Gordon Pask

I came across the ideas of Gordon Pask while researching reflection theory, relating to reflective dialogue.

Andrew Gordon Speedie-Pask, cybernetician, producer for the stage and lyricist, born June 28, 1928; died March 29, 1996.

http://tip.psychology.org/pask.html
The Conversation Theory developed by G. Pask originated from a cybernetics framework and attempts to explain learning in both living organisms and machines. The fundamental idea of the theory was that learning occurs through conversations about a subject matter which serve to make knowledge explicit
....
Pask identified two different types of learning strategies: serialists who progress through an entailment structure in a sequential fashion and holists who look for higher order relations.

http://www.pangaro.com/Pask-Archive/guardian-obit.html
Gordon Pask, who has died aged 67, spent his life developing an elegant theory of learning that stands without peer. His achievement was to establish a unifying framework that subsumes the subjectivity of human experience and the objectivity of scientific tradition. Sponsored by governments and industries on both sides of the Atlantic, his life-long research spanned biological computing, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, logic, linguistics, psychology, and artificial life. His was an original approach to age-old questions of how the human organism learns from its environment and relates to others through language.


http://artsci-ccwin.concordia.ca/edtech/ETEC606/paskboyd.html

Conversation Theory (CT) in a Nutshell

A "P-individual" (= participant) originates (by internal conversation) a conceptual procedure which when "applied" (i.e. executed) produces a representation or an action. Another P-individual tries to do the same, if the representations or actions that they produce and display in shared space, are regarded by each other to be about the same, then an agreement has been reached, and the agreed concept can be given one label which both participants can confidently use in further conversation. If however, the productions differ, then the participants need to exhibit the ways in which they are executing their concepts in order to establish a distinction between the two. At this point they become able to assign two different agreed labels. In which case each participant gains a new concept. There is however in CT, a strange recursion underlying such conversational learning, because the participants themselves are taken to be no more than emergents from previous conversational agreements, all executing in some informationally coupled M-individuals (= biological-bodies &/or machines). (See also: Glanville, "Pask a Slight Primer", (1993).

FirstClass impressions, and remaining purpose of ultrastudents email group

A week or so ago I was wondering whether the ultrastudents group would die out now that we have all the facilities of FirstClass. It would remain there if people wanted to use it , but what purpose would it serve?
But over the weekend, while we were writing up our activity one, several of us sought answers to questions, help with quotes etc on the group and received prompt useful answers. I feel this has served as a model which can only reinforce the community purpose and identity.

Why choose to post to the email group instead of to FC?
possible answers:
*One group instead of fragmented.
*it's unofficial, students amongst themselves
*disorienting effect of FC structure, red flags and so on - simple unfamiliarity?

Problems with FirstClass are not technical, but social and existential.
There are many Â?write onlyÂ? posts, people posting because they have to.
Also itÂ?s already becoming a bit of a dumping ground, with crossposts and extracts from other conversations arriving confusingly in the middle of threads. ThereÂ?s no common culture, with a mixture of top posting and bottom posting, quoting and not quoting, big pink blobby letters and plain courier.

Advantages of FC are that it�s fast and efficient, you can get replies from LFs in your own tutor group, you can reach a wide group of people in the common areas, the close integration of group posts and private mail. Lots of extra facilities such as the Summarize function, private Chat, documents, Résumé , homepage and so on. And it�s compulsory anyway, which forces people to contribute - but is that an advantage I wonder?

an "aha" moment

Yesterday I started to write up Learning Activity 1, which is about looking into the theoretical background and developing an understanding of 'reflection'. It took me quite a while to get back into the swing of this kind of formal, non conversational writing and thinking and I kept wanting to distract myself by checking for new messages in various places instead. After a few hours I ran out of my allotted time, but felt that I had only just circled around the topic and messed about with the format without really getting to the nub. This made me feel restless the whole day through, and worried about getting to the end of the assignment in time.

