be better implies a self-centred slightly grasping attitude. The real knower is not the academic who thinks that they know but the person who acts appropriately in the moment. The really good person does what is needed for collective flourishing without thinking ‘I am doing this, I am a good person’.
 
The apparently harmonious co-existence of respect for Confucianism and for Taoism in China is itself testimony to the success of an essentially Taoist relational way of thinking often associated with the Yin-Yang symbol. There are no hard and fast distinctions: the extremes secretly depend upon each other – there is no black without white, no good without evil.

Apparent meaning for us, the apparent meaning of terms like  ‘good’ and ‘evil’ or ‘self’ and ‘other’, come from making contrasts within the whole and the Taoist seeks wisdom through embracing the whole. Hence the extraordinary resonance of the much quoted first verse of the Tao te Ching:
 
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao,
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
道可道 非常道
名可名 非常名

Chinese Buddhism

Guanyin, a Chinese name for the Boddhisatva of compassion, is depicted as having a thousand arms so that she can touch the hearts of all sentient beings. This ideal of compassion through extended embodiment is closely associated with the ideal of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not simply intellectual in this tradition – it includes growing a bigger heart. The Chinese Buddhism I witnessed seemed to focus on the heart sutra, the ‘spell of great wisdom’ which claims, through a short speech from the Boddhisatva of compassion, that the way to enlightenment lies in realising that ‘form is emptiness and emptiness is form’.
 
The Heart Sutra stresses the educational value of emptiness in much the same way as the Tao te Ching. The ideal of Taoism, 'wu wei', [无为] is action through non action, action that somehow accomplishes everything yet involves no effort. In the Heart Sutra the ideal is freedom from fear, suffering and death that comes from realising that everything is empty. 
 
I find it useful to compare this more original Chinese enlightenment tradition to the relatively more recent European enlightenment tradition. Both are about increasing awareness. In the European tradition, education and science drive an expansion of knowledge and reason that increasingly enables ‘us’ to explain, predict and control the world. This enlightenment project of expanding power through applied knowledge has proved amazingly successful since its origins in 18th Century France. But the initial division assumed between ‘us’ and the world, ‘self’ vs ‘other’ or ‘subjectivity’ vs ‘objectivity’, becomes increasingly problematic as this project progresses. It sometimes feels as if this project ends with people apparently having more knowledge, wealth and power, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, often feeling more lost and more alone.
 
The Chinese enlightenment tradition spelt out in the Heart Sutra is also very much about an expansion of the reach of consciousness, but it begins by questioning any distinction between self and world. Meditating on the body images, the places where the body touches the world, the eyes, the nose, the breath, one finds that the body is not what it seems, not so much a thing in the world as a meaning, like other meanings, produced by a patterning of the void. Where we really live is not then in the external world but in the ‘void’ that precedes the world. The idea of void here is not really ‘empty’ of course, it is also full, it is more the idea of a potentiality for meaning: it can perhaps be thought of as like the blank paper that waits to be patterned into meanings by the swish of a calligraphy brush. Realising that all apparent reality is built from distinctions that pattern underlying – and encompassing – emptiness, means expanding awareness – expanding what the word ‘self’ or the word ‘us’ refers to – in order to embrace all others, all sentient beings and indeed, all that is or could be. If everything is a patterning of the void then whomsoever becomes one with the void becomes one with everything.
 
Simplifying greatly one might say that whereas the European enlightenment project aimed mainly at an external embrace of the universe, observing and controlling, the original Chinese enlightenment project aimed more at an internal embrace by the universe, becoming one with the universe through stepping back before the division of self and other. The mystery of the Tao that cannot be named lies before the first cut that gives birth to the infinite number of apparently separate things as these lines in the first verse of the Tao te Ching elegantly expresses : 

The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
[無名天地之始, 有名萬物之母]
A similar ontology is articulated in the Heart Sutra:
this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body
 
Chinese Marxism

I was lucky enough to be in Shanghai at the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party on the same day that it was formed 102 years ago.  Many groups were lining up to be photographed in front of the building where the first congress met.
 
