While the Hedgehogs, Foxes and the Internet Filter Debate post directly related to Internet censorship or what has become known as nocleanfeed, I did not seriously link my last post, Revisiting activity systems, to that issue. I kept reading my thesis and realised the next section spoke directly to issues of the filter, learning and change. Transparency of technology involves the ways in which we no longer focus on the technology, but rather on the tasks and processes afforded by technology. That is, the computer fades into the background and becomes a means by which we achieve something else.
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‘Situated learning’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) also posits that learning must be participative and, hence, partially contextualised within a community of practice. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) main thesis is that learners work within communities of practice and that ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ helps to describe the relations between new-comers (i.e. novices) and old-timers (i.e. experts) so that “learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice” (p31). It is through their participation in the community of practice, according to Lave and Wenger (1991) that individuals’ identities are developed in association with the community. These processes and outcomes are directly associated with learning. The emphasis is on the ‘whole person’ acting in the social world. Their perspective implies:
emphasis on comprehensive understanding involving the whole person rather than ‘receiving’ a body of factual knowledge about the world; on activity in and with the world; and on the view that agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other. (p. 33)
That is, through their participation they come to know and understand. However, that participation and knowing is a product of the exercise of both individual’s agency and that afforded by the community. It is a ‘theory of social practice in which learning is viewed as an aspect of all activity’ (p. 37-8). So, their contribution and alignment with Burke’s pentad (1969) is to emphasise the interdependence between learning and participation in a socially-derived practice.
It is important to link Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of transparency of artefacts with Burke’s scheme as it aids in the discussion of “cultural practice and social organization within which the technology is meant to function” (p. 102):
Invisibility of mediating technologies is necessary for allowing focus on, thus supporting visibility of, the subject matter. Conversely, visibility of the significance of the technology is necessary for allowing its unproblematic – invisible – use. This interplay of conflict and synergy is central to all aspects of learning in practice: It makes the design of supportive artifacts a matter of providing a good balance between these two interacting requirements. (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p102)
‘Transparency’ refers to the interaction of the use of an artefact for learning and understanding the significance of the technology with the learning tasks. This suggests that employing a mediating technology, such as computer-mediated communication, is useful mainly for learning communication mediated by a computer, because it is only in learning to communicate that the use of the artefact, the computer, and its significance to the communicative act become merged.
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This notion of transparency is really central to some of the issues of using more recent developments in social technologies, namely social media such as Twitter, Facebook and others. For many of us, the computer artefact itself, fades into the background while we interact with others. It becomes almost second nature. However, for many other people, people who have little experience with social media for instance the ‘super awesome social media guru‘, the technology seems more opaque – the individual is very focused on the technology rather than the processes afforded by those technologies. Learning about them, which is somewhat the focus of my thesis, should eventually make the technologies transparent, so you see the activity or the process rather than the technology, as I explain below.
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However, for learning other tasks, such as solving mathematical formulae, computer-mediated communication may be incidental to learning – facilitative rather than indispensable – and, hence, may disrupt the transparency of artefacts (the computer) that allows for unproblematic use of computer-mediated communication in learning. That is, the computer does not directly influence learning to solve mathematical formulae. For individuals whose learning is about computers (e.g. the IT students in my study), there is less conflict as the technology is part of what they are learning and mediated communication is becoming very much a part of the social practice of the IT industry. Other disciplines are less connected to technology, so unless discussion as a means of learning is extremely important and visible in their learning, the use of the technology for discussion could be construed as ‘busy-work’ – irrelevant and non-productive activity which benefits the teacher knowing the student is understanding. There is a longer history of the use of information/communication technologies (particularly bulletin boards) in IT and related fields, giving it a cultural validity that it may lack in other fields. {Note: the study was done a decade ago, only a decade? seriously!} The point here is that, the artefact, the computer, and its mediation of learning are both necessarily visible for communication but that visibility may impinge upon the kinds of learning being undertaken and which may not be reliant on either the artefact or its effect on learning. Consequently, a consideration of the importance of the artefact and its relationship to learning particular sets of knowledge is important.
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Given what we know about transparency of artefacts for ensuring focus on process, it seems quite concerning that the filter is very focussed on the technology, the artefact of the Internet. There seems to be an assumption in certain quarters, that the affordances of computer mediated interactions are centred on illegalities – viewing various forms of pornography, downloading and sharing files. There is little recognition that these are less popular than the myriad other things that the Internet allows us to do. Also concerning is the idea that there is a ‘body of knowledge’ which we are ‘receiving’ and that that knowledge is being defined by people who would prefer that ‘unknown unknowns’ remain that way. For them, the computer is problematic as they do not feel in control of it. They are overwhelmed by the potential for things to go wrong.
For those of us for whom the technology is transparent, we no longer even notice this. We simply do what we do, we focus on the process rather than the technology. The proposed filter, and the arguments used in its favour, focus on the technology. While the focus remains on the technology, there is little likelihood of learning about the affordances of the technology – it will always be a black box that is in control and which ‘brings’ porn into our homes.
References
Burke, K. (1969) A grammar of motives, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Tags:
censorship, nocleanfeed