Langemeyer (2006) ‘Contradictions in Expansive Learning…’

Langemeyer argues that technology has both changed the division of labour in work environments, and has fuelled the lifelong learning agenda: ‘For operating machines, physical strength and manual skills are required above all for the actual work process. However today, as a result of the implementation of information technologies (IT), work activities have become increasingly intellectual… [T]he former division of labour has become more or less obsolete… A new less hierarchical organisation of work gives more autonomy and responsibility to the employee and requires collaboration’.

Langemeyer argues the lifelong learning agenda is about maintaining employability, and the responsibility for lifelong learning falls to the individual learner. However, this new activity system creates its own contradictions for workers: ‘they have little or no influence on either the conditions (global competition, rationalisation processes and the tight labour market) under which they are supposed to learn, or the purposes for which they are supposed to learn. This means that although more familiar restrictions of institutionalised education… have more or less been abolished, other constraints have come up that affect these self-dependent forms of learning.’ Hence, lifelong learning is not necessarily liberating or autonomous, but is determined by the market for labour.

In addition, Langemeyer argues that assessment creates the conditions in which people learn to the assessment only: ‘Rather than seeking autonomy, the achievement of good grades becomes the priority objective. Thus, education, although it provides a wealth of possibilities to learn, often fails to generate sustainable learning.’ Hence, the context and purpose of learning are out of the learner’s control, and the structure of learning, focused on measurable outcomes, limits the potential, full value of learning.

Furthermore, learning within the context of employment imposes additional restrictions, because the employer holds proprietorship over the learning, and a learner who collaborates is potentially diluting the labour market value of their learning by sharing it with others, as Langemeyer found in her interviews with trainees: ‘Several trainees were able to benefit from collaboration and support in forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists in the Internet. But this was undermined by the fact that they had to consider everything they had learned as company-owned “know- how”. Otherwise they would have been violating an unwritten rule that one must be loyal to the firm and its strategies to compete in the market. Thus, they had to deal with knowledge as a form of capital rather than a common good, and so refused to share their knowledge and their experience with others.’

Hence, Langemeyer argues, workplaces are nominally more cooperative, with technology (the tool in Engestrom’s terms [1987, 2001]) causing a change in the traditional division of labour. However, cooperation serves the purpose of work productivity, and hence learning is targeted towards this end, thus generating new contradictions within a new activity system, as subjects may be less inclined to pool knowledge, as the rules of the community (the workplace) dictate, and thereby limit, the content of the purpose of the learning. Hierarchies in the workplace may be less explicit than before, but are no less pervasive.

References
Engeström, Y. (1987) Learning by expanding: an activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki, Orienta-Konsultit Oy. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/toc.htm (accessed 10 June 2011).

Engestrom, Y. (2001) ‘Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization,’ Journal of Education and Work, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 133-156.

Langemeyer, I. (2006) ‘Contradictions in Expansive Learning: Towards a Critical Analysis of Self-dependent Forms of Learning in Relation to Contemporary Socio-technological Change,’ Forum: Qualitative Social Research, vol. 7, no. 1.

Junco et al. (2010) ‘The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades’

Junco et al seek to establish if the use of Twitter has a beneficial impact on student engagement and student attainment. They survey 125 students on a pre-heath professional course at one H.E.I. in the United States.

One feature of Junco et al.’s research is that the students received an hour-long induction in Twitter. By so doing the researchers may have imposed limits on students’ uses of Twitter, by setting implied parameters of usage. They may also have established, implicitly, preferred uses of Twitter. Had the researchers pursued a Disruptive Technology (Christensen 1997) or Expansive Learning (Engestrom 2001) model, they might have introduced the technology but let the students create a purpose for the technology by themselves, without any coaching.

One interesting aspect of the research is that it implies a linkage between online and face-to-face interaction. Rather than online contact removing face-to-face contact, it facilitates it. Hence, ‘Twitter was used to continue conversations begun in class’ (p. 4). The researchers also report students organising a study group, ‘with only a little encouragement from the authors via the Twitter feed’ (p. 4). In common with the initial coaching offered, the encouragement, however modest, comprises some element of instruction, and implies a preferred usage of the technology. The researchers may have missed an opportunity to give the students undirected use of the technology. However, the researches argue that students at this stage in their studies in the specific subject context rarely form study groups. They argue that Twitter enabled students to share their anxieties about assessment, realise that those anxieties were shared by other students, and thereafter form the study group (p. 10).