Then when I woke up this morning, as I lay in bed, I started thinking forward, imagining myself writing the next part. I imagined writing a list of bullet points to cover the key concepts which I have discovered and understood. At this point I suddenly realised that this was all I needed to do! I had been making much too heavy weather of it and with this new insight I could now see a way to get to the end. So I got up straight away, worked for a short while ( before I forgot again ) and then felt happy enough to go back to bed and enjoy a nice Sunday morning lie in [details removed]

New journal started

I've just started today keeping a short note after each ICT lesson that actually takes place, how it went, what was my role, and what worked and didn't. I write it as quickly as possible, and as soon as possible. Just a simple page per day, with one paragraph per lesson, loosely formatted I'm going to try to discuss briefly with the teachers afterwards as well, and note their feelings. I think I might be able to keep this up because I already make a regular diary entry about which class was timetabled, whether they turned up, and what was done. I've just decided to expand it a little and view it as another learning journal.

Holidays

During the holidays I've been trying to keep up the ultraversity work because I know next term will be short, and busy with the possibility of some evening work for me. And I'm hoping to have a real holiday at Easter at last.
Unfortunately the detailed learning plans ( ILP2) for next term haven't been released, and the Ultralab Staff are all away on holiday so It's difficult to get ahead of myself.

So what have I done so far? I have:

*maintained contact with some fellow students through the email group. This has thrown up some useful links on the subjects of reflection and action enquiry.

*researched and discussed the implementation of the new community software (First Class) with others, including LFs.

*learned how to set up a wiki site, understood the advantages and appropriate applications for Wiki, and begun to get contributions.

*designed an entry page for my own personal ultraversity work site.

*promoted and studied a peer review process, tried it in collaboration with others, learned lessons and published some initial guidelines on the peer review wiki page. This involved reading several other students reports.

*revamped the ultrastudents.co.uk site with multiple pages and buttons, incorporating links to the wiki pages.

*begun to set up a structure for next term's work and discussed action enquiry and reflection.

Resumption after short gap in blog

I haven't wriitten in my blog for quite some time, this is because of the overwhelming focus on producing Report 1 quickly followed by report 2 with strict deadlines to meet. I don't feel too bad about letting the journal lapse a little though, because I know the other students have done the same. This is one of the benefits of being part of an online learning community rather than isolated on other types of individual and conventional distance learning courses. One of the strange feelings immediately after the reports was that it was nice to get back to getting on with learning again, even though the reports themselves necessitated a consolidation of experience, reflection and brushing up on presentation skills, it still felt like an interruption of the term's rhythm rather than a part of it. I think next term should be less disconcerting, through familiarity.

On JellyOS after 2 months

Stengths and Weaknesses

This post in reponse to the discussion started by Jolyon Miller - Making a better JellyOS.

The strength of jellyOS lies in the ability for almost anybody to create a simple homepage, upload photos, make a guestboook and link to others. The weakness is in the functionality of discussions - having to scroll slowly through lots of old messages only to find there a re no new ones, no ability to sort for most recent, by author, or anything like that.
So I conclude that the best way to make a better jellyOS would be to keep it as it is for some purposes, but to move all the serious discussions and extended conversations onto another platform. Unless this is done pretty soonish, then a lot of the advantages of online community will be tragically missed. I'm not exectly sure how the linking will work between the jelly pages and the new discussion forums, but I hope someone is working on this right now. Who wrote jellyOS anyway? I was impressed to read that ultralab collaborated with Oracle over think.com and If I heard it was Macromedia themselves helping with jellyOS then I'd have confidence in it's future development.

peer to peer learning - new practise and observations

Since I've been exposed to all this theory about the importance of peer learning groups, I took advantage of an opportunity to try out a different approach with a class of year 5 children today. It was their first lesson with the new eMac computers and OS X desktop.
I suggested to the class teacher that instead of a demonstration by me, we would just let the children go straight in and experiment for themselves, then report back whatever they managed to find out.