In the grounds of the Confucius temple in Beijing I encountered an ancient college that had once prepared students for the government entry exams. I was struck that the long traditions of formal education in China had not been built upon but abandoned and replaced by a Western model. The impressive modern universities that I visited, Peking University, Tsinghua and Beijing Normal University, had all been founded around the beginning of the last century to follow a European curriculum with more focus on science and technology than on Chinese classics. This sudden change in educational system was perhaps a response to the shock of being defeated by western powers, who, in different military expeditions, plundered the capital city. Thousands of years of Chinese culture: the great humanism and ethical focus of Confucius, the wisdom of Taoism and the enlightenment project of Chinese Buddhism failed to protect China from invasion. 
 
President Xi has advocated more teaching of Confucius but not at the expense of teaching Marxism. He advocates a new kind of Marxism that is in keeping with Chinese traditions. Confucianism and Taoism came out of periods of chaos in Chinese history and seem to be designed to support stability and harmony rather than change. Marxism, by contrast, is very much a European enlightenment project advocating progress through the expansion of knowledge and reason. But unlike some other versions of the European enlightenment project, Marxism is not individualistic. 
 
For Marx, and for Vygotsky who applied Marxism to education, intelligence is always already understood as something collective. It originates in social interaction where groups work together to get things done and is then internalised to take the apparent form of individual intelligence. The teacher’s role in education is to induct children, individualistic little animals at first, into the collective thinking of their culture helping them internalise the ‘cognitive tools’ of the language so that they can become more fully self-conscious only at the price, as it were, of becoming more fully collective. Having internalised the culture individuals externalise it again, working together with others in conscious association to create a better future. 
 
In the light of its support for violent revolution Marxism is often seen as interventionist in a way that seems to go against the Tao. However, Marx, a great fan of Darwin, was clear that he sought a scientific view of history in continuity with nature. In Marxism as in Taoism, internality and externality, the self and the world, subjectivity and objectivity, are seen as two aspects of one dynamic evolving whole. The human role, Marx argued, is to discern the big patterns of history and facilitate them, using force when needed in order to serve, in Marx’s phrase, as kind of ‘midwife’ to the birth of the new. Although it will be seen as an odd interpretation it could perhaps be argued that discerning what nature wants and doing this is quite Taoist even when the patterns discerned are large-scale and social rather than local and physical. After all the word Tao, 道, does not mean being empty, that is the word ‘wu’ ,无, or ‘kong’, 空: tao means ‘the way’, more specifically  ‘the way ahead’.

 
The future 
The education students I taught in BNU’s new Zhuhai campus were prospective teachers. They were engaged, enthusiastic and thoughtful. For example, they challenged my claims that Confucius was a dialogic teacher pointing out that he was always in charge and did not himself ever show signs of learning from his students. I am not sure if dialogic teachers really always need to learn  from their students, but they certainly ought to be open to this possibility and modelling that from time to time is not a bad idea. So I learnt from the students and we concluded that Confucius was in some ways dialogic and in some ways not. It seemed to me that these teachers were hungry to rethink education in the new context within which they find themselves. How to work with new technology and teach the kind of skills that the future needs were issues high on their agenda. The same seems to be true of China as a whole. In discussing and developing new models of education, education appropriate to China with its unique history and modern challenges, it is good that they can draw upon the profound philosophical resources provided by Chinese traditions of thought. I am delighted to be asked to participate in this adventure. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if China can find a way to unite the different ‘enlightenment projects’ that have so motivated humanity: enlightenment as power-giving knowledge about nature and enlightenment as becoming one with nature?

[Students at the end of a short course on dialogic education at BNU Zhuhai. Prof Li Yuan who invited me is standing in front of me and Shengpeng Shi, my phd student who helped me deliver the course, and helped me with much else, is kneeling in front of Li Yuan in the middle of the bottom row]


Possibly useful links:
https://taoism.net/tao-te-ching-online-translation/
https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation
Li, L., & Wegerif, R. (2014). What does it mean to teach thinking in China? Challenging and developing notions of ‘Confucian education’. Thinking skills and creativity, 11, 22-32.

