Dialogic

Education for the Internet Age

Rupert Wegerif

Overview

1) Transition from Print Age to Internet Age- From monologic to dialogic but with a twist

2) New dialogic theory for Internet age- Old dialogic plus multi-media dialogue between

question and unbounded horizon

3) Educating technology- importance of tools as ‘voices’

4) Learning to learn together with the Internet

Why isn’t the Internet used much in schools?

• The Internet has obvious affordances for learning. We all use it to look things up. It supports learning communities.

• Teenagers in the USA now spend 7 hours a day with gadgets – ie all the time they have except when asleep or in school! Why not school?

• Answer: because schools follow the logic of print. The Internet does not fit. It is ‘disruptive'.

e.g: Encylopedia Britannica vs Wikipedia (and Qwikipedia)

Authority of truth, One-to-many

A dialogue, Peer-to-peerParticipationNeed to check

Essential dialogic distinction: Living word of

dialogue versus dead external word

SOCRATES: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which

can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.

PHAEDRUS: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of whichthe written word is properly no more than an image?

Writing changes the brain. Literates see words as wellas hearing them. Meanings become visible like things. There is a shift from holistic perception to analytic.(Dehaene 2009)

Around the 16th Century,from Montaigne to

Descartes, the dominant image of thinking changed

from being about utterances in dialogues to being about propositions in proofs. (Toulmin, 2000)

‘The medium is the message’. Talk: situated in here and now. Affords dialogic.Writing: supports reflection and cumulative science

but supports unsituated ideal of Truth as a representation. Affords monologic in combination with formal education.

Schools embody the logic of print, education is the transmission of knowledge found in books, assessed by solitary written exams.

Internet: Affords a return to dialogic but unbounded by locality.

Reversal of real and ideal Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - 'Lux

Aurumque'

Internet as disruptiveAs bandwidth increases and smart-phones proliferate we can begin to see the potential of the Internet for anytime anywhere education.A disruptive technology is one that improves a service in a way that is unexpected and so goes on to create its own new ‘value system’ and way of doing things eventually displacing an existing technology. Eg peer-to-peer music sharing.The Internet is a disruptive technology for education. It has a different inner logic from the print-based education system.

Part 2: DialogicMonologic (Print?) Dialogic (Internet?)One voice: one truth Many voices:

Closed Open to Other

Representation Relationship

Identity Difference

Reification (outside view) Participation (inside view)

Bakhtin and educationThe authoritative voice remains outside of me and orders me to do something in a way that forces me to accept or reject it without engaging with it whereas the words of the persuasive voice enter into the realm of my own words and change them from within

(Bakhtin, 1981 p343).

In every dialogue there is a ‘third’ voice and so the call of infinity

Superaddressee

Infinite other

Expanding dialogic with chiasmI see the world, the world sees me

Figure: Ground

Tension and mutual envelopement

Key concepts

• Dialogic gap – without difference, no meaning• Dialogic space – internality of dialogues• Inside-outside chiasm around gap as hinge

Dialogic emerges between an inside perspective and an unbounded (infinite) outside perspective held together in the creative tension of a dialogue.

Ontogenesis of thought is dialogiceg Visual cliff experiment

Phylogenesis of thought is dialogic

Symbolic vs iconic (Deakin)Theoretical vs metaphoric

(Donald)Holistic vs analytic (Dehaene)Top down attention vs bottom up

voices

Global workspace theory: many voices talking all the time in brain – pre-conscous dialogue - only one makes it to the threshold of conscoiusness at a time and broadcasts back to the rest. Education trains attention using symbolic technologies like graphs, tables, taxonomies etc

But recall min i-positions (Hermans) are all around us in world as well as in brain – ie the world is our workspace

Consciousness is dialogic

3 types of consciousness

1) Sentient – figure/ground awareness metaforic and iconic, generative

2) Attentional – socially directed, self-conscious, analytic focus

3) Dialogic flow – self as dialogue between inside and outside requiring trust and participation

Collective thinking

1) Orientation within shared worlds (Stahl)2) Foregrounds give different perspectives but

background horizons overlap. Thinking and consciousness unite both sides – the lit up focus and the dark background

3) The shared background of the Internet can support participation in an increasingly global creative intelligence otherwise known as ‘the democracy that is to come’

Some principles of dialogic education

1) Aim is dialogue as an end in itself ie asking better questions, not finding final answers

2) Engage in dialogue first, teach skills and facts afterwards when needed (just in time)

3) Drawing learners into participation in those dialogues that are powerful and shape their lives.

4) The dialogue between a question and an unbounded horizon ie listening to the supposed ‘unconscious’

Part 3: Educating technology

Tools or voices?

The first signs, cave paintings, were voices not tools. They evoked the superaddressee voices of the tribe (Lewis-Williams, 2002)

The pictures, videos and avatars of the Internet are similarly more like voices than like tools.

Progress piggy-backs on signs. Dialogue produces an insight which is given a sign and becomes a voice in the next dialogue.

Learning to learn together

The key competence children need to use the Internet is Learning how to learn together or L2L2.They need to be prepared to question and challenge and collaborate in shared inquiry with the Internet.

Providing roles

‘Epistemic games’ allow students to role play being a journalist or a bio-scientist and seeing the world from that role.

Metafora: L2L2An ICT system to support learning how to learn together

(L2L2). Through literature review we isolated some key

features of L2L2. We turned these into icons within an ICT environment to support planning and reflection of inquiries stimulated by real-world challenges.

Design-based research in secondary schools in the UK, Spain, Greece and Israel over one year developed and evaluated this tool and found that it can increase awareness of the key aspects of learning together.

e.G Lleida study with Metafora

Used the visual language to help structure a real inquiry into the pollution of the Segre resulting in a real letter to the civic authorities responsible.

Dialogic Education for the Internet Age

What to teach?1. Learning to learn together ( L2L2).2. The dialogue so far. 3. Dialogic space.

How to teach? Opening, widening, deepening and resourcing dialogic space

Why teach?Education is participation in the global dialogue of humanity as an end in itself.

Called out by the future event of global democracy

The way in which we think as well as how we understand ‘education’ has been shaped by the logic of print.

The Internet is emerging as the new dominant mode of communication and it has a different logic: unbounded dialogic.

Dialogic education for the Internet Age is about drawing people into collective creative intelligence, teaching L2L2, expanding and resourcing the space of dialogue

Summary