I wrote up on the board ( instead of a learning objective taken from the QCA scheme) :

What can we learn from each other about the new computers?
1)
2)
3)
etc

Then I introduced the session by saying "today I am not going to show you what to do, you are going to learn from each other. "

Result: Chaos! But the lesson was sucessful in a number of ways and everybody was pleased. In particular, those children who aren't good at following instructions and usually get told off seemed to feel empowered by the liberating lack of constraint, eagerly reported back discoveries and displayed positive self esteem. The two TAs and the class teacher all learned things as well, without having to pretend they already know more than the kids.

So instead of me telling them "this is how to find your documents, this is how to find your applications" and then they go off and play with the CD eject button, they got all that out of their systems in one go and then went on to seek out the Internet Browser. Once one person found it, you could literally observe that knowlege spreading along the walls of the room in both directions, just like wild fire.

I'm quite excited writing this up, because this is the first instance really of the ideas I have come across on the degree course affecting the way I act at work and think and observe. And to top it all, I believe this is just the sort of thing these learning journals are meant to be used for.

Should a learning journal be public?

This is from my write up of activity 4, which is about setting up the blog in the first place, and my reflections on the use of blogs for Learning Journals.

"Should a learning journal be public?

Issues such as confidentiality and inhibition could mean that certain kinds of personal reflection can be included in a private LJ which couldn't in a public one. But writing for a perceived audience may improve quality or motivate to keep up to date. I find it useful to be able to share some of my writings, such as "my impression of jellyOS after a few days".

Some blogs allow others people to make comments on your writings. This turns the writer into a kind of interactive columnist, with feedback and discussions going on around the articles. Mine doesn't do that, and I suspect that this could make it harder to write in a spontaneous and uninhibited fashion. It's just a little bit too public for this specific application. Fine for internet 'celebrities' though.

Actually, I think it might be a great idea to set up a private blog with a comment facility, because this would allow me to read back over old thoughts and make comments myself, on my own past reflections, in the light of later experience. Yes, that seems very much in the spirit of the reflective practitioner philosophy. You could have a dialogue with yourself telescoping forward through time.

voice recorder

Another idea I have had is in response to the question I posed in my blog about mornings, afternoons and evenings. I decided it would be most useful to get one of those tiny digital voice recorders, so that I can 'jot down' any thoughts, information, questions, worth recording when I'm away from a computer. It may even be possible to upload the soundfiles rather than have to type in a transcript. I'm looking through eBay to see what's available."

What do you think?

report 1

I haven't written an entry in this blog for a few days or more, and this is mainly because I have been chanelling my creative writing energies into my "report 1". This has to be submitted by this sunday, so I have only two weekday evenings and then saturday and sunday mornings left. What a fuss!

Action researcher

I discovered someone who works at my school sometimes who is familiar with the concept of action research and reflective practice, having studied and used it for many years. She may be willing to give some useful advice and feedback, perhaps in exchange for technical support with her projects, although she does always seem to be very busy. She left me with the suggestion that the essence of good teaching IS action research, and I think I understand why.
It has always seemed to be to be a bit of a waste that after an ICT lesson has taken place in the suite, with both myself and a class teacher present, there's should be a possibility to discuss afterwards, how did it go, what worked and what didn't work.

Mornings, afternoons and evenings

I often have my clearest thoughts in the mornings, perhaps when I'm travelling to work on the train but it isn't usually until the afternoon, when I'm feeling tired and take a break that I get around to recording them, if at all.
In the evening I like to catch up with lighter conversations and entertainment, but I have to get some things done then as well and often stay up late.
Given this understand of the pattern of my day, how can I make more out of it?

A hard week

Events have conspired to make this last week particularly difficult, and I've been tired and tetchy some of the time. At this point, I'm wary that my ultraversity activities are having a detrimental effect even though I understand why that shouldn't be the case.
I have told people who are interested that I'm doing a degree course but it isn't really recognised on any formal basis. Communication is getting harder rather than easier, and the situation with upgrading the computers has got unnecessarily awkward.
Late nights and stressful travel have compounded the general frustrations and the endless questions about printer queues and lost files occasionally solicit a terse reply, which hasn't gone unnoticed.

course

I received a letter from EiC Action Zone about attending a training course for evaluating software for the Curriculum Online content. Although I am sceptical about the whole concept of curriculum content software, preferring the contructivist approach, I suppose I had better register an interest so that I can take advantage of the opportunity. I'll also do some research about "schoolzone" the company behind this, 'creating success' 'creative tools' and 'Lewisham Education in Cities Action Zone' who work from an office upstairs in this school.