A brief preview of a new book coming soon from Routledge. I wrote it with Louis Major who is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Education at the University of Manchester. 

Educational technology is controversial. Some see it as the solution needed to provide free global learning. Others see it a dangerous distraction undermining good education. To move this debate forward, we need theory that can help us understand educational technology and its role in the future of education. Most theories that have been applied to educational technology have been educational theories that do not account for the distinctive nature and potential of technology. This approach does not work because the tools that we use make a difference to the kind of teaching and learning that is possible. What we consider desirable in education is already informed by the kind of technologies that we are familiar with. In this book, we explore how education has been bound up with technology from the beginning. This means that what we think of as educational aims have already been shaped by technologies. It is important to disentangle the effect of legacy technologies on education if we are interested in designing for a future that will shape, and be shaped by, new emergent technologies. Thinking about the design of educational technology is thinking about the design of the future. The ‘dialogic’ theory of educational technology that we offer is a response to the challenges that face us today, challenges such as climate change, misinformation on the Internet, and the effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These challenges all stem from collective human activity that has not been steered sufficiently by collective intelligence. 

Discussion of theory is contextualised in each chapter with case studies and illustrations of the design and use of educational technology in a wide range of contexts, from primary education through to adult lifelong learning. Each chapter ends with a short summary of practical implications for design. At the end of the book, we bring these implications together to offer a dialogical theoretical foundation for educational design. 

This book is essential reading for all those creating and researching educational technology. It should also be read by those involved in making decisions about the design and use of educational technology.

Contents: 
1. Introduction
2. An alternative history of educational technology
3. Affordance theory
4. The 'grammar' of educational technology
5. Steps towards a dialogic 'grammar'
6. Heidegger's hammer
7. The 'meaning' of technology 
8. Technology and expanding dialogic space
9. Technology and expanding dialogic time
10. Researching educational technology
11. A dialogic foundation for the design and practice of educational technology

Extract from the Introduction:
Why do we need a 'theory' of educational technology?Most educational technology research is done with limited or no reference to theory (Bond et al., 2019; Bodily et al., 2019). And when theory is mentioned, this is almost always educational theory without reference to the theory of technology (An & Oliver, 2021). This chimes with the frequently expressed view that teaching should be led by pedagogy and not by technology. This claim is often asserted as a truism, as if no one could possibly disagree. A great deal of the theoretical literature on educational technology reinforces this assumption by expressing the concern that technology and technologists, possibly backed by money from the ‘EdTech industry’, are taking over education (e.g., Selwyn, 2017). In other words, the underlying framing here often seems to be that human-led education is good and that a technology-led education is bad.

At first glance, this makes perfect sense. On the whole, we use tools to help us achieve our goals. We like to think that we are in charge of the plan, not the tools that we select to help us. It would be odd to think of the tools as having agency on their own. Odd and also uncomfortable, perhaps even a bit frightening. The idea of technology taking over and telling us what to do is a common plot of dystopian movies and TV shows such as the Terminator or Westworld. But if we step back from this surface way of seeing things to take a more theoretical perspective it is not so clear that we can separate people from technology in any simple way. In Chapter 2, we argue that humans have always been entangled with technology. We established how a lot of the teaching and learning that most people tend to assume as being central to education serves the needs of technologies, especially communication technologies. The focus in primary education is on learning how to read printed signs in books, writing similar marks with a pen on paper, and how to use mathematical notations including numbers and a specialised symbol system. Because they have been around for a while, we sometimes forget that literacy and numeracy are technologies just as surely as social media apps on mobile phones or AI language assistants. 