Twitter is also shown to have a functional value in the research, as the H.E.I. uses it as a de facto bulletin board, posting reminders of assignment and exam dates. Twitter also allows the H.E.I. to promote social functions, and academic enrichment opportunities.

The article details one sample Twitter conversation, the most notable feature of which is the depth of the exchanges. At first glance this seems unlikely, given the 140 character limit placed on individual Tweets, but users are innovative in their abbreviations, and trim the points down to the essential.

Junco et al. found that the students who had used Twitter showed greater levels of engagement, and achieved better grades, than the control group who did not use Twitter. The idea of taking a popular and free technology and integrating it into learning and teaching is a good one, but the coaching, however slight, in usage of the technology means that one of the most interesting possibilities of the research is not realised. To give students a technology with no instruction would be to create a blank canvas on which students construct meaning. The ingenuity with which students can maximise the meanings in a 140 character posting suggests there is no problem with students’ ingenuity.

References
Christensen, C. M. (1997) The innovator’s dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press. Engestrom, Y. (2001) ‘Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization’ Journal of Education and Work, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 133-156.
Junco, R. Heilberger, G. and Lokent, E. (2010) ‘The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades’ Journal of Computer Assisted Learning no. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00387.x .

‘Becoming individual in education and cyberspace’ (2004)

Krejsler advocates project work for assessment: ‘the purpose of the project is to build up knowledge about the phenomenon investigated and to mediate that knowledge to others to whom it might be useful. A further purpose may be to take action on a knowledge-based background’ (p. 490). In the digital age, an online space (a blog, for example) comprises a canvas on which a range of project activities can be undertaken.

Building on the work of Foucault, Krejsler sees institutional learning as confined by a distinct hierarchy and values: ‘populations are made into useful individuals in various institutions that operate according to similar principles no matter whether we talk about prisons, schools, factories or nucleus families. Each institution represents an enclosure that subjects individuals to specific criteria for entry into and exit out of the enclosure’ (p. 492). The Community of Practice theory is interested in the subject’s movement from entry to exit, but less interested in entry and exit criteria. Krejsler imbues the community with sinister undertones, as its boundaries become associated with containment and constraint.

Krejsler argues we are in a post-Industrial age in which the structure of our institutions has changed: ‘Culture, marketing and service that respond sensitively to the whims of fashion and markets in a globalized economy with a high-speed turnover increasingly replace the production of basic goods, which moves to the Third World. The job market is no longer stable. One cannot anymore expect long-term steady employment on the basis of a diploma from an authorized educational institution’ (p. 492). Krejsler’s analysis challenges the Community of Practice theory because the community itself becomes unstable and febrile; individuals cannot rely on continued membership of the community, as the community’s terms of membership may shift. This was not a problem in the original communities of practice (eg, Yucatan midwives, West African tailors) studied by Lave and Wenger (1991). As Krejsler argues, ‘Enclosure within the disciplinary institution is replaced by individualized anxiety. It is expected that one can constantly market one’s competencies so that they match at any given time the volatile needs of the job market. One is constantly und pressure to convince one’s employers that one is indispensable’ (p. 493).

Krejsler cites Deleuze (1990), who ‘distinguishes between the individual, who has an indivisible identity within a certain enclosure, and the dividual, who is under constant pressure to simultaneously divide his/her attention between several different projects, environments, and relations’ (p. 494). Individuals have multiple personae for different institutional contexts and, in the twenty-first century, these personae are digitised.

Krejsler suggests learning in the digital age can threaten institutions: ‘Learning that is organized in accordance with military principles of hierarchy, obedience and discipline increasingly dissipates into more volatile forms. Computers and the internet threaten to distribute knowledge and learning from the authorized enclosures of school to a virtual ubiquitous space’ (p. 495). Furthermore, the digital age learner has a new set of resources: ‘When access to the Internet, chat rooms and e-mail is part of project work, the student is constantly subject to the temptation to surf out into spaces that genuinely interest and excite him/her’ (p. 497). Therefore, Krejsler argues, the institution cannot be assured of full control over learning.