Back to work

I've had a good week getting on with the course activities and exploring jellyOS, and I feel glad that I now know a lot more about the course, what I'm expected to do and how it will shape up in practice. It all seemed a bit formless and abstract.
Meanwhile back at work, I'm still having to deal with the installation of a the new computers in the ICT suite. I had a terse phone conversation with the suppliers this morning and then the Head, which resulted in a plan to close the suite for 1 week and do it all in one go, rather than the phased transition which I had envisaged. Oh well, at least there is some communication going on rather than none at all.

Tuesday reflection

Just a short blog, as I really want to get on with putting my research together. All going well AFAICS, with positive feedback from facilitator and appreciative messages from students. I'm learning bits and pieces about research, about technology, about other people's roles and getting a better understanding of the tasks I'm supposed to be doing. This is enjoyable, and I'm hoping to stick at it most of the week, with a couple of days break at the end perhaps.
The only slight reservations I have are that I should have paid more attention to the required learning outcomes, and planned more activities to do at work, but hopefully this is just because of the situation I'm in, catching up on activities I would have done during the first half term during the break.

getting stuck in, and choosing HTML for presenting coursework

Yesterday was the first day of half term and I had decided to stay in and rest, so I ended up spending quite a few hours on the computer, mostly dealing with Ultraversity stuff. JellyOS is a terrible time waster, although it feels rewarding when you do manage some kind of communication after lots of repeated faffing about. I've built a page of links to links and links to current discussions which should help with slightly more direct access. The discussion which I created and linked to from the learning support page is starting to pick up, and I created a quality new piece of jellyART work.

That's all very well, but i can't afford to spend all my time messing about there when there is coursework to be done!

I've re-read the brief for activity one and realised that I have a problem finishing it off, since I'm required to interview a line manager and now it's half term I won't be able to do that for ages, if at all. So I came up with two other ways of researching the Coordinator Role. I posted a short question to the newsgroup uk.education.schools-it and within 20 minutes had a useful reply from an ICT Coordinator in a primary school. That may even break out into a more lengthy discussion, as can easily happen in an unregulated environment using simple and well established technology.
In addition, I was looking at fellow student Denise Binks website and realised that as a technician who takes a lot under her wing, she still works with a Coord, so I asked a question in Denise's guestbook and soon there was a new section in her activity one coursework about the two roles. This is useful to both of us.

I've now got rather a lot of gathered material for activity one, but that's OK because it is a substantial activity compared to some of the later ones. I looked at the work in progress 'simpletext' document I'd brought home on my pen drive and found it hard to work with in a Windows environment, and appleworks documents are unreadable so what format should I use to write up my coursework?

I had previously discounted the idea of presenting it as a website, for two reasons - it seems a bit OTT, takes a bit longer to load up a big package like dreamweaver than a text editor, and I don't feel I want to be writing for a world-wide audience "hullo this is me, here's my picture, here's my cat " sort of thing.

But when it comes down to it, HTML is the best tool I have for the job. It is afterall, a
(hypertext) Markup Language, which is quick and easy to create headings, subheadings, lists and bullet points. it's platform independent, universally deployed and I'll be able to incorporate multimedia elements later if I really have to. I don't have to put it online if I don't want to, I can transport it on my keyring pen drive, and email pages to my facilitator as attachments.

So that's the decision made, I've made a good start, and I'm happy that I know what I'm doing at last. Now I should be able to concentrate more on getting on with it, and finding it enjoyable. By the end of half term I'll be well up to date.