It is interesting that we do not tend to think of literacy and numeracy as technologies. They are clearly not natural nor universal. It is quite possible to be human without knowing how to use written sign systems. It is not obvious that oral societies are helped by education into literacy, indeed much of the evidence seems to point the other way[i]. Perhaps literate people are incapable of distinguishing themselves from their particular kind of communications technology and so assume that education that preserves and expands literacy is a universal human good. Taking a theoretical perspective or stance means questioning this kind of assumption. After all, non-literate oral societies also have education, and future societies in which the means of communication might be very different from what we can imagine now will also have education. If it is true, as we argue, that being human means to be bound up with technology, then it follows that education needs to change as technology changes. This is because when our technology changes, then so do we.
​
An overarching theme throughout this book is that we need to develop the theory of educational technology as a new strand in the dialogue about education. This is because, so far, our theories of education have not taken the distinctive point of view of technology into account. Technology does not just do what it is told and help us to realise our independently arrived at ends. Technology shapes us from the inside, it is always already there influencing how we understand ourselves and how we make decisions. This means that thinking about how we use technology in education is thinking about how we want to shape the future of education and, indeed, future humans. Designing educational technology requires thinking about what technology is, and what it could be, as well as thinking about what education is and what it could be. 

In the spring of 1988, I had a dream about a bull snorting and charging around a ring. I realised that I had to go and talk to my father. I was 28 years old, no job, no home, very little money and no clear plans for the future. I had just spent six months in a back to nature community in the South of France. From my parents, especially my father, I had inherited the idea that ‘the system’ was bad. Materialism was bad. Capitalism was bad. Personal ambition was bad. Status was bad. The idea of leading what I thought of as a ‘normal’ life; a career, house, mortgage, car, partner and kids, filled me with distain. I saw myself as a kind of spiritual seeker or pilgrim trying to find, or perhaps to create, an alternative way of being. I had chalked up tens of thousands of miles hitch-hiking. I had lived in a squat in Amsterdam, hung out for many months in rural Turkey, spent time in various ashrams in India. I even managed to find a modest cave in the mountains of Tibet and meditated there for a while living on ‘tsampa’ (roast barley flour) and pretending to be ‘Milarepa’, a Tibetan Buddhist monk of legend, until I was arrested by Chinese police and politely asked to leave. I had some good stories to tell. But I was 28 now and it was becoming stale. I felt uncomfortable when people younger than me, with cars and children and settled lives, picked me up on the road and treated me with compassion. 

My father was living in an isolated wooden house in a forest in Sweden. I hitch-hiked to Denmark in two days, sleeping rough. There was no bridge then so I took the ferry. The people were well dressed. I felt out of place. The border police in Sweden did not want to let me in. I did not have enough money. I eventually persuaded them that I was visiting family. I saw myself through their eyes: hairy, scruffy, poor and probably a bit smelly. What did I have to offer? I wouldn’t have wanted me in my country either. 
 
It was cold and snowing. I got a train from the port to a town in central Sweden. My father picked me up at the station in a beaten-up old Volkswagen beetle. I recall that he drove with what seemed to me like extraordinary courage straight into sheets of white driving snow, every now and then stopping to clear a new porthole in the packed ice that was building up on the window screen. 
 
I do not have pictures from that time but there is a documentary about my father made in 1998 for Swedish TV that can still be found on You Tube: https://youtu.be/EkwUTKkvefk. He hit the news in Sweden when, in a pre-published act of vandalism, he smashed a bank window with a hammer. It was a protest against what he called the debt-based money system. He went to jail. The film is about his walk from Uppsala to Cape town. ‘For Love not Debt’ was the slogan written on a flag that he stuck to the little pram he pushed in front of him all the way. 

The house was very simple. No running water. A wood stove. There were sheep to look after. He was an interesting guy. I asked for guidance. We talked a lot, mostly about his projects. He was keen on the Christian anarchism of Nikolai Berdyaev. His main argument was that each of us had to choose. Either we joined ‘the beast’ and went down with it in its ‘death plunge’, or we could step aside and form new communities based on love and simplicity. I asked him what he meant by ‘the beast’ and he said ‘Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and the whole money machine’. Odd that he focussed on the American car industry but he also meant oil, big pharma, the military industrial complex and most modern technology, including electronic networks supporting global banking. It was all bundled up with the beast. And somehow, he knew with great intensity that the beast was going to fail. The debt-based money system was, he claimed, unsustainable. It would collapse soon. It was important that we all choose now which side we want to be on before the coming apocalypse.
 