Kejsler’s analysis is frequently dystopian, yet he accurately describes classroom encounters, and the power relations that underpin them. Describing the teacher responding to off-message behaviour by the student, ‘he/she applies the tactics of the lifted eyebrows at first, seasoned, if necessary, with joking or slightly ironic comments. This should make the students aware that they are leaving the path of the virtuous.’ Next, ‘The teacher, being trained as an expert in communication, here asks the students to explain how their work proceeds, whether something blocks their learning or whether they are inadvertently being led astray from the formulated goals of their project. The students decode the situation and the futility of taking recourse to any other outlet than confessing that they are astray. They therefore express that they have already realized their wrongdoing and are rapidly returning to what they are expected to do. The teacher wraps up his/her absolution in informal and joking language. Employing an inescapable logic of reason, however, he/she leaves no doubt about what is expected of the students’ (p. 498).

Most people could recognise teacher behaviour along these lines. However, Krejsler argues that what he calls a ‘logbook’ (‘blog’ is better suited to the digital age) ‘makes us enter a foggy area where it becomes difficult to distinguish private from public matters, where the role of the student gets thoroughly intertwined with the role of the private person… [enabling] the student to enter spaces of reflection and wondering resembling the diary as a point of departure for challenging dialogues’ (pp. 498-99). A log, digital or otherwise, allows personal factors, including emotions, to be brought into institutional learning contexts in which emotions have not always been welcomed.

Having conducted a gloomy analysis, Krejsler concludes with a more uplifting quote from Morss (2000, p. 196): ‘learning can be an eventfulness whereby the teacher is not “empowering” students (as though power were something in the students’ future), but where their learning is already an expression of their own power, energy and joy.’

Krejsler’s focus is on how knowledge is managed and controlled in institutional settings. He does not mention Communites of Practice but it applies, because he is interested in entry and exit criteria for institutions/communities, and what people have to accomplish to meet the criteria. He does not examine, however, the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not stable, and its effects are not predictable. The subversive potential of knowledge is intrinsic to knowledge; the educator may have a clear sense of what values they wish to convey, but students may form their own interpretation of the information in front of them, even if they have to suppress their own insights in an institutional setting, for their own good. For example, a teacher may tell students that Lear is mad when he says, ‘Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags, a pygymy’s straw doth pierce it,’ but the student may yet interpret the statement as saying the rich and powerful get away with it, and the poor get screwed. That could be a useful insight.

References

Deleuze, G. (1990) Postscript on the societies of control, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Krejsler, J. (2004) ‘Becoming individual in education and cyberspace’ Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, vol. 10. no. 5, pp. 489-503.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Morss, J. R. (2000) ‘The passional pedagogy of Giles Deleuze,’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 185-200.

Learning and Assessment (journal article review)

Gibbs and Simpson (2004-05) open by arguing, justifiably, that students are more influenced by assessment than teaching. Consequently, students will ignore learning material if it isn’t going to be assessed.

None of this is shocking, but laying particular weight on assessment is problematic because research suggests that examination success is not an accurate predictor of subsequent professional success (p. 7).

The article cites research arguing that feedback is the most powerful influence in student achievement (p. 9). However, ‘studies of what students do with feedback makes for depressing reading’ (p. 10), as feedback is often misunderstood, or unread.

When feedback is misunderstood, the assessor may (unwittingly) be to blame: ‘Teachers’ feedback is often (though not always) generated from a more sophisticated epistemological stance than that of the student and this offers plenty of scope for misunderstanding of feedback or blank incomprehension’ (p. 22).

The authors do have some ideas for assessments that are more relevant to what a student will do after a course is over: ‘probably the only way to learn how to solve problems is to solve lots of problems’ (p. 15). This approach links with Expansive Learning, whereby students are given a problem to solve, the tools to solve the problem, but have to work out how to do it, individually or collectively.

Students learn to the assessment, but success in assessment is not a predictor of professional success. Therefore, we’re doing something wrong with assessment. Problem-based learning has potential, as does the idea of an ongoing, reflective journal, especially as blogging software enables more technologically imaginative reflective learning than is possible with a solely paper-based reflection. The challenge is to create mark schemes for these different kinds of assessment that are both fair to the students and meet with the approval of the fearful QAA.

Reference
Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2004-05) ‘Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning’ Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, no. 1, pp. 3-29.