Online Inset

Yesterday, I discovered that the NGFL had organised an 'online Inset' for ICT coordinators that began the day before. I had enough time to read the transcript of the opening speech, which I saved because it gives another point of view of what ICT Coodinators are supposed to do.

The video link didn't work, even after installing the free version of RealPLayer One which the government site recommended. With luck, I'll have time to look at this in more depth over the half term.

Drains

Yesterday I sorted out two problems.

At work, I was called down to the office where they had installed a new laser printer on the network, but they couldn't print to it from the other office PC. Despite never having dirtied my hands with windows 2000 before, after messing about for half an hour I managed to get them talking.

At home, my downstairs toilet, when flushed, was filling up but not draining away. I emptied the sump directly outside but this didn't help, then I opened up a manhole cover halfway down the garden and cleared a smelly blockage there. Still no joy at the toilet end. Not knowing exactly what I was doing, but suspecting some sort of air-lock, I pushed a plastic bag down the toilet bowl and swooshed it back and fore a couple of times. With a glug glug glug, the bowl emptied and is now functioning perfectly.

Out of the two problem solving excercises the second was by far the most satisfying!

On JellyOS, after a few days

Last night I spent more than an hour or two looking around the community for new contributions and adding a couple of pages into "my stuff" At the end, I felt that a lot of time and effort had passed with little acheived really. So now I have a page of 'useful' links and a new piece of jellyART ;-)
I'm still not exactly sure who is in 'my group' and who isn't, but that's not so important.

There are several fundamental problems with the use of Flash for a web board and community like this, but the process which seems to be happening now is that people who are getting very frustrated with the poor functionality of the discussion boards and the page editing, are finding out work arounds and requesting short cuts which can make them happy in the short term, simply because the problem is then not quite so bad as it appeared to be.

I shall list the problems as I see it in two categories

1. Problems of the specific

a) Speed of typing, editing and browsing discussions is unacceptably slow.
b) Lack of a functions, eg 'your recent discussions' 'view unread messages' 'go to latest discussions' , that sort of thing.
c) Need to use the mouse too much, and too heavily.
d) When editing a page, there are some intermittant faults, such as the disappearing pallette, text boxes zooming off to the right hand side and strange things happening with the scaled vector graphics when you make a large object and rotate it.
e) Double clicking on a discussion icon sometimes brings up the page requested, but sometimes doesn't.
f) You can't tell how many pages or how many posts there are in any particular discussion without paging and scrolling all the way through. ( see b)

2. Problems of the Fundamental

1) JellyOS appears to have been specialy commissioned by ultralab, and the decision to build it on Macromedia Flash means that it doesn't build on any existing tried and tested community software. Everything has be designed and programmed in from scratch, so what we have now is an extremely immature system, lacking even the basic functionality which an internet discussion taking place in 1985 would have had.

2) Running in the Flash Player plugin within a Browser page and attempting to simulate a windowing operating system seems to place places a massive processing burden on the client computer, which is one element of the slow response problem. The other aspects may be caused by using Flash actionscript to communicate with the host server, or problems with the contention ratio at the server itself, it's difficult to say from here.

3) For the users, learning to use JellyOS is a heavy investment, since we cannot use existing techniques we already know from existing similar technologies, and the knowlege we gain is virtually untransferrable to anything else.

4) It could also be said that jellyOS breaks the existing internet protocols and flies in the face of carefully contructed conventions. This can only lead to a fragmentation and weakening of the wider community.

And now for some positive points :-)

1) Being a closed private community, the atmosphere is more open and trusting than out in the wild world. This means people are happy to talk about themselves, their jobs, families and hobbies and so on, and will even upload photos. ( This would happen anyway, within a community isolated through login mechanisms and hidden from search engines no matter what technology was used. A private newsserver, linked to web based email and a simple online webpage builder would do the trick for a fraction of the cost with a massive increase in efficiency and functionality)

2) It's fairly easy to upload files. This last one was pointed out by Denise Binks, whose webpage holds many useful tips and links as well as providing a model for displaying the coursework
http://www.denisebinks.com/