At one point, in a spirt of openness and honesty, I shared with him that I was not happy that he had abandoned my mother and me when I was still a baby. He did not respond well. Perhaps it was too much to expect an apology, but I did expect some acknowledgement of my feelings. Instead, he stormed around the house ranting. A bit like the snorting bull in my dream. He told me, quoting the bible, that I was supposed to respect my father, and that if I could not love him then I could not love God. I remained calm. Analysing our conversations that night I recognised a theme. He was the saviour. I was, at best, his assistant. He was so trapped in his own narrative, a narrative in which he played the starring role, that he was unable to care about my well-being or indeed that of anyone. 
 
This was a major turning point in my life. Deep in my guts I felt the pure fire of righteous anger. If I was a failure, it was because of him. With no father around to love me and to guide me into a useful role within society, of course I had failed to thrive. Believing in him and his main message, that the whole system is irredeemably corrupt, had made it hard for me to create any life of my own. All that I was now offered in return for this loss and this sacrifice was a lack of respect and perhaps a vague role as one of his many followers. He was not the only one to blame, I realised. I also blamed all the misguided people who supported him, encouraging his grandiosity.
 
Previously I had seen him as an admirable man, a man of unusual integrity standing up for morality and for truth at great personal cost in the context of a dishonest and unjust system. Now I saw a petulant boy playing the role of a great man to fool himself as much as his audience. Unable to cope with reality he had created a dream in which reality was evil and he was a prophet crying in the wilderness, holding out for a new dawn. Instead of growing up and coming to terms with his own limitations and the imperfections of the world he had retreated into myth. Fighting the great beast. Saving the planet. 
 
I left the next day smiling and apparently on good terms. I had achieved exactly what I had come for. Clarity. Outwardly I was polite. Inwardly the fire of anger had turned to contempt. I could see no point in any further engagement. The best I could hope for now was to avoid feeling the need to spit on his grave. On the train back to the port, with sunlight streaming through the window, I felt new, like a weight had been lifted. My father had asked me to choose between him and the beast. I chose me. If that meant joining the beast then so be it. I decided to stop drifting, stay in one place and build something. I took out my map of Europe, closed my eyes and stabbed my knife somewhere in England. The point landed near Bristol. Soon I was there, staying on a floor at first, then moving into a rented room. I got a temping job with references that I faked. I applied to Bristol university to do a Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) and was accepted. 
 
Over that summer I worked clearing invasive plants and dangerous rocks from the cliffs around Cheddar Gorge. I was fit and tanned – the best job ever. It was so good that I deferred my entry to university. Clearly, I still struggled a bit with the project of ‘going straight’.  As the days drew in and it got colder the outdoor job was less fun. I switched to working nights in a call centre. Lonely I attended meetings of the Quakers or the Religious Society of Friends. Some seem to think that religion is about ‘belief’ but I found little interest in beliefs here, more a focus on experience and people engaging profoundly with the question of how to live, sharing their insights and struggles. Amongst the quakers I found role-models working constructively within the system as social entrepreneurs and professionals yet feeling able to combine this with a spiritual worldview. The PGCE gave me academic references.  It was followed by a masters in computing in London and then a PhD in Educational Technology at the Open University. I did not abandon all that I had learnt from my time as an itinerant spiritual seeker but I cautiously embraced the system. And I loved it. It was fun to earn money and buy experiences, participating in the collective dream. Ten years after that encounter with my father in a hut in the forests of Sweden I was a properly employed professional with a doctorate, a mortgage and a car. Later that year, 1998, I married a wonderful woman in the Quaker meeting house in Milton Keynes. Everyone we knew and worked with was invited to the party in the old church on the grounds of the Open University campus. Guests provided the food, the drink and music. Within a year we had a son.

​It was not easy to change my life around. I still got odd twinges prompting me to ‘fight the power’, be a hero, save the planet etc. but, having learnt how not to be a human being from the example of my father, I treated these urges with suspicion. Instead of big causes and moral abstractions I focussed most of my passion on those closest to me. I loved (almost) everything about being a father and being a husband, teaching my son how to skim stones in the river, shopping in local markets with my wife, going to the family pub on Sunday and watching our son play with the other kids while we ate too much and drank warm beer. Just like everybody else. Bringing my son up with all the structure, security, love and careful guidance that I did not have was a journey of personal healing and redemption for me. In being his dad, it was as if I was going back in time and being the dad to myself that I had so desperately needed.
 
I am not saying that my father was a bad person. I have a limited view. Many found him inspiring. Talking with him when I was younger helped me learn to think more critically and more deeply about everything. My feelings remain ambivalent. After all, who does not want to smash a bank window with a hammer and walk to Africa? But mostly what I learnt from him was not to trust people who talk big about morality whilst failing to look after those near them. Of course, it is good to criticise bad things with a view to making them better but I am suspicious of the motives of those who, like my father, seem to gain energy from condemning ‘the system’ as a whole, without apparently feeling any obligation to offer a workable alternative. Wandering on the margins of society I met quite a few troubled young people who, like myself at that time, seemed to prefer fantasies about an imminent apocalypse or revolution to the more complex and slow business of building the kind of life that provides nourishment. In the context of our history, any ‘system’ that enables at least some families to bring up children in peace seems to me to be already quite a big achievement; an achievement not to be thrown away lightly. Ordinary life turned out to be the miracle that I had been searching for all along. Despite appearances, despite all the conflict, frustration and confusion, I find the world to be wonderful just the way that it is. 

A rose window: Notre Dame Cathedral

​Comenius's vision included the need for feedback from students to show that they are now "possessors of knowledge" (p. 293) and also the need for end of year examinations ensuring that "subjects have been properly learned" (p. 293). Comenius's model of nationally-based phases of schooling was adopted by the whole of Europe and the USA during the 19th Century (Barsky and Glazek, 2014). 

​It is understandable that many celebrate the vision of Comenius and the achievement of having nearly  universal literacy with lots of children everywhere spending many years of their lives, up to 18 years now for some in richer countries, just learning stuff and getting increasingly good grades on exams that show just how how much stuff they have learnt. But is there perhaps something that we might have lost in this push for universal literacy and universal knowledge?

​The way of thinking found in oral cultures is different from literate ways of thinking. An example of this difference is the nature of the 'song lines' of Australian Aborigines. Song lines, or sung stories of journeys through the landscape around them, have been said to map the territory and encode knowledge essential to survival. These songs include information about animals, plants and water holes, for example, but all embedded in sung stories about the doings of mythical ancestors in the 'dreamtime' when the land was created. This knowledge is not a classification nor is it a representation. Song lines are experienced as a relationship with the ancestors who created the landscape. That is, cognition is experienced not as something that humans impose on the landscape but as coming from the landscape. The collective stories are called 'song lines' because the land sings its stories as an individual journeys across its lines. 

A couple of years ago now Tech Cedir had a reading group which started well and then got interrupted by strikes. Tech Cedir has now given birth to a new Cambridge Research and Development Centre called DEFI (https://www.deficambridge.org/). But I do hope that in all the practical ed tech activity of DEFI we do not forget the importance  of theory. Often when people talk about theory and ed tech they seem to mean 'critical theory' from a sociological perspective and write papers about how dangerous it is that digital technology serves the interests of capitalism and has the potential for surveillance and control. These papers can be valuable  but they can also seem a bit one-sided in their lack of acknowledgement of any positive potential for technology.  Interestingly these left sounding critiques of tech repeat an argument first made by a thinker who was so not left that he was actually a card carrying nazi for a while. Heidegger. In our reading group two years ago I made the mistake of dismissing Heidegger. In the introductory blog for the first reading I explained why we were ignoring Heidegger. He had no sympathy for modern technology, I wrote, claiming he expressed a simple binary still found in Waldorf and Montessori schools: Human scale tech - good; big global networked tech - bad. Re-reading Heidegger's 'A Question Concerning Technology' recently I realised that I had been unfair. After complaining about modern technology Heidegger goes on to write, in a rather mystical and poetic style that is quite hard to follow, that modern technology is 'in a lofty sense ambiguous' and might even have a 'saving power' for mankind. In this blog, which returns to continue 'the theory of education technology series of blogs', I want to unpack just why and how technology might be able to save us. 

Why technological thinking enframes and limits us 
​
Heidegger tends to refer to agency only in terms of a response to a call. Our response to the call can be more or less superficial or it can be more or less thoughtful. The problem with modern technology, according to Heidegger, is that it can limit our capacity to respond in a thoughtful manner. He refers to this danger of technology as 'Gestell' which roughly translates as 'enframing'. Imagine you phone the local council to ask a thoughtful question about their environment policy and find you have to select one of five possible areas of questioning and when you select one of these you have to further select one of five possible answers. That is being enframed and limited. Modern technology, Heidegger complains, has always already decided for us that the most important questions to ask are all about calculating and measuring. Instead of nature being a mystery to be related to it becomes a 'standing reserve' of resources to be used by us for rational economic ends. Forests become just so many metric tonnes of cellulose for paper production and the great river Rhine itself becomes just a standing reserve of potential energy to be harvested by hydro-electric dams. We ourselves are in danger of becoming lost in this framing such that we forget even our most fundamental role of world revealing, understanding ourselves as information processing machines maximising economic rationality. 

In this video Heidegger outlines his critique of technology [https://youtu.be/4WK8PJvkzG0]

For Heidegger it is caring about things that 'unconceals' them in everyday life. There is no truth unless you care enough first to want to find it. If you do not care enough then things stay hidden. And since our capacity to care is limited we are always surrounded by much that which remains hidden to us. The things we care about, the things that are revealed to us, depend upon our histories, the cultural traditions that we are part of and the tools that we use. If we are led through involvement in modern technology to only care about economic rationality or the best way to get what it is presupposed that we want, then we might fail to ask the more important questions, the questions which might help us find out who we really are and what we really want. 
 
In his lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ Heidegger goes back to the original Greek use of the term techne to refer to arts and craft. Techne in this sense is to be understood as making things (poeisis) that reveal the world in new ways unconcealing that which was previously concealed. In a way, reading Heidegger, it becomes clear that his ideal of poeisis is poetry, especially the poetry of Holderlin which he frequently quotes. A poem is a work, a construction, taking words in the form of signs and arranging them on a page such that, taking up that work and living it from within by reading it attentively, the world is revealed in a new way and things that were once hidden swim into view. But Heidegger  gives us instead of a poem, the example of an ancient Greek  craftsperson making a silver chalice intended for sacrificial offerings. Heidegger describes this process of creation as a collaboration in which several elements participate, the idea (eidos) of the chalice, the context of its use (telos) and the material to be fashioned (hyle) which is the silver. All of these elements are, he says, co-responsible for the finished artefact. The role of the craftsperson is not to impose their autonomous separate human will, taking on all the responsibility, but to bring careful thought (logos) to bear on how best to combine all the elements in the most right, most truthful and most beautiful design. The craftsperson is responsible for realising the chalice but this responsibility is precisely, as the word responsibility implies,  a response to the needs of the context that calls for the chalice. Agency here does not lie only with the human but is distributed across the whole system. 

What worries Heidegger about modern technology, understood  as the application of science, is that it is no longer open to the call of Being.  Everywhere we look we do not see the mystery of Being, we see a preordered pre-understood reality of things that can be measured and that serve only as being useful for us. Heidegger calls this way of seeing the world as seeing it as if it is a 'standing reserve'. The forest that he loved, for example, becomes just so much cellulose for paper production. His greatest fear was that we end up even seeing ourselves as part of this standing reserve for economic activity instead of experiencing our role as the revealers of the truth of Being. 
 
‘the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth’ (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)

The sort of thing Heidegger is worried about can be illustrated by recent articles in education and education technology research journals responding to the Pandemic. There was much research about the 'learning loss' that occurred when children did not go to school and calculations about how much this learning loss would impact on the economy in decades to come. There were no articles published, to my knowledge, researching how being unable to go to school  led some children to a more profound encounter with Being than they would have had otherwise and further discussing if this sort of encounter was not perhaps more authentic 'learning' than the countable variety which consists only of scores on standardised tests. How much calculable learning on standardised tests is equivalent to one lightening flash of insight into the nature of being? The danger Heidegger is referring to here is that our participation in modern technology networks determines already in advance what questions can be asked and the kind of answers that count such that we end up losing even our own awareness of ourselves as anything other than a 'standing reserve' for economic productivity. The most significant product of such an education system might be suicide and mental illness rather than real 'learning'. Heidegger is right to be concerned.

Heidegger's turn to the future 

Heidegger writes that technology is a destiny. A destiny in Heideggerian language is something given to us as a responsibility. If a child is gifted with a great talent for dancing, for example, that would be a destiny that they ought to work with. In a similar way it seems that technology is a destiny that humans should take up.  Modern technology is not, in fact, all bad, it is, Heidegger writes: ‘in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e. of truth’. Interestingly this is what Bernard Steigler claims about technology, that it is a ‘Pharmakon’ a word which means both poison and cure. Modern technology, Heidegger writes, produces the great danger of closing down our openness to Being  but at the same time it seems to open up a prospect of salvation or of ‘freeing’. But what does Heidegger mean here by 'freeing'?
 
Writing about how the greatest danger of technology, closing us off from Being, can also be the greatest hope of salvation or ‘freeing’  Heidegger continues: 'But where is the danger? What is its locus? Insofar as the danger is Being itself, it is nowhere and everywhere. It does not have a place, as something other than itself. It is the place for all presenting, itself without a place’.  If the danger is in this no-place beyond place, then so is the salvation or ‘freeing’ that is bound up with the danger. This freeing is not, of course, the idea of the freedom from constraint or freedom of the individual to do whatever they want.  Heidegger dismissed this kind of individualism as an inauthentic product of a lack of self-awareness. (He associated this childish idea of freedom with America) By contrast freedom, for Heidegger, comes from responsibility, from responding to the call of destiny and in this case human destiny seems to be bound up with technology. 
 
‘Man is indeed needed and used for the restorative surmounting of the essence of technology. But man is used here in his essence that corresponds to that surmounting. In keeping with this, man's essence must first open itself to the essence of technology.’
 
The essence of man for Heidegger is being open to Being and serving as a kind of steward for Being’s coming into unconcealment. Being comes to know itself from the inside through us. The essence of technology is poesis or revealing by making. For Heidegger then the next stage or the ‘turn’ (Kehre) – perhaps the epoch in which the absent god returns - seems to depend on a collaboration between human essence and technological essence. 
 
Heidegger writes of this: 
 Do we see the flashing of Being in the way to be of technology? The flashing that comes from out of the stillness, as the stillness itself?

Heidegger's language of ‘restorative surmounting’ implies that as technology builds a new kind of body for Being this might initially appear to us in the form of a great danger, the danger of becoming entrapped and lost within a rational calculating cage, but if we continue through the danger we might eventually reach the other side which is when the human essence joins with the essence of technology in a new kind of truth-revealing. Could modern technology in fact be preparing the way for us to come to a new place beyond place where the lightening flash of Being might be even stronger than it was once in ancient Greece? 
 
The challenge for education technology raised by Heidegger is how can we avoid simply inducting students into a world already pre-understood by human centred instrumental technological ways of thinking. The potential for education technology here is: can we use modern digital technology to build new collective dialogic  spaces in which truth is unconcealed and the lightning flash of insight can occur?

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 
​
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).
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Tegos, S., Mavridis, A., & Demetriadis, S. (2021). Agent-Supported Peer Collaboration in MOOCs. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 4.

https://www.deficambridge.org/
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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.
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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/]
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​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.